Love on the Run

by Katharine Kerr

  I went upstairs to the master bedroom that belonged to Aunt Eileen and Uncle Jim back home. Although it sat in the same relation to the stairs up, the other Nola had decorated it with flowered chintz curtains and matching bedspread in pastel blues and greens on white. The curtains had swags and the bed, ruffles around the base. The lamps on the bedside tables had frilly shades, also matched. Aunt Eileen would have been horrified at her taste. I could imagine her sneering at the “dust catchers,” as she would have called them.

  Some of the clothes in the walk-in closet were big on frills and pastels, too, though I found a few low-cut dresses in stretchy fabrics, all sequins and slink. I took an honest cotton shirt in pale gray. It was a size ten, too big. Her jeans fit me so loosely that I needed a belt to cinch in the waist. She’d had two kids and spread a little.

  And now she was dead. I felt like weeping for her, for her children, and for her bewildered husband, too. She’d been just my age, twenty-six, when she’d died, before she’d had any chance to spread her wings, to find out who she was and what her talents meant. I got out of the bedroom as fast as I could, before I began seeing her ghost in the corners.

  They’d warned me when I joined the Agency that I’d see more misery than I could cure if I took the job. I saw the truth of that in every case I worked.

  That night we ate Lucy’s chicken casserole for dinner, though I felt too nauseated from the concussion to eat much more than a nibble. For dessert, I took two painkillers of a brand that didn’t exist on my own world. Cam measured out dabs of ice cream for the kids, then put the dishes in the dishwasher. He got the kids to bed while I sat in the living room in a recliner chair with my feet up and felt the head ease a little. I tried to read a magazine, but my eyes refused to focus. I went to bed in the guest room early.

  In the morning I woke up confused and aching, but less aching and confused than before. The guest room, a cheerful yellow, had chintz curtains in greens and blues and a pale beige rug. The narrow dresser was maple, as was the double bedstead. Maple and chintz—the other Nola had consistent taste. On one wall was a big print of a painting of two small children with their arms full of flowers. It had all the style of a greeting card.

  I got up and slid the closet door open. I found more of her clothes, these all size eights, which fit somewhat better. Probably she’d kept them in the hopes she’d lose some weight and get into them again. I put on another shirt that had belonged to her, a red-and-white check with long sleeves, and a pair of her trouser jeans.

  The room had a half-bath attached. I washed my face and changed the gauze over the cut, which was deep enough to leave a scar once it healed—if it ever did, here on this deviant world. I had a dark red-and-blue bruise on my cheek, and a scrape along my chin just below it. My head must have hit the ground at an angle when I landed facedown. The bright light in the tiny room made my eyes blink and tear. I shut it off fast.

  I went downstairs and followed the long hallway to the kitchen with its round maple table and chairs. Cam was sitting at the table reading a newspaper, the Call-Bulletin. I had the dim idea that in the past of my own San Francisco a newspaper by that name had once existed. He laid the paper down. The headline read, “Second Explosion in McLaren Park.” My handiwork and Ari’s had made the papers.

  “You look better this morning,” he said. “Bruised, but better. Take it easy, though, okay? Concussions need caution.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re right about that.”

  Coffee in a glass carafe sat on the stove. I looked its way with longing.

  “Go ahead,” Cam said. “Help yourself. There’s cereal in that cupboard there and fruit in the fridge.”

  “Thanks, but I never eat breakfast.”

  “You’re welcome to the food.” He gave me a faint smile. “Honest.”

  “Thanks. When I feel better, I’ll do stuff around the house. I can’t just sponge off you. Do you work during the week?”

  “Yeah, for a textbook publisher. My teaching career came to an abrupt end.”

  So had my Cam Douglas’ career ended, when the school authorities found out about his affair with a student. No other district would hire him, either, not in California, anyway, where the year before he’d won awards for the quality of his teaching. I remembered that he’d left town and gone back east somewhere. I couldn’t remember where, which lapse struck me as sad. I’d loved him so much and then forgotten him with the casual cruelty of the young.

