08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  Lisa brought coffee cups and filled them. Then she talked about the apple pie and how it was fresh from the oven, and then she talked about where they were from: Joanie, Terry, and Mandy were from the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene area; Joanie and Terry still lived in Coeur d’Alene; Lisa grew up in Hawthorne, Nevada, and was studying at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

  Finally, Lisa left.

  Where were they?

  Joanie looked puzzled. “What do you want to know?”

  Terry broke in, “I thought you were supposed to tell us.”

  Well … she could blow them out of the water by telling them, but that wouldn’t prove Joanie and Terry were real friends from then, the life she couldn’t possibly have lived but did somehow … Oh, Lord, help me, don’t let me freak out.

  “Sweetheart, are you all right?” Joanie asked.

  What can I say, what can I say? “I … I might know you, I mean, kind of like a trick and kind of for real. It’s hard to explain.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Could you tell me … what was her father’s name?”

  Joanie tilted her head. “You don’t know that?”

  Terry said, “So … what? We’re doing mentalism in reverse? How’s this work?”

  Oh, please, just tell me! She was desperate but wanted with all of her being not to look crazy. “Uh, okay, let’s do this: let me try a little mentalism on Mandy and we’ll see how I do.”

  They perked up, Terry ready to be amazed, Joanie still nervous about it.

  “Uh … she … she …”

  Lisa brought the pies. “Apple for you, apple for you, and cherry for you. Can I bring you anything else?”

  Terry thought he might like some cream for his coffee. Lisa then recalled she had a cousin in Spokane but hadn’t been up there to visit since high school. Was the weather still cold up there? Yes, that was why Terry and Joanie thought to spend some time in California and then Vegas. So, could she bring them anything else? No, they were fine.

  “I know!” said Mandy. “Why don’t you ask me some questions?”

  “Ask you … ?” Joanie faltered.

  “About Mandy, anything you want.”

  “Who’d she marry?”

  Ohhh … Her mind froze. She didn’t know the answer to that. She didn’t want to know, she just couldn’t bear it. “Sh-she got married?”

  Lisa popped by again. “Oh, I forgot to ask: is this on separate tickets?”

  Separate, they told her, Mandy on one, Joanie and Terry on the other.

  Terry asked, “What was her favorite animal?”

  Mandy was still working on the fact—was it a fact?—that she got married. “Uh, animal?”

  Terry helped her out, “She had some pets.”

  “Doves?”

  They affirmed that but didn’t seem too impressed. Joanie countered, “She was a magician. Easy guess.”

  Mandy groped for the right suggestion, the right way. She finally tried, “Now, what if I asked you some questions?”

  Terry said, “Well, how are we going to know whether you know our answers are right?”

  Joanie offered, “Well, if we give a wrong answer and she says we’re right, then we’ll know she doesn’t know.”

  He crinkled his face.

  “Uh, back and forth, back and forth,” said Mandy. “I’ll ask one, you ask one. Let’s try that.”

  “Okay,” said Terry, “you asked what her father’s name was. It was Arthur.”

  “Where did Mandy live?”

  “No, you tell us,” said Joanie.

  “Hayden, on a ranch. What was the name of the ranch?”

  “Wooly Acres. What did they raise there?”

  “Llamas and some horses. What were the names of Mandy’s doves?”

  Joanie scrunched her face. “Um … Bonkers was one. What were the names of the others?”

  “Lily, Maybelle, and Carson. What big, significant thing happened to Mandy in the ninth grade?”

  Joanie balked a moment, then answered, “Her mother, Eloise, died of breast cancer. What was Mandy’s favorite card trick in junior high?”

  “Flipping the Aces. Who was Mandy’s favorite Mouseketeer?”

  Joanie was reeling from the question and from knowing the answer. “Cubby.” Then, mustering strength, she sang an advertising jingle they learned in their childhood, “If you need coal or oil …”

  “Call Boyle,” Mandy sang back. “Fairfax eight-one-five-two-one.”

  Joanie’s hands went to her face and she gazed over her fingers at Mandy. “My God!”

  Yes, Mandy thought. Silence. It was her turn. “Um …” She didn’t want to ask. “Is … is Arthur, Mandy’s dad … is he … ?”

  “You mean, is he alive?” asked Joanie.

  “Yes.”

  Joanie seemed to sense the game was getting serious. She spoke as if bringing bad news to a friend. “He died from a heart attack in 1992. I think he was about eighty-three.”

  Mandy’s hand went over her mouth. She shouldn’t have asked. She should have known she would believe the answer, that an old sorrow-in-waiting would take its opportunity.

  Daddy …

  This was not a dream she could wake up from, a delusion she could excuse away. There were no other worlds she could run to, no other places or times in which to hide. There was only this corner booth in the Claim Jumper restaurant at twenty-two after eleven, and all of it, including the couple sitting there, was real. She looked away as the tears came. She couldn’t hold them back.

  Game over.

  Terry sighed. “Well, it’s been very interesting.” But Lisa had not brought their checks yet.

  Mandy tried to recover, couldn’t shake it, signaled she’d be okay—it was a lie—put a napkin to her eyes.

