Time After Time

by Lisa Grunwald

—

  It had obviously exhausted her, that loss of energy, and when they were back in their room, Joe helped Nora off with her dress and tucked her into bed. He watched her as she fell asleep and for a long time after. Every once in a while, he reached out to touch her hand, needing to feel its warmth.

  When, eventually, he tried to sleep, Joe struggled to understand what had happened. They had already proved that Nora’s limits were ruled by distance, not time. Why had she flickered at the Cascades? It hadn’t occurred to either of them that her limits could be related to floors as well as streets, could be vertical as well as horizontal. On the street that first night, she had vanished at the corner of Forty-sixth and Lex. The next year, she’d gotten as far as Third Avenue. How far were those places from the spot where she had died? Joe did a rough calculation. Eight hundred, maybe 900 feet? She should have been safe at the Cascades. Twenty-two floors, even in a grand building, couldn’t cover those city blocks. Yes, she should have been safe, with several hundred more feet above her.

  Joe sat up, wide awake. Unless. Unless she had several hundred more below.

  He crept out of bed, grabbed a notepad and pencil from the desk, and stepped into the bathroom, blinking at the bright light. He knelt on the tiled floor, leaned the notepad against his thighs, and did the math. Yes, if he was right, those feet below should take them all the way down to the converters in M42. From there to the Cascades, it was roughly the same distance to the spots where she’d flickered out.

  Back in the room, Joe stared at Nora in the darkness. Those converters created the current that powered the rails that powered the trains all up and down the East Coast. And apparently, in Nora’s strange magic, they were powering her life as well. Stealthily, for the rest of the night, Joe watched Nora sleeping, every once in a while rethinking his calculations, just as he had checked the warmth of her hand. It had been terrifying, that moment of almost losing her again. He wanted to put his arms around her, but he didn’t want to disturb her. He figured she had been through more than enough.

  * * *

  —

  Nora woke at around eight to find Joe holding a silver hotel tray laid out with a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, and a basket of pastries that shone like fine leather.

  “Breakfast in bed?” she asked Joe, smiling.

  “I didn’t know how you’d be feeling,” he said.

  “Starved,” she said, and bit into a roll. “Tired, I guess,” she added reluctantly.

  “Well, that’s no wonder,” Joe said. He gestured to her coffee cup. “Drink up. I want to show you something.”

  She knew he was worried about her. Even if he hadn’t asked how she was feeling, she would have known by the extra-casual attitude he was putting on. And she actually wasn’t that steady. In the bathroom, she soaked a washcloth in steaming water and pressed it against her cheeks and eyelids, a simple luxury. Brushing her curls, she met her eyes in the mirror and saw Joe’s reflection behind her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’ve got this idea,” he said.

  “An idea for what?” she asked.

  “For a little experiment of my own.”

  “Right now?”

  “If you’re game,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”

  She took a breath, but after a second she said, “When am I not game?”

  * * *

  —

  Since the beginning of the war, the mammoth converters in M42 had been guarded by armed soldiers twenty-four hours a day. For all their power and size, the machines were weirdly vulnerable. All an enemy would have to do was pour a bucket of sand into one, and the third rail would instantly be compromised: The communications and transportation systems along the entire Eastern Seaboard would grind—literally grind—to a halt. As a consequence, the soldiers stationed at the entrance to M42 had been ordered to shoot to kill any person who approached carrying anything at all.

  Joe had no intention of risking any misunderstandings, but he wanted to get Nora as close to the converters as he could, as close to what he now believed was the power that kept her going.

  “You have any particular place in mind?” she asked as they made their way down to the tracks.

  “Down,” Joe said.

  She was skeptical. “Is this going to be like last night?” she asked.

  “If I’m right,” he said, “it’ll be just the opposite.”

  * * *

  —

  Nora had never seen any level of the terminal below the subway, and she took the first set of metal stairs cautiously. It wasn’t just that she feared a repeat of the previous night. The world she was entering was murky and dank. Here, beneath the terminal’s glamour and its celebration of light, it was so dim that it was almost impossible to see more than a few feet beyond the stairwells. The first two subfloors were used for maintenance, filled with all the essential supplies, equipment, and men to keep the place in running order. On the third floor down, Nora could just make out three heavyset men apparently taking a break to have a smoke.

  Down another flight, they passed rows of recently built bomb shelters, empty and closed for now but seemingly ready for disaster. Two more floors, and Joe realized that Nora had started speeding up, holding the yellow metal stair railing while she hopped over each bottom step.

  “Wait up!” Joe said, but he was loving the way her strength was returning.

  Four more floors down, Joe was out of breath, but Nora seemed elated.

  When they finally stopped, it was because they could go no farther. They were standing in the dank carved-out hollow beside M42. There were three or four bare bulbs casting shadows, enough light so that Nora could see the wall of rock from which the space for the terminal had been blasted.

  “How far does it go on?” she asked.

  “A long way,” Joe said. “You see those holes? That’s where they crammed in the dynamite sticks when they blasted out the rock. This is what was left.”

