Megan dumped her bags, sat on a rock next to the water, and stretched her legs out in front of her. She and Brian and Jill should really do something about the old house downtown. It would free up a lot of money. Their parents had left a mysterious trust, held by a secret trustee that even Elmore, who considered himself a legal wizard, could not track down. The taxes were paid on time; checks were sent to Jill, the oldest, for bare-bones maintenance, and all three children got a small monthly stipend. Since neither parent had been declared dead, Megan knew that Elmore frequently raged that various time limits were up and that they needed to sell the property and divide up the money, but none of the Dance kids wanted that. Elmore’s latest feint was to attack the very legality of the trust, but, since no papers were available, he was having a difficult time doing so. The property had not been in the best location when their parents bought it, but now, it was worth a bundle, and their tax bill reflected this. Halcyon House, bordered by a park much like this one, was bound on one side by a strong, fresh-running stream. Just try to find another house like that downtown. But the old mansion had fanciful turrets and odd roof junctures that made leaks hard to find, and was monstrously huge. Elmore thought it a wasteful hobby that the sentimental Dance brood needed to cash in on.
The emotional turmoil Elmore seemed bent on maintaining might have something to do with Stevie giving himself a new name. A new identity called
Anyone but me!
Elmore’s wearing bid for partnership, which seemed to have permanently warped his once easygoing personality, might last years. Jill had jumped hand-in-hand with Elmore into the maelstrom, so it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known what might happen.
But maybe Jill’s deepest problem was that she missed their father.
Megan did too; fiercely. Megan, Brian, and Jill had gone to Germany, his last known destination, but they had not found him. Jill’s screaming fit, a month into the search, convinced Megan and Brian that it was time to quit. Brian had hired a private detective, who showed up one day at Brian’s house looking frightened and returned the retainer. He refused to say why, just cited family problems that kept him from traveling.
So now they were left with this double hole in their family. The Vanished Parents.
Dad had not gone to look for Mom in ’63, even though her body was never found. He had held no funeral. It seemed very strange to Megan, now that she was grown. You’d think he would have done both, but he did show them the letter from the State Department that said Bette Elegante Dance was missing, presumed dead. Megan had been too young to question Dad as she should have during those years before he too left. Or died, somewhere, undocumented, maybe even under a different name. Megan was now positive that her dad had known all along that Bette was still alive, and was furious that he had withheld that information.
Obviously, the Dance lines of communication were not as clear as they ought to have been. Megan was sure that Jill knew something she was not talking about—something about why both parents were gone. But, if so, why not tell her and Brian?
Megan stood, rehoisted her bags, and headed out of the woods. She passed through an empty ball field and emerged from the woods many blocks from home—if the meandering streets of the Tall Oaks could be said to contain blocks. Regaining the sidewalk, she continued to muse, admiring the gardens of her neighbors in spite of her worry. Crocuses, yellow forsythia. Lovely front porch, with those wicker chairs. Jill always enjoyed this walk, and exclaimed about everything she saw, along with Whens.
Stevie,
Megan told herself firmly.
Megan suspected that Jill’s hardcore medications were the result of Elmore’s fears, which he’d no doubt communicated strongly to the doctor. These were drugs for schizophrenia, and, perhaps, from Elmore’s point of view, that was Jill. Schizophrenic. Seeing things, hearing voices, needing to be controlled.
Megan walked faster. Her role was suddenly clear. She would have to meet the doctor, have a talk with him. Jill probably didn’t need drugs at all. Not her Jill! She needed something. But not drugs. Megan knew a lot about pharmacology—not that M.D.s were inclined to listen to anyone else. She’d give them all a talking to, raise hell. As she walked, she got more and more fired up.
She called Jim and asked him to pick her up at the corner. “Take Abbie to Beth’s. I know; tell her that I love her and that I want to see her. But I think we need to get over to the hospital.”
Jill
A FEW GHOSTS
March 25, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
T
HERE WAS LITHIUM
, benzodiazepines, and God only knew what else. Something clamped shut deep inside Jill.
