“Yessum, Sister Edith,” Joe said. He wished McCoy a happy anniversary and left the room.
Keeler picked up the remains of the cake, along with the knife she’d used to cut it, and then passed them over to Deke. “And would you put this back in the carton and back in the icebox for me?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Deke said, and he too exited.
McCoy waited for Keeler to turn back toward him before speaking. “Thank you,” he said, grateful for the swift end of the unexpected gathering. “I really am very tired,” he explained. “But thank you for the cake. It was a nice surprise.”
Keeler angled her head to one side and seemed to evaluate McCoy in some way with which he did not feel comfortable. “Was it, Doctor?” she asked.
“Yes, it was,” McCoy said, a bit taken aback by the question. Much as he despised the reality that he’d been stranded in Earth’s past for an entire year, that did not detract from the kindness inherent in Keeler’s gesture, nor from his appreciation of it. “It was very sweet of you,” he concluded.
Her head still aslant, Keeler nodded her acknowledgment of his compliment, but then quickly moved past it. “I think our little celebration might have been a surprise for you, but I’m not convinced you found it a nice one.” Before he could protest, she clarified her statement: “It seems clear to me that you’re not happy here.”
McCoy felt stung, not by her frankness, but by the truth of her words. While he didn’t want to confirm her assessment, though, neither did he want to insult her intelligence by contradicting her all-too-accurate observation. “I…I don’t know what to tell you,” he admitted.
Keeler glanced over her shoulder at the open door to the hall, then reached out and pushed it closed. Folding her arms across her chest, she paced into the far corner of the room before going on. “Tell me why you’re still here,” she said.
“I’m…I’m waiting for my friends,” McCoy said, feeling foolish for reiterating the claim he’d already made so many times over the past months. He thought that, like a sound repeated over and over again until it had lost all meaning, his words surely must ring hollow to Keeler by now. But rather than debate his assertion, she accepted it. Instead, she questioned the outcome he sought.
“I mentioned this possibility to you once before,” she said, “and you really need to think about it: perhaps your friends aren’t coming.” Again, Keeler’s observations, perceptive despite being uninformed, wounded McCoy. He had many times wondered not only when he would be rescued, but if he would be. Always, though, he had settled confidently on the expectation that he would return home. He could not imagine Jim and Spock relenting in their search for him.
Unless they believe I’m dead, McCoy suddenly thought, and then even more darkly, Or unless they’re dead. The idea, however irrational, saddened him.
When McCoy didn’t respond to Keeler, or maybe because he didn’t respond, she continued in a softer tone. “I don’t mean to be negative, Doctor,” she said, “but you’ve been here for a full year. I’ve taken you at your word that you’re not on the run or hiding out, that you’ve had a loss of your memory, and that you truly expect your friends to come find you and bring you home.” She took a few steps toward him, which had the effect of emphasizing what she said next. “I believe all of that because I believe in you. You’ve worked hard, you’ve caused no trouble, and you’ve lent your time and effort to this place.” Keeler unfolded her arms and spread her hands, clearly indicating that she spoke of his contributions to the mission. “But you’re unhappy here.”
“But not ungrateful,” McCoy said. “I genuinely value all that you’ve done for me.”
“I know that,” Keeler said, “but please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not offended that you’re not happy. Why would you be? This place is for men down on their luck, men who need some assistance, men often incapable of helping themselves.” She folded her arms and moved forward again, until she looked up at him from barely half a meter away. “I don’t think you fit into any of those categories, Doctor McCoy.”
“I did at one time,” he said.
“On the day that you first showed up here, and over the days that followed, yes,” she said. “You needed help then. But not anymore. At least, not the type of help that I or the mission can give you.”
“Just what sort of help do you think I need?”
Keeler didn’t reply right away, instead peering into his eyes as though searching for an answer there. Time seemed to elongate in the near-silence, and McCoy became acutely aware of the faint ticking of the clock on the desk. Finally, Keeler dropped her hands to her sides and paced away from him, retreating once more to the far side of the room. When she turned back to look at him again, she exuded an air of thoughtful concentration. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I do know that whatever help you need, you won’t find it here.”
“No,” McCoy said. “I guess not.” He remained unconvinced that Jim and Spock wouldn’t eventually find him here, but how long could he realistically expect to live here in Keeler’s backroom office? He’d initially decided to stay at the mission because of its proximity to the location of his arrival here in the past, but over time, he’d also come to view this small, out-of-the-way room as a sanctuary of sorts, a place where he could sequester himself away as much as possible and in that way better avoid altering history.
He’d also realized, though, that Keeler likely would not have allowed him to remain indefinitely at the mission had he not found work and fed himself. And so he’d done that, but had still attempted to limit his interactions with people, including with Keeler herself. He’d willfully made no friends during the past year, although he had out of necessity developed genial relationships with Keeler and a number of the men who helped out at the mission. Of course, how could he possibly know what small action might ripple down through the centuries and change the timeline? Maybe Jim and Spock hadn’t come back for him yet because, despite his efforts to the contrary, he’d done something that had made it more difficult for them to find him.
