Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  Annie gave her a shocked look.

  Beth bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Annie. My stupid mouth.”

  Annie released her shock. “No, Beth. That he definitely isn’t. I already know what he wants and he’s not going to get it.”

  Beth’s jaw dropped open. “Tell me!”

  “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  “You’d better. I take that as a promise. If you don’t show, I’ll come and hunt you down and cut off your promise pinky.”

  For a second Annie started to laugh, and then it was gone. “What time?”

  “6:30.”

  Annie pushed her notebook and pen into her backpack and then waited for Professor Grae. She closed her eyes and within seconds could see Tony’s beautiful but angry face in their final minutes together, and her angry words.

  “It isn’t fair. We get married and you leave me.”

  “You want a divorce?”

  “No! I want you. I didn’t marry the Marines.”

  “I was a Marine when you married me.”

  “You weren’t a Marine when you proposed. As a matter-a-fact, you never talked about anything like that. You were going to continue after your masters with me.”

  “Things changed.”

  “What changed?”

  He shrugged. “Life. Priorities.”

  “I’m not a priority in your life anymore?” She hissed the words at him, her rage tempered only by the awareness of people moving around them.

  He looked up at the vaulted airport ceiling. “Annie, that’s not fair.”“Fair! What’s not fair is you running off to fight a stupid war seven months after we’re married. That is so unfair it’s crazy. Yes, maybe I do want a divorce. Why should I have to be alone while you go off and play soldier?”

  Tony grabbed her and pulled her into him. She pushed his arms away like a prizefighter breaking a hold. “Just go!” She stepped back. “I . . .”

  “Ms. Caschetta.”

  Annie opened her eyes to find Professor Grae standing a few feet away.

  “Maybe this is a bad time. I’m sorry.”

  She wiped at her tears with the sleeve of her jacket and then shook her head. “That’s okay. I was just . . .”

  “Remembering?”

  She nodded and finished mopping at her cheeks. “I probably know what you want to talk to me about. Just as before, with all due respect, my answer is no.”

  Professor Grae released his briefcase to the floor and then sat in the seat that Beth had vacated. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “After seeing you like this I’m more convinced than ever that your answer should be yes. This is also different than what we talked about before.”

  “Why? So I can stay busy?”

  “In a way, yes. But it’s much more than that.”

  “It’s not going to make it better.”

  He shook his head and looked at the floor. “No. Staying busy is no guarantee.” He raised his head. “It’s not going to make how you feel any better. Your heart has been shattered and for that there is no remedy . . . except . . .”

  Annie snorted. “You mean the old universal healer, time, that which can fix anything. It’s also called the universal solvent, that which will eat and destroy everything. Sure, I’ll probably feel better in time, if I don’t self-destruct in the meanwhile. Right now I feel like crap.”

  “You’ve got it wrong. Time is not the healer, it is simply the vessel in which we exist while we take action, or not, to start the healing. The only reason why many people self-destruct after a loss like yours is that they don’t take the action, and they don’t fill that time between the crap they feel now and the happy they could feel again. Staying busy is not to make you feel better, but to fill the vessel of time until you do.”

  “Tell me this, Professor Grae. How do you feel? It’s been nine weeks for me. How long has it been for you? Five years I believe. How do you feel? What kind of action have you taken in your time vessel to deal with your loss?”

  He straightened up and thought for a few seconds. “After losing my partner of twenty-seven years? A very fair question, Ms. Caschetta. Yes, very fair. I dumped the feel-like-crap stage after three years, two years longer than the entire time you knew Tony.”

  Annie started to say something but he held up his hand. “My apologies for that statement. I’m not implying that your pain should be any less than mine because you were with him such a short time comparatively. What I am implying is that I understand your emptiness and your anger. It wasn’t long after the third anniversary of my wife’s death that I had someone come to me as I am coming to you. As with you, I declined, but my friend was persistent. If not for that I would certainly still be in the crap stage, or possibly wouldn’t even be here. Yes, it’s been five years, two months, and seventeen days. Two years ago when I made such statements as to how long it had been since Susan’s death, it echoed out of a broken shell of a man, a count up to the day that I would join her. Now when I say those words, it is different. My shell, you might say, is intact again. I am filled with hope and promise.”

  “What do you mean? Joining you on the Energy Research Council will make me feel better, fill me with hope and promise? I don’t think so, Professor.”

  “Please, Ms. Caschetta. You’re making assumptions. I’m not talking about the council. It’s something else altogether.”

  “What then?”

  “I can’t talk about it here. I just ask that you keep an open mind and come hear what we have to say. We’re meeting tomorrow night.”

  “Who is we?”

  “A few of my colleagues. It’s a research project. We believe you would be a valuable asset, and very interested.”

  “What’s in it for me? Hope and promise?”

  Professor Grae’s face broke into a huge, happy grin. “Yes.”

  Annie snorted again, and then picked up her backpack and stood. “The answer is still no.”

