Peter leaned against the sink. He was silent, and so was his mother.
He finally said, “I appreciate what you’re saying, Mom. And maybe you’re right, maybe that is a positive way to think about all this. I’m not an old man who’s come back but a young man who’s seen the future. But my being here has already changed things. And thinking that way doesn’t alter the fact that I have to return to Janice and our children.”
“Don’t you see, Peter?” his mother said. “You are returning to them. You’re returning to them every day. It’s just that it’s going to take you a lifetime to make that journey. You shouldn’t wish any of that time away.”
That stopped Peter cold. What penalty would fate impose on a man who was offered a whole extra life and spurned it? What new hole was he digging for himself?
Neither of Peter’s parents asked him if they would be alive in 2020, which was statistically unlikely. The father didn’t ask because he believed it was all imaginary, and the mother didn’t ask because she knew it would make Peter uncomfortable, and anyway, that he didn’t mention them when he talked about his future life suggested the answer. She never expected to live to be ninety-eight years old.
When he found himself alone with his father, Peter tried to remember things he’d wondered about later in life and wanted to ask him. Mostly it was questions about the Wyatt family’s background, which had become the subject of Thanksgiving Day speculation with his sisters after the judge had died.
Were they actually descended from the Pilgrims? Had their great-grandfather really fought at Gettysburg, and with what company? Howard was delighted that Peter was such a good audience for the family history. It was the first time any of the kids had ever cared. He even opened up about his service in the South Pacific during World War II.
They were driving home with an order of Chinese food when Peter asked him, “Dad, had you already been married before you met Mom?”
The car accelerated and the judge said, “Who told you that?”
“When I was about fifty, I got a tax bill on some property in New Hampshire I’d never heard of. I called and said it was a mistake, but the town clerk had your name and birthdate on a plot of land in the White Mountains. He said you had purchased it in 1946. I drove up there. The land was empty, just woods, but it was adjacent to a house and property that had been the home of a Mrs. Mary Appleby. I went to the town hall and checked the records. The late Mrs. Appleby had been born Mary Sotto, in Bethlehem, Rhode Island, and before she married Mr. Appleby—also deceased—she had apparently been briefly married to Howard Wyatt of Rhode Island, with whom she’d bought the house in New Hampshire. Needless to say, I was curious.”
His father’s face was rigid. He squeezed the steering wheel.
“Who told you about this, Peter?”
“I told you—I got a letter…”
“You got a letter in the future. Right. And you couldn’t ask me because I was already dead? What year did all this happen?”
“A long time from now, Dad.”
Howard Wyatt turned his car into the driveway of a shingled, three-story house, put it in park, and turned and faced his son.
“I need to know how you heard about this.”
“Dad, I told you…”
“Peter—we’re all with you during this tough time, but I need you to search your memory and try to remember how you really heard about this.”
“It’s not going to change, Dad. So, you were married to this woman…”
“No I was not. It was annulled. Legally, we were never married.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
His father stared at him. “How old are you right now?”
“You want me to say it?”
“In confidence between father and son, with God as our only witness—how old are you?”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sixty-five. I heard about this around the year 2005.”
“Did you tell your mother? Your sisters?”
“I didn’t tell anyone. I settled the taxes and sold the lot, and that was the end of it.”
Peter didn’t know if the anguish in his father’s face came from the hidden history coming to light or from believing his son’s madness was now going to infect the family. Judge Wyatt was not a man used to making confessions. It went against his Yankee rectitude.
“Mary Sotto was a girl I knew before the war. She was a nice girl from a bad neighborhood. Her father was a drunk who would disappear on long benders, for weeks at a time. Her mother was, frankly, a tramp. When I got out of the service I saw Mary a couple of times. I guess you could say we dated. It wasn’t serious. Anyway, she…” He could barely force out the words. “She got in trouble. She came to me. She was worried her father would beat her up, or her mother would force her to get a coat-hanger abortion. She had relatives in New Hampshire who would take her in, but only if she had a marriage certificate. The baby had to be”—he smiled coldly—“made legitimate.”
“So you married her?”
“We never lived together. I went to the New Hampshire town hall with her and her aunt and her grandmother and we were married by a justice of the peace, had a nice lunch at a local restaurant that the grandmother paid for, and I kissed her on the cheek and took the train back to Rhode Island. A few months later she sent me photos of the baby, a little girl. Thirty days after that we filed for an annulment. I never saw Mary again.”
Peter hesitated before asking, “Is there a chance the daughter was yours?”
His father said, “Very, very unlikely. Apparently Charlie Appleby was in the wings the whole time. He worked in the printworks, same sort as her father. A bum. Bernie Sherman knew him over there. Bernie told me later that Charlie and Mary conspired to set me up. They figured my family had money and would pay to avoid a scandal. Bernie said she never expected me to agree to marry her. I guess I was a sucker.”
“The property in New Hampshire?”
