by Ken Grimwood
"Except that I have money now, and access to as much more as we need. It’s not as if we’d be out on the streets."
"But I’m still underage; don’t forget that. You’d be in a lot of trouble if they caught us."
Jeff managed a grin. "Jailbait. I kind of like that idea."
"I just bet you do," she taunted. "But it’s no joke, particularly not in this era. The Summer of Love is still three years away; in 1964, they took that kind of thing very, very seriously."
"You’re right," he agreed dejectedly. "So what the hell are we going to do?"
"We’re just going to have to wait for a little while. I’ll be sixteen in a few months; maybe by then they’ll at least let us date, if I butter them up and play the role of the obedient daughter for now."
"Christ … I’ve already waited a year and a half to be with you."
"I don’t know what else we can do," she said with compassion. "I don’t like the prospect any better than you do, but I don’t think we have any other choice right now."
"No," he admitted. "We don’t."
"What are you going to do in the meantime?" "I guess I’ll go back to Boston; it’s a nice city, not too far from here, and I’m more or less settled in there. Probably work on building up our nest egg, so we don’t have to bother with making money once we’re able to be together. Can I at least call you? Write you?"
"Not here, I don’t think, not yet. I’ll get a post-office box so we can write, and I’ll call you as often as I can. From outside the house, after school."
"Jesus. You’re really going back to high school again?"
"I have to." She shrugged. "I can put up with it. I’ve done it so many times before, I think I know every answer to every test."
"I’m going to miss you … You know that." She kissed him, long and passionately. "So will I, love; so will I. But the wait will be more than worth it."
FOURTEEN
Pamela adjusted the tassel on her mortarboard, looked out into the crowded auditorium, and spotted Jeff, sitting alongside her parents. Her mother beamed with happy pride. Pamela caught Jeff’s eye, winked, and got a wry smile in return. They were both aware of the comic irony in this ceremony: She, a woman who had been a practicing physician, a successful artist, and a celebrated motion-picture producer, was at last being awarded her high-school diploma. For the third time.
It had required considerable tenacity, and she was glad Jeff had understood how tedious the past three years had been for her. He’d had his own experience of reentering the academic world, at the college level, during his second replay; but going through high school again, this many times, was a unique subcircle of Hell.
Her perseverance had paid off, though, as she’d known it would. Her family had relented somewhat when she turned sixteen, a well-behaved A student who exhibited no interest in going out with the boys in her supposed peer group, and she was allowed to see Jeff two nights a week. He took an apartment in Bridgeport for their weekend use, and was scrupulously punctual about having her back at her parents' home by midnight every Friday and Saturday night. As far as her mother and father were concerned, the young couple saw a lot of movies; and if there were ever any question of that, they could easily recite the plots of such films as Morgan!, Georgy Girl, or A Man for All Seasons, having seen them all at least twice in the years past.
The arrangement had been kind of fun, in an odd way, once the negative parental pressure had begun to ease. There’d been a delicious erotic tension arising out of the limitations on their time together and the necessary furtiveness of their passion. They’d loved each other with their fresh young bodies as if they had never been intimate before, never given or received such libidinous delight with each other—or indeed with anyone.
If her parents had ever suspected anything about her sexual involvement with Jeff—and they must have, certainly by now—they’d been admirably silent about it. Their initial cautious tolerance of Jeff had soon given way to acceptance, then approval, and eventually an outright fondness. The four-year chasm of age that had loomed so disturbingly in her parents' eyes when he was eighteen and she fourteen had become a thoroughly conventional discrepancy by the time they were twenty-two and eighteen. Besides, in this era of LSD and promiscuous nonconformity, her mother and father were obviously relieved that she had developed a stable relationship with such a clean-cut, well-mannered, and prosperous young man.
The last of the diplomas was handed out, and the fledgling graduates who surrounded her raced from the stage with boisterous cheers. Pamela made her way calmly toward where Jeff waited with her parents.
"Oh, Pam," her mother said, "you looked so lovely up there! You just put all the rest of them to shame."
"Congratulations, honey," her father said, embracing her. "I have to turn in the cap and the gown," Pamela told Jeff. "Then we can get going."
"Do you really have to leave so soon?" her mother asked, chagrined. "You could stay for dinner, get an early start in the morning."
"Jeff’s family is expecting us Thursday evening, Mom; we really ought to get as far as Washington tonight. Here, hold this," she said to Jeff, handing him the scrolled diploma. "I’ll be right back."
In the girls' locker room she took off the black cotton robe, changed into a blue skirt and white blouse. A few of the other girls shyly congratulated her, and she them, but she was subtly excluded from their general camaraderie, the excited talk of boyfriends and summer plans and the various colleges they’d be going to in the fall. These girls had been her friends in her original existence; she’d fully shared in all their shenanigans and banter and tentative first steps to womanhood. But this time, as when she’d repeated her high-school years at the beginning of her first replay, there was a gulf between them that the girls somehow recognized, incapable though they were of understanding what it was. Pamela had kept her distance from them, ignored the social aspects of adolescence, had done what she had to do to fulfill her promise to her parents that she would finish school before leaving home to be with Jeff. Now that day had come, and she hoped the awkwardness of her departure could be kept to a minimum.
