Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  Wendy went in and came face-to-face with a frightened little girl. Wendy smiled and asked if she could please use the telephone. The girl pointed. Wendy dialed for an ambulance and asked the little girl for the address of the house.

  “My daddy is a police officer,” the little girl said when Wendy hung up. “He can arrest you.”

  “Oh, he won’t want to do that, honey,” Wendy said. “This is all a mix-up. That boy outside made a mistake. He was looking for someone.”

  “Who was he looking for?”

  Wendy wanted to get outside, but she knew she needed to reassure the little girl. She said, “He’s looking for a girl named Janice. Janice Crowley.” Wendy whispered, “He might have made her up. He’s a little silly.”

  The little girl said, “I’m Janice Crowley.”

  Wendy pulled back. She was a mother on a mission, but hearing this little girl announce herself as the wife Peter claimed he had lost lifted her into the anti-logic of a dream. Wendy still knew what she had to do, but she no longer knew what to believe.

  Peter’s mother was speaking to him. She repeated his name. She told him she was right there and he was going to be okay. His lips were bloody and beginning to swell, but his mouth was moving. She leaned in. He said, “Janice? Honey—how did the surgery go? What did the doctor say?”

  She said his name again but he was somewhere else. He whispered, “You won’t believe the dream I had…”

  Gus Crowley was shaking but steady as the boy was loaded into the rescue unit. Terry Canyon stood next to the cop, ready to tackle him again if he bolted toward Peter. Two police cars pulled up and the officers came to Gus and conferred with him in low voices. Peter’s mother was giving instructions to the ambulance team and glaring back at Gus. Little Janice looked out from inside the screen door.

  Wendy was down on her knees in the grass, searching. She found Peter’s front tooth and wiped it on her shirt. She wrapped it in a Kleenex and pressed it into Joanne’s hand. She said, “The root is still attached. They might be able to save it.”

  Joanne rode to the emergency room in the ambulance with Peter. She held his hand and spoke to him the whole way.

  Dr. Terry followed in the Wyatts’ car. Wendy followed Terry in her son’s Charger. She felt there was something wrong with the undercarriage.

  At the hospital Wendy had to sit in the waiting room while Mrs. Wyatt and Dr. Terry conferred with the nurses. She tried calling home to tell the boys where she was, but no one answered. Her kids never answered the phone. After a full hour Dr. Terry came out and sat next to her. He gave her a reassuring smile.

  “Looks like a subdural hematoma, bleeding on the brain. Concussion. His eye will be okay, I think. They put the tooth back in; we’ll see if it stays. Not too much worse than a football injury.”

  His eyes didn’t look as optimistic as his smile.

  Wendy said, “That little girl was named Janice Crowley. Like Peter said. About his wife?”

  Dr. Terry stared straight ahead. “You can find any name in the phone book.”

  “The dad, the cop, Gus. The town. The house. Everything was like Peter said.”

  Dr. Terry mumbled, “More things in heaven and earth.”

  Wendy didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed to be intended to kill the conversation.

  She finally asked him, “You work with teenagers all the time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You figure them out yet?”

  He sighed. “You have three boys.” Dr. Terry looked straight at Wendy with his striking blue eyes and told her, “I’m certain you know more about the subject than I ever will. There’s no substitute for field experience.”

  “What do you think is really wrong with Peter? Before tonight.”

  Dr. Terry said softly, “He made a mistake nearly all of us make. He thought he could control how his life would go.”

  Wendy DeVille and Terry Canyon sat together for another two hours, drinking vending-machine coffee and considering the mysteries.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

  Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

  Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

  Living nor dead, and I knew nothing

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  Peter’s mother kneeled by the hospital bed holding the hand of her unconscious son. She spoke into his ear. “You don’t have to tell them who you really are. You don’t need to say what you’re thinking, ever. Keep in your heart what belongs to your heart. Blend in.”

  Peter’s father came into the room.