“I agreed to put a down payment on a little place on the GI Bill to help set her up. Her family took over the debt after the annulment. Charlie Appleby moved right in.” The judge chuckled. “Actually, he was probably there already. He was probably waiting until I got on the train to come out from behind a hedge. I didn’t remember that the land behind it was a separate lot. Mary must have kept paying the taxes on it until she died.” He swallowed. “And then they came looking for me and found my son. You must have thought your old man was a real phony.”
“No, Dad, not at all. I just figured it was something that happened when you were young that was nobody’s business. I’m glad I had a chance to ask you.”
“Now you know I was a goddamn fool.”
“I know what I knew already. You were a man who always did the noble thing.”
A man carrying a rake appeared from behind the house and walked toward them. Howard Wyatt waved at him vaguely and backed the car into the road.
“Do you suppose this is why you came back in time, Peter?” Howard asked with a nervous smile as they drove away. “To solve the mystery of your old man’s hidden wife?”
“Well,” Peter told him, “if I’m gone when you wake up tomorrow, you’ll know that was it.”
They drove for a while before Howard said, “You were fifty when you learned about Mary Appleby?”
“More or less.”
“I’m fifty this year, you know. In September.”
“Fifty is a good age, Dad. You’re secure and settled but still young enough to explore, to travel, to learn new things. I took up golf when I was fifty. Maybe we can play sometime.”
Howard nodded, lost in thought.
When they got home with the Chinese food, his father said to Peter in a soft voice, “Don’t mention any of this to your mother.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Peter told the psychiatrist he was having trouble differentiating between memories of his life in the twenty-first century and dreams.
“You know what I’m going to say to that,” the doctor
replied.
“Yeah, I know—my life in the twenty-first century was a dream,” Peter said. “I appreciate that it’s hard for you to accept being a figment of my imagination.”
“It’s sort of demeaning,” the doctor said, and then scratched his nose.
“Last night I was thinking back on my last day in 2020. I was floating on my back in a pool looking up through the leaves at a blue sky. My ears were underwater and I could hear the humming of the pumps and filters. There was music, too. The Beatles’ Let It Be album. ‘Across the Universe.’ ”
“More details. Tell me about your pool.”
“It’s a stone pool in a meadow surrounded by trees, with outdoor speakers attached to an old barn we converted into a pool house.”
The doctor said it sounded great.
Peter said, “I’m sure that was where I was when I left. When I came here. I think I fell asleep in the pool listening to the Beatles and woke up in my childhood bedroom in 1970.”
“Good thing you weren’t listening to Beethoven—you might have come to in the Napoleonic Wars.”
Peter continued: “I keep returning to the idea that I drowned in the pool. Maybe lost consciousness and inhaled a lot of water before they found me. Brain damage. I might be in the hospital now while my wife argues with the doctors. I’d like to get a signal to her that I’m conscious in here.”
The psychiatrist knew there was a proper way to respond to a formulation like that, but he followed his gut. He said, “Why don’t you try wiggling your toes, blinking your eyes. Tap out SOS with your forefinger.”
Peter blinked rapidly and drummed his fingers. He could have been wiggling his toes at the same time.
This went on for a while. The doctor said, “We have to hope they got the signal. I want to try something else. Let’s go out to my car.”
“Where are we going?”
“Not leaving the driveway. In my Corvette I have an eight-track player, and among my tapes is Let It Be.”
“If you had a swimming pool, we could get really scientific.”
“Peter, this is about as scientific as a séance.”
Peter and the doctor went out the door of the white house and climbed into a Corvette convertible with the top down. The doctor yanked a Santana tape out of the changer and fished around behind the seat for the Beatles eight-track. He inserted it. The music surrounded them. “Two of Us.” “Dig a Pony.” Peter closed his eyes and tipped the passenger’s seat back as far as it would go. The doctor sat with his hands on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield at the flagpole in the front yard of the house across the street. Beneath the Stars and Stripes flew a POW/MIA banner. The doctor and the boy sat in silence while the music played. When the first track began again, the boy said, “Keep it going.”
The doctor said they were already over fifty minutes. Peter said, “I’m your last patient of the day, right? And we’re sitting in your car listening to the Beatles. Come on.”
The doctor said okay. He thought they might get somewhere. “I’ve Got a Feeling.” “One After 909.”
“You once told me you were thinking about your Christmas shopping when you left the future.”
“It was the middle of December; I was almost out of time.”
“But your last memory of 2020 is floating in your swimming pool, looking up at the sky through the branches of an apple tree.”
Peter looked like he had something to defend. The doctor pressed on.
“Do trees bloom and people swim outside in December where you come from?”
Peter thought about it. “I must have that wrong. Maybe I was remembering something about Christmas shopping while I was in the pool. I’m old, my mind wanders. Memories get crossed.”
“So it was summer when you departed.”
“Must have been.”
“Summer of 2020.”
“Had to be.”
Peter folded his hands and moved his legs together and leaned forward.
