by J. D. Robb
Looking up into the rafters, she thought the rotations might be slowing down, but closed her eyes again to keep from getting sick. She couldn’t really recommend carpet travel…except to those who had lost their way or needed to see what was truly important in their lives…It was nauseating and disturbing on several levels.
When the rotating slowed and the whir started to fade, she thought she heard her name being called. Seconds later, she was positive.
Nine
“Jan? Is that you?” She sat up, using her hands on the carpet to support her. She opened her eyes. The carpet wasn’t going any faster than a merry-go-round now and shapes were…taking shape.
“Bonnie? Can you hear me?”
“Yes. Yes.” She put a hand over her heart. “You sound so good! I’ve missed you so much.”
“But you didn’t go anywhere, honey.” She watched the carpet stop and hover high for several seconds—like it had its motor running. “You’ve been spinning up there for the last four or five minutes. I was afraid to leave you, in case I was hallucinating. And you had my cell so…Oh! Here it comes. I think it’s landing. This is so bizarre.”
And you don’t know the half of it, sister, Bonnie thought.
As if it had a crack pilot at the helm, the rug settled gracefully over the steamer trunk and positioned Bonnie like she was sitting on a high bench. She felt the heat of it against her palm and the nicest kind of thrill passed through her body as the gentle guardian—or whatever—in the rug bid her farewell.
“Thank you,” she murmured softly, spreading her fingers wide and pressing down significantly. “I won’t forget.”
Bonnie hopped down off the trunk and crushed Jan in her arms like an avocado heading for guacamole. “You are the best sister. You’re the only constant in my life,” she told Jan. “No matter what version of my life I’m living in, you’re there with me.”
“Of course I am. So what happened? You were awfully quiet up there. Thank God you’re all right. You are all right, right?” Jan was nervous and excited all at once and talking very quickly.
Startled, they both squealed as the carpet moved suddenly, lifting swiftly and hanging in the air, then rolling up like a shade in a window. It came down again softly, draped itself gracefully across the steamer trunk. Then it lay still, and Bonnie sensed it was inert, like the dollhouse or the birdcage in the corner. Jan kept a wary eye on it as she said, “What happened to you?”
“So much,” she said, walking backward, pulling her sister excitedly toward the attic steps. “You’re not going to believe it…and I can’t tell you right now…”
“Ah, come on!”
“And I need you to stay with Pim for a bit, can you do that?”
“I do have clients, you know. I’m a professional real estate broker.”
But more than a savvy businesswoman, Bonnie knew her sister was a bone-deep romantic.
“That’s fine. It’s not a big deal, I guess. I was going to tell Joe about all this, but it can wait until after the nurse comes. Oh, here’s your cell phone.”
“Joe?”
“Yes. My husband?”
“But I thought you were going to wait for him to come back to you, for your self-esteem.”
“More like my pride. And I don’t think there’s any room for pride when you’ve seen how fragile life is.” She turned off the overhead light and started down the attic steps. “When you’ve seen how one decision can alter your whole destiny.”
“You saw something up there? What’d you see? A premonition? A past life?”
“No.” Bonnie held the door open at the bottom and waited for her sister to come through. She closed it and shook the handle to make sure it was tight, then turned to Jan. “I saw my life as it might have been. I lived it.”
“In five minutes?”
“I think that must be part of the magic, because it felt like one very long day in a very different lifetime.”
“Different how?”
Bonnie sighed in frustration and palmed her sister’s cheeks. “Please. Stay with Pim. I’ll be back as soon as I can and then I’ll tell you all about it. I promise.”
“You’d better. I also want to know what happens when you see Joe.”
Bonnie grinned, then skipped down the main staircase while Jan remained on the second floor, leaning over the railing.
“I’ll be back soon. Put on a pot of coffee.”
“Hi,” she said when he opened the door. She was as anxious and jumpy as she had been on their first date—and even more in love. Just the sight of his face was a balm to her soul and the sound of his voice was like heaven.
“Hey.” His surprised expression dissolved into a hesitant happiness. “Is everything okay? The kids?”
“Yes. Fine. Everybody’s fine. Can I come in?”
“Sure.” There was still a small ripple of concern on his brow as he watched her pass by. He twisted a bit to close the door. When he turned back, she hurled herself at him—and the ripple was gone. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in the curve of her neck. They clung to one another for a long moment.
“Come home now,” she murmured close to his ear, her eyes closed, her senses absorbing his every nuance like she hadn’t absorbed them all before. The strength of his arms, the scent of warm shampoo and fabric softener around his neck, the sound of the hum—that hum—from deep inside him when he was overwhelmed with happiness.
She started slipping down his body and opened her eyes in time to meet his hazel gaze.
“I’m not going home until you hear why I left.” When her feet touched the floor, he released her. “I don’t want to be at home if you’re not there. And you haven’t been there, Bonnie.”
“I know. I wasn’t.” She hesitated. “But I didn’t know I wasn’t…and that’s just the first of a lot of strange things I’m about to say, so I need you to trust me.”
