“What’s very soon?”
“Something terrible is going to happen.” He made a face as though he tasted something sour. “I hate doing it this way,” he said. “I hate telling you about this ahead of time, but it may be the only way I can prove to you that what I’m saying is true.”
I hung the dish towel from the oven door with a sigh. “What now?” I asked. “What is—supposedly—going to happen?”
“It’s at Kent State University in Ohio,” he said. “You know how the student war protests are intensifying there and they called in the National Guard?”
I nodded. The protests were intensifying everywhere, actually. At UNC, my alma mater, the students were on strike. I always felt torn, watching them on the TV news. The scenes of their angry protests were often followed by footage of our soldiers fighting in Vietnam, the war that took my husband from me. I found myself agreeing with the protesters more often than not these days, and then I’d fill with shame. I didn’t ever want to feel as though Joe had died in vain, fighting a war we should never have gotten into.
“Are you listening to me?” Hunter frowned. “Did you hear what I said?”
“I … no,” I admitted. “What did you say?”
“Kent State. It’s sometime this week, I’m pretty sure. I don’t remember exactly when, but the National Guard will kill four students there.”
“What? Hunter, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you need to stop it.” I lowered my voice. “Stop talking this way or I swear I’ll tell Patti.”
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “And they’ll injure other students, too. I don’t remember how many, but I do know four students die and another one is left paralyzed. It’s a horrible piece of American history. If it doesn’t happen, you can tell Patti I’ve gone off my rocker, all right? But it’s going to happen.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because it’s in the history books I had in school in the nineties,” he said simply. “Then Neil Young will write a song about it. ‘Ohio,’ it’s called. Only he pronounces it ‘Oh-Hi-Oh,’ and—”
“Enough,” I said, putting my hands over my ears. “I don’t know what to think or believe or … If you supposedly know this is going to happen, why don’t you stop it? You’re going to just let those students get killed?”
“One of the questions we were researching at Temporal Solutions was if the past could be changed,” he said. He sounded like a madman.
“And…?”
“It can be, but it’s a very dangerous thing to do, so my mother laid down the law,” he said. “No tampering with the past.” He was talking rapidly, the way he often did when he got excited. Even when I was first getting to know him in the rehab ward, he occasionally talked that way. I remembered wondering if he was manic then, and I was thinking the same thing now. “Martin Luther King, for example,” he continued. “One of our scientists was this black guy and he worked out an experiment for himself. He planned to go back to 1968 and somehow stop the shooting that left King paralyzed. But—”
“Left him dead, you mean.”
“No! That’s exactly my point about how we have to be careful when we tamper with the past,” he said. “King was shot in the neck and paralyzed from the neck down, but our guy—Dave was his name—he broke into the room where James Earl Ray was staying and knocked him off balance. Ray still fired, only this time it resulted in getting King killed instead of saving him.”
“Oh my God,” I said, before I remembered this had to be a made-up bunch of poppycock. “Hunter,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know why you’re doing this. Making all this stuff up. But even if I believed you, even if it’s all true, why are you telling me about it?”
“Because I want to send you to the year 2001,” he said. “They can treat your baby then. Before it’s born. It’s called fetal surgery. I know they—”
“You want to send me to 2001?” I rolled my eyes. “On a plane or a ship or what? This is nonsense. I’m going up to my room to read,” I said. “I can’t listen to this anymore.”
“I’ll be going to RTP in the morning,” he reminded me, and I remembered tomorrow was Monday, the start of his short workweek away from home. That worried me. If he really was going off the deep end, I didn’t like the idea of him being alone. “You and I can talk more about this when I get back,” he said.
“You’ll call Patti a couple of times a day, like you usually do?” I asked.
He smiled. He knew I thought he was losing his mind. “Of course,” he said. “And I’m fine, Carly,” he added. “You’ll see.”