“This world, this post–World War II society you live in, Terry. It goes away. I don’t come from a place where everybody’s parents came through the Depression and World War II, where the adults tried to give the kids everything they never had, where the kids rebelled against materialism. This world of the New Deal and the Great Society and the Atlantic Alliance is gone. It slipped away without us even noticing. It’s as dead as the lost airmen of the Pacific campaign. It’s as dead as the flower children.”
“Kid, I’m sitting right beside you.”
“Why did I come back here?”
“We’re working on that.”
“Why did I come back to live among ghosts?”
The doctor looked directly into the boy’s eyes. “There’s more of them than there are of us.”
“More of who?”
“The dead.”
“How old are you, Doctor? What year were you born?”
“Nineteen thirty-seven.”
“You might be alive, still, in 2020.”
“I do hope to stick around till they legalize pot like you promised.”
“My friends are getting old. They tell you that if you live through your sixties, odds are you’ll live into your eighties, and everybody says that’s great news. Then you find out how tough it is to live through your sixties! Monica has heart disease. Annie had a brain aneurysm. Steve has a tumor on his bladder. Mark had a stroke. Mike has throat cancer. Jim got diagnosed with Parkinson’s. And prostate cancer—half the guys I play poker with are watchfully waiting. We compare PSA numbers like golf scores.”
The doctor said, “What’s your prognosis?”
“Me? I’ve been lucky so far.”
“No issues? Exercise?”
“Yeah, I go to the gym. I swim.”
“Close your eyes. Tell me again about your swimming pool. You said there was a humming?”
“The pool filters. It’s a steady hum. You don’t even notice it until your ears are under water.”
“And the apple tree over your head, looking up.”
“Yes. I was looking through the branches at the blue sky.”
“Kind of strange.”
“What is?”
“An apple tree with branches hanging over a pool. Don’t apples drop into the water? Mess up the pool, muck up the filters, draw flies? Why do you have an apple tree branching over your pool?”
Peter considered. “They must fall on the grass.”
“But you told me over and over, you were looking straight up through the branches.”
“Yes. I was. But there were no apples.”
“You said there were apples on the branch.”
“There were.” Peter was confused.
The doctor said, “Tell me again about your friends and their illnesses.”
“Well. Everybody had something. In 2020, it’s not like here. Here, they find cancer and you’re dead in a year. Where I come from, they detect it really early and they have all kinds of treatments. Immunotherapy. The CyberKnife. Some guys I know let the surgeon plant radioactive pellets in their prostates! I said, ‘I don’t want radioactive anything inside me! Take it all out! Get the fucking disease out of me!’ ”
The doctor looked at Peter steadily. He wasn’t playing the smiling hippie. He said, “So you did have it.”
Peter’s body unfolded. He was puzzled. He said, “I didn’t.… What a thing to…”
The doctor said nothing. They listened to the Beatles. “Get Back.”
Peter said, “Something happened. I went in for my annual checkup. I had skipped a year. When we went to Spain I missed my physical. The doctor stuck his finger up my ass, and instead of making his usual bad joke he left the room. I waited for him to come back. I put my clothes on. I thought he had to check on another patient. Instead, the nurse came in and handed me a card and said, ‘Go see this doctor, he’s a specialist.’ I said, ‘A specialist in what?’ She said, ‘Urinary.’ She didn’t look me in the eye. When I went down the corridor, my doctor ha
d closed the door to his office.”
“You must have been scared.”
“I was confused. It seemed like they were being mysterious, but I didn’t think I could have anything seriously wrong with me. I felt fine. I went to the specialist, and he stuck a rod up my ass without warning me. That hurt. Then he told me, ‘Okay, you can go now.’ I said, ‘You haven’t told me what you’re looking for.’ He said, ‘Oh, you have an enlarged prostate.’ I was almost laughing when I left the building. I figured I was off the hook. Every man my age has an enlarged prostate. That’s why the restroom lines are so long at a Willie Nelson concert.
“I put it out of my mind. Then out of the blue, I’m driving to work on a Monday morning, coming down from the country, and my phone rings. I hit the button and it’s the ass doctor. He says, ‘I got the results of the biopsy, and unfortunately there’s some cancer.’ That was all I heard. He was talking about a very limited radius and lucky we caught it early—but what I heard was I had cancer. It seemed impossible. It was like he’d told me I was Nigerian. There was a population I had always been in, and now I was being moved to a different population on the other side of the world.”
Dr. Terry said, “You don’t have cancer now. In 1970.”
Peter was astonished at his own memories. He said, “No. I don’t have cancer in 1970. I’m just a kid.”
“Where was the apple tree again?”
“The apple tree branch hangs over our pool…”
“Yeah? And the humming?”
“The filters.”
“And the music?”
“The outdoor speakers.”
“Tell me again what the music was.”
“The Beatles’ Let It Be album. It took me back to being fifteen, when there was endless empty time.”
“It took you back. You were stressed about the cancer so you floated in your pool, listening to the Beatles.”
The eight-track clicked. “Across the Universe.”
Peter said, “No.”
“No?”
“It was almost Christmas. I was looking up at the apple tree and pretending I was in the pool.”
Fifty in Reverse Page 12