“I always have. Do you want to sit?”
“Not just yet. I’m nervous.”
“Okay.” The corners of his mouth twitched, but he didn’t laugh. He leaned back against the wall just inside the door. “I’ll stand, too.”
She nodded and was taken aback at how much better that made her feel.
“All right, now I know how this is going to sound but…I’ve been on the other side of the fence.”
“What fence?”
“The one where the grass is always greener on the other side…that fence. Only the grass isn’t greener, Joe, not even close. And anyone who says it is will only find out that it’s…you know, the green stuff the football players like?”
“Money?” His tone was dubious.
“No. Ah…Astroturf. The grass on the other side of the fence is Astroturf. It just looks real, but…well, maybe it is real and not Astroturf, because it seems like a life but it’s a life where we’ve made all the wrong choices…or just different choices, maybe, but we, you and I, we’ve made our best choices in this life. We’re so lucky, Joe.” She banded her arms around his torso and hugged tight. “We have so many of the things you can’t buy with money.”
“So then…” He rubbed her back slowly. “…we can afford a couple of black plastic squirt guns?”
Her heart stopped and a flush of fear washed over her. Which life was she in? Her life or her if-only life? Was this Joe or was it Cal in her arms…and if it was Cal, where was her Joe?
“Joe?” she raised her head to look up at him.
“Yes.”
“Cal?”
“Not really.”
“Then what…how do…” She caught herself, unsure if her mind could handle any more magic today.
He scooped her up close to his chest again and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
“I’ll try to explain what I know so far.” She heard him swallow and knew he was thinking it through to get it all straight. “When I—Cal in the other life, got out of jail ten years after you died…”
“I died?”
He nodded. “One
of the first things he did was to drive over to Pim’s house. Not our Pim, the Pim in his world.”
“Right.”
“He wanted to explain what had happened and apologize to her and your sister. He told her everything, even about the plastic gun. He was still devastated. He just couldn’t forgive himself for what happened. He started to cry and…Pim took mercy on him.”
“She took him up to the attic.”
“Yes. And explained about the carpet on the way up.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I’ll tell you what I know. Wanna sit yet?”
“Is this story going to get weirder?”
He smiled encouragement and pulled her down beside him on the couch.
“First she had him…Cal, dig the carpet out of its hiding place in the attic, haul it down the steps, and roll it out in the big part of the hallway by her bedroom door. She said it would take him anywhere in his life he wanted to go if he wished it. He could stay there for only one day to fix wrongs or to relive something that made him happy, but if he didn’t make a second wish to bring him back, before dead of night, he’d be stuck there forever.
“There, apparently, is a parallel world, his life because he made certain choices. And yours, if you’d chosen differently. The carpet takes you to what might have been.”
“But I didn’t know there was a ‘this life’ in that one, not like I know about that one in this one…did that sound like English to you?”
He laughed. “Yes. And actually I wondered about that, too, when Pim was explaining it—after all, Cal was falling for you and you did sacrifice yourself for him…not that I’m the least bit jealous.”
“You’re not really, are you, because I didn’t know—”
“No, honey, I’m not. Bad joke. Anyway, Pim says it’s part of the magic in the carpet: You don’t remember traveling to a different life, but you remember everything when you get back to yours.”
“That makes sense. So I can see how much fuller my life is and how the choices I made, like marrying you, made me a better person, less self-centered, more caring, not as rich, but perfectly comfortable, with time to cuddle with the man who loves me, who I adore and never want to be apart from again?”
“I believe so.” He chuckled and leaned forward leisurely to give her a slow, warm, wet kiss that made her want to cry for some reason. “Want to hear the rest of this now or go straight to bed?”
“I better hear the rest now—I might not be in any kind of shape to hear it later.”
“Okay. Um…Oh. The memory-loss business…You also forget about the second wish to get back. Apparently, that’s the chance you take, the danger of the magic; it has to come from you spontaneously.”
“For the same reasons, don’t you think?” she asked quietly, her mind drifting back. “And because if it were too easy…no one would…”
“What?”
“Pim. The other Pim, she tried to warn me. She knew I had the rug—and I did—framed over the couch in my office, and that I was in danger and had to make things right before dead of night.”
He shook his head. “I keep hearing that. When the hell is ‘dead of night’?”
She shrugged and they both chuckled, glad simply to be talking, alone, in a quiet place, together, at the same time.
Joe let loose a full-sized sigh and took another step toward bedding his wife. “Cal considered going back to the day he met you but he figured that would only turn out the same. He thought of going back to before his felony arrest, but then he never would have met you…and he wanted very much to meet you so…he went back to the night of Chicky’s birthday party.”
She gasped. “But that’s the night we…”
“And when I saw you hiding in the bushes I had the same choices Cal had—ignore you and assume that you’d find your own way home or flush you out and make sure.”
“Ha. Flush me out. That’s a good one.”
