The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘No?’ I feel a shiver rush down my spine. A man who vanished the night Mum left Brooklyn, that could be him. That could be the man. ‘Who?’

  ‘Thomas Delaney.’ Her smile is fond. ‘Now there was a man; I would say he kept the hearts of at least half of Third Avenue’s ladies in his pocket. He must have had secrets, though, because he just walked away from everything he had here on the night of the blackout, not a word, not a note, nothing. There were rumours he might have tried to challenge the wrong people, you know? Tried to stand up to “powers that be”. And some people thought he’d been caught getting a little too close to someone else’s wife … There’ll be a photo of him on my walls somewhere, more than one most likely, I always used to get a picture of the church summer social, every year, best night of the year …’

  I follow her as she goes into the hallway, peering at the procession of photos, gradually taking one stair and then another.

  ‘Bingo!’ she shouts when she is halfway. ‘There he is. Thomas Delaney. This was … yes, seventy-seven. Look at him, he was such a fine-looking man. And this was the night of the blackout; this must be the last photo taken of him, round here anyway.’

  Holding my breath, I make myself look at the photo. There is Mrs Finkle flanked by two smiling men, head and shoulders shorter than both of them. I stare at one man, lightbrown, wavy hair, dark-maroon suit and tie. I feel nothing.

  ‘I must admit,’ I say, ‘he doesn’t look like the neighbourhood heartthrob.’

  ‘Oh, well, that because that’s Robbie O Connor,’ says Mrs Finkle. ‘No, that’s Thomas Delaney on my left. Father Thomas Delaney, the priest that broke a thousand hearts the day he took the vow.’

  My heart stops as I peer closer and look into those smiling blue eyes and I’m drenched in cold.

  It’s him, I just know that it is. The pillar of the community. A priest. Older, respected. Disappeared on 13 July 1977. It has to be him. The man who raped my mother. My father.

  9 JULY

  ‘Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.’

  —Marcel Proust

  CHAPTER TWENTY

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  When I wake up, I know what I should do. I should make arrangements to see a neurologist, I should get examined, have a CT scan. But if I do, and there is something there, something physical, then all this is over. I could go and get a scan, and that would provide me with one kind of proof. But I don’t want that kind of proof. I have plenty of circumstantial evidence; the necklace, the friction burn on my neck, the names of the people I met in 1977 that Mrs Finkle knew. What I need, though, what I want, is the definitive proof that I am travelling through time. And today I am going to find it.

  Young Mr Gillespie told me it was exactly the same day of the month, exactly the same time of day when I found him. And it was exactly the same date, exactly the same time when I first stumbled into Riss’s home, like taking a sideways step that spans thirty years. And both times it happened, it happened close to the building; maybe that’s the key. Perhaps the building is a kind of portal, a door through to another thread of time; maybe all days happen, side by side, moment by moment, stretching out from the beginning of time. Time is just a river, one of my professors told me once, flowing everywhere, everything happening all at once. You only see it as linear because humans are linear; you’re born, you live and you die, in a straight and ordered line. And anyway, it doesn’t matter how it happens, there will be time to understand that later. For now, it only matters that it happens, and that I can prove it.

  Somewhere, through the finest of veils, Riss is waiting for me to go back, and if I can find a way to her, I can protect her, I can save my mother from the horror she couldn’t live with any longer. I can give her back her life the way it was meant to be, create a whole set of new memories, just like the ones I have for the necklace, new memories that are getting stronger every day, the old one fading away, harder to hold on to, more and more like a dream I might have had, and will soon forget.

  The question is whether or not to tell my sister.

  Pea says we should go out for a walk.

  ‘That’s what I do when I feel like I am losing it, and I want a drink or a hit, or whatever. I walk, it doesn’t matter where or when, I just keep moving until the worst of it is over.’

  ‘I don’t want to walk,’ I tell her. ‘This isn’t the same thing, I need to talk to Dad, I need to tell him about all of this … figure out what to do next, formulate a plan.’

  ‘That is the last thing you need to do!’ Pea had actually shouted, picking my bag up and throwing it at me as she’d headed for the door. ‘Dad can’t hear this over the phone! It would kill him. No, we don’t tell him anything, not yet. Not until we’ve talked about it properly, worked it through …’

  ‘Pea, I don’t need a support group,’ I say, bending to pick up my scattered loose change before following her down the stairs. ‘And I don’t need a walk, I’ve got things I want to do …’

  She stops me in Mrs Finkle’s hallway. ‘You’re in denial.’ The house was full of cool shadows and quiet, and I guess that Mrs Finkle must have gone out before the heat of the day set in. ‘Trust me, I know what it’s like, I’m more familiar with this shit than you are. And I want to go there too – the nice safe, booze-sodden place where you don’t have to think about anything – I really do. But you can’t, we can’t. I know how to get you through this, and the best way is to walk and talk it out. Talk about how it makes you feel, and things that happened in our past that make sense, and what it means for the future and—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to go for a walk,’ I try to tell her. ‘I need some time on my own. I need to figure this thing out.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Luna, are you made of ice?’ Pea snaps, bringing up me up short and sharp. ‘Why aren’t you tearing your hair out, crying and wailing, going to the bar and ordering a line-up of shots? So much heart-breaking stuff has happened that I think you have to let your heart break. This isn’t something you can fix, Luna. It isn’t some equation you can solve. This is something you have to learn to live with, and you have to start doing that now!’

