08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  Seamus came to her side. “Right here?”

  “Right here where I’m standing. I sat down and leaned against this tree in 1970, and the next thing I knew”—emotion choked her voice—“I was sitting in the same spot and the tree was bigger and it was 2010.” She steadied herself against the tree and took in the North Lawn, the empty concession buildings, the vacant grandstand. “And I can’t describe the feeling. Like being a little kid who’s lost. You just don’t know what to do.”

  She didn’t know what to do now. She’d hoped that if she could go back to where it all started, some clue might reveal itself. Perhaps a feeling would occur, or a vision. Maybe a portal would open that would take her back.

  But there was nothing here, only the cold, the quiet, the gloom of winter—in 2011.

  “Do you remember what time it was?” Seamus asked.

  “There was a clock on the corn dog booth right over there.” The booth was gone; she pointed to where it was on that day. “It was one-oh-five. In 1970. In 2010 the corn dog booth and the clock weren’t there anymore.”

  “That would have been Pacific Daylight Time …” Seamus took a pen and marked the location and time on the map. “Anything else? Just bring it out, envision it. Take command.”

  She described the people she saw before and after the jump in time and how things changed from one year to the other: the paint on the buildings, the clothing and hair styles, the sudden advent of strange little gadgets such as iPods and cell phones, the funny cultural shifts such as tobacco-free zones and hand-washing stations.

  “And none of it was like a dream, you know what I mean? All the memories are of real things. I remember being in 1970 just as clearly, just as real, as looking up and seeing I had nothing but a hospital gown on and it was 2010.”

  Standing against a real tree in a real place, both of which confirmed a real memory, she discovered a new resolve and dared to say it to another person for the first time: “I think … I think there is no crazy woman standing here. It was real. All of it. I can’t explain it, but somehow it was real. Everything I’ve seen, everywhere I’ve been, Joanie last week … it’s all real.”

  She looked at him for his reaction, but there was no skepticism, no condescension in his eyes. He simply said, “Take hold of it. Own it, whatever it is.”

  She nodded and drank in the scene. It was hers. She’d really been here in both the recent and the distant past, and that was all there was to it. As for explanations …

  “I need to find Joanie.”

  “You can use my car.”

  Parmenter’s supersophisticated GPS-and-then-some arrived by FedEx, and Parmenter’s enclosed list of instructions was clear enough. Dane went upstairs, stood in the exact spot where the mysterious vision of Mandy stood, and switched it on. The screen booted up, some numbers scurried across the LCD screen, and then it was ready. He pressed the Function button, then the Waypoint button, and in seconds he had the numbers.

  This time he used the pay phone on the outside of a bank in Hayden and wore a hooded jacket.

  “Very good, Dane, thank you very much.”

  “So what’s this about?”

  “Oh, it’s probably nothing. Then again, it could be everything.”

  So close, so close to knowing! Mandy’s hands trembled as she paged through the Coeur d’Alene phone book and found the number for Terry and Joanie Lundin—real names, a real number, proof that the couple she met in Vegas a week ago was not illusory—if the same Joanie answered the phone. Oh, Lord, here goes.

  The same Joanie answered the phone, and the same Joanie answered Mandy’s knock on her door. Mandy gave her a weak little smile, a face that said, Well, here I am, can’t help it, think you can help me?

  Joanie absorbed the sight of her, then stepped out and gave Mandy a sisterly hug. “I don’t know who you are, kid, but any friend of Mandy’s is a friend of mine.”

  They went into the quaint old house that Terry inherited from his parents and remodeled. On the hallway wall were pictures of their children and grandchildren. The kitchen was modernized; Joanie had a latte machine and took Mandy’s request for a mocha.

  As the machine ground and tamped the beans, Mandy had to marvel. “Wow.”

  “You’ve never seen one of these?”

  “Oh, I have, but it seems like everybody has one now.”

  “Oh, they’re the thing.”

  “All we had was one of those little coffeemakers with the paper filters.”

