Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  “The why continue with this pill if you have no need —

  “I can’t explain it Robert,” I said honestly. “Part of it is habit, like taking vitamins, but the Pill also…represents something—”

  I had never really thought of it until I tried to explain it, but Robert saw it instantly. “Tremendous freedom,” he said at once, awed by the thought. “Unparalleled control. Lord, it just hit me. And all for women. The impact of it is staggering.”

  My hand travelled lightly down his side. “Shush,” I said.

  “T'is one of your — what do you call it? — cultural icons, this pill. Isn’t it?”

  I could tell he was winding up for one his tedious lectures wherein he explains my century to me. “Robert,” I cut in sternly, trying to head him off. “Hush.”

  For once, he decided to oblige me. For a long time we laid quietly listening to the rush and sigh of the surf and the sound of our own breathing. Then Robert said: “What ho! A scout.”

  He was referring to my hand, of course.

  “Let us retire from the field, Kathleen,” he said presently. “Bivouac someplace snug and comfortable. And allow our scouts to patrol the countryside.”

  I knew precisely what he meant.

  The Garden Shed

  Chapter 41

  In the morning we left without so much as a backward glance, if you discount the images arising from some skittish corner of my mind of an entire posse of suspicious deputies (reinforced by government agents) just dying for an excuse to stop us and demand identification (Robert’s in particular), thus detaining us on the Outer Banks forever, and our drive from Avon to the mainland was entirely uneventful. Still, I didn’t really heave a sigh of relief until we crossed the state line about an hour later.

  At Great Bridge, Robert unfolded the road map and busied himself tracing our route. “A thought’s occurred to me,” I said.

  “Clever Kitty. No surprise there.”

  “I was thinking that someday Lila may actually marry Phillip.”

  Robert looked up from his map. “And does that … concern you?”

  “It would have, before I got to know him better. Phillip’s a very nice man, Robert. He’s, I don’t know, thoughtful. Kind.”

  “He tends toward the tedious,” Robert commented.

  “You sound like Henry. But then, Henry’s jealous.” I paused. “Anyway, Lila’s been married five times, so I suppose I thought a sixth marriage would be overkill.”

  “Yes. I can see where you might think that.”

  “But it doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what Lila thinks. It took me a long time to understand that.”

  “Aren’t you a bit ahead of yourself? Has the man even offered for her?”

  “He will, if she wants him to. You’ll see.”

  We chuckled at that. After a bit Robert began humming one of his little songs.

  “Sing it to me,” I said.

  “A night is short/there is no time to spare/A nightingale’s song/will soon die in the air.” He stopped and looked at me expectantly.

  “That’s it? That’s the song?”

  “All that I remember.”

  “Well, it’s a silly song. I hope you do better with the other verses.” For the next several miles we argued about the relative stupidity of popular songs, with Robert making liberal use of the radio to support his argument that twenty-first century popular music is far stupider that its eighteenth century counterpart. Then, about the time we made Norfolk, Robert snapped his fingers.

  “Don’t you think, dearest maiden, we better agree/to kiss while the nightingale/sings in the tree?”

  I teased him for his lyrics, and the miles swept by. Traffic was light in our lanes but heavy beachbound. I glanced at Robert and saw that he was mesmerized by the seamless miles-long wall of nearly stationary cars.

  “It’s not just the single automobile I find amazing,” he mused, “but the uncounted numbers of them. By itself, an automobile is merely a toy. But collectively, they have reshaped the human condition in a way war and religion could never hope to do. The same is true of the telephone in your kitchen and the computer we used at the library. By themselves they are nothing, yet they represent communication on a planetary scale.” He looked at me, pleased with his observation. “You have shrunk time and space to nothing, Kitty. It is no less unimaginable than our mysterious trap door.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you were sitting in that traffic jam. You’d make better time on horseback.” But he was right. There was nothing any more remarkable about time travel, even if it was accidental, than there was about global transport and communication. And if you stretch it a little, sliding from one century to another seems almost normal, nothing more than a kind of natural phenomena like Old Faithful or a total eclipse of the sun.

