If Only in My Dreams

by Wendy Markham

  Yes, she ran away. She ran because she was frightened. Scared out of her mind.

  And who wouldn’t be? She stepped off the train into 1941, for God’s sake. That’s enough of a shock to freak out anyone.

  But the shock of it wasn’t the only reason she bolted.

  It was because I was afraid for my life.

  I was stuck in the past with no treatment for my disease, and staying there would have meant dying.

  I was worried I’d never get back.…

  But you did.

  Yes. She did. All she had to do was get on the train, and she was somehow able to travel right back through that inexplicable portal to the present.

  Her conversation with Mr. Kershaw echoes in her mind:

  The Wright brothers came along and figured out how to harness energy.…

  So you’re saying that, scientifically, time travel isn’t impossible.…

  Theoretically, it isn’t impossible. Scientifically, it may not be possible yet.

  All we need to do is harness energy.

  She said it… and he didn’t argue. It was all about physics and energy.

  Okay, not all. He did dispute that.

  Yet maybe it isn’t all that complicated. Not when you add to the equation some energy, some power greater than she—than anyone—can possibly comprehend.

  It happened. To her.

  Meaning it’s potentially there. The energy.

  She knows it exists—that it provided the final component needed to propel her to the past… and then back again.

  And now that you know that you can come home…

  What’s stopping you from going back?

  Jed has just dispatched the last of the lunchtime rush customers when he spots a familiar blue Packard pulling into a diagonal parking space beyond the plate-glass storefront.

  Arnold Wilkens climbs out and heads across the sidewalk toward the five-and-dime, wearing a heavy overcoat and a cap with fur earflaps.

  Maisie isn’t with him, to Jed’s relief. He isn’t in the mood for her. His temper has been short as it is today, ever since he arrived back from the city to open the store forty-five minutes late and found Alice waiting out front.

  She had the nerve to complain about the cold and his absence.

  In response, Jed fired her on the spot without the slightest qualm.

  Watching her storm off down the street, he expected to feel a hint of remorse, but he felt only relief.

  Even now, hours later, his only regret is that he’s had to man the store single-handedly once again. He’s been inundated with Christmas shoppers, which is a good thing, businesswise. But today, Jed would much prefer to be left alone to figure out what he’s going to do about Clara. Instead, he’s spent the day forcing small talk and smiles, filling requests and ringing up purchases.

  Then again, he knows what to do about Clara.

  He just doesn’t know when he can possibly bring himself to do it.

  He can’t help but feel a perhaps ill-advised urge to hold out just a little longer before going to the police.

  Perhaps ill-advised?

  What is going on with you, Jed?

  Arnold voices precisely the same question the moment he enters the store.

  “What do you mean?” Jed asks, striding toward the soda fountain.

  Arnold is right on his heels. “Maisie said you showed up at our door in the middle of the night all wild-eyed and crazy. She said you wanted our car.”

  “I wanted to borrow your car… and it wasn’t the middle of the night. It was ten o’clock, and I figured you’d be up and she’d be in bed.”

  “She never sleeps,” Arnold informs him gloomily. “She just walks the house, hour after hour, like some kind of…”

  “Hideous spook?” Jed supplies, recalling Maisie’s appearance when she answered the door.

  Arnold blinks agreeably behind his thick lenses. “I was going to say night watchman, but… yes, hideous spook will suffice. And it’s impossible for me to get any sleep—she keeps poking me to tell me that she’s uncomfortable, or that she thinks this is it, she’s in labor… and she never is.”

  “Well, sooner or later she will be,” Jed promises, as though he knows the slightest thing about such matters. “Any day now, the baby will be here, and things will be back to normal, and you’ll be able to get plenty of sleep.”

  “I guess you’re right. As I always say…”

  Chiming in with Arnold, Jed choruses, “Sometimes the longest way round is the nearest way home.”

  Then he pops the caps off two bottles of Coca-Cola and hands one to Arnold.

  “Thanks.” Arnold gulps some Coke and suppresses a burp.

  “Is Maisie still sure the baby’s going to be a girl?”

  “So sure she told me I can name it if it happens to be a boy.”

  Jed nods knowingly. “She’s sure, all right.”

  “So… why did you need to borrow my car last night?”

  “Because the DeSoto has a flat, and I had an errand to run in the city.”

  “What kind of errand?”

  “You know. Just… business.” Jed takes a deep swig of his own Coke, wishing he had never gone to the Wilkenses’ house last night.

  “What kind of business?”

  “Cripes, Arnold, who are you, Dick Tracy?”

  Dick Tracy…

  He finds himself thinking again of the little Japanese boy at Clara’s supposed address. Isamu.

  “Come on, Jed,” Arnold says wearily, “give a fella a break. My whole life is columns of numbers and a wife who looks like she stepped out of…”

  “A horror film?”

  “I was going to say a magazine ad for maternity clothing, but horror film will suffice. Cigarette?” he asks, taking a pack from his pocket and offering it to Jed.

  “No, thanks.”

  He watches Arnold light up, then tuck the pack and matches away again.

