Less than ten minutes later they flagged down a cab on North Street. The driver was a big, cheerful Irishman, and he turned down the Celtic-punk CD just enough to be able to shout over it. Something about this comforted Trix, though at first she couldn’t quite place what it was. Jim shouted his apartment address, the driver waved a hand and pulled out into traffic, and the music provided a drum-and-fiddle theme to their journey. It was as the Irishman started shouting about roadwork and how the city still wasn’t spending enough on road maintenance that she was able to sink back into her seat and relax. He doesn’t see anything different about us, she thought. To him we’re normal. Clasping Jim’s hand, she closed her eyes and rested.
I wonder if Trix is feeling this as well, Jim thought. The sense of being followed was subtle, an itch on the back of his neck and a tightening across his scalp. He did not turn around to look back; all he’d see would be headlights, vague shapes walking along pavements, shadows in this place where he should never be. The feeling was slight. And besides, whoever followed them would be at home in those shadows.
He looked forward past the big driver at the streets unrolling ahead. Trix’s hand felt solid and real in his, and he gave her a slight squeeze, smiling when she squeezed back. The driver was speaking, but his words were all but lost in the rush of music blasting from the speakers. Amid such cacophony, Jim found it ironically easy to rest and gather his thoughts.
From what he’d seen of the skyline from the upstairs window in the house they had just fled, this Boston looked quite different from the city where he had been born. How strange that a few significant changes could affect the view so fundamentally, even though ninety-five percent of the city was probably nearly identical.
Yet already he felt so much closer to Jenny and Holly. He and Trix had come through into this reality from another, stepping across the threshold with little more than watery eyes and a sense of shock at their accomplishment, and maybe somewhere in this Boston, Jenny and Holly were breathing, living, striving to discover what had happened to them and waiting for him to find them again. Though this was a strange city, the sense of being an invader here was rapidly fading away.
He could feel the folded letters in his back pocket. Soon they would go to the first of those addresses and look for the first name, but before that he had to see for himself just how different this place was. As Trix had said, both of them had died in this reality and left their loved ones grieving, so his apartment would belong to someone else. But it was the first place Jenny would have checked, and perhaps…
“Perhaps she’s still there,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” the driver called.
“Nothing,” Jim said, raising a hand. “Turn the music up.”
“That I can do!” The driver flicked a dial on the dashboard, and the music roared louder, filling the car and allowing Jim to clear his head.
“She might be,” Trix said, leaning into him and resting her head against his shoulder. “But if I know Jenny, she’d have moved on.”
“Holly will be her priority. She’ll be trying to figure out what the fuck has happened, but she’ll be steered by Holly. They’ll have to eat, and have somewhere to sleep. And if they can’t find anyone who knows them, it’ll be a hotel.”
“Providing she came through with money.”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “And providing the currency here is still dollars.” He wondered what would happen when it came time to pay the cabdriver. He reckoned he had fifty bucks in his pocket, but would the driver recognize the president on Jim’s currency? And beyond that… would they have to steal? And if they were arrested, what story could they give? Their names here matched those of long-dead children.
As they left the North End, Jim took more notice of their surroundings, leaving the problems of money and identity until later. The overall impression he’d gleaned from that brief look at this new Boston’s skyline was becoming more refined now, and initially he was surprised by how little had really changed. The JFK Federal Building was still there, which told him plenty, and Boston Common was still a welcome oasis of nature within the city. It was across the Common, roughly in the theater district, that the cathedral they’d seen from the house rose toward the night sky. It was well illuminated by display spotlights, proudly flaunting its magnificence over the lower buildings surrounding it.
“That is massive,” Trix said, and Jim realized she was leaning across the backseat with him to get a better view.
“What’s the cathedral’s name?” Jim shouted, taking a risk. The driver glanced curiously at him in the mirror, then grinned again and switched into a new, even more verbose mode. Tourists, he must have thought, and Jim vowed to keep an eye on their route.
“That’s the world-famous Cathedral of Saint Mary in the Park, and that in front of it is Saint Mary’s Park. Green an’ lovely, even at night.” He turned the music down, and Trix glanced at Jim and raised her eyebrows. What have you started? But this was good. They needed information, needed to know what this Boston held for them. And who better to ask than a taxi driver?
“Almost thirty years to build, and fourteen souls taken into the cathedral’s bosom,” the driver said. “If you visit it on your stay, make sure you take a look at the shrine in there, built to those brave souls. Beautiful, it is.” He looked in the mirror again, the smile slipping.
“Where are you from?” Trix asked.
“Well, you’re asking me two different things there, young lady,” the driver said, his good humor restored. “As to where I was born, that was Cork back in the home country. But where I’m from?” He waved both hands around him, holding the wheel with his knees. “Lived here since I was three years old, and never been back. So anyone asks where I’m from, I say Boston. Who wouldn’t, eh?”
“Who indeed,” Jim said. A few raindrops speckled the cab’s windows, smearing his image of the cathedral, and he wondered whether Jenny and Holly were getting wet in the same shower.
“You’re here visiting?” the driver asked.