The dayroom at St. Elizabeth’s was full of people who would not look at her and that was fine. She didn’t want to look at them either. She noticed that the hallways were narrow and dirty but that did not bother her. It didn’t bother her when Elmore told her that he was filing for divorce because he couldn’t afford the expense of an insane wife who couldn’t even take care of their son. She did think, silently, that it was vastly inappropriate of him to bring it up at this particular time, but then, his emotional compass had swung to some bizarre new bearing lately. It was remotely pleasing not to have to worry about that anymore. It didn’t bother her when Brian came and begged her to say something, nor did it cheer her when she heard her sister Megan, who had a doctorate in molecular biology, raging at the doctor in a slightly hoarse voice, so Jill knew she was smoking again and that, like everything else, it was her fault.
She started talking after her mother and father came to visit her, because their visit perked her up considerably. But when she told Brian he just looked alarmed, particularly when she went into detail about the visit. So she did not mention the other two visitors at all.
* * *
Jill saw her parents, Sam and Bette Dance, when she opened her eyes one night, soon after she was admitted. Dimmed lights revealed a clock on the wall that said 2:17
A.M.
Footsteps passed the open door. The rattling wheels of a cart grew loud and then soft; an impassive female voice paged Dr. Hogart for the third time.
Sam and Bette leaned over her, looking worried. Jill was not surprised. It seemed to her as if they had just been gone for a while. Of course they would visit her in the hospital.
She wakened more fully, and realized that she was not dreaming. She tried to speak, urgently, but couldn’t. Something that sounded like
bllg
came out. She felt as if she were pinned underwater.
Bette wore a minimalist blue evening dress that revealed fit arms and shoulders. The pendant hanging from a chain around her neck was a simple design, and glinted like her short, silvery hair in the dim light.
Sam, in a completely uncustomary suit and tie, took her hands. “Jill, I’m sorry.”
Bette bent down and hugged her, pressed her cheek against Jill’s. “You’re not crazy, Jill.” Her voice was strong and fierce. “We came as soon as we heard. We were at a party at McMillan’s, and got on the Underground, and—”
“Shhh,” said Sam. “Someone might hear you. And we shouldn’t talk about anything sensitive.”
A sensitive party?
wondered Jill. She felt a distant impulse to giggle. She later realized that their unconventional way of getting from a fashionable party in London to a hospital room in the United States, probably from a different timestream, when there were people who might be able to trace them through that action, was what Sam meant by
sensitive
.
“I don’t care,” said Bette, although she lowered her voice. “This is my girl they’ve got here.” She turned and lifted the IV bag, squinted. “What is this crap?” She shut off the IV.
Sam said, “Bette! You’re not a doctor.”
“Well, this one should lose her license.”
“Maybe Jill needs fluids.”
“Not if the fluid is full of this much lithium and all kinds of other junk. No wonder she can’t talk! It’s a wonder her heart is still beating!”
Jill struggled to speak once again, but could not. Tears of frustration welled from her eyes and trickled down to her ears. Part of her wanted to laugh—
I have tears in my ears from lying in my bed at night thinking of you
. She couldn’t move, couldn’t get up, couldn’t hug them.
Where have you been? Stay here!
“Listen carefully, Jill,” said Sam. “Until we knew about particle physics, we didn’t know this was possible. But it’s dangerous.”
What is
this
?
Jill tried to ask.
What is
it
?
Bette picked up her chart, which was clipped to the end of the bed. “Sam, this is 1991. Wink didn’t tell us that!” She blinked. “So much time … just gone … we’ve got to leave!”
Sam kept talking to Jill, his voice low and urgent. “Now we know that it is possible, but we don’t know all that much about it. It’s difficult to … move around. There are other forces at work. Other people who want to know what’s going on, and we keep finding things out—”
What
things
?
“We have to go, Sam. Now.”
As Bette yanked on his arm, Sam said, “Read my notebooks, Jill. If you still have the house you still have them.” He looked very old, and very tired. “I love you.”
Bette bent down, gathered Jill up with strong arms, and crushed her face to Jill’s, so that her muffled voice was close to Jill’s ear. “I love you so! And I’m so, so sorry. We’ll be back.”
