Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  I don’t believe in ghosts. There are no demons in the woods, no creatures of the night waiting to send me to the land of the dead. But something inside me refuses to agree. I believe in the fear. I believe that if I face it, I’ll destroy some of those demons that have hounded me since the loss of Mom and Dad. This stupid game has to end, one way or another. I played it hoping to shake off some of the deep-rooted fears of my childhood. I forced myself to play it. What did I think? That I could reclaim what I’d lost? Redefine myself?

  Don’t freak out, James.

  I have just one option; there’s only one way to finish the game.

  I take a deep breath. As the fear bubbles inside me, something else I haven’t felt in a long time joins in. It’s a single word, the first word from a childhood game, and what the word means to me is: You can make it. I start counting, very slowly, through clenched teeth, and with each tick of the clock, as blood from my arm drips on the porch, I prepare for my run around the cabin and into the unknown.

  “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock . . .”

  Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: I published my first novel when I was 55. I would tell my younger self to keep writing and don’t put it off for so long. I’d say that the whole “it’s a life-long dream to publish a novel some day” goal is admirable, but it doesn’t have to be that far along in life before it’s realized!

  Lay Down Your Heart

  Liz Westbrook-Trenholm & Hayden Trenholm

  Jeremy inspected the spare bedroom, rearranging the pillows on the double bed. A vase on the night table awaited a fresh bouquet of flowers, and the small desk held a pen set and a sheaf of note paper. A space had been left for a fresh water jug and a glass. A single photograph adorned the wall, from their trip to the jungles of Bechuanaland to see the gorillas in 2007, the year before Lesedi went away.

  Lesedi had always needed a retreat, a place to go when the troubles of the day—his or hers—led her in the night to abandon their marriage bed for a place of private repose. After twelve years of sleeping apart, he doubted either of them would easily grow accustomed to sleeping together again, no matter how hard he had worked for and fervently dreamed of that blessed day. She’d need the room more than ever, and it was perfect. He would have to commend Henry for the thoroughness of his preparations. He jotted an aide memoire on the pad he now kept tucked in his jacket pocket.

  But wait. Where was the book? He’d told Henry to put it there. Told him he wanted Lesedi to see it. That book, that book about—he scrabbled through his notepad, looking, looking.

  No such book exists. His own scrawl, just that sentence and a date. A memory sputtered to life. He’d shouted at Henry, accusing him of stealing the book, and Henry’s dark eyes, gentle as he reminded him that they had talked about it before, that he did not own such a book, that Master Falconbridge himself had searched and found no such book had been published.

  Jeremy lurched to the window, leaning on the frame and pulling in deep breaths. Two men stood across the street, watching the house. He leaned closer to the glass, squinting to make them out. They resolved into one figure only, the single hawker who always waited forlornly beneath the palms for someone to buy his fruit cups.

  Jeremy’s face flushed with sudden heat, and he raised the sash to relieve it. The dry season was well begun and the morning air was cool against his skin, though the wintery July sun promised heat before the day’s end.

  He thought briefly of a trip he and Lesedi had made on one of the few occasions the Tanzanian Institute of Advanced Physics could spare its assistant director, to the Serengeti highlands, waking to frost on the ground and the duttering rumble of an old bull elephant half hidden in the high grass at the edge of their camp.

  Warmer than that here, and the breeze carried the smell of curry from the small restaurant on the corner and, faintly beneath, the honeyed scent of jacaranda trees. Beyond the fruit seller lay Bagamoyo at its most beautiful, the turquoise Indian Ocean lapping languidly on white sand, empty of all but a few of his neighbours, huddled beneath open-sided tents away from the browning rays of the sun. A liveried slave stood to one side, awaiting the whims of his owners. A momentary unease filled him, like the stomach drop in an elevator, and the sand was filled with laughing children—black, brown, and white—playing together under the watchful gaze of their loving parents. Absurd imaginings.

  The never-ending hum of traffic was underlaid with the faint rhythm of drumming from the free town of Jijilabure, on the far side of Bagamoyo. Rehearsal for the evening festival which he had promised to let Henry go to. Perhaps he and Lesedi could join him. . . . He turned to ask her.

  Jeremy stumbled back to the bed and sank onto its edge. He forced his thoughts into coherence, planting himself firmly in the here and now, Lesedi in prison for twelve years because she would not help the government weaponize her work, and he, expending his dwindling political capital in obtaining her release. This room was the symbol of his success at last, thanks to a regime change that placed some of his carefully nurtured contacts into positions of power in the new government of national unity. This waiting flower vase, this pen set and notepaper, this space ready for water all meant that Lesedi herself was returning. He remembered her here from all those years ago, turned sideways on the desk chair, voluptuous and desirable in her little pink suit as she listened to him expound on the bureaucratic battles he was fighting to bring his colleagues into the twenty-first century and to convince his government that investment in selective breeding, maternal health programmes, and better care were critical to maintaining Tanzania’s pre-eminence in the slave trade.

  “Feed them, treat them, breed them properly, and Tanzania will have the most valuable stock on the continent,” he’d told her.

  “And it makes the slaves happy,” she smiled, raising an eyebrow.