Or maybe I’ve already irrevocably modified the past and they can’t come back for me, he thought.
Gazing around the room, McCoy said, “I suppose it’s time for me to move out of here.”
“I’m not asking you to leave,” Keeler said.
“No, I know that,” McCoy said. “But you’ve been more than generous with me. I should find a place of my own and let you have your office back.”
“I can’t argue that it would be nice to have my privacy again,” she said, though rarely had Keeler needed to use the office during the scant time McCoy spent there. On most days, and for most of the daylight hours, he worked at whatever jobs he could find around the city. Since he’d arrived in the past, the economic crisis plaguing the nation and the world had deepened, but New York City appeared less affected than most other places he read about in the newspapers. Sizable capital projects, both public and private, had continued to arise throughout the metropolis. He currently worked in midtown on a project of considerable scope, in which a dozen or more buildings would ultimately be built around large open space. And not long after he’d arrived in 1930, he’d labored for a few weeks on the nascent Empire State Building, which would open in a couple of months as the tallest manmade structure in the world.
Some things never change, McCoy thought wryly, picturing the vast Erickson Transporter Complex stretching along the coast of Manhattan just above the mouth of the Hudson River. Even in the twenty-third century, New Yorkers thought big.
“If you’re interested,” Keeler said, “there are vacant rooms available where I live for two dollars and two bits per week.”
McCoy considered saying no, thinking that maybe he should search for a place on his own, find a different apartment building where there would be no possibility of interacting with Keeler. Does it really matter? he wondered. He would still see her at the mission, where he intended to continue volunteering his assistance. He could stop doing
that too, but…no. It had been difficult enough during the past year not practicing medicine, other than to administer first aid to the men who occasionally arrived at the mission with minor injuries. McCoy needed to contribute; as a medical man, he had that inclination, and it hadn’t disappeared just because he hadn’t been able to work as a doctor. He knew that he could find another establishment to which he could donate his time and services, but he would still face the issue of mixing with people. No, better to limit his intermingling with the people of the past to as few individuals as possible, rather than to concern himself with how well those he’d already met knew him.
“All right,” he told Keeler. “I’ll go by your building tomorrow evening after work.”
“That’s very good,” Keeler said, evidently pleased. “I’ll let the landlord know to expect you.” She started for the door.
“Good night, Miss Keeler,” he said.
As she swung open the door, she stopped and looked over at him again. “Edith,” she said.
“Pardon me?”
“My name is Edith,” she said. “We’ve already known each other for a year, and if we’re now to be neighbors as well, I think you should call me Edith.”
McCoy smiled, warmed by her suggestion. He thought a great deal of Edith Keeler, not only for the work she did and for her charitable nature, but also for the person he’d observed her to be. He respected her, and he also liked her. “Leonard,” he said now, reciprocating.
Keeler—Edith, he corrected himself—smiled back at him. “Well, then,” she said, “good night, Leonard.”
“Good night, Edith,” he said.
After she’d gone, McCoy finished changing into his nightclothes, turned out the light, and then crawled beneath the blankets on his cot. As sleep—and the often troubled dreams that came with it—loomed in the darkness, he realized that, strangely enough, he actually felt good about leaving the mission and living in an apartment of his own. He resisted thinking of it as a new start of some kind, still clinging to the belief that he would return to his life in the twenty-third century.
Still, he couldn’t help recalling Keeler’s words to him tonight: perhaps your friends aren’t coming. To this point, although he had thought about it, he had been unable to truly countenance such a prospect. Now, he had no choice but to take into account that he had been trapped in the past for a whole year.
A year in my life, he thought, but not necessarily a year in Jim and Spock’s lives. Though it bedeviled him to contemplate the realities and possibilities of time travel, it seemed plausible that he could have one day journeyed from 2267 to 1930, and then one week later in 2267, Jim and Spock could arrive in 1931 to bring him back home. Yet, it also felt unlikely, more like rationalization than reasoning, like a lie he told himself to keep from going mad. For even as he waited to return home, even as he peppered newspapers around the globe with signposts pointing to his location in time and space, even as he held on tightly to his certainty of his eventual rescue, the notion of being trapped here for the rest of his days haunted him.
It took more than an hour for McCoy to fall asleep. When at last he did, he slept fitfully, beset by the same foggy, partially glimpsed images that so often had invaded his slumber ever since his arrival here. Tonight, other faces joined his nightmares, faces he had no trouble distinguishing. All of them belonged to his daughter: as a baby, as a girl, as a young woman.
In the morning, exhausted and on edge, McCoy began his second year living in Earth’s past.
II
Clouds of Nameless Trouble
O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
‘What is it makes me beat so low?’
Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!
Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken’d eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.’