  Joanie caught the rich brew in a small cup. “So … you know about computers and cell phones and … ?”

  “I got a cell phone. It still amazes me. And computers? Guy, it’s unbelievable!”

  Joanie handed her a mocha in a mug.

  “Thank you!” It smelled heavenly.

  Joanie reflected, smiled, and said, “Guy! I haven’t said that in years. Where’d we ever get that, anyway?”

  Mandy shrugged. “A take off on ‘gosh’ or ‘golly’?”

  “Do you …”

  Mandy waited.

  “Do you remember Mrs. McQuaig?”

  Mandy cracked up and imitated how their third-grade teacher would get so involved in finishing a thought she’d run out of air. “… boys and girls, master these tables and they will always be at haaaannnnd …”

  Which brought them around to Mrs. Goade, whose head-nodding mannerism was contagious so that the whole class started doing it.

  “Whatever happened to Angie?” Mandy asked.

  Joanie shook her head. “I don’t know. Lost track of her after college.”

  They sat at the dining table, coffee mugs in hand, and neither seemed to notice how bizarre it was for a woman near sixty to be sharing old times and old names with a girl who’d just turned twenty: the Play Day race that Mandy won two years in a row; Joanie and Mandy doing a tap dance at the talent show in fourth grade; pretending to be Tennessee Walkers out on the playground; Steve Randall turning his eyelids inside out and chasing them; Mandy’s magic act with interlocking rings in the talent show in sixth grade; Dave Leverson being a jerk from the first grade and all the way up through high school; Mandy being King Lear’s daughter—what was her name?—in drama class, and Joanie being King Lear.

  At last, Mandy drank down the settled chocolate from the bottom of her mug and asked, “So how are you taking this?”

  Joanie thought a moment, gave her hands a little upturn, and said, “Just going with it.”

  Going with it. They used to use that term whenever things got freaky. “So am I.”

  “You never skip a beat. A lot of things you remember better than I do.”

  “Well, for me, they were just a few years ago.”

  “I’m not going crazy, am I?”

  Mandy shook a pointed finger to emphasize, “No, you’re not, not at all. I’m not crazy so I know you aren’t.”

  “It’s just that you being Mandy Whitacre is impossible. Other than that, I’ve got no problem.”

  “But that’s the riddle I’m trying to solve. What am I doing here in 2011 when I should be back in … well now it would be 1971?”

  “It’s absolutely nuts.”

  “Well, what if we just pretended, kind of like we’ve been doing? What if we just assumed that I’m the real Mandy Whitacre?”

  Joanie tilted her head thoughtfully and locked eyes with her. “So you were born … when?”

  “January fifteenth, 1951.”

  “But now you’re only twenty.”

  Mandy cringed. “Right.”

  “Watergate.” That was all she said, and then she waited.

  Mandy was puzzled.

  “You don’t remember that?”

  “No.”

  “What about Karen Carpenter?”

  Mandy sang a line of “Close to You.”

  Joanie wagged her head. It seemed being amazed was becoming a steady state for her. “So … you only remember things up until 1970.”

  “That’s all the older I was, uh, am.”
<
br />   Now Joanie rubbed her face as if trying to clear her brain. “All right, let’s pretend. How did you get here?”

  “How … you mean—”

  “How did you get from 1970 to 2011? You must have a story.”

  “Uhh … yeah …” Mandy steeled herself and went into it, recounting that sunny day in September 1970 at the Spokane County Fair. She listed the rides the three girls went on, the anklet she bought, their plans for lunch and seeing the Great Marvellini, the last time they saw each other: in line at the Spokane Junior League Chicken Basket concession.

  At each and every step, Joanie reacted with increasing astonishment until her fingers were over her mouth and she was gawking, as if Mandy were Samuel or Elijah.

  “And then,” Mandy completed the story, “I woke up, I guess, and everything was different. I’d skipped ahead forty years, just like that, and I don’t have the foggiest idea how or why, and I’ve been trying to find out ever since. Now, remember, we’re pretending this is all true, okay? You don’t have to believe it, just let me know if it checks out, tell me anything you can, I want to know. Were you with me at the fair that day?”

