Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  “I knew the night I left that I’d made the first truly big mistake of my life by not being with you. But by then I was pregnant with Tanner’s kid and the two of us were going to run off with his college money and start a life for ourselves. I couldn’t tell you—I couldn’t tell anyone. I lost the baby, he got bored with me, and less than seven months after we left this burg, he dumped me in L.A. with two hundred dollars and one suitcase of clothes.”

  “How’d you manage to get by?”

  She smiled but there was no humor in it. “I was a pretty young thing. It wasn’t hard to find work—no, I didn’t start hooking or anything like that.” She shrugged. “Made some movies—not the kind they would’ve shown at the Midland, but it paid the bills. I got involved with a guy who knew what to do with money, how to invest it, and between that and the movies, I got by just fine. You’re making me stray off the point—I always loved you, Danny. I still do—and I think you must still feel something for me or else you’d’ve kicked my ass out the door thirty seconds after you saw me.”

  “What’s going on, Laura?”

  She stared at her hands. “If you’re asking me if there’s been some big dramatic turn of events, then the answer is ‘nothing.’ Three days ago I was sitting in my apartment in L.A. watching television, and French Connection 2 was on. I remembered how you always used to rave how it was every bit as good as the original—”

  “—better, in some ways—hell, John Frankenheimer had some sequences—”

  “—could we not do our Roger Ebert imitations right now? So I watched it, and you were right, it’s great, Hackman’s even better in it than he was in the first one, and all of a sudden I wanted to talk to you about it, about why Frankenheimer’s your favorite movie director, about why you still own LPs when most everything is available on CD, about anything and everything, the way we used to in high school. And then I realized that what I wanted was . . . you.

  “I blew it twenty-five years ago, Danny, and I want a second chance. Will you think about giving me one?”

  I reached out and turned her face toward me.

  We all want to know what happened to the first Great Love of our lives, but we never think about the danger in actually finding out. Meet someone after half a lifetime, someone who was once the center of your world, and you risk seeing all the signs of diminished hope or smashed dreams embedded in their face like scars, or—worse—discovering that they’ve gone on to be happy without you. I used to fantasize about a moment when Lama Kirwan would return, a broken shell of the girl I once knew, and beg me—Mr. Astronaut/Rock Star/Famous Author/World-Renowned Physicist—to take her back.

  Arrogant male bullshit, that; I know.

  I hadn’t made it and neither had she, not in the ways we’d imagined at seventeen, but you’d never be able to tell it from her face; it was older, yes, a few more lines here and there, crows’ feet when she smiled, but aside from these inevitable tracks of time’s forward march, she was no less beautiful in my eyes now than she’d been in high school. In fact, if anything, age had given her humility and grace and made her all the more stunning.

  “We can talk about this later,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay here with Blair and me as long as you want, until you figure out what you need to do.”

  “I knew that’s what you’d say.”

  “Quarter of a century later and I’m still that predictable.”

  “No,” she said, squeezing my hand. “You’re dependable. You’re loyal and true.”

  “You make me sound like Dudley Do-Right.”

  “Dudley’s gonna be on soon,” said Blair. I blinked—I’d almost forgotten she was in the kitchen with us.

  Laura saved the day: “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I love Dudley!”

  Blair grinned. “ ‘I save you, Nell.’ ”

  “Can I watch Dudley with you?”

  Blair’s face lit up. “Oh, yes!” And she left to tune in the Dudley Channel.

  “How long have you been caring for her?”

  “Since about a year before Mom died.”

  “Is that why you never . . .?” She didn’t have to finish the question.

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  We looked at each other.

  Live your life as if you were already living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.

  I was getting ready to say something tender and profound, something that would have won the heart of any woman, something that would have gone down in the record books as the Most Brilliantly Poetic and Romantic Reply Ever, when there was a knock on the front door.

  I looked up at the wall clock and saw that it was 10:00 a.m. Already I was so exhausted I was ready to pack in it, and it wasn’t even noon yet.

  “Shit,” I whispered.

  “You sweet talker.”

  “No—sorry, that wasn’t for you. I forgot I was supposed to do something at ten.” I leaned down and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. “This’ll only take a minute. Go watch Dudley and Nell.”

  “Actually, I always thought Snidely Whiplash was pretty hot.”

  “I can’t tell you how warm and fuzzy that makes me feel.”

  Out on the front porch, I found Mr. Finney waiting for me. “Sorry it ain’t the curb, but I waited almost five minutes.”

  “I apologize. I lost track of time.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look for yourself.”

  He was right. The streak of old white paint was gone. The front porch was once again uniform in color. We both touched the area where the streak had been, and found that the paint there was dry.

  “Danny, does this seem odd to you?”

  “It’s actually a little scary, Mr. Finney.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Danny?”

  “Why?”

  “Do you think it’s possible for a house to haunt itself?” I thought about this for a moment.