  He looked at his wife bent over her son. He said, “One prediction of Peter’s will not come true. That man Gus Crowley will never become chief of police here or anywhere. I very much doubt he’ll keep his job. I know some higher-ups in the Long Island judiciary.”

  A nurse appeared. She asked how our boy was doing. The mother flinched at her calling him that. Peter was her boy. The nurse lifted one of Peter’s eyelids and shined a light. His pupil contracted. His breathing was even. She left. The parents waited.

  After an hour the boy lifted his head. He said, “Hey?”

  His parents drew close. “How you feeling, Pete?” his father asked.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’re in the hospital,” his mother said. “On Long Island.”

  The boy seemed baffled. “Why are we in a hospital?”

  “You got in a fight, son,” his father said. “Do you remember?”

  “I got in a fight? Who with?”

  The nurse returned and said, “Hello, Peter. My name is Claudia. You’re in the hospital. How do you feel?”

  “Okay…?”

  The nurse asked Peter to count backward from twenty to one. He did. She asked him to recite the alphabet, skipping every other letter. He did that too. She asked for his full name and the names of his parents. When he got those right, she said, “Very good. No indication of brain damage.”

  Peter said, “But you don’t know how smart I was before.”

  A heartbeat passed before everyone laughed. The nurse asked the date and Peter said, “April twelfth, 1970.”

  The nurse registered no concern but asked him again, and he repeated, “April twelfth, 1970.”

  The father could not contain himself. He said, “It’s June fifth, Peter.”

  Peter said, “No, no. I have a paper due April fourteenth. It’s not June, Dad.”

  His mother put her hand on her husband’s arm. She said to the boy, “Peter, what’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Last night we watched Bonanza and then I went up to bed. We had corn chowder for dinner. Dad was talking about maybe us driving to Vermont next weekend to see Sally.”

  The parents looked at each other. Peter was describing the night before the delusion began.

  When the nurse left, his parents asked a dozen questions about the events of the previous seven weeks. Peter told them he remembered none of it. When they talked about his being an old man from 2020, he assured them he was fifteen and knew very well it was 1970.

  A doctor came in to do some tests, and the parents went out into the corridor. Howard said, “Joanne, we have our boy back.”

  The mother said it did seem that way.

  * * *

  Barry DeVille got his car back, and Wendy saw to it that he didn’t press charges. Pressing charges wasn’t really Barry’s way anyhow. Wendy made sure he didn’t exact personal vengeance either.

  When Peter heard about the activities of his lost month, starting with stripping naked in front of the class, he said he never wanted to go back to West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School again. That was a relief to Moe Mosspaw, who was able to keep a lid on the story of Peter stealing a car and menacing a little girl on Long Island and being beaten unconscious by her police detective father. Mosspaw arranged for Peter to go to summer sessions in a neighboring town. In the autumn he would take up tenth
grade at his father’s old prep school in New Hampshire. His mother noted with approval that the school was close to Dartmouth. Perhaps Peter would go there for college.

  The boy had one more session with Dr. Terry Canyon, who found a very different Peter Wyatt, truculent and sullen.

  “You don’t remember any of our talks, Pete?” the psychiatrist asked. The boy shook his head and looked at the door like he was planning to run for it.

  “How you feeling about leaving your school?”

  “Good,” Peter said. “I don’t want to see any of those idiots again ever.”

  “Not John North? Not Rick DeVille?”

  “Rick DeVille’s a fucking creep. I told you, I don’t remember anything about playing music with him or his criminal brothers, and I don’t want to remember. I just want to forget everything you people say happened to me.”

  Dr. Terry didn’t argue. He kept looking for some indication that the articulate old man he knew was alive in there somewhere, but there was no sign of him. He said, “You’re embarrassed about the whole naked in algebra thing, huh?”