  “What happened to the rest?” she asked.

  “Did you ever go to Riverside Park?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Down to the water’s edge?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, the rocks that came from here are what they used to line the banks.”

  “Of the Hudson River?”

  Joe nodded. “I once heard all the way up to Albany.”

  “That’s a lot of rocks.”

  Joe sat on an overturned milk crate and motioned Nora over to sit beside him. Within moments, Dillinger had sprung onto Joe’s lap, and perhaps a dozen other cats had come out as well.

  “Oh, these poor kitties,” Nora said. “All alone down here. Nowhere to go. And who feeds them?”

  “Everybody feeds them,” Joe said. “Everybody thinks no one else does. These are the fattest cats in creation. Look at them!”

  Nora stood again and scooped up a gray kitten that had enormous white paws. “I wonder if the boys in the lounge would want to have a kitten around to cuddle.”

  “I’m guessing that wouldn’t be their first choice for cuddling,” Joe said.

  Smiling, Nora put the kitten down and bent to pet some of the others. She seemed to have brightened this place.

  “Nora,” Joe said. “Come here.”

  “What?”

  “Come back over here.”

  He reached out to take her hand, then pulled her down to sit next to him again. He kissed her on the lips, which were warm and soft.

  “How do you feel?” he asked her.

  “I feel terrific!” she said. “What’s that smile for?”

  He explained it to her. Sitting in the barely yellow light of this level far below the bustling world, Joe told her how he believed the energy from the converters in M42 had somehow captured and mingled with the energy of the Manha
ttanhenge sun. It was that special sunrise that had brought her here, but it was the power of the terminal that kept her.

  “So this is what keeps me going?” she asked.

  Holding her nearly electric hands, Joe said that, as far as he could tell, the terminal’s heartbeat had become her own.

  PART FOUR

  1

  700 FEET

  1942

  Eight hundred feet was just a measurement, but as the length of the radius that could keep Nora safe, it immediately became the most significant of the many significant numbers in Nora’s and Joe’s lives. More meaningful than the years 1925, ’38, ’39, or ’41. More important than Track 13 or any room number they had. Even more weighty than twenty-three, the age Nora would always be—as long as Grand Central had electric power and she stayed within 800 feet of it.

  That “as long as” might have frightened her. But climbing up from the subbasement with Joe this morning, back to the public levels of the terminal, Nora actually felt safer than she had in recent memory. An invisible sphere now existed, defining and containing her world. She was still trapped in a single place, but the simple number 800 had made the place feel less like a cage and more like a nest.

  Back in the concourse, Joe walked Nora to the servicemen’s lounge. It was just before ten o’clock, time for her shift. He squeezed her hand and said tenderly, “Don’t work too hard. And no testing that number until I’ve measured it out.”

  But she had to test it a little. On her lunch break, Nora strode down to the lower level and bought herself a Hershey bar, went back up the ramp to the exit, opened the door, and stepped outside. If 800 feet was the limit of her freedom, it was still freedom. Standing for once across the street from the terminal’s corner entrance, she watched a trio of charcoal-gray pigeons swoop onto the railing of the building’s overhang. She tried to enjoy their flapping and bobbing without envying their chance to fly. Inhaling deeply, she broke off a piece of chocolate, popped it into her mouth, and stared straight up at the splendid white winter sky.

  * * *

  —

  Like so many people all over the world in 1942, Nora and Joe were in the habit of beginning a lot of sentences with the phrase After the war. But since the morning of M42, their most exciting conversations had been starting with a different, private after: “After we get our own place.”

  Their goal would be to find a way to live a settled life: to find an apartment, however modest, that would lie within Nora’s safety zone. Joe figured that Ralston Young could marry them. They would be Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Damian Reynolds. They would have a home with a front-door key that wasn’t constantly changing. For now, every extra dime Joe made was being used to help Faye and the kids, but when Finn came back, that would change. And who knew? The war had meant that women were doing men’s work all over the country. Maybe Nora could get a paying job in the terminal to help with the rent. Even better—and Joe knew she dreamed of this—she might have the space in a place of their own to make her art and then sell it in the Vanderbilt Passage stalls or at the Christmas market. One way or another they would have a real address, and they would have their own furniture, plates, blankets, and stove.

  Before any of that could happen, though, Joe would need to make sure about the 800 feet. So in that second week of December, he borrowed a 100-foot surveyor’s tape from one of the engineers and got some yellow chalk from Bill Keogh. Joe knew where M42 was in relation to the Main Concourse. Starting at that spot, he pinned down the tape end with a piece of brick and unwound the tape from the reel. Methodically measuring in 100-foot increments, he reached the corner where Nora had disappeared. Even being as conservative as possible, Joe calculated that the limit turned out to be closer to 850 feet than 800; 850 feet from Nora’s presence to her absence; 800 feet from safety to danger. Surely they could eventually find some little place that was close enough. But for now, there was yet another after: “After the holidays.” Because the Christmas rush came first.