5
By the time I came downstairs in the morning, Hunter was already gone and Patti was making John Paul breakfast. I headed out to walk on the beach as I’d been doing nearly every morning since moving in with them. My obstetrician—back when he thought I had a normal, healthy pregnancy—told me the gentle exercise was good for my baby and I liked the time alone. Since getting the horrible news at NIH, I had to force myself just to get up in the morning, much less go for a walk. I had to keep going, though. I was hoping for a miracle—a perfectly healthy baby. I needed to keep doing my best for her.
It was warm enough this morning that I kicked off my sneakers, rolled up the hem of my jeans, and headed barefoot toward the water line. The sun was barely above the horizon, spilling wavy peach and orange light onto the water. I walked toward the pier, which was my usual route. I liked seeing the pier in the distance, the way it stretched far into the water. I liked knowing it was exactly a mile and a half from our house, making my walk three miles. And I liked how the sound of the sea, rhythmic and so familiar, gave me time to think, and sometimes to cry.
There was another reason I liked walking to the pier. Memories. My walk took me past the small cottage that used to belong to Joe’s aunt and uncle. It was where I met him in 1959, a year after my parents’ death, when I was fifteen years old. His aunt and uncle’s cottage wasn’t officially one of the old Unpainted Aristocracy. It was much newer, the siding barely weathered back then, but it was only a few houses away from our string of ancient cottages and it fit in well.
I was beachcombing by myself early on that particular morning, something I’d done every morning of every childhood summer for as long as I could remember. That summer, though, was my first without my parents. My first as an orphan. Patti and I rattled around the big musty house, stumbling over summertime memories of our parents in every room. Being out on the beach was something of an escape. My quarry as I walked was shark teeth and sea glass and I had huge collections of both. I had the beach to myself that morning when I spotted Joe a short distance ahead of me. He was fishing, alone, casting his line into the waves. I’d only recently started noticing boys in a new way—a way that made my stomach tighten, my mouth water. This particular boy had that effect on me even from a distance. He wore only blue bathing trunks, and while he certainly wasn’t heavy, he was muscular for a teenaged boy. His legs and arms were tight and toned, although they were pink instead of tan. He was getting a burn and I knew he had to be a tourist. His reddish-blond hair was short, somewhere between curly and wavy. I couldn’t have said back then why the sight of him made my stomach do a flip. All I knew was that, at that moment, the last thing on my mind was finding another piece of sea glass.
I didn’t stop to think before walking right up to him.
“Hi!” I called out as I neared him. “Catching anything?”
“I’m about to give up,” he said, reeling in a long strand of seaweed and nothing else.
I peered into his empty pail. “What are you using for bait?”
“I was using squid,” he said. “But I’m out, so I guess I have to pack it in for the morning.”
“I’m Carly,” I said.
“Joe.” He had mesmerizing translucent blue eyes. The skin on his arms and chest was freckled, and a spattering of freckles ran across his pink nose. “My aunt and uncle just bought that house”—he pointed toward
the new cottage behind us—“and I’m here for the summer.”
The entire summer? My heartbeat quickened. “Do you want to give up?” I asked.
“Huh?” He looked perplexed by my question. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you said you had to give up fishing because you don’t have any bait,” I said. “But you don’t have to stop.”
“Fish without bait?” He laughed. “That’s a new one.”
“No, really.” The tide was going out and I walked barefoot into the surf where it pulled back over the beach, leaving dozens of V-shaped rivulets of water behind. Dropping to my knees, I dug my fingers into the sand at the point of one of the Vs and pulled out a mole crab. I carried it back to him.
“This is a sand flea,” I said, holding the unlucky two-inch crab out to him on the palm of my hand. “Pop it on your hook and see what bites.”
He stared at me, a look of amusement on his face that made me suddenly weak in the knees. “Seriously?” he asked.
“Seriously.”
He looked at the crab in my hand. “How do you put it on the hook?”
I pulled the seaweed from his line and demonstrated baiting the hook with the crab. I did it quickly, rather cockily, showing off. I was suddenly grateful to my father for teaching me this trick when I was six years old. I felt as though Daddy was peering over my shoulder at that moment, cheering me on.
