She tried to bring this up with Charlie in case there was an equally impressive supply of cash stowed somewhere in the place, but all she got out of him was a lengthy, very one-sided discussion on the evils of money, capitalism, and the fascist tendencies of the government of the United States, not necessarily in that order. Then he offered her a tab, which she politely declined.
So the whole food thing was a problem, and one that Violet—as a mother—was going to have to deal with eventually. She was perfectly happy to go without food for an entire winter, but little Corry needed his nutrition.
Vi’s template of motherhood was crafted out of twenty years’ worth of detergent commercials and Leave It To Beaver-type programs, which explained both why she was consistently unprepared for any issue that could not be resolved between thirty seconds and thirty minutes and why she always felt so thoroughly inadequate. But she knew enough to understand that children needed healthy food that two-month drug benders couldn’t replace. These were the thoughts that occupied her as she walked from room to room, casually looking for her son. This was nothing like the panic that had overtaken her on their first night in the house; she knew he was around somewhere. If there was a good thing to be said about the people Charlie had collected for his Grand Walden Experiment, it was that everyone was cool. She didn’t have to keep a constant eye on Corry, because wherever he was, an adult was watching out for him and not in any weirdly inappropriate kind of way. And little Corrigan was an easy child to keep an eye on.
The house was actually pretty big. It had seemed to her that she was in much more drastic straits when she woke up on that first night, but she’d actually been in the largest bedroom upstairs, and the reason she’d been sharing that room with everybody else in the place was that they’d lost the fire. The fireplace was very temperamental, meaning it wouldn’t work if nobody remembered to pull in some wood from the yard and give it time to dry. They had all been together because it was warmer that way.
There were a total of fifteen rooms to the farmhouse, not counting the barn across the yard. Miraculously, one of those rooms was an indoor bathroom with a standing shower. Hot water was at a premium, and the toilet backed up all the time, but all anyone had to do when they felt like complaining about it was look out in the middle of the backyard and see the snow-covered outhouse for an idea of what things were like here before Charlie’s grandparents had decided to spend a little cash on creature comforts.
Electricity was a wondrous thing when they had it, which was only about half the time. The electricity only reached the house via aerial wires, and if any wire in the county went down, so did the entire county’s electrical supply. With the weather as it was that happened pretty often. They had a phone that also relied largely on the caprice of the weather, but since nobody there ever had a dire need to make a phone call—anyone they might have wanted to phone was already there—this was less of a noticeable problem.
She started on the first floor, in the living room. As the second largest room in the house and the only one with a functioning fireplace, it was where most of the commune’s occupants could be found during the day, especially given the fire was the only source of heat they had. It had been argued that as the bathroom had a moderate supply of hot water, there must ergo be a device somewhere in the home that heated said water. It had been further argued that the presumption of a water heater also led one to infer the existence of other devices somewhere within the confines of the farmhouse which might heat the rooms, possibly via the perpetually arctic radiators. Charlie, being of a stubborn and charismatic sort and clearly unwilling or otherwise unable to admit to any failure—in this case, a failure to locate the furnace—insisted somewhat stridently that the hot water came from the tap that way via some kind of wondrous unknown process that heats well water naturally. Thus far, nobody had been either brave enough or adequately non-stoned to challenge this position.
“Anybody seen Corry?” Vi asked. In doing so she interrupted a profound discussion regarding whether the Vietnam War would have still happened if Dylan hadn’t gone electric. Conservatively, this discussion had been going on for two days. As this was a day when they had no electricity it was the best anyone could do by way of music; Charlie had neglected to recruit anybody who could play guitar, or at least anybody who owned one.
A half dozen dazed faces looked up at her. None of them seemed to be familiar with the name. Finally, Harriet—Vi was almost positive that was her name—asked, “The boy?”
“Yes,” Violet said patiently. “Have you seen him?”
They looked around to see if he might just happen to be in the room, in case Violet was in the habit of asking deep questions without provocation.
Having confirmed his absence, and just to make sure this was not a philosophical inquiry, Mondo—definitely not his real name but the only name he ever gave to Vi—asked, “Recently?”
“Yes.”
“Dunno,” he declared. “Don’t think so.”
A young, chubby girl named Gingham held a lit joint up in the air without even turning to look at Violet, which was who she was offering the smoke to. This was her way of saying, “Hello, won’t you join us?” and might have been construed as a friendly offer except Vi knew if cops kicked down the door and burst into the living room they’d find Gingham sitting in that exact spot, offering them a toke.
Violet was tempted. There was only one thing worse than being straight and that was being straight in a house full of people who were not. Somehow everything smelled worse, and nobody was half as pretty or a quarter as smart as she’d taken them for previously. She wondered, not for the first time, what Corry thought of all of them.
She passed on the offer, reluctantly and without comment, and moved on.