  Flowered mugs hung on a little rack near the stove. I got myself coffee and sat down opposite him at the table.

  “Where are the kids?” I said.

  “Little League. One of the neighbors took them. I don’t know what I would have done without the neighbors, these last couple of weeks.”

  “Well, while I’m here, I’ll help out. I’ve got a few domestic skills, though I’ll warn you, I’m a lousy cook.”

  “Better than me, I bet.”

  I smiled.

  “Nola—I mean, Rose,” he said. “Who are you? Really, I mean, not our little fairy tale for the children and neighbors.”

  I sat back and wondered if I could think clearly enough to explain, if in fact I could ever explain in a way that would allow him to believe me. He waited for a few minutes, then spoke.

  “You don’t want to tell me, do you?” he said. “The times are making me paranoid. You’re not one of the terrorists, are you? Not that you’d tell me if you were, I guess.”

  “No, I wouldn’t, but I’m not. I’ll swear that to you on any sacred name you want. Look, Cam, I’ll tell you the exact honest truth, but you won’t believe me. Just listen to it, okay? You can make fun of it when I’m done.”

  “Okay.” He made a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp for breath. “It’s a deal.”

  “Have you ever heard of parallel worlds? Alternative histories? Deviant world levels? Science fiction stuff like that? Well, it isn’t fiction. It’s true, and I come from a level that deviates from yours, but not real far. If I hadn’t lost my damned ID in that explosion—” I pointed at the newspaper article—“I’d show it to you. In my own strange way I’m a law officer. My partner and I came here on a murder case. We found what we needed, but in the scuffle that followed I got left behind. I’m hoping against hope that my partner—Ari Nathan’s his name—can find me and get me back where I belong.”

  Cam sat very still, silent, unmoving except for the occasional blink, for what seemed to be a very long time. I had a couple swallows of my coffee. He continued to say nothing.

  “I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” I said, “but it’s God’s honest truth. I realize you’d prefer to think that I’m your Nola, driven amnesiac and crazy by being on the edge of the Emporium tragedy, but I’m not.”

  He sighed, then got up and walked over to the back door, where a pile of newspapers sat on a cane back chair. He rummaged through the pile, found one copy, and brought it back. He folded it open at an inner page and pointed to a column. By squinting my aching eyes, I managed to focus enough to read. The name jumped out.

  “The bombing attempt was thwarted when Interpol agent Ari Nathan, newly arrived from the Republic of America, realized that the elevator contained explosives.”

  “Yeah, that’s him,” I said. “There are reasons why I never identified myself to the local police. Of course, you can’t know for sure that I didn’t read that article.”

  “Yeah.” He sat down again. “I had that thought.”

  “If you’re worried about me being one of the bad guys, I’ll leave. I don’t want to cause you any pain.”

  He shrugged and stared at the tabletop. “If your story’s true,” he said eventually, “it would explain how you knew my name and about my Nola and the baby and the rest of it. I know you didn’t read that in the paper.” He looked up. “You’re the right age. You look exactly like her.”

  “Except for the scars.”

  “Yeah, except for that. You had an abortion? That’s legal where you com
e from?”

  “Perfectly legal. It isn’t here?”

  “More or less. They make it hard on the girl, but she can get one. Do you—” He paused. “Sorry, none of my business.”

  “Do I regret it? Do I feel guilty? No.” I considered saying, “especially not now, seeing what happened to her,” but I refused to hurt someone who was sheltering me, saving my life, probably, one way or another. “I had the procedure when I was eleven weeks along. There was no soul in that lump of cells.”

  “I’ve never seen anything wrong when it’s that early.”

  “Besides, if I’d grown that lump into a baby, he wouldn’t be the son you know. He’s a great kid, your Donnie, mature for his age, bright, sweet, even. Mine would have been a neurotic mess, growing up without a father in a big strange family that wished he’d never been born.”

  “Without a father? Would I—would he have just run off somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll bet my mother would have driven him away, sooner or later. She’s no saint, not like your Deirdre. You see, my dad was in prison back then. Things weren’t good at home.”