“Do you have a pole?” he asked when I’d finished. “Want to fish with me?”
I hadn’t fished in a couple of years, but I decided that was a very good day to begin again and I ran home to get my pole. Together that day, we reeled in half a dozen sea mullet and a seven-pound sheepshead. Joe’s aunt and uncle invited Patti and me over for dinner and the sheepshead fed all five of us.
I spent the rest of that summer with Joe, fishing and swimming, playing miniature golf, rubbing lotion on his hideous blistering sunburn—he didn’t have the right skin for the beach, which was a shame because he clearly loved it. We laughed a lot that summer and fell madly in love. We’d kiss for hours at night on the gigantic dunes of Jockey’s Ridge. Puppy love, Patti called it, but she adored Joe and trusted him to treat me well. I knew it wasn’t puppy love. I knew I’d met The One. I was right.
Joe was an “Army brat,” one of those kids who moved from place to place depending on where his father was stationed. He was an only child, and ever since he was small, he’d spent the summers with his aunt and uncle wherever they were living. He said they were the opposite of his strict parents. “I like the balance,” he told me, and I thought that he was so mature to be able to appreciate both the discipline and the freedom in his life.
It was an idyllic summer, but as always happens, it came to an end. Joe went back to his parents in Texas and Patti and I went home to Raleigh, and everyone—except Joe and me—thought that would be the end of our romance. But we wrote to each other several times a week and saved our allowances for long, sweet phone calls on Sunday nights. He’d always start those calls the same way: Hey, girl, he’d drawl, his voice full of affection, and my heart would melt. Our relationship grew deep and serious even before the next summer began.
I knew Joe planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the army. It was the life he knew and understood, and even though it was alien to me, I respected his passionate longing to be part of it. As for me, it was my mother’s footsteps I’d always wanted to follow. She started out as a nurse but received extra training to be a physical therapist so she could work with polio patients. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a physical therapy major, and nearby NC State in Raleigh had the ROTC program and engineering degree Joe wanted. Our schools were less than an hour apart. For once, we didn’t need the summer months to be able to see each other.
When we graduated, Joe was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the engineer corps of the army and we spent the first two years of our marriage in Fort Eustis, where I was able to get a job as a PT. Then he was transferred to Germany for a year and a half. We made a lot of friends in Germany, where people treated us—treated the soldiers—better than they had in the States. Joe had been spit at by a girl in the airport in New York and once had to be transported in a bus with cages on the window as protection from the rocks and apples and bags of urine war protestors threw at him and his fellow soldiers. The Germans, though … they appreciated us, and for that year and a half, our lives were perfect. That was when I stopped taking the birth control pill.
Patti and Hunter didn’t support the war in Vietnam. They were careful when they talked to us about it, though, especially to Joe, not wanting to offend or hurt the close friendship between the four of us. We thought they were being brainwashed by all the antiwar hype at home, but maybe Joe and I were the ones who’d been brainwashed. All our news came from the Stars and Stripes newspaper or the Armed Forces radio or our military friends who thought we were winning the war, keeping South Vietnam free of communism.
When Joe received orders to go to Vietnam, I was frightened. We were living in Fort Bragg. The day before those orders came through, we’d seen a young soldier being interviewed on the news after spending two months as a prisoner of war in South Vietnam. He’d lost thirty pounds in those two months, he said. He had weird lesions on his skin. He told the interviewer he’d been forced to live in a cage, his legs chained together whenever he’d be let out. They fed him rice and not much of it. He didn’t want to talk about the torture, but his eyes filled with tears at the question.
Joe had turned off the television before we could hear the end of the interview. If he was nervous about going, he didn’t let on, though he grew quiet as the date to leave neared. He was a kindhearted man and I worried that the kind heart that I loved so much would be a liability in a war.
“You don’t need to worry,” he’d say, pulling me into his arms for a kiss. “I’ll be behind the lines as an engineer the whole time.”