  “You must be tired, Kitty,” Robert remarked presently. “We were late to bed last night. Shall I take the reins a while?”

  I shot him a look and he grinned at me, full of mischief. A few minutes later he was asleep.

  During the long drive through Virginia I entertained myself by mentally choreographing Robert’s official makeover, the one that would provide him with actual IDs and a documented history, even though I had no idea how we’d go about this. I knew I would have to tell Lila everything all at once. She might believe Robert was a con man and I was crazy, but I knew she’d help us. After all, Lila’s favorite ex-husband, Harry, is a con man of sorts, and Lila herself has been crazy, so at the very least she’d have to sympathize.

  We were just south of Richmond when a thought shot through my brain like a lightning bolt: Harry’s specialty, as I may have mentioned, is false papers and documents, and even his defense attorney privately admitted that he was one of the most skilled computer criminals on the planet. Prosecutors could never have built a case against him had he not been fingered by a less accomplished colleague who was the target of an FBI investigation and anxious to bargain. Even from his jail cell, Lila claimed, Harry still controlled an empire built on the creation of phony documents.

  Harry, I belatedly realized, was our passport to the future. Harry could arrange an identity for Robert. Harry could actually recreate Robert as a twenty-first century man with all the papers that would make him an official person with a verifiable and unassailable past. And no matter what her suspicions were, Lila would persuade Harry to do it because she loved me and I loved Robert. It was that simple.

  I began thinking of all the property Lila had purchased, and how she was wooing Phillip for his seventy-five acres. I never could imagine how she would manage all that land, and now I knew she didn’t have to. Robert would do it. He was bred to farming, and he was a quick study. He’d raise hay and horses, corn and soybeans. He’d learn modern farming in a heartbeat. And River House would be the one thing (aside from me, perhaps) Robert and Lila could agree upon. It would surmount her suspicions and his impatience. it would give us peace and even closure. In this time and place, River House would be Robert’s Talbots.

  There was a mathematical balance in the idea, a perfect symmetry in the thought, that told me it was true. River House was our beacon in the dark. Robert would find the land again and I … I would find my mother and myself. And perhaps my own redemption.

  I was smiling to myself, feeling light-hearted and sure-footed, when Robert finally stirred from sleep and looked at me. He said, “I remembered the last verse.”

  “Is it as silly as the others?”

  “Very nearly so.” And then in his fine, deep voice he sang: “It’s a shame that a handsome/young fellow like me/should wait whilst the nightingale/sings in the tree.”

  “Sing me another song.”

  “You’re never satisfied, Kitty.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, turning suddenly serious. “I have everything that’s important to me.”

  Robert reached out to touch my hair. “And what is that, Kitty, my heart?”

  “My children. My mother, my friends.” I
glanced over at him. “You.”

  *****

  Somewhere just past Wilmington we stopped for a late lunch at a fast food place. To please Lila, I called her from a pay phone by the restrooms rather than my cell. Ironically, as soon as I hung up the pay phone, my cell phone rang. I pulled it from my purse and saw Cameron’s name displayed across the screen.

  I almost didn’t answer it, and then I knew I had to.

  “Where are you?” he asked as soon as I said hello.

  I told him.

  “Good God, Kathy Lee,” he said, sounded exasperated. “You just can’t stay in one place, can you?”

  “I have to sign some papers for the house.”

  “Have you sold it?”

  “Not yet, but I may have a buyer.”

  “What are you going to do with the money?” This was the first time Cameron had ever mustered up enough interest to ask.

  “Buy a place of my own,” I told him.

  He scoffed.

  “Are you calling to check up on me?” I asked.

  Cameron had no idea I knew about Alfred. Still, I knew this was hitting close to home.

  “You have no intention of attending the chief’s dinner, do you?” he parried.

  “You called to ask me that?”