  Professor Grae wrapped his hand around the handle of his briefcase and rose to his feet. “Don’t think that I’m asking you because I feel sorry for you. Certainly I do feel sorry for you, but that is not the reason. At just about any other university in the country you’d be a bright shining star. Here at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you are a bright star among many. The problem with bright stars is that so many of them are only bright in their narrow field of interest. You are a bright star everywhere you turn. I want someone on the team who can, not only step out of her box, but can shine in whatever box she steps into. You have no idea how valuable you could be on our team; for us, for me . . . especially for you.”

  He handed her his academic business card. “I’ve written my address on the back. 7:00 tomorrow night. Thank you for your time, Ms. Caschetta.”

  The doorbell rang, but Annie didn’t move. She knew that her father would get it, that it was probably one of his university cronies. The grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs had gonged seven o’clock and she thought about Beth again, felt a pain of guilt and then hoped that Beth had forgotten about her. Ever since the conversation with Professor Grae she’d had no desire to party with Beth. He had left her feeling . . . weird. That was the only way she could describe it. Weird. Week after week of depression and total emptiness, and now this. Guilt! That was it. He made her feel guilty because she wasn’t striving for happiness. She was quite satisfied to wallow in her sadness, carry her cloud of gloom around with her. It wasn’t fair that he tried to break in and compare himself to her. Well, screw him! She would accept the guilt. She would add it to her list of emotions and wear it like a badge.

  And what did he mean by, especially for you?

  Annie was lying on her back staring up at the ceiling, Tony’s last letter resting on her chest. It had arrived in the mailbox on February 17th, twelve days after he was killed; like a slam in the gut when it appeared amongst bills, credit card offers and ad flyers. She remembered standing half in the street, one foot in the snow bank, staring at the envelope and feeling as t
hough she had been flipped into a twilight zone, or someone was playing a cruel joke. Somehow she had made it back up the driveway and into the house, driven by the thought that everything that had happened two weeks before—the news, the official visit by the Marine Major, the funeral, the mournful trumpeter, the folding and presentation of the flag, the consolatory comments, the anger—may have been a terrible dream, or a simple mistake.

  She never made it past the foyer, barely remembering to close the door before giving in and crumbling to the floor. It was there where, instead of ripping the envelope open, she slowly peeled the flap away and shakily slid the two page, handwritten letter from hiding.

  “My Dear Sweet Wife.”

  All her life, just like her mother, Annie didn’t need to read things more than once. She had a photographic mind that could capture entire pages with little more than a glance. But other than a passage now and then, like when Beth quoted his popcorn and wine saying, she could not remember Tony’s letter. She had read it a hundred times, word for word, but every time, seconds after putting it down, the only words that would come back to her where, “My Dear Sweet Wife,” and “I love you, Tony.”

  What was in between those two statements didn’t matter.

  She put the letter to her face and inhaled. She could smell him. Though she knew it was probably only her memory that was doing the smelling, she tried to believe it was his essence in the words in the letter.

  “Annie.”

  Annie pulled the letter from her face, grimaced at Beth standing inside her bedroom door, and looked back up at the ceiling.

  “I forgot my promise pinky shears, but next time, don’t count on it!” Beth waited a half dozen heartbeats for a response. “Or I could just go down to the kitchen and get a butcher knife.” Still nothing from her best friend. “Okay . . . that’s what I’ll do, and maybe if I run back up the stairs fast enough I’ll trip and fall on it, then roll back down the stairs and break my neck.” She then turned around and walked out of the room.

  “Damn it!” Annie rolled off the bed. Dropping the letter on her bedside table, she ran out the door only to find Beth waiting in the hall, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “What! I have to threaten to get blood on your carpet before you’ll respond to me?”

  “I’m sorry, Beth. I just . . .”

  Beth put her arms around Annie. “I know. It sucks the big one.” After a time she added, “I’m sorry,” and then for a full minute they stood, crying dry tears.

  “You know,” Beth finally said, “there was a time when I dreamed of being Mrs. Caschetta.”

  Annie pushed away. “What?”

  “Don’t worry. It was before the two of you started dating, before you and I became good friends.”

  “How come you’ve never told me this before?”

  Beth Shrugged. “I don’t know. Wasn’t important, I guess.”

  “Did you two date, or ah . . .?”

  “Or what?”

  Annie looked up at the ceiling. “You know what I mean.”

  “Maybe I do, Maybe I don’t.”

  Annie gave her a stern look.

  “We dated twice. Kissed a little. Some light petting. That was it.”

  “You kissed my husband?”

  Beth rolled her eyes. “He wasn’t your husband at the time. You didn’t even know him.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “You hadn’t dated him.”

  “So? If you dreamed of being Mrs. Caschetta, how come you only dated twice?”

  Beth’s shoulders and her eyebrows shrugged together. “Apparently he didn’t share in the dream, or he didn’t like the taste of my tongue.”

  Annie just looked at her.

  “I sure liked the taste of his.”

  Annie made a face and put up a hand. “Spare me. I don’t want to hear how you made it with my husband.”

  “I didn’t make it with him. We just did the kissy-face, and a little groping.”

  Annie stuck her fingers in her ears. “Enough! I don’t want to hear anymore.”

  Beth grinned. “Okay. I’m hungry. Let’s raid your kitchen.”