“Looking for someone,” Jim said. Trix tapped his leg, but he moved her hand aside. Why shouldn’t he tell the truth?
“Who’s that, then? Maybe I can help.”
“I doubt it. So… I haven’t been to Boston before, would you believe? The Irish influence is big?”
“You kiddin’ me?” the driver asked. “It’s way beyond just influence. Some of them”-he waved both hands again, a gesture that Jim thought perhaps the man used all the time, but which he was sure would wrap them around a lamppost within the next mile-“… New Yorkers. Y’know? There’s Irish there, for sure, but none of them are really Irish.” He looked in the mirror again. “You’re not New Yorkers?”
“Baltimore,” Trix said, and the driver nodded.
“Knew it. Baltimore. Good city. This one, though, yeah, heavy Irish influences. The best pubs in the States are here, and the best of them are run by guys who’ve come over from the home country to escape the Troubles.”
“The Troubles are”- over, Jim wanted to say, but the man was staring at him in the rearview mirror yet again-“terrible,” he said.
“Got that right,” the man said, voice more cautious now. “Since they started blowin’ up planes and trains… well, Boston’s like the Ireland that should’ve been. Peaceful. Mainly.” They were heading southwest toward Jim’s apartment, and as the streets flitted by left and right he found himself growing increasingly nervous rather than excited. He fully expected to find no sign of his wife and daughter at that address, and that should move him on in his search. But there was something else niggling at him.
He glanced over his shoulder into the glaring headlamps behind them.
“You, too?” Trix asked softly.
“What?”
“Getting the sense we’re being followed?”
“Yeah. Ever since…”
“We came through.”
“Probably the least of our worries. We’re dealing with this,” Jim said. �
�Coping. I don’t know how, or why, but we are.”
“The why is because this is for Jenny and Holly. We’ve come through to look for them, and that’s making us strong.”
“So what about them?” Jim asked, and his voice broke. What about them? They were dragged through; they didn’t come through of their own accord, with their own aims in mind. They didn’t understand like he and Trix. They had no inkling of what was going on. What could the trauma of this do to them?
“They’ll be fine,” Trix said.
“You can’t know that.”
“No, and I can’t say anything else. Just believe it.” She glanced behind them, then back at him.
“Unsettled, that’s all,” he said softly. “With all that’s happened, all the weirdness. No one’s following us. They can’t be.”
“Right,” Trix said, meaning it to sound emphatic. But to Jim she just sounded scared.
They settled close together in the backseat, not quite touching but drawing strength from proximity. And ten minutes later they pulled up outside what should have been Jim’s home, and he knew already that things here were very different. Through the rain-speckled windows he could see that Tallulah’s still took up the first floor, but above that the floors were dark, several windows boarded up, and it felt nowhere like home.
For a moment Jim wondered whether Miranda was still the restaurant hostess, and what her reaction would be were she to see him. But there would be no reaction. Back in the Boston he knew, she had been his friend and, after Jenny’s disappearance, apparently his erstwhile lover. But in this Boston he would be unknown. He had never been here before, and to attempt to imprint his memories on this place would be futile. And maybe even dangerous.
“It would have been too strange,” Trix said, leaning into Jim to see from his side window.
“Yeah. But this would have been the first place she’d come.”
“They’ve been gone for half a day.”
“And I doubt she’d have hung around.”
“So where to if you’re not getting out here, pal?” the driver asked. There was an edge to his voice now, nervousness or tension, as if he could suddenly sense that things were not quite right.
“Just… drive on,” Jim said. And he thought, Where to indeed? Where would Jenny go once she had been here, and seen the differences? Trying to put himself in her head was just too traumatic, because the confusion and terror she must be feeling were shattering. Instead, he started to analyze her probable approach objectively.
“After here, she’d go to your place,” Jim said.
Trix’s eyebrows rose in surprise, but then she nodded. “Yeah. But… I’m not sure I want to go there myself.”
“Right. After that, probably her parents’ place. Then following on from that-”
“Oh, shit,” Trix said. “Her parents.”
“What?”
“She’s not Unique, Jim. Somewhere in Boston there’s another Jenny.”
“Another Jenny,” he echoed. It set his head spinning, and he felt suddenly sick.
“Maybe her parents don’t live in the same place here,” Trix said. “Didn’t you help them with their mortgage, back in… well, our Boston? So here, maybe they’re still living somewhere else. Maybe outside the city. And maybe Jenny will have gone to the cops, realized things were amiss, and maybe-”
“Too many maybes,” Jim said. He lifted himself from the seat and took the folded envelopes from his back pocket. He checked them both, and then held up the one he now knew applied to where they were right now. “We go here. Yes?”
“Yes,” Trix said, and she sounded relieved. She wanted to go there right away, Jim thought, and perhaps that would have been the safest thing to do. He looked across at the building one more time, at the dark windows that he had stood behind a thousand times in another world, another life. He wondered what was behind those windows here… but just as quickly realized he did not want to know.
“You know O’Brien’s Bar?” Jim asked. “It’s down on… East Broadway.”
“Know it?” the driver said. “Sure I know it.”
