If Only in My Dreams (35 page)

P
eering out into the street as he turns over the
CLOSED
sign in the front window, Jed sees a swirl of snowflakes in the overhead streetlight’s yellow glow.

He sings softly about having snow and mistletoe and presents under the tree.

“
On
the tree,” Clara amends.

He turns to see her standing behind him, wearing her coat and hat and offering his.

“On the tree?” Jed echoes, taking them from her. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can presents be on the tree?”

She shrugs, smiling as she pulls on her red mittens. “Don’t blame me. I didn’t write the lyrics.”

“No, I know. The thing is…”

“What?” she asks reluctantly, as though she senses a sticky question coming her way.

“Why hasn’t that song been on the radio yet? It’s Christmastime. And it’s a swell song. I don’t understand
why I haven’t heard it anywhere but on your music machine… and nobody else has ever heard of it, either.”

“Nobody else?” A shadow crosses her face. “As in… who?”

“Never mind. It’s not important. Say, I had that flat fixed on the DeSoto yesterday, remember?” He settles his fedora on his head and buttons his coat. “How about if I take you out for dinner tonight instead of eating with the family? And afterward, we can go dancing at a nightclub. I bet you can do a mean Lindy Hop.”

“I don’t know, Jed… I’m not really in the mood for dancing. I think I’d rather spend a quiet evening alone with you.”

“Being alone with you always sounds good, but I feel bad, never taking you out on the town.” He opens the door for her and they step out into the falling snow.

“I don’t need to go out on the town, Jed,” she says, her breath puffing frosty white in the air between them.

“I know you don’t
need
to,” he says, reaching into his pocket for the list of things his mother asked him to pick up at the store when she called earlier, “but I thought you might
want
to.”

“No. I just want to be with you.”

About to lock the door, he looks up at her, uneasy at the note of desolation in her voice.

“What’s wrong, Clara?”

“Nothing. What’s that in your hand?”

He hands her the shopping list and sticks the key into the lock. “I guess Doris got to my mother, because she called and said she’s going to make fruitcakes after all. These are
the ingredients she needs. We can stop at Ferguson’s; they’re still open.”

Clara holds the paper up in the glow from the streetlight, reading it. “Cinnamon, mace, allspice.… Is she using Minnie Bouvier’s recipe?”

“Yes… how did you know?”

“I just remembered.
Nutmeg, ground cloves
—” Clara stops short. Then she fumbles in her coat pocket, pulling out a wrinkled piece of paper.

“What’s wrong?” Jed asks, watching her hurriedly comparing his mother’s list to what appears to be another list.

“Ground cloves,” she murmurs, almost in… dread?

But that doesn’t make sense.

“Clara, what—”

“That’s what Minnie forgot! Ground cloves.”

Before he can ask her what she’s talking about, he hears the roar of a car engine, rapidly approaching from a distance.

Both he and Clara turn to see headlights coming down Main Street.

“Say, that’s Arnold Wilkens’s Packard,” Jed notices as the car passes, wondering why his friend doesn’t slow down or wave. Maybe he’s still sore at Jed for not coming over yet to clear things up with Maisie.

“
Packard?”
Clara echoes.

“Say, he’s got Maisie with him.… I wonder if she could really be in labor this time!”

“Oh, no,” Clara murmurs. “No!”

Startled, he looks at her and sees that she’s gaping at the car in horror.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, wondering if she’s somehow, somewhere, had a brush with the notorious Crazy Maisie.

“Stop!” Clara screeches at the top of her lungs. “No, stop!”

In disbelief, Jed watches her running away, frantically chasing Arnold’s car down Main Street.

Jed quickly turns the key in the lock and takes off after Clara, bewildered.

In the distance, he sees the Packard’s red taillights disappearing around the corner of Oak Street.

Then, a sickening squeal of brakes.

“I brought you some hot tea.”

Huddled on the bed, knees to chest, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Clara looks up dully.

Jed steps into the apartment with a tray and sets it on the table.

“At least, it was hot when I left the kitchen a minute ago. Doris insisted on making you some toast, too. With marmalade.”

Minnie Bouvier’s marmalade, no doubt.