  The boy made an anguished face and the doctor said, “Peter, I’m going to tell you something that will sound unbelievable to a teenager but is absolutely true. There is very little in this life to be embarrassed about, because—get this—nobody outside your family spends much time thinking about you. You can shave your head, cover your bare butt in peanut butter, and walk into midnight mass with a bullfrog hanging from your dick and everybody will laugh and point and, yes, they will bring it up when they see you, but they won’t really think about it too much. The big secret is, most people you meet hardly ever think about you, good or bad, because most people don’t care. Now, the first time you realize this it’s a disappointment. But believe me, once it sinks in it’s a liberation.”

  Dr. Terry couldn’t tell if Peter took any comfort from this. When their hour was up Peter hurried out of the room without making eye contact or saying goodbye. His parents were more grateful and expressed it, but they too were anxious to put the strange visit from Future Peter and the sessions with Dr. Terry behind them.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Vice Principal Alice Lockwood did not expressly commend Moe Mosspaw for how he finessed the quiet departure of Peter Wyatt from West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School, but one day during finals she said to him in the teachers’ lounge, “I’m so glad we put that business with the judge’s son to rest without any more hoopla,” which in Moe’s world was the equivalent of a slap on the back and a free gift certificate to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Moe had a big summer planned, working at the A&P, coaching a CYO softball team, and helping out as a camp counselor on Sundays. Moe Mosspaw did a lot of good for a lot of people and expected no credit, which is what he got.

  As soon as summer vacation began, Lou Pitano started officially representing the musical career of Daphne Burrows, who had a regional hit with “Afternoon Delight.” For a while Daphne made personal appearances backed up by Ricky and Rocky DeVille, but after Rocky caught her having sex with his big brother, Barry, the group disbanded. Daphne moved to Boston, where she found better musicians and left Lou Pitano for a professional and personal relationship with the manager of the J. Geils Band. A few years later a cover of “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band became a national hit. Daphne earned nine hundred thousand dollars from the publishing.

  Motorcycle psychiatrist Terry Canyon came to believe that the strange case of Peter Wyatt was fate’s way of leading him to the great love of his life, Wendy DeVille. From the moment they saw each other, he believed they were meant to be together.

  Wendy, with her broken beauty and maternal aura, brought out his inner shaman. On a vision quest in a sweat lodge in New Mexico that Christmas he intuited that their future descendants had reached back through time to push Terry and Wendy together through the agency of Peter Wyatt.

  At first Wendy was cautious about Terry’s advances, but he could get through to her son Ricky in a way no one else ever had. Ricky opened up to Terry while they rebuilt old engines. Terry had a gift for talking with all three of her boys that she had never seen before. He passed through all their defenses. He made her believe that her long run of bad luck had turned around.

  At the end of August 1970, two weeks before Peter left for prep school, his parents celebrated their wedding anniversary. They said they didn’t want to make a big deal about it, but both of Peter’s older sisters came home for the weekend, Cathy pregnant with the first grandchild and Sally home from Vermont. Cathy’s husband couldn’t make the trip and Sally had broken up with her boyfriend, so it was one of the very rare occasions when Howard and Joanne Wyatt and their three children were all together with no one else, just the original five.

  Cathy and Sally knew only the outlines of their little brother’s scandal. They picked up the signals from their parents to not pry or tease. Peter had been through something serious enough that he was heading to boarding school. They were relieved that he didn’t seem any different at all.

  The Saturday of the anniversary weekend was hot and sunny, and the five Wyatts piled into the station wagon and went to Misquamicut Beach on the southern coast of the state. They got there at three, when most of the traffic was heading the other way, and all five of them went into the ocean. The waves were big, and the incline into the sea was gradual up to waist level and then took a quick drop. The family splashed one another and rode the surf and let the waves carry them to shore. They stayed in until the sun was descending and an invasion of seagulls took occupation of the sand.

