Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  This, I decided, was something I didn’t need to know.

  “But I’ve actually been flying for a couple of years. You know, before I got my pilot’s license.”

  Well, that was a relief. I twisted around to see how Robert was taking the news, but he hadn’t heard a word of our exchange. His face was averted, eyes glued to the window, watching the earth drop away beneath us. I studied him for a minute, noting his tensed shoulders and chalky, sea-sick coloring. I wondered if he regretted our impulsive plane ride, defining moment or not.

  Suddenly he turned, eyes brilliant against the pallor of his face, and offered me a smile of unutterable joy.

  Chapter 30

  That night I dreamed of flight. I soared among the clouds and when I looked down I saw the earth rolling beneath me toward the dawn, a luminous globe in blue and green, inviting me home. I could fly across the skies. Or I could walk upon cool green earth and swim the warm blue seas. I could do anything. I was a creature of many spheres.

  I awoke sometime in the early morning hours bathed in the cool, eerie light of a full moon. Robert breathed quietly beside me, his arm thrown across my hip. Gently, I disentangled myself and slipped out of bed. I stood for a moment, watching as he slept, the moonlight from the west window playing silently across his face and chest. Then I swept up the sheet that lay puddled on the floor and wrapped it around me. I glided out the door and into the darkness of the hall.

  I know this house like the beat of my own heart. I know which floor boards creak, where the hall table stands out from the wall to catch your thigh and leave a bruise. I know how many steps there are to the landing, how many more to the living room. I can slip between the club chairs, dodge the arm of the sofa, anticipate the turn into kitchen, and I know where the small table lamp sits on the kitchen counter. I switched on the soft, low light, picked up the phone and took it with me to the living room sofa. And then I dialed Cameron’s number. Our number. The one on Prince Edward Street.

  The phone rang three times. “Yes?” His voice was thick. Clearly he had been asleep.

  “Cameron?”

  “Jesus! Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Not a clue.” I could hear him fumbling with the clock on the bedside table, and suddenly, with alarming clarity, I recalled how he always kept it turned away from him because the light from the luminous dial was so bright.

  “It’s three-fucking-o’clock. This had better be good.”

  Now, if someone had called me at three A.M., even if it were Cameron, the first words out of my mouth would not have been a comment on the time. “Are you okay?” I would have asked. “Has something happened? Are the children safe?” But instead, Cameron fumed at the other end of the line.

  “I wanted to talk.”

  “Now? You want to talk now?”

  “Are you busy?” (Do you have company?)

  “Yes, I’m busy. I’m busy sleeping. Can’t this wait?”

  “It already has.”

  “I don’t have a clue what you mean. I’m not sure I even care.”

  “I cut you off the other night when you called. I got your back up. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You called to tell me this?”

  “Actually, I called for two reasons.”

  There was a pause. Finally Cameron caved. “Two reasons. And the first would be?”

  I turned my head. For a moment I gazed at the shadows that spread across the deck, the amorphous shapes that in daylight were tables and chairs and market umbrellas. And then I took a breath.

  “I was wondering, really, where it all went wrong.”

  I heard him shift, heard the sound of skin against linen, and I knew he was sitting up in bed, swinging his feet to the floor. I envisioned him sitting there for a second, phone cradled against his shoulder, one hand running though his hair.

  “Have you thought about it at all?” I asked.

  “Shit.”

  “Because it wasn’t always like this.”

  “I don’t want to get into this right now.”

  “Remember that weekend we spent at the Tidewater Inn?” I pushed on, ignoring him. “Sammy was conceived there. Remember how we knew, right afterward, that there would be a baby? We just looked at each other and we knew. You were smiling, Cameron.”

  I heard the sound of movement and I knew he was making his way to the kitchen. “If you look in the wine rack, on the bottom right,” I offered, “you’ll see a bottle of a very nice chardonnay—”

  “Stashing away the good stuff, are you, Kathy?” he said, but I could hear a subtle lift in his voice. There was the sound of a drawer opening, the one by the sink that always squeaked. “I can’t find the corkscrew.”

  “It’s in the back. All the way back. It kept stabbing me.”

  The drawer closed. I heard the chink of a glass, the sound of the phone being put down and a minute later picked up again. A sigh. An exhalation. I knew he had collapsed into the club chair in the living room, had taken his first sip of wine.

  “I remember the night we conceived Sammy,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  “It began to fall apart right after he was born.”

  “Kathy, I was trying to build a career.” He sounded aggrieved. “The hours are long. You knew that. You knew they would be. And you were preoccupied with the baby. It’s always a difficult time, you know, when you first have children. You have to adjust, and that takes time.”

  “And by the time Blythe was born,” I went on, “There was more than distance between us.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “What was it, Cameron?”

  “It, Kathy? There was no ‘it’. Nothing came between us. We were just doing our jobs. Mine is medicine, making an income. Yours is the children, being a wife, running the house. I’ve never understood why you consider that to be some sort of rocket science. It’s not that difficult, Kathy. Hell, it was the way my parents lived, the way your grandparents lived, the way a lot of couples live right now, today. It may be old fashioned, but there is nothing wrong with that.”