  Joanie reached and touched her. “Sweetie, I don’t know what just happened. Is there some way, any way I could understand this?”

  What other way was there? “Joanie …”

  Joanie stroked her shoulder to comfort her. “Just help me understand.”

  “I’m … What if …” She stepped off the precipice. “What if I really was Mandy? What if I really was born January fifteenth, 1951, and I really did go to school with you and we were friends and … well, what if that could really happen?”

  Joanie’s gaze lingered. Did she believe? Did she?

  Terry fidgeted and looked for Lisa. Joanie …

  Mandy could see her words had fallen to the ground. Joanie’s eyes, though sorrowful, were perplexed and disbelieving. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry, but that just can’t be. My friend Mandy … is dead.”

  Dane was back at the ranch where he could wake up in a plain and simple life, think without distraction, believe most everything he saw or heard, and live in the world as it was, not as it was dressed up to be. From this vantage point he could handle things with a reasonable perspective—things like the letter he got in the old-fashioned U.S. Mail from Jerome Parmenter instructing him to call Parmenter at such and such a time at such and such a number and be sure he called from a public pay phone of his own random choosing.

  He chose the pay phone outside the Conoco Quik Stop on Highway 95, and for an added touch, he wore his cowboy hat and kept his coat collar turned up to obscure his face.

  Parmenter got right to it. “I’m going to ask you a question from out of the blue, all right? Please don’t ask me to explain it, it would take too long and I may be off my nut in the first place, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “You’ve obviously seen Mandy time and time again as the young girl, we know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she was always quite real, solid?”

  “Yes. She worked for me. I saw her shovel and move and clean things …” I also kissed her.

  “Right, right, right. Now, was she always the same age?”

  “What do you mean? She had a birthday in January.” I missed it.

  “No, no, uh, try a different age, a really
different age, specifically … well, how old was she when she was in the accident?”

  “Fifty-nine.”

  “Ever see her at fifty-nine?”

  “You mean, after I met her again, after she, after I thought she’d died?”

  “Yes. Thank you for the clarification.”

  “No, I …” Hold on.

  “Hello?”

  When it happened he thought it was a flashback or a drug reaction, but now his whole world was changing and another impossibility had to be reconsidered as possible. “I may have.”

  Now there was a pause at Parmenter’s end. “You may have? Well, I need to know: did you or didn’t you?”

  “Well, that’s been a pretty big question all along, hasn’t it?”

  “No, Dane, no! Now you know you aren’t crazy, you aren’t seeing things, so please be honest with me. Did you see Mandy at the age of fifty-nine?”

  “I don’t know what age she was. She was older. She looked pretty much the way she looked when I lost her.”

  “But you saw her after the accident; that’s the first big fact I need to establish.”

  “Yes, it was after the accident.”

  “Where?”

  “In my house.”

  “In your house?!” Parmenter’s excitement-o-meter was actually beginning to register something. “When?”

  “Well, a few months ago.”

  “No, no, not ‘a few months.’ I need to know the exact date and time, as close as you can get, down to the second if you can!”

  Oh, brother. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  “Do. Find out, as precisely as you can, and get back to me. Do you know exactly where she was when you saw her?”

  “Yes, I do know that. She was upstairs, looking out the east windows.”

  “Ahhh! Excellent! That’s half the battle right there. Was she solid or transparent?”

  “I would say she was solid. I could have touched her. I could smell her hair.”

  “Ohh!” He sounded as if he were having his own little Parmenter version of a fit. “All right, all right. Here’s what I need you to do …”

  This was where a stable mental platform was necessary. Sometimes—like now—Dane felt he was playing the clueless, cooperative sidekick to Parmenter’s mad professor, shades of those old Back to the Future movies. He listened carefully, taking notes.

  Date and time, date and time. Dane pored over the calendars on his kitchen wall, in his computer, in his cell phone, and on the wall in the loft, trying to remember. He saw her in the house right before he saw her running across his pasture, chased by the beat-up and mysterious Clarence. So when was that? Two weeks after Arnie took him to see Mandy—Eloise—perform at McCaffee’s and he walked out on her. That was November 7.

  Hold on. Did the fire department keep logs?

  He got the number from the phone book and spoke with the dispatcher, a cheerful lady named Maureen. Yes, they did keep logs. He told her somewhere around mid-November, she looked, and bingo! There it was: “Okay, we got the call from the McBride Ranch—Dane Collins is listed as the caller—at ten-forty A.M. on Monday, November twenty-second.”

  “Bingo! That’s it!” Then it hit him. “Huh. That’s the date Kennedy was shot.”

  “Well, I guess you’d know,” she said. “I wasn’t born yet.”

  Right. Who was anymore?

  So he called 911 at ten-forty; he called Shirley right before that, brought Mandy into the house before that, rescued her before that … saw her running in the pasture … right before that saw her standing at the window … couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes. Okay: November 22, 2010, (close to) 10:20 A.M. PST. He wrote it down.