The dining room was spacious, and seemed to have been designed with a vast number of houseguests in mind. It was dominated by a crude wood table with an uneven surface and a finish that was peeled off in several places. Not that one could see the tabletop; stoneware dishes that practically screamed out for somebody, anybody, to clean the half-eaten food off them covered the entire space. It was a good thing it was the middle of winter; otherwise, the room would be a warren of flies. Surrounding the table was a collection of a dozen chairs, love seats, and hassocks, with no two seats alike. Charlie’s grandparents had furnished their home via flea market.
Tyrell and Charlie were sitting in the corner of the room in a heated discussion that might have been called an argument if they weren’t both ripped. Vi could pick out words like proletariat and common good and figured it was nothing she hadn’t heard before.
As the most with-it guys in the house, these two banged heads regularly on all matters. Traditionally, Vi came down on the side of Tyrell, and not just because they were fucking. The truth was Charlie, being the ostensible host, had certain dictatorial tendencies that laced every speech he gave about power to the people a degree of irony he didn’t quite have the intelligence to acknowledge. In the past, Violet had acted as a mediator, but this was not the time for that.
“You guys seen Corry?” she asked.
“Hey, Vi,” Tyrell greeted her. “You all right?”
“Been sleeping, baby.” She had been sleeping quite a bit of late for some reason. “You seen my boy?”
“I saw him out back about an hour ago,” Charlie said, jerking his thumb toward the back yard.
“An hour?” she said, surprised. “Cold out, isn’t it?”
“Wind’s died down,” Charlie said in a somewhat apologetic tone.
“Sure he’s fine,” Tyrell insisted. “Want me to check on him?”
“I’ll do it,” she said.
Leaving the two men to continue acting like little boys, she headed through the unattended kitchen to the back door. Next to the door was a small walk-in space that in more antiquated times had served as a jelly room but now was mostly used to store an array of random winter gear. The aggregate of the equipment there would not sufficiently protec
t all of them from the elements, but fortunately they’d yet to encounter a situation that would require them to leave en masse. She quickly threw on the nearest overcoat, slipped into a pair of boots that were, conservatively, two sizes too large, yanked on a pair of mittens, and headed out.
To call the space behind the farmhouse a backyard was to do a disservice to real backyards, if only by comparison. The house stood on a small hill overlooking a vast untended apple orchard, but that was only the half of it. The vista beyond the orchard was truly breathtaking, opening up on a valley of snow-covered pine trees that bottomed out at a river half-frozen on most days and fully iced over on the really cold ones. Some mornings the ground fog was so low over the valley it looked as if the farmhouse was drifting atop a cloudbank.
Violet shouldn’t have been surprised to find Corry out back; he liked the view. This part of the outside world was very languid, a marked difference from anything going on indoors. She’d found him more than once just standing atop the hill and staring. If she’d been thinking about it, she’d have checked the yard first.
On this particular occasion, he wasn’t staring. He was throwing snowballs.
At just shy of five years of age, Corry Bain was already big enough to pass for seven or eight. Sometime around his second birthday he’d shot up like a weed, as if someone were slipping him raw meat every night when Vi wasn’t paying attention. He had long black hair that she cut only once a year so that at full extension it draped past his shoulders. He tended to keep it tied back in a ponytail, as he’d seen so many of the men in his life do. With a different child, perhaps, this might have given him a girlish appearance. But he was so stocky nobody who wasn’t nearly blind would make such a mistake.
Since there was no coat his size in the house, he was wearing three sweaters and two pairs of pants. The boots he had on were women’s boots, but not obviously so. And he wasn’t wearing gloves, but despite handling snow, this didn’t appear to be a problem for him.
She watched as he bent down and packed together a snowball, checked it for weight and compactness, and then fired it at the tree closest to the base of the hill.
“Miss,” he said to himself, while the snowball was still describing an arc toward the tree. He leaned over to make another snowball without bothering to watch his projectile land. When it did, it missed the tree by several feet. Violet was so happy to hear her son using words she decided not to announce her presence right off.
Corry almost never spoke. When he was younger, it was no worse than a mild curiosity and at times a great convenience for someone who was trying to both raise a child and live her life as if she didn’t have one. But as he aged, the silence became a serious concern, to the point where she had briefly convinced herself he was retarded in some way. Except there was no way to look into his eyes and seriously think such a thing.
Having put together another snowball, he reared back and launched it at the same tree. Almost as soon as he let it go he announced, “Hit!” and then proceeded to make another one, again not bothering to watch the snowball actually reach the tree. As he’d predicted, it did indeed hit the upper trunk of the tree he was aiming for.
She wondered how long he’d been at it, given how accurately he was gauging his throws.
“Mommy,” he said without looking at her. He must have seen her from the corner of his eye.
“Hello, Corry. Are you cold?”
He turned and stared at her. “No,” he said. Then he threw the next snowball at the tree. “Miss.”
“How do you know it’s going to miss?” she asked, growing curious about the whole procedure. “It’s still in the air.”
