Time After Time

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "Good night, Elizabeth," he said as she stood inside with her hand on the doorknob. He turned to go, then suddenly turned back and gave her a fleeting, almost furtive kiss. "Good night."

  After that, Liz showered, then went to bed, utterly exhausted and unable to think, unable, almost, to feel. She was dropping off to sleep when a forgotten sensation slid like a snake through the clutter of her thoughts: she remembered that when she and Jack were saying good night, she'd had the distinct and entirely creepy sense that there was someone in the shadows, watching them.

  Chapter 18

  Liz rose at dawn. She was restless, almost punchy, from the events of the day before. There was much to plan, much to think about. And she wanted to do it on Cliff Walk, with the sound of the ocean in her ears and the taste of salt on her lips.

  Cliff Walk — a thin asphalt path between the mansions and the ocean, scarred and battered by countless storms and hurricanes — was so much a part of her life that Liz scarcely thought about it, any more than she thought about the air in her lungs or the blood in her veins.

  Liz was a Newporter, and Cliff Walk belonged to Newporters — all Newporters. Centuries of trekking along the rocky cliffs had made the path theirs, never mind what the deeds to the mansions said. (Every once in a while over the last century or so, some mansion owner would try a little funny business by extending his fence across the path, sparking a hue and cry second only to the Boston Tea Party. The rich got away with a lot in Newport, but not with highway robbery.)

  Liz walked along the path almost alone, every one of her senses alive to the profound beauty of the place. A robin pierced the air with its absurdly upbeat call of cheer-up-cheerily, while the sea — older, wiser, sadder — answered with a slow, mournful sigh as it ebbed and flowed over the rocky shore below. To the north of her, half a dozen sea gulls wheeled and darted in a midair brawl over a half-eaten fish.

  Through a break in the brush growing along a stretch of chain-link fence, Liz was startled to see a fox standing bold and alert in the middle of a mansion's lawn.

  Lucky you, she thought. A hundred years ago they would've hunted you down here for fun.

  The fox became aware of her. With a flick of his red bushy tail, he trotted off.

  How did he pick up my scent over the rugosa? she wondered. The smell of the bright pink blossoms was intense, driving out even the briny tang of the sea.

  She walked on, leaving the fox, the roses, the sea gulls behind, wishing she wasn't walking alone.

  Did Jack ever stroll on Cliff Walk? Probably not. Why would he, when he could be invited to any one of the estates and gaze at the sea from a higher vantage? No, Cliff Walk was strictly for the hoi polloi like her.

  She came to the legendary Forty Steps, restored after a generation of neglect, and stopped to peer over the low stone wall at the forty granite slabs that led to the rocky shore below. In the old days, she knew, the spot was a popular rendezvous for the lower-tier servants of the nearby mansions. Vanderbilt maids and Astor footmen once dallied and danced to concertinas here in their rare free time.

  Ophelia Ryan had no doubt dallied and danced here, too. Why hadn't she married some nice young footman, or maybe a valet? What was the point of setting her sights on Christopher Eastman? Liz thought about her own kindred stupidity and smiled wryly. History repeats itself Jack had said. And by golly if he wasn't right.

  Her heart was so full. Her emotions seemed to be equal parts of pain and happiness; they weighed so heavily on her that there was no room for the strange unease she'd felt, the night before, of being watched and in danger. On a bright new morning she found it impossible to feel anything like fear.

  She only had room for love. She missed Susy terribly; she longed for Jack even more. And Christopher Eastman? Ghost or fantasy, he'd become as much a part of her life as Susy and now Jack. What did he want? What did he need? If only she knew, she could take care of it and set his soul free.

  "If you don't tell me, Christopher," she said, staring at the swirling sea below, "how can I help you?"

  She sighed, and shook her head, and straightened up to go. When she turned, there he was, leaning against the sea wall not ten feet away from her. This time she was hardly surprised.