  “Mr. Finney, if you mean do I believe in the kind of ghosts that rattle chains and moan and make things go bump in the night, then, no, I don’t. But I do believe in ghosts, sir. Quantum ones. Black holes and Special Relativity and Planck time and how they make origami out of the sheeted layers of the universe.” I glanced at him. He was looking at me as if I’d just told him I was an alien from the planet BoogerFart here to scout good locations for our upcoming Special Olympics.

  “What I mean, Mr. Finney, is that less than two hours ago we both saw a section of this front porch as it was before I painted the house, and fifteen years ago, you and my father saw a section of fresh gray paint—this paint—in the same spot. There were no practical jokers, Mr. Finney. No one’s touched this house except me. I painted it last year, and through some mix-up in the structure of time, a portion of this paint appeared on the porch fifteen years ago.” Finney shook his head. “I swear, the older I get and the more I learn, the less I think I know. How . . . how is something like that possible, Danny?”

  “Why do you care about it in the first place?”

  His eyes misted for a moment. “Because if what you said is true, then it means there’s really forces beyond what we understand, and that means there’s something more after this here life, and that means my Ethel’ll be there waiting for me. I’ll . . .” A tear crept to the comer of his eye. “. . . I’ll see her again. Hold her again. My favorite and only girl. She won’t be lonely anymore.”

  At that moment, I think I loved Mr. Finney as much as I’d loved my own father. Leave it to a man this genuinely decent to think only of his wife’s loneliness, even years after her death.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe the universe is trying to tell us both something with all of this.”

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eye, then blew his nose. “I hope so, Danny. I truly do hope so.” He smiled at me. “Sure would appreciate it if you’d come over for some lemonade soon. Bring Blair a
long, too.”

  “How’s tomorrow? We’ll bring lunch.”

  His smile widened and brightened. “That would be just great. Just great. I’ll look forward to it.”

  I watched him walk back to his house, and hoped that it would seem a little less empty.

  The universe is a four-dimensional four-layered sheet; three existing in space, one in time.

  The soul—be it of a person, place, or event—does not exist in space. 1.62 x 10-33 is a smokescreen. Yes, time and space come apart at that point, and there are spaces between the layers, but only the soul, like images and words erased from a sheet of parchment, can make a physical impression on/in time.

  And if the impression/perception is strong enough, if the past is more alive to the perceiver than the moment in which they exist now, then it matters not a damn if time came before space or vice-versa, because the soul takes control, and bleeds through the layers, and brings back What Was.

  And, sometimes, if the need is great enough, it brings What Could Have Been.

  6. Living in the Past/Love Reign O’er Me

  That night I lay wide awake in my bed, thinking about how the rest of the day had gone while the clock-radio was tuned to an oldies station. Tonight seemed to be Sad Songs Night; “All By Myself” had just finished (mawkish piece of shit still managed to choke me up) and Don McLean’s “Vincent” was just starting.

  Blair and Laura got along wonderfully. They watched cartoons, made lunch, drew pictures (giving me a chance to explain the palimpsest effect, to their rapt, glassy-eyed boredom), then tried to teach me how to dance, soundtrack provided by two 70s favorites, “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” and “Get Down Tonight.” How a K.C. and the Sunshine Band record ever got into my house is beyond me.

  But, underneath everything, I could sense an unease in Laura, a forced cheerfulness whenever she was around Blair. I was trying to figure out why when two things happened simultaneously: my bedroom door opened and the night light in the hallway flickered and went out. I knew I should have changed the bulb this morning, but the day had brought with it too many distractions.

  “Danny?” It was Laura.

  I sat up in bed, pulling on a T-shirt I grabbed from the floor. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she whispered, and softly walked over to the bed. “Can I sit down beside you?”

  “I, uh . . .”

  She smacked my arm affectionately. “Don’t flatter yourself, Studley. I didn’t come up here because the call of your man-meat is irresistible. I was lonely down on the couch. I was just wondering if . . . if we could just lay next to each other and hold hands, like we used to down in your parents’ rec room.”

  I moved over and patted the bed. She lay down next to me and we held hands.

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m gonna tell you something, and I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t look at me while I’m saying it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I really like Blair, I think she’s sweet, and I am in awe of you having sacrificed so much to take care of her. It makes me realize all the more just how much I love you and what I’ve missed out on these last twenty-five years. I’m gonna move back here to Cedar Hill.”

  Listen to the thudding of my heart as she said this.

  “But I can’t . . . I can’t help you care for her, Danny. I hope that doesn’t make me an awful person in your eyes. I mean, maybe someday, later on, when I feel more comfortable being around someone like her—oh, God, that sounded rotten, didn’t it? ‘Someone like her.’ I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  “No.”

