“Try me,” was the equable response.
David thought about it, trying to wrap his head around all that had obsessed, bothered, or worried him over the past several weeks. He decided to start with the big one: “Why did Todd leave Shady Grove?” he asked. “What happened between him and Genevieve that ended their engagement?”
The smirk was back, and in full force. “We’ll get to that, but not yet. Next question.”
David felt his pulse pick up at the prospect of finally getting to hear a straight fact or two on that subject. “Would Lydia and I ever be able to make things work?” was his next query.
A smile. “You two will be close friends for at least twenty-seven years. Hopefully for another twenty-seven years as well! I’m not saying anything further than that, though.”
David found himself wracking his brain. This was ridiculous! There were a thousand things he’d wanted to know; why was his head entirely empty right at the moment?
“How about this,” the older David suggested. His arm rose to lie atop the pew. “I already know that you won’t be able to come up with anything that I feel I can answer directly, so why don’t I just tell you a few things. Things that might… well, reassure you, since I did take such pleasure in quoting my own line to you about that.”
“Okay,” David agreed. If his elder self was aware that he hadn’t been able to come up with any legitimate questions when he was in David’s position, there was little purpose in continuing to try.
“Dad is dying of cancer right now,” was what he said next, though. And as David’s stomach began to clutch, he went on: “Not a reassuring statement, I know. But you need to call him. And then visit him. He won’t even find out about it himself for another few days. But it’s something I’ve never regretted, re-crossing that bridge to see him and Mom.”
“How did you know?” David asked, comprehending even as the words came out of his mouth that the answer was obvious.
“Endless loop,” was the humble reply. “I told you, I told myself. I can’t even fathom how that can work logically, but there it is. Call them. Soon.”
“I will. How does Mom take it?”
A shrug. “Better than you’d expect. She became older, wiser. She has a scrapbook that she’ll show you, with practically every article ever printed about you and Puppy Love ’n Friends, and… well, all the bad stuff that happened, too.”
“Seriously? Great.” David rolled his eyes. “I’m looking forward to it already.”
“Try to act pleased. It’ll make her happy. She’ll surprise you, truly.”
“What about Fran and Nancy?”
And now the older David rolled his eyes. “You’ll never see them.”
“No more requests for money?”
He chortled. “Nope! One thing about all those articles, in print or online: when everybody else thinks you’re broke, don’t ever fill ’em in on the fact that you’re not!”
“Good advice.”
“I knew I was going to give it.”
David shook his head, chuckling as well. Surreal as this was, it was fun. No wonder he would remember so much with such clarity.
“Aishani will contact you in a few years.”
David’s mirth died away.
“I know you were thinking about her earlier, when you ate lunch in the amphitheater.”
David blinked. Of course he knew. “Why tell me this now?” he asked quietly.
“Well, first of all, because I knew I would. Secondly, because it’s something you need to hear.”
“Why?” David felt small, weak. His body felt bruised, as though he had been dumped and beaten just this morning, instead of seventeen years previously.
“She will name her second child after you. After both of us. After she moved out of Lincoln Heights between eleventh and twelfth grades, she spent years trying to understand what had driven her actions during that time period. She will tell you that she lost herself, and is sorry. She’ll want you to know that nothing was ever your fault. Ever.”
“Sounds like what happened to me.” Even David’s voice sounded small at the moment.
“I think her spell of stupidity might have been a bit briefer than ours,” was his older self’s dry reply. “I’m just telling you this so you’ll think about it. A little, not a lot.”
“Okay.” David nodded his head. “Thank you.”
“So. Are you ready to hear about the four things yet?”
David wasn’t, but he had a feeling he was going to be told, whether he liked it or not. “Four things that I love, I will lose,” he intoned in an exaggerated imitation of Clair. “But one of them could be mine again.”
“Is your hand warm?”
“Huh?” David said, and then he got it. “Ah. Clair. Funny.”
“I try. So if you had to guess, what would those four things be?”
David expelled a puff of air. “Genevieve…” he began, but then halted as he tried to marshal his thoughts.
“I admit, she’s got at least four sides to her personality,” quipped the older David, “but if that’s your only answer…”
“Are you able to come up with anything original, or is all of this material stolen?” David shot back.
“Is stealing from myself stealing?” was his reply.
“I guess it’s difficult to be spontaneous if it’s already been said,” David admitted. “But let me have a minute. This is still fresh for me. You’ve had years to develop your end of this.”
A raised eyebrow and a patient smile were his only response.
David once again enumerated to himself all that he loved. People: Genevieve, Lydia, Grandpa Wilcott, Abby Lowell. Things: his freedom, his newfound lease on a better life, his dog. Until a week ago, he would have counted his home at the Rainbow Arms as one of those as well.
“No, that dinky apartment at the Rainbow Arms doesn’t come into this,” stated the older David. “I remember this moment. I’m not Clair, but if this is what she felt like at times, I can tell you it’s more than a little bit freaky.”
David couldn’t withhold a smile. “Johnson,” he said steadily.