  He was nattily dressed in a blue, almost black flannel blazer; the straw boater banded in crimson and gold on his head was tipped at a jaunty angle. His arms were folded across his chest in a manner she knew well; his foot was braced against the granite wall. It was a casual pose, elegantly struck. He looked exactly like what he was: the well-born son of American aristocrats.

  She stared at him, wishing desperately that he could speak — willing him, with all her soul, to say something.

  "Good morning," he said pleasantly. "Do you come here often?"

  Liz gasped and jumped back, struck dumb by his fluency. She waited, wide-eyed, for the apparition to speak again; but he seemed to be expecting her to respond to his opener.

  After a fearful hesitation, she decided to answer him.

  "Gee, I knew that w-was an old line," she stammered, "b-but I didn't think it was that old."

  "I beg your pardon?" he said, not getting it at all.

  "Wh-what you said about coming here often: it sounded like a come-on."

  "Come on? Are we going somewhere?"

  "No, no — never mind," she croaked. She glanced up and then down the path — no one around, thank God — then turned back to the apparition and cleared her throat, still searching for her normal voice. "I'm ... I'm having trouble seeing your face," she said, squinting at him more closely now.

  "It could be the hat," he said. He took it off and flung it like a Frisbee into the air over the ocean below; she followed its path, then lost it in the sun.

  "Is this better?" he asked, turning back to face her. She shook her head. "You've always been clearer than this."

  "Conversing with you takes a great deal of energy."

  "I like to think I'm easy to talk to!" she said with offended whimsy.

  He seemed to smile. "I mean to say, I have a limited amount of energy with which to manifest myself. I can appear to you, or I can speak to you. If I do both at once, the quality of each suffers."

  In fact, his voice was faint.

  "Tell ... please ... why haven't you spoken to me before now?" she begged to know.

  Christopher Eastman seemed amused by the question. She couldn't really tell, because he was becoming hazier, which she blamed at least partly on the sun shining behind him — or through him.

  "There are rules of conduct," he said. "We do not speak unless we're asked to."

  "We? There are more of you?"

  "Oh, yes."

  Oh, great. "Will I be seeing them, too?"

  "I cannot imagine why. Your concern is with me."

  As she thought. "It was the lacquered box, wasn't it? You got out when I opened it in the locksmith's shop."

  "If you prefer to believe that, by all means do," he said. "But the truth is hardly as picturesque."

  "Tell me the truth, then," she begged in a whisper.

  "The truth, my dear lady, is that you are in danger of committing the same fatal mistake in your affair of the heart as I did."

  "You mean, of falling in love with someone I have nothing in common with — with whom I have nothing in common with?" she said in confusion.

  His laugh sounded sad and empty. "No, I mean the opposite. I mean this: You love Jack Eastman, and you hope that he loves you; yet you are unwilling to believe that a match between you can thrive."

  "Aren't you putting the cart before the horse?" she asked, her natural skepticism reasserting itself. "Your great-great-grandson seems in no hurry to marry."

  "He will be," Christopher Eastman said. "Jack is of an age when a man begins to recognize a void in his life. He longs for something more, something deeper. Ah, well. You will have to accept the declaration on faith. You're a woman, after all; you cannot be expected to understand."

  "I see," Liz said, he
r feminine hackles rising up. "It's one of those guy-things, is it?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Never mind. Anyway, even supposing he does love me and may someday be willing to marry me — even supposing all that, which I do not — the match could hardly thrive. I don't know how much you know about modern marriage, but one out of two of them ends in divorce."

  "Ah. I was not aware of that."

  "You should have done your homework, then," she said with some asperity. "Before you went scaring people out of their wits."

  "I have done what you call my home-work," he shot back. "I know that barriers between men and women that were insurmountable a hundred years ago no longer exist. Anyone, I see, can marry anyone these days."

  "Yeah, well, maybe that's why one in two ends in divorce," Liz cracked.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw an early morning jogger approaching them on the path. In a panic she turned her back on the ghost, reasoning that if she couldn't see Christopher Eastman, maybe the jogger wouldn't notice him either.

  As it turned out, the jogger didn't see either one of them; he just shot on by, totally focused on his pain.