  He was trying to muddy the issue. The style of our marriage was not the point. I had always known he wanted a traditional marriage and, after an untraditional lifetime with Lila, I wanted that, too. I was not naive. I really did want to stay home with the children when they were small, and I felt I was damned lucky to have that opportunity. I actually looked forward to greeting my husband at the door each night like some sixties housewife with a glass of white wine in one hand and a plate of hors d’oeuvres in the other. I was a whiz at play dates and menu planning, landscaping and decorating (I am not Lila’s daughter for nothing), and I can throw a mean dinner party. But you know, I didn’t want to do it just because a switch was thrown. I didn’t want to perform on command or when it was merely convenient for someone. I wanted to tend my marriage the same way I tended anything I loved. I wanted to build my marriage and my family and my life with love and respect and joy. And with a partner who could share that with me.

  “You’re right, of course,” I said agreeably. “There’s nothing wrong with an old-fashion marriage if two people are working at it in the same way.”

  “That’s right. And you weren’t. You got a job.”

  He was talking about my job with Julie. “Part time, flexible hours, for a friend, with Sammy in a playpen beside me.”

  “You wanted to go back to teaching.”

  “After both kids were in school.”

  “You were absorbed by the children. It was all you ever talked about.”

  “You were never there. They were. Of course they were what I talked about.”

  “You let yourself go, Kathy. You got too thin and I never saw you in anything but jeans and a tee-shirt, for god’s sake.”

  That was probably true. “So what?”

  “How you look is important, Kathy. No matter what you think, stuff like that matters — and besides, what does it say to me when you don’t give a damn how you look? It
tells me you don’t care about me, that’s what it says. Worse, it tells everybody else the same thing.”

  “Are you really that shallow?”

  “And that’s another thing. You’re a real wise ass.”

  I waited a beat, then said, “Everything has changed, Cameron. If it didn’t when the children came along then it did the day I saw you having lunch with—”

  “Old territory, Kathy. You saw nothing. We’ve been over this and over this.”

  We both pondered that for a while, the empty line humming between us. After a long moment he cleared his throat.

  “You take a lot of things for granted, you know. You’ve never had to scramble.” This was a rare, veiled reference to being down and out in West Virginia. “You sometimes seem to think life will just fall into your lap. I don’t think you ever understood how hard you have to work to ensure that it does.”

  “Maybe you’re right about that,” I told him honestly. “When I first met you, Cameron, you simply dazzled me. Maybe it was that focused quality you have. You spot a goal and go after it. And it got you a long way.”

  “Damned straight it did. And then I saw you—” I could hear the smile in his voice — “and I went after you. You never stood a chance.”

  We both laughed at that, friends for a moment. It made me think of the weeks and months when I first knew him, before he got so brittle around the edges. Back when we could tease each other. Be honest with each other.

  “Will you be home in time for the dinner party?” he asked finally.

  “You mean the hospital deal next weekend?”

  “Yes. For the chief.”

  “No, I don’t think so. That is, I might be back in Fredericksburg, but I can’t go with you.”

  “Kathy,” he said softly, wearily, “we can work this out.”

  “No, we can’t, Cameron. I’m trying to tell you that.”

  “Then what the hell is the point of this call?”

  “I told you one point. The other concerns Blythe and Sammy. ”

  “The short version, Kathy.” His voice flattened with impatience.

  “The thing is, no matter what, we will always be their parents,” I told him. “We can’t change that. I wouldn’t even if I could.”

  “And you called me at three o’clock in the goddamn morning just to tell me this.”

  “Yes, I did. Because we need to be something we haven’t been for a long while, Cameron. We need to be friends. Partners, anyway. For the children.”

  I think he was about to answer when I heard a voice murmur faintly from the other end of the line.

  “Oh for god’s sake,” he exploded suddenly. I wasn’t sure if he was responding to me or The Voice. Then he added, this time clearly to me: “I’ve got nothing else to say right now.” And the phone went dead.

  I sat for a minute, mulling over what I thought I heard just before Cameron hung up. It was muffled and distant, as if the speaker were several feet from the phone, but I was pretty sure I understood what she had said.

  Cammy? Are you coming back to bed?

  *****

  I stood at the deck railing, wrapped in my sheet, watching the play of moonlight on the water. The moon was setting behind me in the west but its pale light still crested on the light chop of the close in swells and gleamed on the roll of the deeper seas. A breeze born of tide and moon ruffled against my skin.

  I heard him come up behind me. He lifted my hair gently and kissed the back of my neck, the curve of my shoulder. Pleasure blossomed warmly from my throat to the instep of my foot. I felt my toes curl, felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth. I leaned my back against his chest, fitting my spine to his breastbone. His arms went about me, his hands cupped my breasts. He buried his face in my hair, his breath catching in my ear, his lips brushing the corner of my jaw.

  “Robert,” I whispered.

  I turned to face him. And dropped the sheet.

  Chapter 31

  On Tuesday morning someone followed close behind me again, and this time it worried me.