“Yes. That’s number one. Don’t worry, it’s a long way off. Another guess?”
“Grandpa Wilcott.”
“Strike one.”
“Really?” David was taken aback. He loved him, he was old…
“He always promised that he would try not to be such a turd, right?”
“About every third time I visit him,” David answered.
“Well, he couldn’t do it. I won’t tell you everything, but trust me, there weren’t too many tears at his service.”
David closed his eyes for a second, trying not to imagine how bad things could get with his irascible grandfather. “Will the service be here?” he then asked, looking about the interior of the church with curiosity.
“Maybe. Or maybe not,” was his reply. “Another guess?”
“Abby,” was David’s next offering.
A nod. “Yes. That’s number two. And, like Johnson, it’s not soon.”
“I have noticed lately that I’m spending as much time visiting with her as I am with Grandpa,” David mused. “I suppose that should have been a clue.”
“The ratio of time you spend with each of them gets even more imbalanced this summer,” the older man declared. “We had some good times with him years ago, but if Grandma could have seen what he became… She wouldn’t have minded all the girlfriends, but to watch him turn bitter and hateful…”
“Do they bury him in the Barcalounger?” David couldn’t believe he had just made a joke of it.
A guffaw. “I forgot I said that! No, that thing probably helped a family stay warm for an entire winter once he was through with it. Honestly, I never did ask where it went. Any more guesses?”
David had only two more legitimate possibilities, but he was afraid to ask again about Genevieve. It seemed reasonably obvious by now that she was the one he would lose that could once again be his
, but it could always be Lydia, or even someone of whom he wasn’t thinking.
But come to think of it, he already had lost Genevieve, at least temporarily. They hadn’t communicated even once since the disaster at Longworth House. Seeing her at Gâteaupia the next afternoon with Janice didn’t count.
“Bill Lopes,” said the older David quietly.
“Bill,” David echoed with a frustrated shake of his head. He hadn’t even thought to include him on his list.
“I know, you weren’t quite sure if you would still want to spend time with him,” the man said. “But it’s funny, how something like what the two of you witnessed can bond two people. Nobody else would understand. Most people wouldn’t even believe you.”
“I helped him with the sprinklers on Sunday,” David said thoughtfully.
“I remember.”
“We didn’t talk about it, even once. Does that change?”
A sly smile appeared. “I don’t know. Does it?”
David smiled himself. He knew better than to ask again. “So did Clair make this happen?” he asked. “Did she arrange all of this, for lack of a better verb?”
The smile had slid away. “I think we both know that she did,” was his response.
“But how? I mean, how? This is huge, you and I sitting in the same place at different ages. How could she go about coordinating something like this, let alone figuring it all out beforehand?”
“Maybe she developed more powers as she matured. Maybe she figured out how to control and use the powers she had.”
But this wasn’t enough for David. “How old is she, do you think? Right now, in my time. She was in first grade, but – ”
“She could be any age. She could look exactly the same in my time.”
“You mean, she could still be a little girl? That’s impossible!”
“She indicated that she’d been in several different first grade classes, right? She could have been doing that for years. Wherever she is right now, I’d bet she’s still wearing those ridiculous saddle shoes!”
David snorted.
“In any case,” he continued, “she was obviously far older than she looked. So no matter what, she had a much slower growth rate than the rest of us.”
“Do you think that she is… that she’s an agent of…” David pointed upwards, and then swallowed. “I mean, we’re here. In a church.”
“Possibly,” was his response. “It would seem logical. But it could also be a cover. This is certainly a convenient location: quiet, private, no one to bother us. Not many places like that outside of churches.”
David mulled something over for a minute. “Does the fact that the pastor who came through saw both of us mean anything?”
“Only that I’m the visitor here. We both recognized him. He’s from your time, not mine.”
“Mmm.” David was sifting, sifting. Such an unbelievable wealth of speculation, yet so few facts upon which one could hang a hat. “Do you think she was ever able to determine if she was good or bad?” he asked.
But the elder David had begun to shake his head even before the question was finished. “I would guess that, like us, she’ll never know. You remember what she said, right?”
“ ‘Do you know, David? Does anybody?’ ”
“Exactly. Even now, all these decades later, I can’t answer that question for me, for us. Sure, I’ve done my best to be a better person. I at least made damn sure that I never headed back in the direction from which I started. But does that make me good? Do my later actions trump my earlier failures as a person? Can I be forgiven for all that I did wrong, just because I eventually cleaned up my act?”
David found himself unsure of what to say. If his older self hadn’t discovered the answers to the questions, it was clearly hopeless for him. “Tell me about Todd,” he said in a low voice. “You said we’d get to it. I’d like to know.”
The older David hesitated. “You realize that I’m only going to tell you this because I already know I told you, right?”
“No. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’s like Mom’s scrapbook. You’re going to have to pretend to be surprised when you actually find out. If you agree, I’ll tell you.”
“I agree.”
“It’s funny how I had a feeling you’d say that.”