He didn’t answer until after the snowball missed the tree. “Is it?” he asked.
“Not anymore, no.”
“Pretty deer,” Corry responded, which made no sense at all to Violet. As she walked to the edge of the hilltop, though, she spotted movement in the orchard some distance away. It was a deer, scampering through the snow and heading for the river. A chill ran up her spine, entirely unrelated to the temperature outside.
“Look at that,” she said. Corry turned completely around, which was the only way for him to gain a view of the animal. Before she’d spoken there was no way for him to have possibly seen it.
Don’t be stupid, Vi, she said to herself. Obviously, the boy had seen the deer earlier and was just pointing out to her that there was one down in the orchard.
“You’re right honey,” she said, touching his shoulder gently. “It’s a very pretty deer.”
Chapter Eight
Now
“I don’t know what happened,” Corrigan said to Maggie. She was still a good six feet away and walking toward him on his blind side, but of course he already knew she was about to sit down at the outdoor table next to him. He sipped his now-cold coffee and continued to stare at the spot across the street where a woman named Maribel Kozminsky had been felled by a sack of dry cement. The police were still at the scene talking to the construction worker, who was trying to reenact his role via a complex series of gestures that did little to help his cause. Corrigan watched the gesturing through the blur of forward motion, focused on the little moments in time, took note of the current present, and reviewed everything as it played out to make sure the future was still going the way it was supposed to. He’d been doing this since he got off the phone with Maggie, and so far everything was working.
“Corrigan,” Maggie said. She’d sat down. “Talk to me.”
“Sure, I’ll have one,” he said, holding out his hand, his eyes still focused across the street.
Maggie was holding her pack of cigarettes. “I didn’t offer it yet.”
“You were about to. Now they lead him to the squad car. The big one radios ahead.”
“Could you . . . it would be nice if we were both in the present for this conversation.”
He didn’t look away until the back door to the squad car closed. The spectators to the scene began to disperse in a sea of projected vapor trails. Maggie was lighting a cigarette and also handing it to him. He was taking it from her and inhaling the smoke into his lungs. He hadn’t done it yet, and he could already taste the smoke. Now he was exhaling and watching her light one for herself. He squeezed the filter of the butt between fingers that were really better with cigars. He took his first drag. She lit her smoke.
“So tell me—” she began.
“Don’t know.”
“Can you—”
“I’ll try.”
“Dammit! Wait for me, will you please?”
He closed his eyes and rubbed the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved that morning. Why hadn’t he done that? Because he’d been following her ass out of the bathroom. That’s right. That had been only a few hours ago.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s . . . when I get agitated I lose focus.”
“I’m getting that.”
“I was about to save her. I was in position and everything. But then . . . there was a split.”
“A split.”
“Two things happened at once. Except only one ended up actually happening. Guess which one?”
It was Maggie’s turn to look perplexed.
“Has that ever happened before?” she asked.
“Not since I was a kid.” He took a very deep drag of the cigarette, exhaled, and tipped the ashes onto the ground. He was still holding the drag.
“What are we talking about here? Did you just lose focus or something? Follow the wrong . . . um . . . part? Of the future?”
“No,” he said, having exhaled, tipping the ashes. “I saw more than one possible outcome, and I didn’t know which one was right. I shouted a warning, but only in one future. But it was already different, that other future.”
“How?” she asked.
That was a good question. He looked up at the scaffolding and tried to remember what he’d seen. The guy didn’t drop the bag at the same moment; that much he knew. Something had distracted him. “He was
looking over there,” he said, pointing. “No, that’s not right. He was looking that way in both futures. But in the other one there was something that made him pause for a heartbeat or two.”
Maggie looked where Corrigan was pointing. “And then what?”
“Then nothing. That outcome disappeared when it didn’t happen.”
“Could have been anything. From that spot you can see right down the street.”
“I know, and with hundreds of people between here and there. It could have been anything. Except it wasn’t just anything.”
“What do you mean?” Maggie asked. She was beginning to regret having ever wandered into this conversation.
“It was nothing,” Corrigan pointed out. “It was exactly nothing. It never happened. He reacted to seeing something that he didn’t end up seeing. That was why the future played out the way it was supposed to.”
“So . . . okay, so we have to figure out something that didn’t happen and wasn’t supposed to happen but almost did happen.”
“Keeping in mind that this was a unique event. The thing that didn’t happen was significant in some way.”
“My head hurts,” she said.
“I know what you mean.”
Maggie flicked the remaining ash from her cigarette, which was now burning its filter. She resisted the urge to light another one—two in a row always made her nauseous—solely because the discussion seemed to warrant it. “Is it possible that this has happened before, and you just didn’t notice it?”
“I doubt it,” he said.
“But it’s possible. It could have happened at an insignificant moment; one where you weren’t in the middle of saving somebody.”
Corrigan asked, “You ever see a glass fall off a table and then not hit the floor? Just float back up to where it was before it fell?”
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