  It happened when were escaping the classroom on the pretext of getting groceries, which we failed to do the day before. Usually, we solved the problem of groceries by going to a lot of restaurants, but this time we were making a serious stab at the grocery issue. I headed south on N.C. 12 toward Hatteras while beside me Robert composed a list. He had already written down butter, eggs and bread.

  “Milk,” I suggested.

  Milk, he wrote.

  “Diet Cokes,” I suggested next.

  Diet Cokes, he wrote, and then looked up. “We need tea. And sugar. Some cream as well.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Perhaps some of those delightful little biscuits with the bits of chocolate.”

  It took me awhile to interpret this. “You mean chocolate chip cookies?”

  “Yes, those.” He bent over his list.

  It was at this point that I glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed the car.

  “Something’s not quite right,” I said.

  Robert peered thoughtfully at the list. “Have we left something out, do you think?”

  “It’s not the list,” I said. “It’s the car behind us. I think it’s been there for a while, a car or two back. But then I speeded up and now it’s right on top of us.”

  Robert turned in his seat and saw the car. “In a bit of a hurry, I suppose.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it’s happened before. It just didn’t seem important then.”

  This time when Robert looked at the car behind us, he discreetly used the side view mirror. “Tell me about the other times,” he said quietly, and I did. When I finished he rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully.

  “Sunday night coming home from the Sanderling and yesterday on our way to the Memorial,” he mused. “But you didn’t notice the color of the car on Sunday night.”

  “No. But yesterday’s car was white like this. Plus, it looked like this one. I can’t really tell makes of cars, especially when they’re behind me like this, but the drivers look similar, only today’s he’s wearing a different hat.”

  Robert glanced in the side view mirror again. “I’ve never seen a hat like that.”

  “It’s a cowboy hat.”

  “Oh, yes. ‘Out West’ and so on. Well, Kitty, I suppose the question is, why would anyone follow us?”

  I slid him a sideways glance.

  “Don’t be silly,” he chided, reading my thoughts. “No one knows about me. And why would they follow me if they did?”

  “It’s the government,” I said, half kidding, knowing how paranoid I must sound. But why wouldn’t I be paranoid? I was sitting in a car with a man who tumbled across time, had actually slipped from one century to another, which was enough to spook anyone. Or, suppose the two of us were delusional. Wouldn’t paranoia go right along with that? Isn’t paranoia a symptom of madness?

  “It’s someone from the CIA or something,” I went on, opting for paranoia regardless of its source. “They’ll pounce on you at the first opportunity and—”

  “If they wanted to pounce they’ve had ample opportunity to pounce. And if this were some sort of agent from your government, we’d never even know he was there. No, Kitty, if this man is really following us, then he’s an amateur.”

  “He’s really following us, Robert.”

  “All right. I trust your instincts. But he’s still an amateur.”

  “An amateur,” I repeated, a new and even uglier thought occurring to me.

  But Robert was already there. “No, Kathleen.”

  “It could be. It’s not impossible.”

  “It’s not him,” he said, meaning his ephemeral traveling companion. “It’s far more likely to be the government agents you’re worried about, than a man who, let me point out, may not even exist, and if he does, cannot have had the time or resources to acquire a car and learn how to operate it.”

  I thought about that. “And there’s something else.
I hadn’t connected it before but … we’ve been having hang-ups.”

  “What are hang-ups?”

  I told him. “It could be nothing,” I went on. “Wrong number or something. But I think we need to…”

  “Take it into consideration,” Robert finished for me. “Yes, I agree. Is that car still behind us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s follow him for a change.”

  “How?”

  “At the first likely spot you see, pull over without giving away your intent. None of those clever little turning signals blinking like beacons, and make your move swiftly. If he doesn’t anticipate your maneuver he can’t duplicate it — he couldn’t, in any event, without tipping his hand. And then, as soon as he’s passed—”

  “Pull out behind him!”

  “What a quick study you are. Look, up here—”

  But I had already seen it: a wide turn off that emptied into a gas station. I snapped the wheel hard to the right, making a perfect doughnut in front of the gas pumps. Then I spun back onto road, tucking in neatly behind the little white car — which was, I saw (now that I was only inches away), an old Toyota sedan with a Virginia license plate. (Didn’t the CIA have its headquarters in Virginia? Wasn’t the Pentagon on the Virginia side of the Potomac? And what about the Office of Homeland Security?)

  I saw that we had alarmed the driver with our sudden little maneuver. His head shot up, catching us in the rear view mirror, and his foot bore down on the gas pedal. I matched his speed and for several moments we went zipping down the road practically bumper to bumper like a pair of mating dragonflies until we caught up with the traffic in front of us and were forced to slow down.

  N.C. 12 is a two-lane road, so the only way to pass a slower car is to go around it, which is exactly what the white Toyota did. And it’s exactly I what tried to do, except that a wall of on-coming traffic discouraged me.

  “Damn, Kathleen! He’s outrunning us!” Robert cried. “Cut him off, cut him off!”

  “I can’t, Robert—” Suddenly a heavy, blue Lincoln Towncar right in front of me came to a full stop. We could have flattened ourselves like pancakes on his rear bumper and he would never have felt it. I slammed on my brakes and came to a screeching, headwhipping halt just inches away.