  It was a stupefied, even fearful Joanie who answered “Yes.”

  “Do you remember—”

  “Everything you said, yes. Some of it I’d forgotten until you told me about it, but now, yes, I remember it.”

  “So”—Mandy could feel a tinge of life and hope—“it happened, didn’t it?”

  Joanie nodded. “It happened. But you can’t … how could you possibly be here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Joanie thought a moment, her eyes watching the memories of that day. “So you never saw the Great Marvellini?”

  “No. I never got there. I never saw you and Angie again.”

  Joanie looked at her. “But you were there.”

  Mandy didn’t get that. “I was … ?”

  “You were there with me and Angie when we saw the Great Marvellini.”

  It just didn’t connect in Mandy’s mind. How could … ? “But …”

  “And he did a routine with doves. You don’t remember that?”

  Not in the slightest, though she tried. “No.”

  Joanie looked incredulous. “How could you not remember that?”

  “I don’t know! I wasn’t there.”

  “But you were there!”

  Mandy was getting flustered. “Well, let’s just keep pretending … or something.”

  “All right, I’ll play along, but listen, this is the truth. I was there, I saw it happen—and you’d better hang on for this one.

  “Marvellini did a routine with doves. He’d throw out his arms and make some fire flash and there’d be a dove out of nowhere, and you were right there with him, really into it because you used to do the same trick with your doves. And then”—her eyes got a dreamy look—“one of the doves didn’t fly back to Marvellini. It flew down to you. We were sitting right in the front row, and that dove just flew right down to you”—emotion choked her voice—“and you put out your hand and it landed on your finger like it knew you; it just perched right there.”

  Mandy knew doves, knew how it felt when such a fragile creature came to trust her. “You’re not making this up?”

  “Hey, I’ve gone along with you on this whole thing …”

  “Right. Sorry. It’s just so—”

  “I know. But it happened. I was sitting right next to you. So then, Marvellini called you up onstage, and”—she broke into a smile, a silent laugh—“and you never did anything halfway. You did a dance step—it was a grapevine, I remember it—right across the stage and went up to him like you were some kind of paid, shapely assistant. The whole crowd went nuts. Angie and I about fell out of our seats we were laughing so hard. But then, you knew the moves. You just tossed that bird in the air like you knew what it would do, and it flew back to Marvellini like it was supposed to, and he was so impressed he told you to stick around, he wanted to talk to you after the show.”

  Then Joanie leaned over the table and delivered the rest of the story in hushed, tender tones. “And Marvellini had a stage assistant, stage manager, whatever you want to call it. And you don’t remember, do you?”

  Mandy shook her head sadly. “I don’t remember anything after the tree in the North Lawn.”

  Joanie nodded, working with that. “There was this guy acting as Marvellini’s assistant and it looked a little weird, a magician being assisted by another guy like they were, you know, gay or something. But he had that guy offer you his arm and escort you back to your seat, and that’s how you and that guy met.” She was holding out, teasing.

  The longest time passed until Mandy had to ask, “What guy?”

  “Have you ever heard of Dane Collins? He’s a big-name magician now, or at least he was.”

  Mandy didn’t hear the sentence after “Dane Collins.” The name hit her like a blow to her chest, stole away her breath, carried away her thoughts. “Dane … ?” Even so, though Joanie’s answer shocked her, it was the right answer. She couldn’t have borne the sound of another name.

  “That’s how you met Dane Collins. Now tell me you don’t remember that.”

  “I … met … Dane Collins?”

  Joanie leaned back in her chair and just gave her a moment.

  Mandy tried to imagine Dane as a young man but could see only the sixty-year-old escorting her back to her seat, getting her name, smiling at her, thanking her for coming, saying whatever it was he said, her fantasy of a reality that only Joanie was there to see. But if that was the day they met … “What are you saying?”