  “Happy workers make for higher productivity,” he’d rejoindered. How often they had had that talk, Lesedi his sounding board for justifying better treatment of slaves?

  Then it would be her turn to tell him her latest thoughts on the mutable relationship between space and time, translating near incomprehensible physics into thrilling possibilities.

  “This science changes everything, even our understanding of time and space. We need to harness it to light the world, perhaps even reach the stars. Not use it to blow up our neighbouring countries.” Her eyes sparkled with intensity and intelligence he found inspiring and erotic. They would have that life again, they would.

  His heart lifted, slowed, and settled. The room was perfect.

  It was perfect, except Lesedi was still not home, was still stuck in the halfway house in Zanzibar City. Every promise of her release only led to further delays in their deliverance. For three days now, no word had come at all and he feared the latest shuffle of ministers would provide the Security Minister, a holdover from the previous all-white government, yet another excuse to keep his wife away from him. Should he again contact Curtis Nyere, his former senior advisor-turned-politician, or see what more Doris O’Brian, restored from the limbo of “special projects,” could do?

  Henry’s footsteps pounded on the stairway, presaging his appearance in the doorway, his black face shining with sweat and his mouth split wide in an unaccustomed grin. “She is here, Master Jeremy! She is here. The Mistress has returned to us. She has come home.”

  A tingle of trepidation lifted in his chest and filled his throat, preventing his voice from releasing the joy he felt. He shuffled past Henry to the top of the stairs, composed himself, and then descended the steps as gracefully as he could, quelling the faint tremor he felt in his thighs, gripping the bannister tightly for fear of falling again.

  She was there in the entranceway, a small bag still in one hand, as if she feared to put it down, as if she feared this house, the house they had lived in since they first married, would suddenly vani
sh, slip away as if it had never existed. Her hair had turned the colour of steel, and lines ringed her eyes and mouth, but it was still the same bright spark of intelligence in her gaze, the same small smile, the same inquisitive tilt to her head. She was so thin! But, he reminded himself, it was the same body he had loved and missed for so long.

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs, afraid to move closer, afraid to speak, as if she too might vanish, might slip away to a place he could not reach. His hands slowly reached out. She placed the bag on the floor beside her feet.

  “My Jeremy.”

  “My Lesedi.”

  She took the first small step; he took the next. They met as they always had, in the middle. He grasped her hands in his, her fingers warm and strong, and then his arms were around her, pulling her face tight against his chest.

  “You still smell like you,” she whispered to his heart. His breath caught, but he had no words to say in response.

  “Should I put the tea on?” Henry’s voice came from the top of the stairs.

  Jeremy stepped away but did not move his hands from his wife’s shoulders.

  “Y-yes,” he said through the tightness in his throat. “That would be nice.”

  “Don’t we have a maid to do that?” asked Lesedi.

  “No,” said Jeremy. “I should have told you. This house and Henry are all we own now.”

  “Well.” Lesedi threw up her hands in an old, familiar gesture of impatience. “We’ll have to see about that. Henry, take my bag up.” She hugged Jeremy. “I’ll make the tea. I did learn some things on the prison farm.”

  Lesedi paused at the baize door leading to the scullery and kitchen. Jeremy remained where he was, looking faded, like a photo left under sunlight. Henry remained at his side, watching her.

  “Look lively, Henry.”

  He dropped his chin, lids hooding his gaze. Deliberately, he lifted her bag and trudged upstairs with it.

  “Jeremy, come with me.”

  Jeremy nodded then and followed, looking for the tea. “Henry does all that,” he said.

  Lesedi found it in a battered tin cannister covered with patterns of jacaranda flowers. She sniffed deeply. “Orange pekoe, but not the best.” She filled the kettle, plugged it in, found the teapot. “China, hemele! I’d forgotten what it’s like. Old tin billies for us on the prison farm.” She turned. Jeremy was seated at the scrubbed table, leaning against an embroidered pillow she remembered from before her arrest. “While Henry is occupied, we can talk about our plans,” she said, pulling out the chair opposite him and sitting.

  “That’s where Henry sits.”

  She stared at him, astonished. “You eat with him? You sit at table with a slave?” He dropped his gaze. “Well. We’ll be putting an end to all that. When I get my job back at the lab, we’ll have enough to get another couple of staff.” She shook her head. “Meanwhile, Henry needs to be reminded of his place. And it is not at table with the master.”

  “You’re a force of nature, Lesedi.” He reached his hands across the table and took hers. “Let’s talk later. Let’s just look at each other for awhile.”

  She was bursting with plans, but she quelled her impatience. She had not remembered him as being so gentle and vague, but twelve years was twelve years, after all. His letters had been sharp and to the point, as much as had survived the sadistic censors, though she had to admit that lately his digressions had increased. And there were his constant references to his increasingly poor memory. No. They were unused to each other. They just needed time. As she gazed into his watery eyes, she felt her own fill, and her impatience fell away. Dear, dear Jeremy.

  Lesedi stared at herself in the mirror, her once-favourite pink suit hanging on her like a wilted petunia.