  ‘You keeping forgetting one very important thing,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m not you.’

  It hurts her, and for the briefest fraction of time I mean it to. I want her, I need her, to back off and leave me alone. But as I watch her storm off, her head down, her chin set against showing any emotion, I regret it at once.

  ‘Pea!’ I catch up with her by a bakery. The sign over the doorway read ‘Sam’s’. ‘I didn’t mean I’m handling it better than you, I just mean that what works for you doesn’t work for me. I need to understand it in my own way. And … well, I think there is more to understand than you know, yet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks me, crossing her arms. ‘You know you talk to me like I’m an idiot, but I’ve got A levels. I’ve got half a degree; I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were; in fact, you are probably going to think I am when I tell you what I mean.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Pea says, looking into the bakery. ‘You can buy me a doughnut to make up for being a bitch.’

  We stand in line in the bakery, not talking, Pea tapping her foot and checking her watch every three minutes as if we have somewhere to be, and me trying to find the best way to phrase the revelation that I believe that I can somehow travel through time to save our mother. There doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing it.

  ‘Yeah?’ an older heavy-set man behind the counter asks me, without looking at me.

  ‘Two doughnuts, please,’ I say.

  ‘Four, four doughnuts,’ Pea says, over my shoulder. ‘Jam.’

  ‘Jam?’ He looks up at me, and I catch my breath. He’s older, much heavier, his skin is ruddy and his face is set in an expression of frustration, but I recognise the eyes;
they are a little faded, more seagrass than bottle-green, but they sparkle, and when he smiles I feel a little tug in the pit of my stomach. It’s him, it’s Michael.

  He stares at me for the longest moment, and I feel myself leaning, just a little, towards him.

  ‘Jelly, she means, jelly,’ I say, feeling a blush creep across my nose; this time it’s me who lowers my gaze. Why is this overweight guy in his fifties making my heart beat faster? Do I talk to him about Mum? Do I ask him about Delaney? They should be the first questions that come to my mind, but they aren’t. The first thing I think is, does he remember me?

  ‘You remind me of someone,’ he says when I look back up. ‘A girl I met once, long time ago.’ He smiles faintly and I see a glimpse of the boy I ran down the dark streets of Bay Ridge with, just yesterday and thirty years ago.

  ‘Do I?’ I ask him. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Met her once, never saw her again,’ he says. ‘Never forgot her though; something about her got to me. Always had a thing for British accents and Converse shoes ever since.’

  Time freezes for a moment as we look at each other, and I know, I know that he has seen me before, and I have seen him, in his glory days. And I know that if I can find a way to master it, then I can make time mine.

  ‘Lady, are you leaving or setting up home there?’ a voice asks me from behind, and I pick up the doughnuts and go.

  ‘So what was that about?’ Pea asks me as soon as we are outside in the glaring sun again. ‘I haven’t seen you look at a man that way since … I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look at a man that way, especially not one that looked a bit like Homer Simpson.’

  ‘I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking at the doughnuts,’ I say, looking back through the window where Michael’s head is down again.

  ‘Fine, now we are going to go for a walk,’ Pea says. ‘And whether you like it or not I am going to talk this thing out with you.’

  And she talks; she talks and talks, and I hear most of it, listen to some of it even, but all the while I’m thinking of ways I can get back there. Get back to Riss, warn her, save her, change everything just for her. And as Pea talks, about coping strategies, and grief counselling and mindfulness, I do not allow myself to consider for one moment more that perhaps all of this, everything I see as evidence to support my theory, is really just another symptom of a disintegrating brain. I can’t, you see. Because if I do, then everything Pea says is true. Everything I fear is true. If this is some reality-altering disease eating away at the architecture of my mind, then I stand to lose everything that I love, my work, my life as I know it. And everything that happened to Mum, every horrific thing she told us in her films is true, and, more than that, it has to stay true. It has to stay true in every moment of time for all of time. It will always be her life, and mine.

  And I can’t allow that to happen.

  I won’t let that be real.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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  ‘I’m going out for a bit,’ I say, picking up the camera. After we’d got back from Pea’s walk, I’d fixed the strap as best I could and it felt good, having the familiar weight hanging around my neck again. A little bit like having Dad’s hand on my shoulder. It hadn’t escaped me that, although Pea had called him, I hadn’t spoken to Dad since we left. I didn’t know how to talk to him without telling him everything that had happened, and it wasn’t the right time for that, not yet. Pea was right: this wasn’t something we could talk about for the first time over the phone.

  ‘Wait, I’ll come.’ Pea makes a half-hearted effort to get up from the sofa, and I silently thank the universe for those strappy sandals that she chose to wear all day; they have rubbed her heels raw.

  ‘I just need a bit of space,’ I say tentatively. ‘A bit of time. Alone.’

  She doesn’t know I already have the keys to Mum’s building in my back pocket.