  “You really don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “This is heavy.”

  “Did I—”

  “Marvellini offered you a job as his stage assistant and you took it, right there on the spot. We thought it was kind of a lame move, I mean, you were dropping out of college to go on the road with a nickel-and-dime magic act, but … we could see the little sparks between you and Dane and you know, he was one hunk of a guy. He was only nineteen, no older than we were, but he was cute, real cute!

  “Anyway, you were Marvellini’s stage assistant until he retired—or quit, just depends on which story you believe. He handed the whole show over to Dane and you, and by then you two were inseparable, so you got married”—she threw in a pause to let that sink in—“on June 19, 1971 … and you started up your act and you called it Dane and Mandy, and the rest is history.”

  Dane and Mandy. She remembered seeing, touching those names on all those crates in Dane’s barn. All the dreams, all the years, all in the past. “I know Dane Collins!”

  Joanie looked at her quizzically. “You know him? You mean, now?”

  Mandy nodded.

  “And how did this happen?”

  “I worked for him! He coached me!”

  “When? I thought you never met him.”

  “I did, but not back then!” Mandy tried to explain how the Gypsy Girl and then the Hobett met up with Dane Collins and became his protégée and worked on his place and learned how to put on a show, and how he never talked about his wife unless she asked him and didn’t have any pictures of her in the house and how she just had to be around him and how she didn’t know why she had to try on Mandy’s costumes and dresses, she just had to, and by the time she got to that part she was in tears. She didn’t say anything about their parting; she just couldn’t.

  Joanie dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “And let me guess: you’re in love with him.”

  That was a question Mandy feared more than anything. She deflected it. “What did my dad think?”

  “About?”

  “About Dane and me …”

  Joanie smiled. “He gave you away at the wedding. You know how the minister asks, ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ Your dad said, ‘Her mother and I do,’ and he put your hand into Dane’s and just held it there for a while. He liked Dane. He told me, and I heard him say to o
ther people, too, ‘Eloise would have liked him.’ I don’t think he was ever worried about you.” She laughed at another memory. “He helped you fix up the first house you rented, the one near Seattle. It was a rebuilt chicken coop. It didn’t have any insulation and the water came from a spring up the hill.” She shook her head at the memory. “I came by to see it once. Holy cow!”

  “But we were happy?”

  “It was like that line from Fiddler on the Roof, ‘They’re so happy they don’t know how miserable they are.’ You had all your money in that old moving van with your show gear in it, and, I tell you, you ran the wheels off that thing. You’d come through Spokane and Coeur d’Alene about twice a year, and every time your show was better. I knew you were going to outgrow the little county fairs and high school assemblies and I guess you did.” Joanie found her a box of tissues, and Mandy pulled out several. “Come on, let’s go on the Internet.”

  They went into the den where heads of deer, elk, and one bull moose stared into space from the walls. Joanie had a computer sitting on a desk in the corner. She placed a chair beside her own for Mandy, flipped open her Mac, and showed Mandy the steps to get online.

  “Now you just type ‘Dane and Mandy’ into the search box up here …”

  What came up was more than Mandy would be able to read in that one visit, but Joanie’s mission for the moment was to find picture after picture of Mandy through the years, and the earliest ones … well, they were pictures of the Girl in the Mirror. Joanie hit the print command, and the printer zip-zip-zipped out hard copies.

  “And let’s see, if we go to the Social Security death index … and enter Arthur Whitacre …”

  Daddy’s name came up in the little boxes on the screen along with his Social Security number and the date of his death, March 12, 1992.

  Tap tap. Zip-zip-zip.

  “Can you bear to see more?”

  By now Mandy felt numb, unable to fight or fathom it. She could only receive it, store it, let it season. “Please.”

  Joanie did a little more searching and brought up an obituary from the Coeur d’Alene Press. There was a photograph of Daddy, so much older than she remembered him. Joanie scrolled down to the part that read, “He is survived by his daughter, Mandy Eloise Collins …”