“But Cal hadn’t made the worst choice of his life yet—which was not meeting you—so he was still Joe, me, at the time. There was no parallel life for him yet. And it was me who went around behind the garage and started to pretend I was going to whiz in the bushes and…”
“…heard you scrambling to get out of the way.”
“…heard me scrambling to get out of your way.”
They said it together and laughed.
“I wonder why the kids don’t ask how we met more often.”
“I love how we met,” she said, a dreamy look on her face. “You very patiently listened to me tell you who I was and how nervous I was and that I only agreed to go out with Chicky because I didn’t know how to tell him no and I felt kind of nauseated and he wasn’t really my type and I might actually die if I had to join the party. And you told me to wait there and came back two minutes later with two cans of Coke and you gave me one. You said that you told Chicky that you heard I had the flu and not to tell anyone any different. And then you walked me home, in the moonlight, with your hands in your pockets. And I was in love before we reached the front gate.”
“For me it was when you came thrashing out of the bushes all flustered and pissy and indignant. Like you had every right to be sitting in those bushes without getting peed on. Then you got embarrassed, which was almost as much fun.”
“Pht.” She sobered. “So meeting me kept you from becoming Cal.”
They searched one another’s face and it didn’t seem to matter that they’d seen it millions of times before. Every day there was something new—a new laugh line, a single gray eyebrow hair, the fluctuation of fat in their cheeks, worry and wonder.
Joe drew his hand up between them and traced the edges of her lips with his finger while saying, “When dead of night came I was sound asleep in my bed in my mother’s house.”
“He didn’t make a second wish.”
He shook his head and released a long breath. “He did in a way. While he was at Pim’s he wrote the whole story in a letter, everything he could remember. He attached it to the carpet and when he was ready to go he made both wishes at once—to go back to the night of Chicky’s party and for the rug to return immediately to Pim without him.”
“The Pim in his world.”
“But with you dead and him basically pre-Cal that parallel didn’t exist for either of you anymore so the rug went back to the nearest Pim it could find.”
“Ours.”
He nodded. “And, of course, she read the letter when she found the carpet in her upstairs hallway. I’ve known this story for years—Cal’s story. Pim and I have talked about it and she said we should let it happen naturally, that we knew you wouldn’t be hurt…in this life so…so when you started acting, what’s the word…? Sidetracked? Sort of far away and unfocused…I thought you might need some space to think and…to do whatever you had to do to get you here this afternoon.”
Her smile was as slow to her lips as the twinkle was to his eyes—but everything else was picking up speed. Her pulse was off the charts.
“And so, my Bonnie wife,” he said, grabbing her shirt at the throat to hold her head steady for a slow kiss. “Whether or not the grass is greener depends on which side of the fence you’re looking over, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does.” They locked their lips together, disengaging only once to pull his T-shirt over his head. Then she forced him back on the couch cushions—though it didn’t take much forcing.
“I’m thinking we should keep this place until Susan goes off to college,” he said, out of the blue, ducking her lips to see the buttons on her shirt. He zigged when she zagged, but she weaved when he bent, and she landed a solid kiss on his mouth. In seconds, he was helpless.
“Why?”
“Wa—Why what?”
“Why would you want to keep this place?” She kissed him again, deeply, and he mumbled his answer.
“Privacy.”
Giving him a moment to catch his breath, she looked around and nodded. “It could use some paint, but…What can we do
here that we can’t do at home…when Susan’s babysitting.”
He grinned at her, taking her hand firmly in his. “Come on, I’ll show ya.”
Ten
It was after dark so the porch light was on and the door was locked. Bonnie knocked firmly on the etched glass windowpanes set in the door to get Jan’s attention.
She came down the hall from the kitchen with her arms crossed at her chest and an annoyed expression on her face. She stopped in the hall to flip her hair in the narrow mirror, then moseyed up to the door to stare at her sister. But she didn’t open it.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m kind of late.”
“Kind of?”
“Definitely. I’m definitely late and I’m sorry.”
“Did you bring anything to eat?”
“No. No, but I put frozen brownies in the freezer yesterday. Two seconds to thaw.”
She continued to survey her for several more seconds before she asked, “Anything of interest happen while you were away for these many, many long hours?”
“Well, Joe and I had sex.”
“What?”
“Sex! Joe and I had sex this afternoon!” she screamed while her sister climbed all over the door trying to get it open.
“What is the matter with you? Get in here. All the neighbors can hear you.”
“Got the door open, didn’t it?” Bonnie buzzed her sister’s cheek. “Didn’t the nurse show up?”
“Yes, but you said you were coming back so I waited.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“What about Joe?”
“I bet he’s glad, too. Shall we call him and ask?”
“For God’s sake. Are you high?”
“No, I’m just…real happy about my life again. It’s not midnight yet, is it?”
Bonnie started walking up the wide front steps and Janice followed.
“Maybe 11:15 or so.”
“Good, because I’ve been thinking…dead of night must be the darkest, quietest, loneliest time of night. Midnight is the middle of Letterman so you know people are up and watching. Two or three in the morning is when most bars close. So between three A.M. and five A.M. is the deadest part of the night.”