  At that moment, I hated just about everything else, though. So the love of my life was coming back after all, to start her life over . . . and it would be without me. Oh, I knew she’d spend a lot of time with Blair and me at first, but after a while, she’d come around less and less, until, finally, her presence in my life would be reduced to a few phone calls . . . and even those would eventually stop. It was the pattern. In the years I’d been caring for Blair, I’d had only a handful of relationships with women, none of them going very deep or lasting very long because they couldn’t handle being around “. . . someone like her.”

  I couldn’t blame them. I couldn’t blame Laura.

  “It’s always been you,” I said to her.

  “I know.”

  I felt a tear slip from the comer of my eye, run down my temple, and drip into my ear. “I wish things were different.”

  “Me, too.” Then: “You wouldn’t ever consider . . . don’t yell at me, okay?” She rose up on an elbow and rolled toward me, wiping the tear-streak from my skin. “Would you consider something like a group home for Blair? If you haven’t done it because it’s a money problem, I’ve got plenty, believe me. I’d pay for it.”

  “I promised Mom I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Not to sound like a bitch, but your Mom’s been dead for fifteen years.”

  “Thirteen-and-a-half,” I said.

  “Whatever. The point is, as much as I admire you for keeping your promise, don’t you think it’s time to start living the life you should’ve had?”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t start thinking about what should have been. Too many detours through depression and self-pity along that road.”

  And wouldn’t you know it—right then the radio station started playing Roger Daltrey’s “Oceans Away,” a song that rips me to pieces every time.

  I rolled away from Laura and looked into the darkness.

  A few moments later, just when I was on the verge of really losing it because of that fucking song, I heard Blair bumping around in the hallway.

  “Dammit,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Blair. She doesn’t see very well in the dark, that’s why I’ve got a night light out there. She’s trying to find the bathroom.” I started to get out of bed. Laura put a hand on my arm.

  “You stay here, Danny. I’ll go.”

  She quietly left the room. I suspected that once she’d helped Blair get to and from the bathroom, she wouldn’t come back.

  The song finished and I turned the radio off before they played “Shannon” or something even worse, and that’s when I heard it.

  The sound of someone coming up the stairs.

  Blair’s room and the bathroom were in the center of the hall, away from the stairs. I waited to see if Laura was going to surprise me and come back, and when she didn’t step through the door again, the old urban panic reared its irrational head.

  Someone had broken into the house.

  I slowly got up and crouched down to retrieve the baseball bat I keep under the bed—my one compromise in this age of ever-deadly home security. I’d never keep a gun in the house, but a baseball bat . . . oh, yeah.

  I got a good grip on it and crept toward the door.

  It was only as I was stepping into the hall that I realized the floor under my bare feet felt fuzzy. I looked down.

  Carpeting. Shag carpeting. From one end of the hall to the other.

  I looked around, stepped fully into the hall, and started toward Blair’s room. I was almost there when I heard someone behind me.

  I whirled around and saw the intruder at the top of the stairs.

  I pulled back my arms, readying the bat, and started moving toward them, so filled with panic that I didn’t bother to register what they looked like, only that it was neither Blair nor Laura, and I was all set to knock their legs out from under them—was just starting to get my swing going—when the night light flickered and I saw my mother.

  My mother as she’d looked in 1974.

  Before there was a Blair.

  I stood there, the bat cocked at my shoulder, and watched her slip her foot under the piece of loose carpeting on the landing.

  She rehearsed it once, then once agai
n.

  It was the interval between the second rehearsal and her actual attempt that the impressions previously erased joined with new ink and began to bleed through for me:

  . . . Live your life as if you were already living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now . . .

  . . . at 1.62 x 10-33 space and time come apart . . .

  . . . and this sheet of parchment upon which I had drawn my new life was giving way to the lives and memories drawn in this space before . . .

  . . . “Thas’ Mommy’s candy. Gonna get it if you eat any” . . .

  . . . “Because if what you said is true, then it means there’s really forces beyond what we understand, and that means there’s something more after this here life, and that means my Ethel’ll be there waiting for me” . . .

  . . . “I mean, maybe someday, later on, when I feel more comfortable being around someone like her” . . .

  . . . and Mom started moving toward the top of the stairs.

  I knew that the “breeze” she’d felt that night was me swinging the bat at someone I thought was an intruder.

  She was gaining speed. When her foot hit that carpeting, she’d go down hard. Not hard enough to kill her, but it would be enough to make her lose the baby that only she and the doctor knew she was carrying.

  I suddenly saw What Might Have Been become What Can Be.

  I saw a life without constant worry, without daily arguments, without Blair screaming and saying that she hated me, without tantrums that left me with bloody noses and spit on the floor and used tampons thrown at me.

  All I had to do was just stand here and not swing the bat.

  Mom breezed past me.

  The night light flickered again, then came all the way on—

  —Mom seemed to notice that from the comer of her eye—

  —and all I had to do to claim the life that should have been mine . . . was nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Mom’s foot caught under the piece of carpeting. . . .