She finished changing, went back into the gradually emptying auditorium to rejoin her parents and the man with whom she would share the remainder of this life.
"So," her father was saying to Jeff, "you really do think I ought to hang on to those quarters, do you?"
"Yes, sir," Jeff replied. "As a long-term investment, most definitely. I’d say in ten to twelve years you’ll see a very healthy return on it."
Her father’s question had been designed to ease the tension, Pamela recognized, and she was grateful. The exchange reaffirmed that he had come to personally respect Jeff as an astute, creative investor and that he was aware his daughter would be well taken care of. Jeff himself had purchased several thousand dollars' worth of the phased-out ninety-percent-silver dimes and quarters before the coins disappeared, and had recommended that her father do the same. It was a logical, conservative-seeming financial move that would not startle her father by skyrocketing with suspicious swiftness or trouble him by appearing too obscurely risky. It would certainly pay off in its time, however; specifically, in January of 1980, when the Hunt brothers' illegal secret manipulations of the silver market would drive the price of the precious metal up to fifty dollars an ounce. Jeff had told Pamela he would contact her father that month, make sure he unloaded the coins before the precipitous crash that would soon follow.
"Will you be staying in Orlando long, darling?" her mother asked.
"Just a few days," Pamela said. "Then we’re going to drive down to the Keys, maybe rent a boat for a couple of weeks."
"Have you decided yet where you’ll be going when … the summer’s over?"
That was still a sore point between them; even though her parents knew that she and Jeff would lack for nothing materially, they lamented her refusal to go on to college.
"No, Mom. We might get a place in New York; we’re just not sure yet."<
br />
"It’s not too late to register at NYU; you know they gave you an automatic acceptance on your National Merit scores."
"I’ll think about it. Is everything in the car, Jeff?"
"All packed, gassed up, and ready to go."
Pamela hugged her mother and father, couldn’t stop the tears that came to her eyes. They’d only wanted what was best for her, hadn’t known their loving guidance and discipline had been long since unnecessary; she couldn’t fault them for that. But now, at last, she and Jeff were truly free: free to be themselves, to strike out into this familiar world as the independent adults—and more—that they had always been beneath their deceptively juvenile exteriors. It was an auspicious day, after all they had been through.
She pulled herself out of the water with one graceful move, climbed the short ladder at the stern of the boat, and caught the towel Jeff tossed to her as she hoisted herself aboard.
"Beer?" he asked, reaching into the cooler. "Sure," Pamela said, wrapping the big blue towel around her naked body and giving her hair a vigorous shake.
Jeff opened two bottles of Dos Equis, handed her one, and sprawled into a canvas deck chair. "Good swim." He grinned.
"Mmm," she agreed contentedly, pressing the icy bottle to her face. "That water’s almost like a Jacuzzi."
"Gulf Stream. Warm current carries all the way across the Atlantic from here. We’re sitting right on top of the heating vent that keeps Europe from having another Ice Age."
Pamela raised her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and inhaled the fresh salt air. A sudden sound roused her from her reverie, and she looked up to see a great white heron swoop elegantly above the boat, its long legs and tapered bill extended in aerodynamic symmetry as it dived toward the shoreline of the nameless key off which they’d anchored that morning.
"God." She sighed. "I don’t ever want to leave this spot."
Jeff smiled, raised his bottle of Dos Equis in a silent toast of concurrence.
Pamela walked to the side of the boat, leaned against the railing, and stared into the sparkling blue-green sea from which she had just emerged. In the distance, to the west, the tranquil water churned with the playful antics of a passing school of dolphins. She watched them for several moments, then turned to Jeff.
"There’s something we’ve been avoiding," she said. "Something we’ve needed to discuss, and haven’t."
"What’s that?"
"Why it took me so long to start replaying this time. Why I lost a year and a half. We’ve ignored all that for too long."
It was true. They’d never discussed the troublesome deviation from the cyclical pattern that had grown so familiar to each of them. Jeff had seemed so grateful just to have her back again, and she’d put her own worries in the back of her mind as she concentrated on the laborious task of finishing school and the delicate diplomacy of convincing her parents to accept her need to be with him.
"Why bring it up now?" he asked, a frown creasing his sun-browned forehead.
She shrugged. "We have to, sooner or later."
His eyes met hers, imploring. "But we don’t have to be concerned about it for another twenty years. Can’t we just enjoy ourselves until then? Savor the present?"
"We’d never be able to ignore it," she said gently, "not completely. You know that."
"What makes you think we can figure out why it happened, any more than we can decipher anything else about the replays? I thought we’d settled that."
"I don’t necessarily mean why it happened, or how; but I’ve been considering it, and I think it may be part of an overall pattern, not just some one-time abberation."
"How so? I know I came back three months later than usual myself this time, but that’s never happened before, to either of us."
"I’m not so sure; never to that extent, certainly, but there’s been a … a skew developing in the replays, almost from the very start. Now it’s simply begun to accelerate."
"A skew?"