The two Davids smiled at each other, each liking what they saw. The younger David had nothing but admiration for the man he would become. And the older David could view his former self in mid-transition, just past the crossroads but not yet through the fire. The best was yet to come for him, and both of them knew it.
“Todd kept a few secrets from Genevieve,” the older David began. “They aren’t the most horrible secrets I’ve ever known. But I have to admit, if I’d been in Genevieve’s shoes, I probably would have thrown him out of the house, too.”
“Throw him out? But they never even lived together!”
“Genevieve might have held back a secret or two as well.”
David could feel the knife twisting in his heart. She had lied to him! Over and over during her ‘explorations’. No wonder their relationship had repeatedly toppled, if the foundations were built on such flimsies!
“Don’t hate her just yet,” was said gently. “Let me continue. It gets better, not worse.”
David took a deep breath, willing himself to remain calm. His older self waited until he had stopped biting his lip, until he had relaxed once more in the pew.
“She came home early one day from the store. It was a Wednesday, and business was slow. I don’t know, maybe she got suspicious and did it on purpose. But when she went upstairs to her bedroom, there was Todd, lying on the bed in a corset, a bra and a dress. He was… um, taking care of himself, and was so occupied that he didn’t see or hear her come in.”
David wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. The image he’d had of the manly, football-loving Todd was shattering; the antipathy he’d felt just now for Genevieve was abating.
“He was wearing an old pair of her underwear, had barrettes in his hair and makeup on, and hanging on his feet – since there was no way they would ever fit him – was a pair of Genevieve’s bright red pumps.”
Now, David cracked a smile. This was moving rapidly from tragedy to farce.
“I don’t know what she said to him. I don’t think I even want to know how the rest of that afternoon went for him. But that was it for their engagement. Kablooey, right there.”
David could only imagine the uptight Genevieve’s scorching reaction to such a scene.
“He stayed in the house for two months more. Separate rooms, separate everything. This was in April, and the school year ended in June. Genevieve was furious, but she wouldn’t disgrace him. She understood that it would serve neither of their interests to have this trumpeted all over town.”
Oh, if David had been aware of this, everything in their relationship would have been different! He’d been working himself up all of this time over a cross-dresser!
“But during those two months, they spent a lot of time talking. And both of them realized that they wanted to remain friends. Seven years is a long time, and you know how Genevieve is… she doesn’t leave a lot of extra room for making friends.”
“Yeah. I’m aware. Partitions, remember?”
And at the very instant David finished enunciating ‘remember’, a third intense shiver swooped down on him. Every one of his nerve endings was tingling, every hair on his body seemed to have stood straight up.
“No!” he articulated in disbelief.
But the other David was nodding. “Yes,” he answered with a smile.
“How the hell did I miss that?” David burst out. “Seriously? I must have been blind!”
The other man shrugged again. “Obviously, I was too.”
“I just… I never put it together. The two of them were…”
“Partitioned off from one another?”
“Yes. Yes! I love that word, it’s just perfect for everything
Genevieve. Todd, Jess. Jess, Todd. Oh, how could I have been so stupid to miss the double consonants at the end of the two names?”
“Or the lack of pictures of either one?”
“Or the fact that neither of them has set foot in Shady Grove for years! Does Jess still come out this July? Do I get to meet her or him?”
The older David nodded, his smile still firmly in place. “Yes. You do. And you’ll like her, too. She’s a trip, as Abby used to say.”
“Is she cute? I could never tell from her voice.”
But the other man’s eyes narrowed as his lips curled. “Not exactly. She’s… handsome, you might say. Muscular for a girl. Tall, too. But she’s gotten easier on the eyes as the years have passed. Better hormone treatments, most likely. And although Genevieve tried to help her with the makeup thing before she left Shady Grove, I believe it took a while before Jess actually got the hang of it.” He chuckled. “You’ll see. I remember trying to keep a straight face at first, but she’s charming. Really. And Lydia would never have spoken to me again if I’d blown it there. She’s always been very protective of those who have slightly different tastes from others, as you know.”
David groaned as yet another aspect of Genevieve’s community interests became clearer to him. “What about Ormsby?” he then asked. “Does my favorite detective have a secret stash of women’s apparel in the closet as well?”
“Oh, no!” he laughed. “Ormsby is straighter than straight. But I’m not going to spoil that for you. Let’s just say that his eventual reaction is well worth waiting for. And yes, you’ll be present for it. And no, he never does get any more tolerable!”
The light in the church shifted, becoming brighter as a pinkish glow began to descend from the Rose Window in a pale shaft. David glanced at his watch, and was stunned to discover that over thirty minutes had passed already.
“You’re not going to need that when you go outside,” the man stated, pointing to David’s umbrella. And then he stood, leisurely but resolutely.
“I guess not,” David replied. He pointed to the faint, roseate column of light. “Was that your cue?”
His answer was a nod. “Yes. I remember it happening before. I remember that this is when we said goodbye.”
A Shiver of Wonder Page 19