  “I was so fat!” she declared. She cinched a belt around the waist, bunching the fabric. “Like a sack!” Hopeless. Her face and neck were as droopy as her skirt, the leathery texture of her skin absurd against the feminine fabric. How could she return to the lab looking like this? Anxiety knotted in her stomach at the thought of running a gauntlet of shiny young colleagues, a haggard old has-been attempting a return to long-lost glory days.

  “There must be something.” She dug among the mothball stink of her old closet and there it was.

  She drew out her white lab coat, flung there the very night they’d come and dragged her from her bed. She slipped her arms into the sleeves and the old thing embraced her as if they had never been parted. It concealed all but the front panel of her suit. It forgave her aged face and hair, indeed, gave it gravitas. “Ah, beloved.”

  “Are you talking to me, or your lab coat?” Jeremy, from the door. She gazed at him in the mirror as he came up behind her, wrapping his long arms around her waist.

  “You are inextricably entwined with my work, my two great loves,” she said. “I cannot survive without you both.” He hid his face in her shoulder. Hurt? Should she have not . . .?

  He raised it again, and his eyes were shining. “I am so proud. So proud of you, to be with you.”

  She held that thought to her as she followed the new director of the Institute to the work room where she would be joint supervisor overseeing research, at least—he’d said—until she’d settled in and caught up with developments, a mere formality, given her acknowledged brilliance. Flattery to cover the fact they wanted her mind, but only if it still worked as it had. She didn’t care about the demotion; here she could do science without the burden of paperwork her old job entailed. The young fellow who’d been introduced as her partner supervisor seemed innocuous enough, if a bit doughy. Archibald Southwood, pure English establishment, was undoubtedly there to keep her out of trouble or report her if she got into it. She was so nervous at returning she could barely bridle at the inference she might not be up to snuff.

  The work room had double doors. The Director and Archibald each pushed open a door onto a room lined with long tables loaded with equipment, so much of it new in the twelve years she’d been locked away. She had requested, though rarely received, the latest research papers in the prison library and had interrogated every new scientist-prisoner for the latest developments, but so much had changed. She had pored over schematics in preparation for her return but still feared she might not recognize some device that had become common place in her absence. Men and women were bending over equipment—a scanning tunnelling microscope in the corner and the new titanium-sapphire laser used to manipulate atoms—or sitting at one of the desktop computers that had largely replaced the massive machine still sitting idle against the far wall. Others were deep in discussion over a dozen lines of calculus on the blackboard at the far end. As she stepped between the Head and Archibald, they turned toward her, falling into two lines either side of the central corridor between the tables. A gauntlet, indeed.

  Lesedi, for the first time in her life, felt an urge to turn and run. Gathering herself, she shoved her hands deep into her lab coat pockets and took the first step toward the large desk at the end of the room where she would do the bulk of her practical work.

  They began to clap. First one or two, and then more, and then all of them, clapping, clapping. She took in their faces then, smiling, some whose eyes shone with tears. She choked back her own emotion. Start as you mean to go on, Lesedi, she told herself. She nodded at each, moving between them until she reached the safety of the so-familiar table, from the like of which she had lectured and instructed, and on which she had worked, diagramming experiments, wrestling the maths underlying theories. She turned to look at them. The applause died away. They waited.

  “Well,” she said. “We’d best get to work.”

  Lesedi lifted her face to the moist warmth of the breeze off the Indian Ocean, enjoying the sight of a backward tilted dhow heading to the fish market under full sail. She’d fallen into a routine of walking home from the lab along the beach, sh
oes off, toes digging into the sand, the line of palms and bush green and whispering on one side, the waves lapping the beach like applause on the other. The journey took her through the fish market with its pungent odours, the sand slippery and oozing with guts—which gave her an excuse to wade in the gentle cleansing waves—but at least she avoided the rough stone slave barracks and hard cobbled streets of central Bagamoyo.

  What a change a few weeks had made. No more toiling in the hot sun, fingers stained orange or red from filling cloth bags with turmeric and henna, while overseers waited for any excuse to apply the lash. And her work, finally able to write out her theories and formulae, free to discuss ideas openly with colleagues rather than in whispered exchanges of encrypted phrases. Though openness was a relative term, given that toady, Southwood’s, constant spying.

  This walk let her transition from work to home, although work never truly left her mind. Nevertheless, she made an effort to give Jeremy her attention, at least during the hours between pre-dinner cocktails and post-dinner brandy. She’d restored some semblance of proper domestic management to the place, now she’d found a cook and a serving girl, both quite skilled, thanks to Jeremy’s reforms that provided routine formal training to slaves. Rather revolutionary that had been, but now the skilled ones were all that were available in the market. She had to admit it lifted some of the burden of breaking in new staff. The restoration of a proper routine was good for Jeremy. He appeared to be improving, a little less vague.

  She wiped the sand from her feet on the ragged grass marking the boundary between the beach and their home. Could she afford to buy a gardener? The grounds seemed beyond Henry to manage, although surely he had time, now he had the cook and the girl. She passed between the pillars into the cool portico fronting the back of the house. She loved the Moorish fretwork framing the arch and the silken feel of polished tile beneath her feet.