“That’s where we need to go,” Jim said. Trix sighed and seemed to settle lower in the seat beside him, and he felt a slight sense of relief at having made a more definite plan. They’d go to find the Oracle of this Irish Boston, give him the letter Veronica had sent through with them, and then tell him their problem. They couldn’t do this on their own.
“Sure,” the driver said softly. “From the second you got in, I knew you needed help.” He turned up his music again, even louder than before, and Jim watched the rain-washed streets flit by.
O’Brien’s Bar was an innocuous pub nestled among a terrace of houses a couple of blocks from Telegraph Hill. Over the tops of the buildings, they could see the white steeple top of the Dorchester Heights Monument, just a block away. In the other direction was a view of downtown Boston. This part of the city, in Jim’s city, had always been Irish, but now the Irish presence was greater than ever. South Boston was truly an old-world Boston neighborhood, mostly residential, with local bars and markets. But in this Boston, where the Irish were the pinnacle of Boston society, Southie was a hell of a lot nicer.
Across the street from the bar was a small park, lit now by streetlights and apparently deserted this late at night. Perhaps shadows moved within the shadows, but Jim could not see, nor did he care. His own safety was not the priority. There were benched tables outside the bar, chained to metal hooks in the pub’s front wall so that they didn’t walk at night, and even at this late hour lights shone inside. They exited the taxi and Trix paid the cabbie-still dollars, thankfully, and Lincoln was no stranger to him-and Jim could tell that the bar was all but empty. There was faint music playing somewhere in the background, but the usual hubbub of voices was absent, and there was a sense that this place was about to go to sleep for the night. It was a strange way to view it, and disconcerting, but he looked up at the facade and saw tired windows reflecting streetlights; the double doors were a closed mouth, and the building gave the sense that it was something with knowledge and wisdom.
The cab drifted along the street, its engine sounds echoing from silent buildings, and then they were alone.
“Is this one going to be as weird as the old woman?” Jim asked.
“Who knows? What’s the name again?”
“Peter O’Brien.” Jim looked at the envelope in his hand, the messy lettering, and something ran a cool finger down his back. The hair on his arms bristled, and his senses suddenly became clear and sharp, flooding him with input: the scent of damp soil from the park and spilled beer from the sidewalk, the night sounds of doors closing and car engines ticking as they cooled, the kiss of fine rain against his skin. As he turned around to look across the street at whatever was watching them, Trix was already doing the same.
“It’s just the darkness,” he said, staring past the street lamps and trying to penetrate the small park. There was a bandstand at its center and a network of pale paths crissing and crossing, and here and there planting beds exploded with the silhouettes of shrubs and small trees.
“No,” she said, “not just the darkness.”
“Bums, then. Lonely lovers. Drunk teens fucking.” But he knew that none of these was true, either. Whoever or whatever watched from over there was more connected to their journey than that. He rubbed the envelope between his fingers and wondered what it contained.
Jim heard the bar door open. He turned away from the dark park and took a step back toward the curb, and the shadow that filled the doorway seemed to swallow the weak light emerging from inside the building.
“Already poured your drinks,” the shadow said, and his voice was higher than Jim had expected, and much more welcoming. “It’s not cold, and the rain’s not too bad. But I’ll welcome you in to take shelter from the night.”
Take shelter from the night. Jim almost asked if he sensed the watcher as well. But that would be no way to greet the Oracle of this Bosto
n. “Peter O’Brien?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“That’s me. And you’ll be from out of town.”
Trix actually laughed, an unconscious reaction to such a mundane observation. “You could say that!” she said.
“Hope you like good beer,” O’Brien said. He moved back from the doorway to let them in, and in doing so allowed them to make him out properly for the first time. As Trix stepped into the pub, Jim held back and sized the man up. Smartly dressed in black trousers and shined shoes, a white shirt and black suede waistcoat, he was a barrel of a man, well over two hundred pounds, but he carried the weight well. He was tall and broad, and even before he’d turned a little to fat, Jim knew that he’d been a powerful presence. Yet there was a lightness about him that quelled any unease Jim might normally feel in the company of such a huge stranger. He moved back like a dancer to let them in, graceful and gentle, and his smile lit up his face. His hair was long and tied in a ponytail, and a scruff of graying stubble softened his features more.
“Jim Banks,” Jim said, extending his hand as he entered. For a second he saw a flicker of something on O’Brien’s face-fear? Discomfort? The smile flexed a little, but it returned just as fresh and welcoming as before. He took Jim’s hand and pumped it twice, firm but not too hard. In that touch, Jim felt the warmth of hope.
“Pleased to meet you, Jim.”
“And you. I hope you can help me.”
“Well, I’ll say to you what I say to anyone coming to my bar seeking more than a drink and a pie and a place to rest their feet. I can only do my best.” He closed the door behind them but did not lock it. Jim thought perhaps this bar was open every hour of every day, but not always for drinks.
O’Brien showed them to a table in the corner. A candle burned in the mouth of an empty wine bottle, spilling hot wax down the green glass, and three recently pulled pints sat before the chairs. Three chairs. The table was large enough to seat six, at least.
“You knew we were coming,” Trix said.
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