“She wanted to come up and see you, but I told her you weren’t feeling well. I promised her she can come up later. She’s worried you won’t be able to go with us in the morning to chop down the Christmas tree.”

Clara is silent, brooding.

“Come on, Clara. This will help.”

She shakes her head bleakly.

Nothing will help.

A few hours ago, Minnie Bouvier, on her way to the store to pick up the ground cloves she forgot, was struck by Arnold Wilkens’s Packard as he rushed his laboring wife, Maisie, to the hospital.

“I’m sure Minnie is going to be just fine,” Jed says, sitting on the bed beside her. “We can even go over to the hospital in the morning to visit her.”

Clara closes her eyes to shut out the image of the sweet little old lady lying crumpled and bleeding in the snowy road.

It was Jed who heroically covered her in his own coat and knelt beside Minnie, holding her hand.

“I’ll get to the hospital and send help,” Arnold Wilkens said helplessly, as his wife wailed and writhed in the Packard’s front seat.

“Hurry, Arnold,” Jed replied, focused on the injured woman. “Hang on, Minnie. Just don’t go to sleep.”

Minnie’s eyes rolled, and her gaze seemed to settle on Clara, standing a few feet away.

“Angel,” she whispered, smiling faintly, and her eyelids fluttered closed.

“You’re seeing an angel? Minnie, come on, hang in there. Open your eyes.” Somehow, Jed managed to keep her conscious until the ambulance arrived.

It probably didn’t take long—the hospital was a stone’s throw from the accident scene.

But to Clara, standing by helplessly in the blowing snow, the wait was interminable.

She wanted to do something, but she was too numb with horror to move or speak.

Several neighbors ventured out of their houses to survey the horrific scene, including a woman named Lorraine. Clara overheard her telling someone that Minnie had just minutes ago asked to borrow cloves from her and, when Lorraine said she didn’t have any, decided she’d have to go buy them.

“I told her not to go,” Lorraine said desolately, “but she wanted to get those fruitcakes made tonight.”

Even after Minnie had been borne away on a stretcher, Clara was rooted to the spot, staring at the crimson stain in the snow.

And it wasn’t Minnie’s blood she was seeing.

It was Jed’s.

“Clara…” Back in the garage apartment, he slips his arms around her. “Look at me.”

She opens her eyes. “Don’t, Jed.”

“Don’t what?”

Don’t stare into my eyes that way.
…

Don’t make me love you.
…

Don’t die
.

“I need to ask you something,” Jed says slowly. “Right before the accident, you said something about Minnie forgetting ground cloves. Lorraine said she had tried to borrow cloves and that was what she was going out to buy. Then, when Arnold drove by, you almost seemed as if…”

He trails off and looks at her, shaking his head.

“As if what?” she whispers.

“As if you knew what was going to happen.”

Clara takes a deep breath.

I have to at least try, just one more time
.

“That’s because I did know, Jed.”

Clara’s words wash over Jed like a cold wave, leaving him sputtering, “But… that’s… that’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible, Jed,” she replies, wearing a cryptic expression. “If anyone is proof of that, I am.”

Wondering what she means by that, exactly, he points out, “Seeing the future is impossible, unless you’re… some kind of gypsy fortune-teller, maybe. Or… I don’t know…
God
. And no offense, but I don’t think you’re either.”

She doesn’t even smile at his lame attempt at humor.

He watches her brow furrow as her front teeth settle over the lower corner of her mouth. Clearly, she’s wrestling with something.

For a moment, the only sound in the room is the rattling windowpane and a faint creaking sound as the wind gusts outside.

Then Clara says softly, “The details aren’t important. What is important is that you’re willing to believe me, Jed—even if what I’m telling you sounds like the most bizarre thing you’ve ever heard. Are you?”

“Am I…?”

“Willing to believe me.”

“Oh, I… I don’t know.”

He knows what he heard, what he saw earlier, on the street outside the store. He didn’t imagine Clara’s inexplicable mention of Minnie, and cloves, nor her panicky reaction to Arnold’s car as it passed.

Still…

“You’re telling me you can see the future?”

“I’m telling you that I’m
from
the future.”