  "Should you not set the police on that fellow?" asked Christopher, alarmed.

  "Good lord, why?" asked Liz. "For exercising?"

  "Exercising what?"

  "His muscles. What else?"

  "He puts himself in a lather for no practical purpose? He is not delivering an urgent message, or flying to his mother's deathbed? He's doing that for ... for? He was at a loss for words.

  "For tone," said Liz. "Never mind. How — what — oh God — where do I start?" Frustrated, she buried her face in her hands, trying to center her thoughts, then looked up.

  Still there. But for how long?

  "Why didn't you marry Ophelia?" It was the question that burned the hottest in her mind.

  Christopher bowed his head in an eloquent expression of regret. For a long time he said nothing. When he looked up, Liz was surprised to see that he had become more real, as if she'd finally gotten him tuned in, somehow. His face, so clear, so handsome, was the picture of pain.

  "I wanted to marry Ophelia," he said. "I loved no other woman, ever, besides her. But two things happened — one of them trivial, the other significant."

  Liz said softly, "Someone took the pin. And your brother was killed."

  "Yes. Of course you know all that. My plan to announce our betrothal — thwarted the first time by that meddlesome, disagreeable St. Onge woman — became postponed again in the grief and chaos that resulted from my brother's sudden death."

  "'Postponed'? I guess it became postponed. For eternity, as far as I can tell," Liz said before she could stop herself.

  He averted his face, as if she'd slapped it.

  "I begged Ophelia to be patient," he said, obviously in agony after the brutal reminder. "She would not. I needed only a few months to put my family's affairs back on course. My father was ailing, my brother gone; there was no one else."

  He turned away from Liz to look at the sea. "It took me a long time to understand that Ophelia was dismayed by my priorities. Who can blame her? Overnight, I had turned into a dutiful son and become a faithless lover."

  He added bitterly, "I did my job well. But without Ophelia the Eastman fortune became nothing more than cold, cruel comfort."

  Liz said to him, amazed, "Is it possible you don't know? Ophelia never told you she was pregnant by you?"

  Christopher turned back sharply, then went very still. Clearly he did not know. Liz had no idea what the risks were for revealing secrets to long-departed souls, but she'd just taken a huge one. She watched, trembling, as a hundred years of regret fused into a single moment of horror.

  "This cannot be true!" Christopher said angrily — and the sea itself seemed to rise up in indignation. Suddenly it sounded louder, closer. Unconsciously, Liz stepped away from the sea wall.

  It was impossible for her to see Christopher Eastman's face, to understand what was happening to him. He seemed to pulsate and shimmer in place, a concentration of energy unlike anything she'd ever known. She looked away — it was too much like looking at the sun — but then she was compelled to look back at him, despite her terror. The hair on her skin stood up, and it was suddenly harder to breathe. She began shivering violently. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. She had to bite her lip to keep herself from whimpering; to hug herself, to reassure herself of her own physicality. She was afraid to stay, unable to go.

  "God in heaven!" he cried in anguish. "I see it now! She was too proud to throw her condition in my face; if I would not marry her for herself, she had no use for me. Ah, that pride of hers! That overbearing, self-destructive pride! It made her refuse to play the trump card that all women possess."

  Not all of us, thought Liz, flinching.

  "She tested me, and I failed the test utterly! Ophelia!" He turned away from Liz, toward the sea. "Oh, God ... Ophelia," he said in a broken voice.

  His pain ripped through Liz like a blade. Ignorant of ghostly conventions, she had no idea how to console him. She could only try in human ways, on human terms.

  "Please — please don't do this to yourself," she begged him. "If it's any comfort to you, I can tell you that Ophelia was cared for by a good man — a shoemaker in town, Anton Pinhel. I've been to see her grave. She lived a long life."

  "Without me, without me," Christopher moaned. "And I without her. What waste. What pain."

  "I'm so sorry," said Liz awkwardly. "Maybe I shouldn't have told you any of this. I — I can't believe you didn't know."