  “Hope springs eternal,” he quipped, and for a moment we both chuckled. Then Cameron spoiled it all by adding, “Well, you can buy your house, Kathy, but I’m not signing any divorce papers.”

  “You know, Cameron, you should be more careful about what you leave behind at the cottage on those weekend trysts of yours.”

  The silence was so heavy it was palpable. Then I heard him draw breath.

  “Save it,” I said quickly. “Don’t waste my time.” I snapped my cell phone closed.

  When I returned to our table I saw Robert’s gaze track a man walking past us wearing khaki shorts and a plain, white short-sleeved shirt. He was forty, maybe forty-five, and so average looking I’d have barely glanced at him, had Robert not eyed him so speculatively. Robert, I realized, was people watching.

  “Engineer,” Robert pronounced. “Definitely an engineer. Or a, um, ah, computer what-do-you-call it.”

  “Programmer?”

  “No. Shorter word.”

  “Geek?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why do you think he’s an engineer or a programmer?”

  “That thing in his pocket,” Robert said, touching the breast pocket of his own shirt. “A, um…

  “Pocket protector.” I stared at him. “How did you know about that?

  “I found an old magazine in your bookcase the other day. There was an article … ‘Employment in the new century,’ I believe it was titled.”

  “You know, Robert,” I said suddenly, “it worries me what you will think when the century — my century — really descends on you. Until now, we’ve been … secluded, you could say. Running below radar.”

  “Dug in,” he acknowledged. “Entrenched.”

  “Yes.” I paused and looked around at the bright, ugly interior of the hamburger place where we sat munching fries and decided this was, perhaps, the perfect place to discuss such a topic. I turned my gaze back to Robert and leaned in close. “These are loud, restless, vulgar times,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Life speeds along like, I don’t know, a missile with a nuclear payload. It’s overwhelming, even for people raised in the context of it. I worry that the speed and rudeness will repulse you. I’m afraid that you’ll hate it.”

  “Kitty,” Robert said quietly. “You need not fear this.”

  I shook my head.

  “You see my century though a rose-tinted lens,” he went on. “It’s not all grace and elegance and reason. It’s a dirty, push and shove century with little justice and less mercy. People starve in the streets, Children — infants — are abandoned to die by parents too sick and poor to care for them. Ignorance and narrow-mindedness are nearly universal. Filth is everywhere and so is noise. The calls of peddlers, the cries of beggars, the clatter of cartwheels on cobbles makes conversations out of doors nearly impossible.”

  He paused. “You leave the manicured quiet of the best neighborhoods, the most fashionable streets, and you are assaulted by noise and stench, squalor and human misery. Thieves and cut-throats are everywhere. So are pain and disease, even in the best households, even among the wealthiest and most educated. Medicine, I realize now, is primitive. Was primitive. Anne died of childbed fever. It is — was — the single most common means of death among women. And babies and children die in horrifying numbers. Each time I held my children, I prayed they would not die. Disease carries them off so easily, Kitty. There is not a household of my acquaintance that has not lost at least one child. We all live with that dread.”

  “I cannot imagine it,” I whispered.

  “No, you could not. And the countryside is not immune. It may be quieter and the air cleaner and the squalor less pervasive, but it has its own evils, Kitty. Landowners have begun to enclose the open spaces, revoking the pasturage and garden spaces formerly granted to the poor. The poor own nothing. They are at the mercy of the estate. When the commons are enclosed for the use of lord or squire, the people starve. Children are the most vulnerable victims of the greed of the rich. They perish in untold numbers of disease and malnutrition. And those who survive flee to the cities to look for work that isn’t there, only to join the multitudes who live and die in the gutters. Nay, Kitty. Your time has its own horrors, but I assure you, they are nothing new to me.”

  Robert reached across the table and took my hand. He cradled it in his own, uncurled my fingers and ran his thumb across my palm. Then he raised his eyes to mine. “Whither thou goest, Kitty. Do you see that? My happiness lies with you.”