The captain who showed up on my doorstep told me what happened. Joe had been supervising the rebuilding of a bridge in Pleiku—bridges were his specialty—and he needed to see the bridge in person. The Vietcong picked that very day, that very hour, to blow up the bridge, killing dozens of soldiers in the process. Later, I received a letter of condolence from one of Joe’s friends and he wasn’t as careful with his words as that captain had been. They were all blown apart, he wrote. Body parts all over the fucking place. It was an image I would never be able to get out of my mind.
After that, I was too angry at having Joe stolen from me to be able to discern the truth about the war myself. All I knew was that too many young men were dying and I could no longer clearly see the reason why.
By the time I heard about Joe, I was quite sure I was pregnant. I knew, too, that my letter telling him I thought we were going to have a baby wouldn’t have reached him before he died. I wished it had. I wished he’d at least had that little bit of joy, knowing he was going to be a father.
Our little girl.
She was the only connection I had left to Joe.
I didn’t tell Patti or Hunter that every time I made this walk to the pier, it was with Joe, even if only in my mind. Patti had gently suggested that every time I found myself obsessively thinking about him, being pulled under by the grief, I substitute the thought with one about the baby. I’d been angry when she said that, although I didn’t let the anger show. She was only trying to help. She didn’t understand that I needed my memories of Joe. I was so afraid of losing them.
And now, thoughts of the baby were hardly the thing to bring me comfort.
In the future, Hunter had said, there was a way to help my baby.
This morning, I thought of my sweet—and possibly crazy—brother-in-law making his long weekly drive to Raleigh, singing along with music on the radio as usual. He’d fiddle with the dial as he lost one station and found another. He always complained about the stretch of highway, twenty miles or so, where he could only get the Bible-thumping stations on the radi
o and no music.
Ticket to Ride.
I stopped walking, suddenly remembering the day I met Hunter when he’d stunned me by knowing both the melody and every single word of a song never before played in the United States. He’d wowed Patti, Joe, and me that way several more times over the years. We thought it was because he listened to the radio more than the rest of us. We thought he was just a quick study. But could he possibly have known those songs from another time and place?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said out loud as I began walking again.
It wasn’t possible to travel in time. To leave the here and now. It simply wasn’t possible.
* * *
That afternoon, I cuddled John Paul at the kitchen table as Patti peeled apples for a pie. We had the radio on and were listening to music when the announcer suddenly broke in.
“Four persons, including two women, were shot and killed on Kent State University’s campus an hour ago,” he said.
I didn’t hear the rest of the report. I nearly dropped John Paul to the floor, a chill spiking through my body. I thought I was going to be sick.
“Watch him!” I said to Patti, and I hurried from the kitchen to the bathroom, where I was overwhelmed by dizziness. I dropped to the floor, my back pressed against the wall.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to myself. “Oh my God.”
6
HUNTER
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
My business, Poole Technology Consulting, was housed in three rooms in a large, nondescript brick office building in the outskirts of RTP. The smallest room belonged to Gloria Shepherd, my sharp, well-paid, middle-aged secretary. She had a desk, a typewriter, a phone, and a filing cabinet. She also had one of the few answering machines in existence, which I’d managed to get from a friend who worked for a communications company. I’d installed a second machine at home, as well.
The middle-sized office was mine. Except for the size and an extra filing cabinet, it didn’t look much different from Gloria’s, although mine also had a radio. I needed music and I liked to keep up with the news, much of it not a surprise to me. The third room was quite large, fifteen by twelve feet, and empty except for another couple of filing cabinets. Gloria was always on my case about moving my desk into that room. “You’re the boss, for Pete’s sake,” she’d say. “Why are you squeezing yourself into that little office when you have all that space?” I’d tell her I liked my cozy quarters. The truth was, I had plans for the big room. By 1980, I hoped to have several computers in there along with some bright young techie types to operate them. Not yet, though. The computers I wanted in that room had not yet been invented.
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