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
In Memoriam A.H.H., IV
Thirteen
1931/1932
Edith gazed around the sodden expanse, looking for Leonard, the vapor of her breath floating before her like an estival ghost in the crisp winter air. Pieces of wood and glass and other wreckage lay strewn about the great, muddy tract, the urban flotsam the only remnants she could see of the ramshackle brownstones that until recently had stood here. Over the past months, she knew, Leonard had helped pull down those buildings, the demolition bit by bit driving away the seedy squatters and delinquents that had once overrun these grounds. In their place, Leonard and the other workmen had left behind a blighted landscape, a long block of pockmarked earth scarred by destruction and softened by wet weather. In recent days, the temperature had dipped, but not low enough to freeze the saturated soil. Littered with debris, the large patch of empty ground sat separated from the surrounding neighborhood not only by the plank fence enclosing the space, but seemingly by the advent of civilization visible all around and yet absent from this bleak lot. The grand, gothic structure of St. Patrick’s Cathedral looked down from across Fifth Avenue as though mocking the vacant land.
Edith felt a cold lick of wind at her throat, and she reached up to refasten the topmost button of her heavy winter coat. The small, brown paper bag she carried flopped against her as she did so. This morning, before going off to work, Leonard had helped with the early meal at the mission, as he often did. Today, like most days, he’d prepared a small lunch for himself, but after he’d gone, she’d found it still sitting in the icebox. As the noon hour had approached, she’d decided to make the trek uptown to bring his midday meal to him.
Now, she stood at a lorry entrance to the work site and peered around the large, open space, searching for Leonard. To her right, numerous vehicles—including a large diesel-powered shovel—sat parked along the inside of the fence. Several other flatbed lorries had been scattered throughout the area, and as she watched, workmen loaded them with the rubble they’d collected, obviously preparing the spread of land for construction. She’d read in the paper that two new low-rise edifices—the British Empire Building and La Maison Française—would be built here on either side of a public plaza.
After a few minutes, Edith spotted Leonard a good distance away, recognizing his long, gray winter coat and weather-beaten black fedora. She watched him briefly, confirming his identity by his familiar movements. Carefully, she began toward him, making her way along the fence in order to avoid intruding upon the workmen. As she trudged through the mud, she congratulated herself on her foresight in donning an old pair of men’s shoes she’d pulled out of the boxes of clothing she kept at the mission.
When Edith had gotten as close to Leonard as she could without moving away from the fence, she called his name, then did so a second time. He looked up from where he crouched, an armload of broken wood and building materials clutched across his chest. A couple of other men looked up as well, and one standing near Leonard reached over and gave his shoulder a quick push. Edith recognized the action as the teasing of one man to another about a woman.
She smiled to herself, pleased at the show of camaraderie. Nearly two years since his arrival at the mission, Leonard remained something of an enigma to her, continuing to reveal little about himself, past or present. But however much or however little she truly knew Leonard, she nevertheless considered him a friend. For that reason, she felt grateful to see his apparent acceptance by at least one of the men with whom he worked on this massive construction project.
Leonard nodded his head at Edith, letting her know that he saw her. Then he turned and made his way over the moist, uneven ground to the lorry nearest him, upon which he deposited the debris he’d gathered. Once unencumbered, he tramped through the mud u
ntil he reached her.
“What brings you here?” he asked.
She held out the small paper sack she carried. “Your lunch,” she said, and then, lifting one muck-covered foot, she added, “and one very old pair of shoes.”
Leonard smiled and took the bag from her. “Thanks,” he said. “I realized when I was halfway here this morning that I’d forgotten it, but I didn’t have time to go back to the mission.”
“It’s my pleasure, Leonard,” she said. She looked past him, out over the wide sprawl of sludge. “You’ve done a lot of work here,” she said. “This place looks a lot different than the last time I was up this way.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said, peering around. “I’m sure whatever they build here now will be an improvement.”
“I should hope so,” Edith said. “I read in the paper that—”
To Edith’s left, she heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle, the sound bitingly loud in the raw air. Both she and Leonard glanced over at the entrance to the site, through which she’d passed just a few minutes ago. She expected to see a work vehicle of some sort, perhaps an unladen lorry returning from discharging its load of scrap. Instead, to her surprise, she saw one of the long flatbeds, not empty, but carrying a large balsam fir. She had little doubt of the use to which the triangular, twenty-foot-long evergreen would be put.
“A Christmas tree,” she said, delighted at the idea of somebody bringing holiday cheer to this dreary place. Despite her own agnosticism, Edith enjoyed this time of year, as it often seemed to bring out the best in people.
As she and Leonard watched the lorry stop near the fence that ran along East Fiftieth Street, many of the workmen started toward it. Edith heard several voices rise excitedly even before the vehicle’s engine sputtered to a halt. The driver and another man emerged from the cab of the lorry, and Leonard identified the latter as the assistant foreman. The man, tall and thin, with a dark mustache, stood on the passenger-side running board and called to the workers advancing toward him. “We might be poor and hungry,” he yelled, his words carrying through the late-morning chill, “we might be cold and overworked, but we can still celebrate Christmas.”
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