  They rinsed the salt off at outdoor showers and rolled up to Captain Dick’s, a seafood restaurant they had visited regularly when the children were small. In the dirt parking lot, Joanne saw Terry Canyon coming out of the restaurant carrying a white take-out bag and two milkshakes. She nudged her husband just in time to see the doctor’s companion come up next to him. It took her a moment to recognize Wendy DeVille. Wendy and Terry looked like teenagers on a date.

  Dr. Terry spotted the Wyatts and pointed and waved. Wendy DeVille smiled carefully.

  “Hey! It’s the clan!” Terry cried. “Don’t tell me these are the mysterious Wyatt sisters!”

  The judge nodded and said hello. He introduced his daughters to Dr. Terry. There was a moment when he couldn’t think of Wendy’s name, but Joanne filled in for him.

  “Wendy,” she said. “How did you get this Bostonian so far south?”

  Mrs. DeVille said she was introducing Terry to the pleasures of the Ocean State.

  Dr. Terry fixed on the boy. “Pete!” he said. “How ya doin’, man? Summer treating you good?”

  The boy shifted awkwardly. “Pretty good,” he said. He didn’t make eye contact with the doctor.

  The suntanned couple began to walk toward the doctor’s motorcycle when Dr. Terry stopped. He felt for his wallet in his back pocket, took it out, and turned back to the Wyatts.

  “Hey, Peter,” he said. “Grab you for a minute?”

  Peter’s mother nodded for him to approach the psychiatrist. The doctor moved close to the boy and turned his face to speak to him privately. He opened his wallet and took out two concert tickets. He passed them to Peter.

  “The Beatles are coming to Boston,” Dr. Terry said. Peter looked at the tickets. “Harvard Stadium on Labor Day weekend. I got two pair. I want you to go with Wendy and me.”

  Peter was nervous. He said, “I can’t take these.”

  “Sure you can. Shit, man. It’s the Beatles! First tour in four years. I got them for Rocky and Ricky, but it turns out they hate the Beatles. Of course they do. Maybe you could ask Amy Blessen to be your date.”

  Peter shook. “What did I tell you about Amy Blessen?”

  “That she’s a cool girl. You asked her out once, you know. In May.”

  Peter was shocked. “I did? What did she say?”

  “You invited her to go see James Taylor at Brown and she said yes, but then it turned out it was a
n afternoon show and she had a game. But she was definitely encouraging.” Peter was anxious. Dr. Terry said, “Hey, Pete. You’re not even going to the same school anymore. Ask her!”

  Peter nodded. Dr. Terry punched him lightly on the shoulder and waved goodbye to the Wyatts with a big smile.

  “Who are those people, Dad?” Cathy asked as they passed through the restaurant doors.

  “She lives over in Buttongreen,” the father said. “He’s a psychiatrist from Harvard.”

  The family took a table by the window and ordered chowder and lemonade and fisherman’s platters overflowing with shrimp, clams, scallops, fried sole, and chips. Joanne watched to see if Peter would object to the grease and batter, but he dug in with enthusiasm.

  She was sleepy from being in the sun and from stepping out of the heat into the air-conditioning. She felt outside herself. She watched her husband and children as if she were looking at an old movie. All three kids had grown up beautiful, with long legs and arms, tanned skin, and sun-streaked hair. She had made these children, but they weren’t hers any longer. They were their own.

  She watched Peter and his sisters chattering and joking and considered their living long into the future without her. Someday they would be here together and she would be gone. Her husband would be gone. The kids would live someplace their parents could never enter. It was the country Peter had visited, reported back from, and—she hoped—returned to safely. She surprised herself by feeling jealous. This was her family. She had made them and devoted her life to them, but they would keep on being a family when she was gone.

  Peter looked away from his sisters and returned her gaze. She studied his face for any sign of the displaced sixty-five-year-old, but then Sally swiped one of his french fries and he yipped at her, and Joanne knew he was her fifteen-year-old boy.

  “Our children pass into another life,” she thought, “where they will be secure and easeful, into which we can never go.”

  Peter said, “Are you still with us, Mom?”