She nodded. "Think about it. At the beginning of your second replay you weren’t in your dorm room; you were at a movie theater, with Judy."
"It was the same day, though."
"Yes, but … what, eight or nine hours later? And the first time I came back it was early afternoon, but the next time was in the middle of the night. I’d say about twelve hours later."
Jeff grew thoughtful. "The third time—the last time I started replaying before this, when I was in Martin’s car with Judy…"
"Yes?" she prodded.
"I just assumed it was that same night, that we were coming home from having seen The Birds. I was so upset about the loss of my daughter, Gretchen, that I wasn’t really paying that much attention to anything around me. I just got drunk and stayed drunk for a couple of days. But the Kentucky Derby seemed to come up a lot faster that time. I got my bet in through Frank Maddock only the day before it was run. As shaken as I was, I still remember being relieved that at least I hadn’t blown that opportunity. I thought I’d lost track of time because of the binge, but I could have started the replay late, by two or three days. I might have been returning home from a completely different evening with Judy."
Pamela nodded. "I wasn’t focusing on the calendar that time, either," she told him. "But I do remember that both my parents were home when I started replaying that morning, so it must have been a weekend; and the previous one had started on a Tuesday, the last day of April. So the skew was probably up to four days, maybe five."
"How could it jump from a matter of a few days to—months? Over a year, in your case?"
"Maybe it’s a geometric progression. If we knew the exact time differences between each of our replays, I think we could figure it out, possibly even project what the skew will be … next time."
The thought of death, and yet another, possibly longer, separation cast a sudden pall of silence between them. The herons on the remote beach beyond the breakers stalked back and forth on their spindly legs, lonely and aloof. The school of dolphins to the west had moved on, leaving the sea once more untroubled.
"It’s too late for that, though, isn’t it?" Jeff said. It was more a statement than a question. "We’ll never be able to reconstruct those divergences exactly. We weren’t paying any attention to them then."
"We had no reason to be. It was all too new, and the skew was so minor. We each had a lot more on our minds than that."
"Then it’s pointless to speculate. If there is a geometric progression and it’s escalated from hours to days to months, then any rough estimate we might be able to come up with could be off by years."
Pamela gave him a long, steady look. "Maybe someone else was making more careful note of the skew."
"What do you mean, somebody else?"
"You and I discovered each other almost by accident, because you happened to respond to Starsea as something new and you were able to arrange a meeting with me. But there could be other replayers, many of them; we’ve never made a concerted effort to track them down."
"What makes you think they exist?"
"I don’t know that they do, but then, I never expected to encounter you. If there are two of us, there could just as easily be more."
"Don’t you think we would have heard of them by now?"
"Not necessarily. My films were extremely well publicized, and your interference in the Kennedy assassination the first time around caused quite a conspicuous ripple. Other than that, though, how much of a noticeable impact has either of us had on society? Even the existence of your company, Future, Inc., probably wasn’t that well known outside the financial community. I know I wasn’t aware of it when I was busy with med school and then my work in the children’s hospital in Chicago. There may have been all sorts of other minor, localized changes—due to other replayers—that we simply haven’t noticed."
Jeff pondered that for a moment. "I’ve often wondered about that, of course. I was just always too wrapped up in my own experiences to do anything about it—until I saw Starsea and th
en found you."
"Maybe it’s time we did do something about it. Something more simple, and more direct, than I was trying to accomplish when you first met me. If there are others out there, we could all learn a lot. We’d have a great deal to share among us."
"True," Jeff said, smiling. "But right now the only person I want to share anything with is you. We’ve waited a long time to be together like this again."
"Long enough." She smiled back, undoing the blue terry-cloth towel and letting it drop to the sun-drenched wooden deck.
They placed the small display ad in the New York Times, Post, and Daily News; the Los Angeles Times and Herald-Examiner; Le Monde, L’Express, and Paris-Match; Asahi Shimbun and Yomiyuri Shimbun; the London Times, Evening Standard, and Sun; O Estado de Sâo Paulo and Jornal do Brasil. Taking into account their own specialized areas of interest during various replays, the ad also began appearing regularly in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and Le Concours Médical; the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Le Nouvel Economiste; Daily Variety and Cahiers du Cinéma; Playboy, Penthouse, Mayfair, and Lui.
In all, more than two hundred newspapers and magazines worldwide carried the superficially innocuous announcement, which would be utterly meaningless except to those unknown, and possibly nonexistent, few for whom it was intended:
Do you remember Watergate? Lady Di? The shuttle disaster? The Ayatollah? Rocky? Flashdance?
If so, you’re not alone. Contact P.O. Box 1988, New York, N.Y. 10001
"Here’s another one with a dollar bill enclosed," Jeff said, tossing the envelope aside. "Why the hell do so many of them think we’re selling something?"
Pamela shrugged. "Most people are."
"What’s even worse are the ones who think we’re running some sort of contest. This could get to be a problem, you know."
"How so?"
"With the postal authorities, unless we’re careful. We’re going to have to come up with a form letter explaining that the ad isn’t any sort of come-on, and send it to all these people. Especially the ones who’ve mailed us money. We have to make sure it’s all returned. We don’t need any complaints."