  Now to call Parmenter. Hmm—which phone do I use this time?

  chapter

  * * *

  43

  Mandy closed her three-week run at the Orpheus on Wednesday, February 16. The next day, she arrived at the Spokane airport, where Seamus met her.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there,” he said as they drove I-90 eastbound through the city.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You look like—”

  “I said I’m all right.”

  “Well, if you need to unwind a day or two, that’s no problem.”

  “Are you gonna help me or not?”

  “Peace, peace. I’ve talked to the head of maintenance at the fairgrounds. He’ll be there to let us in if that’s what you want to do.”

  She let out a breath and tried to calm herself. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. What you’ve been through … I leave you for just a few days and …”

  “Yeah, I know. So how’s the practice?”

  “Oh, we’re current. I have some court dates next week, have to do some depositions tomorrow. Pamela’s helping me juggle everything, which reminds me: Vahidi and I talked yesterday and had a very nice conversation. They’re offering the big room.”

  That news was as good as it was big and it did thrill her—to an extent. She had to crawl out from under her preoccupation to tell him, “That’s wonderful, Seamus, it really is. I’ll be more excited about it, I promise.”

  “He wants to open next month, but I want a bigger budget than they’re offering. We’re going to need a whole new sound track, and with that bigger stage you’re going to need some stage extras and some movable sets, something eye-catching and classy.”

  She winced. “Are we going to have enough time for all that? We don’t even have a show designed.”

  “Don’t worry, your industrious manager is on it—but that’s all for another day. We have today’s business to think about.”

  The Spokane County Fairgrounds were a different sight on a cloudy day in February: dead quiet, deserted, coated with snow and slush. Only a quarter of the parking lot was plowed clear and in use for the three-day Home Design Show in the main exhibit hall.

  Mr. Talburton, the maintenance guy, let them in through a gate in the fence and gave them two security passes to wear on lanyards. Apparently he and Seamus had already discussed the agenda for the visit and any applicable fees. Talburton produced a map of the grounds and marked key sites: the carnival area, the food court, the Rabbits and Poultry Building, and the Camelid Barn. He scribbled a phone number along the top of the map. “Here’s my cell number if you have any questions.”

  They set out, braving two inches of slush between patches of bare pavement wherever they could find it. Mandy took Seamus’s arm. “Thank you for doing this.”

  “You’re very welcome. Try to talk to me. Tell me what you’re feeling.”

  They were nearing the carnival area where Mandy, Joanie, and Angie overindulged on the stomach-turning rides. Except for the permanently built roller coaster and the shrouded carousel—Mandy could recall the music it played—there wasn’t a ride in sight. The game pavilions were boarded up. There was a flat, slushy expanse where rows of craft and souvenir booths had stood. Mandy indicated a general area. “I bought an anklet from an old Indian guy right about there, and …”—she peered through a grove of trees to another empty space in front of the livestock barns—“over there, that’s where the Great Marvellini was going to do his show at two. There was a stage and some bleachers …”

  And now there was nothing. It was eerie, and brought back the same old fear she’d borne for months, that she was out of her mind, imagining things. Where she remembered carnival rides, there was nothing. The old Indian who sold her the anklet could have been a dream. The Great Marvellini? It was only her memory that placed a stage and bleachers in that spot.

  “That would have been the North Stage,” said Seamus, pointing at the map.

  Mandy studied the map. The North Stage was there, at least. “I’m so glad.”

  “So there is a lot of fact here. There really is a fairgrounds, the locations are all the same.”

  “Yes, at least now, in this time, they are.”

  “But let me be sure now: what you’ve descr
ibed so far took place … in 1970?”

  She looked down at the snow, feeling so strange, so afraid.

  “Come on, now, let’s just work it through. Just show it to me. Go through the process. The point is to get it right out on the table where you can see it, own it, take charge of it. If it’s yours, you can do what you want with it, but as long as you hide from it, it’ll keep chasing you.”

  “It was September twelfth, 1970. Joanie and Angie and I were just about to start school again, our sophomore year at NIJC.”

  “And this was the same Joanie you met last Friday night?”

  “Yes. And she was real. She was forty years older and she remembered all the same things I remembered from when we were growing up, so she had to be the same Joanie I was with that day, so that day had to have happened, right? She was here with me, she and Angie. We were just having fun at the fair, you know? My dad was showing his llamas over in the … well, there’s a camelid building there now but it was another building then …”

  They walked down a wide paved walkway spanning an empty field where rows of food booths on each side once formed a village of junk food eateries. “We didn’t want to eat any of the junky stuff, especially Angie …”

  They came to the end of the walkway, where two permanent buildings stood in the shadow of the grandstand. “This one here used to be the Spokane Junior League Booth. I bought a basket of chicken here, but Joanie and Angie wanted to get something else, so we were going to meet …”

  The North Lawn was still there. The tables were gone, stored away; the trees were bare and gray against the winter sky. Mandy scanned the area first, imagining the tables, the people sitting at them, the crowd noise, and the pleasant heat of a lunchtime sun. The place looked so immensely different in September … of 1970 and 2010. The big honey locust tree was still where she remembered it. She walked through the snow to the thick trunk, touched the bark, and looked around to get her bearings.

  “This is the spot,” she said. “This is where I woke up and it was forty years later.”