  That revelation made him wince. He began to fold the newspapers into precise oblongs, creasing each fold with his thumbnail. I finished my coffee and got up to refill my cup.

  “I really shouldn’t be here,” I said. “I’m making things worse for you.”

  “Do you have anywhere else to go?”

  “No.” I turned around and leaned against the counter to watch him watching me. “ ‘Fraid not, but I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”

  Inwardly I cursed the Agency’s directive, TWIXT, our original cover story—everything I could think of to curse. I didn’t know the liaison captain’s name, much less the S.I.’s. They didn’t know mine, either, and I had no ID to show them. If I’d only been an official part of Ari’s team, I would have had an amazing little communicator like the one I’d been loaned on the last job we did. Maybe I could even have reached Spare14 back on Four. I certainly could have called the Los Angeles liaison captain, who could in turn have arranged shelter for me with the police. Now they’d never believe me, especially since they had a Nola O’Grady Douglas on their list of missing persons. Amnesia loomed large in Cam’s explanations of me, and it probably would in the minds of the police, too, once they heard my name.

  “Then you’d better stay here.” Cam was smiling, but he had an odd twist to his mouth that turned the smile painful. Scar or no scar, he wanted me to be his wife, come back from the dead. His SPP told me that in a voice loud enough to be a scream of pain.

  “Okay and thank you,” I said, “but if I can leave, really leave, I mean, and go back to my own world, I will. Cam, you’ve got to understand that. This is only temporary.”

  “Sure. Temporary’s better than never.”

  “Never what? Never seeing her again?”

  His eyes filled with tears. I grabbed my coffee mug and carried it away to the living room to leave him alone with his grief, because comforting him would make it impossible for him to let it go. As I walked down the hall with its odd jog of an angle, I remembered that Sean had always called it the “ghostwalk,” back in the Houlihan house in my own world. I paused and tried to send my mind out to his.

  Sean, please! Find me! Tell Ari, tell Dad! Sean, get me out of here!

  We all like to think about the road not taken. We remember some stupid mistake and wish we could go back in time and avoid it, do things right finally, mend the hurt we caused, restrain ourselves from producing a total mess of our life. Over that weekend, as I learned my way around the house and thus around the other Nola’s life, I realized that I was having the reverse experience. I was seeing what would have happened had I made the mistake of marrying my Cameron Douglas. Even if we’d stayed married, even if my mother’s poisonous meddling had failed to break us apart, my life would have been essentially over.

  Never. The word rang like a bell through my thoughts. This world’s Nola never used her talents. She’d never gone to college, never made friends her own age, never helped out on the suicide hotline, never discussed with deadly seriousness the issues raised in her classes. She’d never made contact with someone who could have trained her talents. She’d never known what she was.

  She’d turned into a demon housekeeper, once she’d given up running away to Nowhere in Particular. Under every sink and in every cabinet, I found stashes of cleaning products that even Aunt Eileen would have found excessive. The furniture showed years of polishing. She’d reupholstered every piece that could possibly take upholstery, sometimes with needlepoint she did herself. Cam admitted that she compulsively washed walls once a month, floors twice a week. The kids never had a pet because of “the mess.”

  It passed the time, I supposed, all that cleaning and fixing, until the morning she went down to the Emporium to pass some more time and never came home. I remembered the nightmare I’d had of being caught under fallen masonry. Had that happened to my doppelgänger? As soon as I framed the question, I knew the answer. The other Nola had lain there, pinned, helpless, screaming on the floor as the huge and engulfing fire swept toward her. No wonder they’d never found her body. I could only hope that she’d gone under from the lack of oxygen before the flames reached her.

  CHAPTER 12

  CAM’S BOSS HAD TOLD HIM to take all the family leave he needed. Now that I was in the house, and he’d decided that I wasn’t a terrorist, he returned to work on Monday. It was the best thing for him, as I told the kids.

  “But you’ll be here with us?” Donnie asked me.