He stares at her for a long moment. Then he bursts out laughing. “You don’t look much like Buck Rogers.”

“I’m not kidding, Jed.”

“Neither am I. You don’t even have a space suit.” His mirth fades as he sees that she’s deadly serious.

He reaches out and brushes her hair back from her forehead, revealing the yellowish-gray bruise still visible above her brow.

“You’re thinking I’m delusional.” She pulls back. “Aren’t you? You’re thinking that this bump on my head has me imagining all sorts of things. You know what? I thought so, too, at first. I even thought I was imagining you.”

“I’m real,” he says gently, dropping his hand from her head to her shoulder.

“I know you are. And you’ve got to believe that I’m real, too, Jed. Because you might look back on this at some point and decide that I wasn’t.”

“Look back?” Dread seeps in. “Clara—”

“I’m going to tell you something that you have to believe, and you have to remember. Even after I’m gone.”

“No!” he says sharply. “You can’t go. I need—”

“I have to go back home,” she cuts in, and he knows somewhere deep inside it would come down to this. “I don’t want to… believe me, Jed, I want nothing more than to stay here with you, forever.”

“Then stay. Forever. We’ll be together, right here… or we can get a real house! I’m making over two thousand dollars a year, Clara! We can get married, and—”

“Stop it, Jed! We can’t get married, and I can’t stay.” She’s sobbing now.

He opens his mouth to comfort her, to remind her that even if she does have to go back sooner or later, the city isn’t on another planet. They’ll still see each other as much as they can, until they can work it out so that they can be together all the—

She stops him before he can open his mouth, laying a fingertip against his lips. “Shh, just listen. I knew Minnie Bouvier was going to be killed tonight, just like I know—”

“Killed? She wasn’t killed, Clara. She was alive. She’s in the hospital. I’m sure she’s going to be just—”

“She’s going to die, Jed. And… and
so are you.”

Clara watches Jed’s mouth drop open in shock.

Oh, no, I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that
.

But she had to get his full attention.

And you certainly have it now
.

He seems incapable of speaking… and she feels the same way. But she knows she has to keep talking—has to make him understand.

“If you enlist in the army and go off to fight in the war in Europe, Jed,” she says, choosing her words more carefully this time, “you aren’t going to come home. You’re going to be killed.”

Relief swoops over his face, and he lets out a nervous laugh. “Is that what all this fuss is about? That’s what every gal says when her fella goes into the army. Listen, now that I have you, the last thing I want to do is enlist, so don’t—”

“You say that now,” Clara cuts in. “But you won’t feel the same tomorrow.”

He frowns. “Sure I will.”

“No, Jed, tomorrow we’re going to be at war. You have to believe me. The Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor.”

“How’s that?”

“Pearl Harbor. The Japanese are going to attack—”

“What is Pearl Harbor? And where is it?”

“It’s a military base, it’s somewhere in Hawaii, and hundreds of people are going to die, and I need to warn the president, or the police, or… or someone.…”

“Clara, you can’t do anything of the kind.”

“But maybe I can save—”

“Do you remember what happened in the store the other day, when Pete was there? I barely managed to convince him that you’re not some kind of spy. You can’t go running around now, calling the police or the government and making dire predictions about imminent military attacks. They’ll want to know how you know. And you’ll tell them…?”

“It doesn’t matter, because I’m right. They’ll see when everything I tell them comes true tomorrow.”

“Which is when they’ll arrest you on suspicion of treason.”

She falls silent. He’s right.

“But, Jed, you have to believe me about Pearl Harbor. You do, don’t you?”

He rakes a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“Listen to me. After the attack, FDR is going to declare war, Jed. And he’s going to make a speech on the radio and say that December 7, 1941, is a day that will live in infamy. That’s tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he echoes flatly.

Clearly, he has no idea what to make of any of this.

“You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“So let me just make sure I’ve got it straight. The Japs are going to attack tomorrow”—he begins to tick off items on his fingers—“and we’re going to war, and Minnie Bouvier is going to die. Is that it?”

“
It?”

“Those are your predictions? All for tomorrow?”

“Yes. Oh, and your friend Arnold’s wife is going to have a baby boy,” she remembers, “and they’re going to name him Denton.”