  * * *

  —

  “There were marines sleeping in beach chairs here last night,” Nora told Joe as he walked her to the crowded lounge one morning when they each had an early shift.

  “That doesn’t sound too comfortable.”

  “It’s not,” Nora said. “Could you do me a favor, pal? Would you mind rerouting just a few of those trains today? Send some boys somewhere else for once?”

  Joe laughed, gave her a see-you-tonight-honey kiss, and walked on toward the track entrances.

  In the lounge, putting on her apron, Nora was practically accosted by Paige, who seized her by the elbow and pulled her back to the small space behind the baggage-check shelves.

  “Okay,” Paige said. “Enough. Who’s the guy?”

  “Shh. The girls will hear you!”

  Paige lowered her voice. “Who’s the guy who’s always dropping you off looking like he wants a coat check ticket for you?”

  Nora weighed her answer quickly. If she denied there was anything going on with Joe, that would pretty much be it for her friendship with Paige. Paige knew how to spot hooey as well as anyone Nora had ever known. On the other hand, if she didn’t deny it, then in Paige’s eyes Nora would automatically become a married woman who was cheating on “Danny,” the patriotic husband she’d previously invented. Nora wasn’t crazy about the second option, but—liking Paige as much as she did—she couldn’t bear to risk the first.

  She took a breath, looked over her shoulder, and said: “His name is Joe.”

  “Joe. Joe what?”

  “Joe Reynolds.”

  “And he works here?”

  “In the signal tower.”

  “And you and he—?”

  Nora nodded, trying to look guilty.

  “How long has it been going on?” Paige asked.

  “Do you really need to know the details?” Nora asked.

  “Absolutely,” Paige said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought I was the only one.”

  Paige, it turned out, had been having an affair of her own even before her husband joined the army. George, Paige was quick to explain, had cheated on her first.

  “And your husband?” she asked. “It’s Danny, right? Is he a bastard too?”

  Nora shook her head. “No,” she said. “With Danny, I’m the bastard.”

  They laughed hard enough that the girls at the coat check looked back at them. When they stopped laughing, Paige smiled with genuine warmth. “I’m so glad we’re both so rotten,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “Are you spending Christmas with him?”

  “Can’t. He’ll be with his family,” Nora said.

  “Is he married too?”

  “No.”

  It was refreshing to say something true. “Joe’s brother is in the army, so he’s going out to Queens to be with his sister-in-law and niece and nephew. And anyway, these guys—” Nora said, and together she and Paige looked out over the armchairs, couches, and beach chairs that were filled with the men. Even if Joe hadn’t needed to go out to Queens on Christmas Eve, Nora would have felt it her duty to help take care of the men. Still, as she started to prepare the Christmas decorations, she couldn’t help thinking what it would be like after they got their own place, to hang baubles on their own Christmas tree or sit with Joe in front of their own fire. Was that after really possible?

  2

  PRESENTS IN THE

  MORNING

  1942

  The railroad office had warned that there would be a huge increase in traffic for the holidays; all the trains were sold out through the first week of January. Joe and the other levermen had been told to prepare for additional shifts. But by Christmas Eve, it seemed that civilians had heeded the requests to stay home if they could. For the most part, the trains were filled with servicemen, and the extr
a shifts were canceled.

  In the shower after his regular stint, Joe found himself singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Smiling, he remembered how Alice, thinking the words God rest were actually get dressed, had long ago asked him why the merry gentlemen were not wearing clothes.

  As he walked back from the tower, Joe felt his wet hair stiffening in the cold. Jamming his hands deep into his coat pockets, he thought about his parents and Finn, the years of Erector sets and his mother’s knitted scarves. He sighed, his breath white and puffy. This would be the family’s first Christmas without Damian. Knowing that Finn would have done the same, Joe had bought Mike and Alice the traditional Erector sets. Though he was sure the only additional gift Mike would have wanted was an enlistment card stamped 1A, he had bought him an electric phonograph that came in its own carrying case. He’d found a Shirley Temple paper-doll book for Alice.

  Somehow, though, he had forgotten Faye. They hadn’t usually exchanged presents. But now, gathering the kids’ gifts from the hotel room, he knew he couldn’t show up empty-handed. Faye would either get feisty and curse him out, or she’d get that hollow, orphaned look she got when she was too hurt to bother acting tough.

  The major department stores were always closed the day before Christmas, but the small shops in Grand Central stayed open until seven, and there was the holiday market too, with extra stalls set up in the Vanderbilt Passage. So, with the kids’ presents in a shopping bag, Joe hustled down to the lower level and combed the stalls for something neither too personal nor too impersonal for Faye. He pondered a pair of gloves and a handbag, wishing he could steal Nora away from the lounge just long enough to get her advice, but then he saw it: a Kelly-green sweater with a white collar embroidered with red berries. He wasn’t sure if the size would be right, but he knew Faye would love the bright colors.

  As the saleswoman wrapped it, he felt a presence beside him and turned to see Big Sal, looking odd without a counter and pastries in front of her.