  He looked so worried that I went down on one knee and put an arm around his shoulders.

  “You bet. I’ll never leave you alone.” I wondered how much of the truth I could tell him: not much. “Now, someday I’ll have to go back to L.A. But I won’t leave unless your dad is home. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He looked relieved, then sly. “Can we have ice cream?”

  “No,” I said. “Not until after dinner.”

  The way he grinned told me that he’d wanted me to say no. Following the rule indicated that some kind of normal routine had returned. As I gave him a hug, I wondered how it would have felt, to hug the Donnie who might have been my child.

  Over the next few days, that question recurred as my constant headache and I slipped without thinking into the housewife role. Cam went to work. I stayed home with the kids, because Cam had taken them out of school when the tragedy happened. The school year ended very early in June, so Donnie would only be missing a few weeks. Beth’s first grade hardly counted as school, according to Cam. He had high standards.

  We played games. We went for short walks. I tried to read to them, but my concussion refused to let my eyes focus properly. We talked about their mother and how they missed her. Often they cried, and I told them it was all right to cry, that they needed to cry. We planted some new flowers—perennial periwinkles and a rosebush—in the backyard in her memory. Donnie gathered stones and laid them in the shape of a heart around the base of the roses.

  I did what cleaning I thought necessary, mostly in the bathrooms and the kitchen, though the other Nola would have judged me slovenly, I’m sure. Lucy the neighbor took us grocery shopping whenever she went, which was often. I thanked her profusely. It was hard on her, knowing that her Nola was dead while this look-alike cousin was alive in her friend’s house. The other neighbors introduced themselves and believed me when I told them my story about Rose and L.A. I made sure to mention that I had a boyfriend and a job and thus couldn’t stay forever.

  “Cam needs to hire a housekeeper,” Mrs. Sanchez told me one day. She lived across the street and knew the family well. “Once you’ve got to go home, that is.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll work on him to do that.”

  I tried, but he refused to take the idea seriously. “Later, when the kids are ready to meet a stranger,” was the only answer I could get out of him. I realized that he’d stopped thinkin
g of me as a stranger, even though he’d only known me for a handful of days.

  The kids, of course, believed me to be their aunt with the easy trust of kids who know their family loves them, not that their mother had been the cuddly, indulgent type. At lunch one day, Beth spilled the end of a glass of milk, maybe a quarter cup at the most. As the puddle spread on the protective glass over the tabletop, Beth grabbed her napkin and slapped it into the puddle. Donnie gasped and jumped up. He ran for the counter and seized a roll of paper towels. The milk beat him to the edge of the table. As it dripped onto the floor, Beth began to cry.

  “Hey,” I said, “it’s all right! It’s just a little milk.”

  “It’s mess,” Beth said. “I’m sorry. I’m real sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” I put my arms around her and scooped her off her chair. “It’s all right. Life is full of mess.”

  I hugged Beth while Donnie pulled a towel from the roll and stooped down to mop up the dribble. When I set her down, she’d stopped crying.

  “Mama hated mess,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess she must have.” I took a tissue out of my pocket and wiped her face. “Well, it’s not a crime to spill a little milk.”

  Beth smiled. I noticed that Donnie had done a great job of mopping up. He’d had a lot of practice, I figured. I made sure to praise him for it.

  In the evenings I threw together some kind of dinner, which Cam and the kids ate without complaining, even though the other Nola had been a great cook, or so I judged by the amount of cookbooks and fancy equipment in the kitchen. Cam supervised their baths and got them into pajamas while I cleaned up. He read them stories at bedtime. I liked watching him with the kids because he so visibly loved them.

  When he read aloud, he kept them involved in the story, pointing out things in the illustrations to Beth’s picture books, asking Donnie questions about what they’d read in the chapter books, listening to their opinions without interrupting or correcting. Mr. Douglas had made American history come alive for his high school classes in similar ways. This Cam had the same ready grin, the same sharp wit—until he turned out the light in the kids’ rooms and walked out in the hall to face his grief.