  Around the cigarette clutched between his teeth, Arnold says, “Come on, humor me, won’t you, Jed?”

  “I really don’t want a cigarette, Arnold.” He’s never been much of a smoker. Not cigarettes, anyway.

  He prefers a pipe. He has a couple of nice ones that used to belong to his father. Whenever he lights one, the pungent sweetness of the tobacco seems to carry him back to happier times.

  “I didn’t mean humor me by having a cigarette.” Arnold exhales a stream of smoke from his nostrils. “I mean tell me about your mysterious mission. Did it have anything to do with that city gal you were chasing down Main Street the other day?”

  Here we go again, Jed thinks. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Maisie told me—and she heard it from Betty Godfrey the first time, but it’s all over town now. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Jed admits, and sets his half-empty bottle on the counter. “Say, Arnold, can I show you something?”

  As the Lexington Avenue Express pulls into Grand Central Station on its southbound journey toward Greenwich Village, Clara has every intention of staying on the subway.

  Fourteenth Street—her home station—is the very next stop. The train isn’t all that crowded; she even managed to get a seat.

  Why, then, as the doors rattle open, does she find herself standing? Striding purposefully toward the exit?

  What is she doing stepping out onto the platform with all the hell-bent bravado of feisty little Brittany back at the rink?

  Yeah, and look what happened to her.

  She got hurt…

  But then she gave it another shot, Clara remembers. She dried her tears and she set out on the ice again, knowing she might take another nasty spill. She allowed her mother to coax her out because she so obviously wanted to glide across the rink with the wind in her face, and she realized that it was possible.

  It’s almost as though Clara’s legs have taken on a life of their own, propelling her to the top of the stairs, then on up the ramp marked TO METRO-NORTH TRAINS.

  She comes a
cross a monitor listing northbound trains on the Harlem line and stops to check it. Just because…

  Well, she doesn’t really know why.

  She just knows that she has to.

  Wow. What a coincidence.

  The next departure for Glenhaven Park is in less than five minutes from a distant track on the upper level.

  If it weren’t leaving for, say, another hour, she wouldn’t hang around Grand Central waiting. She would talk herself out of this ridiculous impulse—at least for today.

  Or, if it was leaving in the next sixty seconds, she’d realize she couldn’t possibly make it, and, again, forget the whole thing. At least for today.

  But it’s leaving in five minutes, and… well, why not today?

  Five minutes.

  The upper level.

  It’s now or never.

  She’ll have to run if she wants to make it.…

  I do, she realizes all at once. I want to make it.

  I have to make it.

  Her legs are already back in action, her whole body oddly tingling again as she hurtles herself up the stairs, across the main terminal toward the track… and Glenhaven Park.…

  And, with any luck at all…

  Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…

  Nineteen forty-one and Jed Landry.

  Jed has second thoughts about showing Arnold Clara’s belongings as he leads the way to the back storage room, but it’s too late now.

  His friend’s curiosity has been whetted. And anyway, it will be prudent to get a second opinion… won’t it?

  Maybe. Or it might be better to just keep this whole thing to yourself.

  Without voicing his suspicions about Clara, he shows Arnold the handbag and its contents, the suitcase and its contents. Not trusting Doris not to snoop, he brought it to the store.

  Arnold does a lot of low whistling and saying, “Jeepers creepers!”

  He is, of course, particularly interested in the tiny transmitter. At least, in what Jed assumes is a transmitter. Because…

  Well, what else can it possibly be?

  He watches his friend turn it over and over in one hand, inspecting it, as he puffs away on the cigarette he holds in the other.

  “What do you think?” Jed asks at last, and holds his breath for the reply.

  “Golly, Jed… I think she’s a Nazi spy, that’s what I think. And her code name is Agent Jezibel.”

  “I just don’t buy it,” Jed hears himself saying. “She can’t be a Nazi.”

  “Well”—Arnold gestures at the photo card—“she sure doesn’t look like a Jap.”

  “No, but—” Jed breaks off, not wanting to go there.

  “But what?”

  Jed is reluctant to tell him about the Japanese mother and son who live at Clara’s supposed address.

  Yet, the more he thinks about it, the more he wonders if they were covering for her, all of them working for the Japanese government.

  “Jed?” Arnold prods.

  “You’re right. She might be a spy.”

  “Might be? If she isn’t, then what is this?” Arnold waves the silver device at him. Then, lowering his voice to a whisper, he adds, “For all we know, the Nazis could be listening to us right this second.”

  “Why would they want to listen to us?”

  “Maybe they think we know government secrets.”

  Jed shakes his head. “I doubt that, Arnold.”

  Still…

  What if that thing is some kind of transmitter and…

  And Clara herself is listening?

  He never thought of that.

  “You’ve got to take this stuff right to the police,” Arnold is saying in a stage whisper as he stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray Jed hands him. “Or—wait. The FBI. That’s who you should go to. They handle Nazi spies.”

  “You’re right. I’ll do that,” he promises distractedly, wishing Arnold would leave.

  He has an idea.

  An outlandish idea, to be sure.