  ‘Right, OK.’ She makes a visible effort not to mind. ‘So … ?’

  ‘We’ll have dinner when I get back. We can check out that little Italian place up the road, it looked really good.’

  ‘And … should we watch another one of Mum’s films?’

  ‘I think we have to,’ I say. ‘The more we watch, the more we really know about her.’

  ‘Luna.’ Pea twists on the sofa bed, reaching for my hand. ‘If there was any chance you might be about to go to that massive bridge up the road and throw yourself off it, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Only vehicles allowed on the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge,’ I tell her. ‘And no, there is no chance of that. I promise you.’

  ‘Good, because I can’t do life without you, OK. Forget all that bullshit I said about being there for you earlier; I need you to be there for me, at all times, on a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week basis.’

  ‘As long as I am alive,’ I tell her, ‘I’ll be at your beck and call.’

  ‘A tad dramatic, but hey, I’ll take it.’ Pea releases my fingers and goes back to her sketchbook, filling it with drawings of the snapshots she has taken in her head all day long.

  I watch her for a moment more, before I close the apartment door behind me.

  And I go out to throw a brick into time’s river, and see how much the ripples might change the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

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  I stand across the street from the building that used to be Lupo’s Tailoring and Alterations and stare at it. It watches me back, dark and covered by its own system of shadows, even in the early evening sun. People on their way home from work, kids with balls tucked under their arms on the way to the park, an old man drinking beer for a bottle, all pass it by. They don’t even give it a second glance. They’ve gotten so used to the place, as it crumbles and decays behind the boards and the barbwire, that they’ve ceased to see it. But it still sees them. It still sees me.

  Half of me is hoping to feel that quiver that sends tremors through my body, to feel the earth tip and slide away from me, and everything else that has happened to me before, but currently Bay Ridge stands solid and sedate around me, determinedly real.

  It takes me a few moments to fumble with the keys on the fence gate, and another as I stand outside the exposed green door, its paint blistered and flaking. Deep terror drenches me as I look up at the mass of the building. It’s not her I’m afraid of, not Riss; it’s her I long to see. And it’s not even how every time I find myself in 1977 it feels as if it leaves something like a little scar somewhere on my body … tears a significant chunk of me away. It’s that other day that happened here, that darkest hour that occurs four days from now, and thirty years ago. The hour, the event, that turned this home into this dark and crumbling ruin. All moments of time may run simultaneously side-by-side, but that moment feels like a fixed point to me, a dark star or a black hole, sucking everything that dares to come near into it, crushing everything it encounters. I can feel it, the same moment, repeating again and again, and each time it does, the dark mould creeps a little higher up the wall, the shadows get a little deeper, the cracks a little wider.

  Without realising, I’ve retreated. I find myself backed up against the board fence, my heels jammed hard against it, the rough surface biting through my T-shirt. I don’t want to go back in there as it is now; I’m afraid to. It’s that happy place – that place full of family and laughter, music and Elvis calendars, before the pernicious darkness got in – that I want to go back to. Somehow I need to find a way to make the shift happen.

  Staring at the door doesn’t work.

  Simply being here clearly isn’t enough. There has to be a way to cast a line out through time, to hook on to that other summer and reel it back onto this one.

  Thoughtlessly, I begin to hum to myself. Tuneless at first, but gradually it begins to take form. ‘Love Train’, t
hat’s it, it’s one of Mum’s favourite songs, one of the few that could be guaranteed to get her off her seat or from behind her camera and dancing, usually with Pea and me trailing in her wake. Closing my eyes, I listen very hard to a moment, a memory, long ago, that wasn’t even mine, and yet if I am very still and very quiet I can hear it. I tap my foot, thinking of her in those special, bright moments when something she loved would take her out of herself, almost literally. Of how Pea and I would orbit around her, basking in the heat of her joy. As I sing, as I see her, a band strikes up, more voices join in, a great weight seems to descend on me, pushing its way down through the top of my head, and it feels like I am certain to crumble away under the pressure. Staggering forwards, I feel my body thrown hard back towards the fence that will surely break my fall, but the fence is not there.

  Landing hard in the road, a car swerves, the sound of its horn screeching as it narrowly avoids me. Scrambling onto the sidewalk, I stand, waiting for a moment for the world to steady around me. I can taste blood.

  ‘That was close, you OK?’ It’s the curly-haired girl I met at Riss’s party. Michelle, young and fresh faced. This is then. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know what happened. Tripped, I guess,’ I say. The sound of The O’Jays drifts down the alleyway and I turn my head towards it.

  ‘Come on.’ Michelle links her arm through mine. ‘Mr Lupo is out, and we’re gonna turn the radio up loud and have some fun while we can, just us girls.’

  ‘If you’re sure I’m not intruding.’ I don’t know why I say that; what would I do now if she suddenly decided I was imposing and changed her mind?

  ‘Nah, come on. Riss was hoping we’d see you again.’

  Nerves contract my stomach muscles; it feels like the first day of school. Will she still like me?

  There’s a little cheer as Michelle enters through the green door, propped open with a brick to let a little sunlight and fresh air in.