  My heart filled with joy like a sail catching the wind. Somewhere inside me the nameless paranoia of the last two weeks lifted and vanished, as if I left it somewhere on the road behind us. No one hunted Robert. No one knew or cared what happened in that garden shed. Our life together lay all before us. There was nothing left of the past.

  *****

  We continued our journey up Route 202 to Skippack Pike. Early that evening we arrived at Mary Stein’s office where she was waiting for me with several confusing papers to sign which I pretended to understand. I introduced her to Robert, who made appropriate noises and watched the proceedings with great interest, mercifully asking no questions involving references to Africa.

  Afterwards, we drove to Uncle Bennett’s and put our luggage not in Bennett’s room or even mine, but in one of the guest rooms, appropriating it for our own. Then I called Lila in Kinsale, who was relieved I had, once again, evaded the Tipton Curse, and reminded me she was leaving John and Helen’s the following morning. And I talked to the children who, for the first time, asked when I was coming home.

  Soon, I told them. Two days. I promise.

  When I hung up the phone Robert was nowhere to be seen. I prowled around the house until I found him in the bedroom we had assigned ourselves, gazing at an arrangement of framed photos that stood on the dressing table. “A veritable portrait gallery,” he said to me, his eyes still on the pictures. “They must all be your family.”

  I stood beside him and saw that most of the photographs were old black and white snapshots of various departed Tiptons, including my father. There was also a studio portrait of my grandmother as a very young woman in a white dress with ruffles down the bodice. But my favorite was a family grouping: my great-grandparents with assorted children and babies, kith and kin, sitting on a fresh-cut lawn in shirt sleeves and summer dresses, the garden shed visible in the background. It was June 1918, Bennett told me once, and in my grandfather’s teenaged hand there was a glass of lemonade. I picked up the picture and stared at the faces. My father, I realized, would not be born for another decade or two.

  “Kitty,” Robert said, lifting up two photos in hinged, gold-tone frames, “these are of you. And in this one you’re actually dressed as a gir
l.”

  I took the pictures from him and smiled. One was of me in a prom dress with a corsage on my wrist, an absolute vision in predictable pink, and the other was of me astride a Thoroughbred mare, a young and willing bay, as I recalled, belonging to a family friend. The photo captured us suspended over a four-foot fence in what was (I was fairly certain) near-perfect form and balance. Judging from the prom dress in the adjoining frame, I figured the pictures were taken in the spring of my senior year when I was seventeen and Lila was still at Havenhurst. This meant they were probably sent to Uncle Bennett by Mae-Mae, who had assumed the duty of keeping Bennett informed of family news (that is, Lila’s “progress” at the fruit farm) and arranging my summer visits to him.

  “I’m enamored of photographs,” Robert said, lifting the pictures from my hands. “They’re rather like living things.”

  “I’ve always thought of them as windows,” I told him. “Especially the old ones. As if you could slip right into the picture and everybody would suddenly move and talk and offer you a seat and something to drink.”

  I felt Robert looking at me. “Another form of time travel, I suppose.”

  That was a disturbing thought.

  “But what really fascinates me, Kitty, are the dynamics of you and the horse.”

  I could tell by the lift of his voice that he was about to launch into one of his lectures.

  “You can’t actually see this with the eye, you know,” he went on, “because the movement is too fast. But when the camera freezes the motion, suddenly you look afresh at ordinary things. Such a wonderful invention, the camera. If, for example, you look at a photograph of a person running, captured in mid-stride, all at once you actually see how human legs really work. Or a photograph like this, of a horse and rider taking a fence…” He paused suddenly, his voice drifting off as he studied the picture. “You’re a bit behind, Kathleen, don’t you think?”

  He was suggesting that I was too far back in the saddle, that I wasn’t as forward on the mare’s neck as I should have been, and it annoyed me because he was probably right. I’m a good equestrienne but not a natural athlete, and my timing at jumps has never been especially great.