  “Fine.” Annie wasn’t hungry, but now that she was on her feet, what difference did it make?

  Beth was eye-balling the occasional rising bubble in the yet-to-boil water while Annie sat at the table turning the empty spaghetti sauce jar as though trying to read the label. “We should brown up some hamburger to put in the sauce. Do you have any hamburger?”

  “I don’t know. Just the sauce is fine.”

  “Boring.” Beth dragged out the last syllable for emphasis.

  Annie’s father entered and stopped, momentarily surprised, and pleased, to see Annie not in her room. “What’s boring?”

  “Spaghetti sauce without hamburger, Doctor Waring. Would you like to join us for spaghetti?”

  “I’d love to, but I’m already late for a meeting.”

  “It must be Wednesday night,” Annie said.

  “What’s Wednesday night?” Beth asked.

  “A bunch of silver haired profs get together and rehash the good old days.”

  Steven put on a shocked look and grabbed a handful of his hair. “Do you see any silver in this, my dear daughter?”

  Annie ignored him and in an attempt to get into the banter, but without an ounce of enthusiasm in her voice, said, “He’s almost fifty.”

  “Forty-seven is not almost fifty. That’s the respect I get, Beth?”

  After Annie’s father left, Beth found a package of frozen hamburger. She put it in the microwave to thaw and then returned to her watching-water-boil duty. Annie had abandoned the spaghetti jar and was staring at the hamburger turning in the microwave. After a full minute of silence Beth said, “Mikhail and I had a big fight.”

  Annie turned to look at her, but Beth’s face was still intent on the now bubbling water. “About what?”

  Beth picked up the package of spaghetti, found the kitchen scissors and cut it open. When she turned to face Annie tears were flowing down her cheeks. “He wants to join the Marines.”

  “NO!” The word exploded from Annie with such force that Beth jumped. Spaghetti rocketed across the kitchen, landing in a corner like a pile of broken and colorless children’s pickup sticks.

  Beth’s shock lasted only a few seconds. “That’s exactly what I said, and then we fought.”

  “No no no no no no no!” Annie shook her head, her hair flying around her face. “What about his Master’s? What about getting married?”

  “He doesn’t care about school, says it’s getting too hard anyway. I . . .” Beth looked at the half empty package of spaghetti still in her hand, and then into the pot and furrowed her brow. “He wants to go to the justice of the peace. I don’t . . .” She looked up at Annie, sniffled and nearly choked. “I . . . I don’t want to be a widow.”

  The microwave dinged as Annie took three quick steps and put her arms around her best friend.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Of course you don’t want to be like me. Well, guess what? I don’t want you to be like me either. I don’t even want to be like me, but I’m stuck with it; you’re not. You two are going to get married and you’re going to walk down the aisle in a white dress with all your friends and family watching. He is not going to abandon you, even if we have to break his legs.”

  “His legs will heal and he’ll go anyway.”

  “Then we’ll break them again. You’ll walk down the aisle pushing his wheelchair.”

  Beth laughed, but the tears didn’t slow.

  Chapter 3

  May 17, 2007 – Thursday

  “It’s the last day of classes!” Steven forced excitement into his voice hoping that Beth’s visit the night before managed to trigger his daughter back to life.

  “Hm.”

  Not her old animated self, but at least it’s a response, Steven thought. Every time he considered saying something to her about her
state of mind, about how she needed to move on with her life, he’d remember his own mental condition nearly 20 years before when Annie’s mother returned to him after a 44-year journey across time. In quieter moments he’d close his eyes and see the blinding white light, hear the screaming wail as the fabric guarding the wormhole ripped open, and he’d see the sudden appearance of the blanket covered form. And then he’d remember Abigail bringing Annie, whose crying, according to Abigail, would give Annie’s mother a reason to fight for her life. And then he’d remember the funeral and the sudden realization that all he had left of Anne was Elizabeth Anne, and being clueless how he was going to raise a daughter by himself. How was he to talk to her about moving on when after 20 years he hadn’t completely figured out how to do that for himself?

  Annie lifted her face from her cereal bowl and her thoughts, and watched her father pore a mug of coffee. “What do you know about plasma field fluctuations?”

  He lifted his eyebrows and analyzed her across the top of his mug, surprised and pleased. “Plasma field fluctuations? That’s a rather deep subject for breakfast conversation. You having a problem?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I’m turning in my paper on the photo-dissociation of molecules today. It’s a simple paper, really, a little extra credit. My conclusions seem solid, but sometimes I get this flash in my head of the plasma field fluctuation calculations. Something doesn’t seem right, like I’m missing a subtle, but hugely important anomaly.” She got up from the table, grabbed the black grease pencil clipped to a magnet on the side of the refrigerator and began writing on the refrigerator door.

  τ(s)= σ.0∫sds’N(s’)

  “That’s just the absorption of light,” Steven said. “Optical depth.”

  “Yeah, I know, Dad. I’m not finished.”

  Steven acknowledged with a nod and sipped his coffee.

  “The thing is, plasma field fluctuations have an influence on the absorption efficiency. Consider the EA Law.”