  But now that it’s stuck in his head…

  Beyond the rain-spattered window of the Metro-North railroad car, the urban landscapes of Harlem and the Bronx have long since given way to the low skyline and bare treetops of suburbia.

  “Station stop… Bedford Hills,” proclaims a disembodied electronic voice as the doors glide open.

  Just a few more minutes to go. Clara shifts nervously in her double seat, relieved that the chatty female passenger who was sitting beside her got off the train in Chappaqua a few stops earlier. Clara wanted only to stare out the window and prepare herself for whatever may—or may not—happen.

  She might arrive in Glenhaven Park to see a condo complex, an A&P supermarket… and, in the center of the green, the bronze statue commemorating the eleven local sons killed on D-Day.

  Or she might find woods where the condos should be, a Victorian mansion on the supermarket site, a tremendous maple tree growing in the statue’s future spot…

  And Landry’s Five-and-Dime across the way…

  And Jed, alive and well, in 1941.

  One thing is certain: She’s in for an emotional upheaval in either case.

  Too restless to sit, she stands and moves to the wide aisle between the two sets of exit doors on either side of the car.

  Please let it happen, she pleads silently, clinging to a metal pole.

  Returning to the storage room after Arnold has gone, Jed picks up the transmitter again.

  For a dubious moment, he just looks at it.

  Then he lifts it to his lips.

  “Clara… Clara, can you hear me?” he asks, feeling slightly foolish, yet at the same time slightly exhilarated by the mere notion that she might be out there somewhere… listening.

  “Clara, hello—Clara?”

  “Station stop… Katonah.”

  Nearing the end of the line, only a smattering of seats are filled. No one is paying the least bit of attention to Clara, other than the flirtatious young conductor.

  “Getting off at this stop?” he asks as the doors open.

  “The next one.”

  “Tired of sitting, huh?”

  She nods distractedly.

  She can’t sit down. Nor can she face forward.

  Everything has to be just as it was the first time it happened.

  Though of course, certain key elements are missing.

  This is a sleek, modern commuter train as opposed to the vintage car in which Clara was riding that day.

  And she herself is still wearing jeans, sneakers, and a down jacket: distinctly twenty-first-century clothing.

  But maybe none of that is relevant.

  Maybe, if she keeps trying to put herself in a 1940s’ frame of mind, just as she was doing on Friday morning, the contemporary trappings won’t matter.

  This time, however, she isn’t concentrating on becoming the fictional Violet.

  This time, she’s just Clara… willing herself back to 1941, and Jed Landry.

  Please, take me back.

  Beyond the window, she notices, the familiar low stone wall has materialized, running alongside the track bed.

  Please take me back.

  They’re passing the wooden signpost now.

  WELCOME TO GLENHAVEN PARK.

  Please take me back…

  “If you can hear me… you have to come back. I need to talk to you. Please, Clara. Please come back.”

  Jed pauses, listening, half expecting a reply.

  Not a sound—the room is hushed.

  He closes his eyes, willing the impossible.

  “Please come back, Clara. If you can hear me… please come back.”

  Please take me back.…

  The track is starting to curve; the train slows ever so slightly.

  Please take me back.

  Clara closes her eyes to block out the rows of blue-vinyl upholstered seats, the glare of the overhead lights, the wide, modern windows.

  Please take me back.

  She focuses every
bit of her concentration on 1941.

  Please take me back.

  Her body is beginning to tingle as if from an electric current.

  Please take me back.

  And… there seems to be a far-off humming in her ears.

  Please take me back.…

  “Please come back, Clara.…”

  She can’t hear you. This is crazy.

  Yet he can’t seem to make himself stop.

  “Please come back.…”

  Jed pauses to listen.

  Do you honestly think she’s going to answer you?

  No, he honestly doesn’t.

  So there is no surprise when he can hear only the beating of his own heart… then, at a great distance, the far-off whistle of a train making its approach to the depot.

  No other sound. Not even a crackle of interference from the transmitter—if that’s what it is.

  Put it away and get back to work now.

  You know you’re not going to hear her voice.

  “Please come back, Clara,” he persists ludicrously, ears trained on the stillness, until he realizes that it is gradually broken by a distant rumbling.

  “Please come back, Clara.…”

  The train. He looks at his watch. It comes through every day at this time. Nothing unusual about the train…

  Unless…

  Unless Clara is on it.

  CHAPTER 12

  Station stop… Glenhaven Park. Glenhaven Park. Please watch your step as you leave,” the conductor calls.

  Clara’s eyes snap open.

  Conductor?

  Yes. The station announcement was just made by a living human, as opposed to a robotic recording.

  Through a haze of cigarette smoke—cigarette smoke! she marvels with the wonder of George Bailey discovering Zuzu’s petals—she spots a uniformed conductor coming down the aisle.

  “Glenhaven Park! Next stop!”

  He isn’t the same conductor who just asked her if she was getting off the train.

  No, and Clara sees that on either side of the aisle, the seats are occupied by women in sleek hats and red lipstick and shoulder pads, men in baggy suits and fedoras, or military uniforms.…

  Literally in the blink of an eye, the seats have become mohair and the lighting fixtures are bare bulbs and the people are smoking and…