  "She married very quickly ... I assumed, to hurt me. Whatever the reason, it would have been dishonorable to pursue her after that."

  "Excuse me?" Liz dared to say. "From what I've read in the letters, you were a bit of a —"

  "Not with married women!" he flashed. "Never, with a married woman!"

  He reminded her, just then, of Jack: a man who'd devised a strict moral code of his own and who didn't give much of a damn what society had to say about it.

  "Can I — can I ask you something?" she ventured.

  "Ask," he said in a flat, dead voice. He was standing against the sea wall, arms limp at his side, head bowed in sorrow. He was hard to see, harder to hear. Whatever he'd just gone through, it had consumed him.

  "How does that work? I mean, don't you learn all the answers to things after you—?"

  "Pass on?" he said, using the grim euphemism.

  Liz winced and said, "Yes. After you die. Shouldn't you be able to look all this up somewhere?"

  "I see. You assume that there is a City Hall in Heaven, is that it?" he said with a flash of Jack's wryness.

  "Is that so very funny?" Liz asked. "I should think that enlightenment is the least we can expect for giving up everything we have on earth. We ought to be able to know exactly where we screwed up — failed, that is — and where we did well."

  "Some may have been given that satisfaction," he said quietly. "I was not. I know what I knew on earth, just enough to get me started on this mission. Which, I may say, you are not making any easier," he said, annoyance creeping into his manner.

  He folded his arms across his chest in a way that, again, reminded Liz of Jack. "Are you as contentious with Jack as you are with me?" he asked. "You remind me more than a little of—" He laughed softly and finished his thought. "Of Ophelia. Of course you would. You have her blood in you."

  "Obviously. She was my great-great-grandmother just as —"

  "—I am your great-great-grandfather!" he cried, as it dawned on him for the first time. A look of utter amazement seemed to pass over the hazy features of his face as he considered Liz in this new light.

  "There is your answer as to why I stand before you!" he said, astonished. "You are my flesh and blood as well as Ophelia's. You are the product, however distant, of a love so ... so ...."

  The memory of that love seemed to bring home to him, again, how carelessly he'd thrown it all aw
ay. He seemed unable to trust himself to speak for a while.

  Then he said, in the softest, most melancholy voice, "I wish I knew where she is now."

  Trying to comfort him, Liz splayed one hand over the other on her breast. "Here, Christopher. Ophelia is here. At least you know that."

  For one brief second he came into crisp focus for her. She saw his face as clearly as she'd seen Jack's the night before. He was not Jack: his chin was less square, his eyes a much paler blue. His hair was browner, finer, the sideburns thick, as the fashion dictated. But there was Eastman in him, and Liz responded to it in a way so complex, so unfathomable, that it made her heart hurt.

  He said nothing, only continued to stare at her, as if he'd just seen her for the first time.

  Liz felt the blood rush up as she said, "We should have had this talk several apparitions ago."

  He smiled bleakly and shrugged. "Last night I did everything I could to provoke you. I was waiting for you to say, just once, 'What are you doing here?'

  "And instead I just ranted. I remember it well. But at least now that's all behind us. We simply have to agree to a system for communicating that's—"

  Behind her, she heard voices on the path; they were raised in anger, and one of them she knew as well as her own.

  "Judy Maroney is dead, Ben! She died in a car crash with her husband and two children! Accept it!"

  Liz swung around and saw Victoria racing ahead of her Dr. Ben, gesturing vehemently with her hands. Victoria was in a state of high agitation. She didn't see Ben, she didn't see Liz, she certainly didn't see the ghost of Christopher Eastman. She was completely intent on making her point. "I am not Judy Maroney. Stop trying to make me Judy Maroney!"

  "Tori, you're being unfair!" said Ben behind her. "All I said was, I've met a psychiatrist in Boston who's extremely interested in your case."

  "I am not a case!" she tossed back angrily.

  "Fine! Neither are the Cambodian women with healthy eyes who became blind after watching the horrors of the Khmer Rouge! There's nothing wrong with any of you! You're all fine!"