“Bette, you can’t promise that.” Jill heard anguish in Sam’s voice.
“I promise, Jill,” she said in a firm voice. “I promise that we’ll be back.” She kissed Jill.
“We really do have to go,” said Sam. He gave Jill a long hug, a short kiss, and held both of her hands for a moment while gazing at her
as if to remember,
Jill thought. And she looked on them as if it were her last look, gathering their dear faces into herself.
Bette and Sam stood facing Jill, arms around one another’s waists, and looked at her for seconds that, for Jill, were stripped of everything except their shared gaze. Then Bette pulled Sam from the room. Jill heard Bette’s heels and Sam’s heavier tread recede down the hall.
Come back,
she shouted, with the voice in her head that didn’t make it to her lungs, her vocal cords, the voice that was so submerged she couldn’t even open her mouth.
But the intensity of her interior cry finally forced her mouth open. She sobbed: deep, hoarse, alien sounds that took all the air in her lungs. She could not stop. She didn’t want to.
A nurse came in. She turned off a beeping sound, frowned, and said, “Don’t you dare touch your IV line again or I’ll tie down your hands.” She opened the line and left.
She remembered then that she’d had another visitor, earlier, before Mom and Dad. She had no idea what time he had been there, of course. He had looked vaguely familiar to her semi-dreaming, drugged mind.
He sat in the chair in the corner. His short beard was grayish, perhaps, but most of his face was shaded with a fedora with the brim snapped down over his left eye, so that she could see only the right one, appraising and somewhat sympathetic. Shadows obscured any details of what looked vaguely like a government-issued uniform. His ankle rested on his right knee as he sprawled back in his chair, so one muddy, well-used boot was visible in the sliver of light from the doorway.
She went over it in her mind after he got up and left, which was as soon as she tried to sit up. A loud, medical beep signaled that she had pulled something loose.
He had a long stride. One, two—and he was out the door.
“Hey,” she heard from down the hall. “Who are you?” Then someone—presumably that same nurse—paged security. “Dr. Yellow to third floor east, please.”
As Jill sank back onto the bed, she realized that, despite the drugs, her heart was beating very fast. She rather thought she had seen him earlier that same evening, after they had done the evening bustle to get her battened down for the night, and dimmed the lights. Or maybe it had been some other time … so hard to remember …
She closed her eyes and tried to memorize him, but he rapidly became entangled with a long-ago cartoon of Popeye and Brutus fighting, and then she was back in limbo, and then Mom and Dad showed up.
When the third man came, she screamed.
* * *
I was born in 1950
, Jill wrote in her imaginary journal.
The War was over, at least on paper. Germany had been divided in a series of ad hoc agreements.
She started over again, in her head. She could not write a real journal because she did not want anyone else to read it.
She was lying in her hospital bed, one ear on a pillow. She pulled another pillow over her head to block out the television sounds. She went over and over them again, each time from the beginning, to set them in her mind.
She continued.
I was born five years after the end of the War, and its shadow lingered. I knew it had been a terrible War and an exciting War and that its end released the world in a burst of great light. I gathered that we were now living in a wonderful time, The Future, where an image of superimposed ellipses illustrated the font of all being, The Atom, and that all would be good, henceforth and evermore, because the War had been fought, the War had been won, and the War was over.
But the War was still there.
The War was in the chairs, rounded and tucked in the lines of the thirties, the years when War was accreting like leaves in a headlong stream, lodged against implacable economic and political rocks. The War was in the black-and-white photographs of my father in uniform on my parents’ dresser. It was on the bookshelves and in the acrid pages of old newspaper clippings I found in trunks, in the books I found and read at my paternal grandparents’ house—books like
Boots and her Buddies
, or
Nina and Skeezix
, illustrated by pictures of German and Japanese spies with narrow, ominous mustaches, wearing spectacles that blanked out their eyes, war propaganda for kids. It was in movies, where black-and-white spies played out their games on mysterious trains and in narrow dark streets that seemed the epitome of Europe, where the ominous two-toned siren of the Gestapo signaled deportation and death.