Darkborn (46 page)

And what happened to the other guy?

Maybe it isn’t too safe here. He stepped out of the circle. Off the star point.

I’m cold and I want to go home.

And he knew he’d do that. No matter what crazy ideas Kiff came up with …

Narrio giggled. Drunk as a skunk. And then he too wobbled away from the circle.

Will looked back to the man.

But the …?

He was gone.

* * *

43

Will climbed up to the street.

I won, he thought. I won.

It never happened.

Nothing happened at Manhattan Beach. We never went to Steeplechase. Narrio never climbed onto the ride.

It all never happened.

He reached the comer, the row of small houses with unkempt lawns, unmowed for months. The breeze made the grass dance. The light let him see something that he hadn’t been sure of.

My clothes, he thought. Blue jeans. Leather jacket. Sure, I’m dressed the way I was.

But now .
 
.
 
. now I’m here.

Before men like me wore blue jeans.

It was just as Dr. James had said it might turn out.

A one-way trip, Will. You have to know that. You have to
accept
that.

You may never come back.

And now Will knew that it was true.

He kept on walking, following the street to some faint neon lights in the distance.

But he also knew this:

If it all never happened …

Then Becca .
 
.
 
. and Sharon .
 
.
 
. and Beth were safe.

Time is a mental construct, Will,
James had said.
Something to keep us sane, to give order to a universe more complex and chaotic than we can ever begin to imagine.

Time can be changed.

And —

Will took a breath, sucking the air, clean, fresh.

I did it.

I changed what happened .
 
.
 
. what will happen. I was the only one who could.

With only one small problem.

I have to stay here.

This is my life now. My time.

Will kept on walking. The lights grew brighter. He saw people. Stores. Someplace to stop, perhaps. And think.

About the irony, the terrible irony.

To think that I saved them. That they’ll live.

Only because I left them.

He laughed. And then because it seemed like the right thing to do, something he had to do, he started crying. Full out, crying, for joy, for sadness, for salvation.

Yes, by God.

Salvation.

* * *

Epilogue

1.

One of those lights, that night, had been a bar.

H was called the Bay Ridge Tavern. And Will went in looking for something to give him some sense of normalcy. A sink to wash the blood off his hands. the smell from his fingers .
 
.
 
.

But instead. what he saw and heard made him feel more lost.

The TV was on. Jack Paar was talking to a starlet with mile-high hair. But no one in the bar was listening. The men — there were only men in the bar — were talking loudly, laughing, ignoring the flickering colors on the set.

A purple blotch sat near the top of the TV screen.

Color TV had problems back then, Will knew.

Back then —

Which is now .
 
.
 
. for me.

He sat down on a vacant stool.

The bartender, a bowling pin of a man with a loud laugh and sleeves rolled up, came up and asked what he wanted.

Will said, “A beer.”

“Hey, speak up, mac. Can’t hear you.” Then the bartender turned to a bunch of guys at one end who were laughing as if they had just heard the funniest damn thing in the world.

“Will you fokin’ guys pipe down’” Then back to Will. “Jeeez .
 
.
 
. What’ll it be?”

“A beer.” Will said. The bartender went in search of a clean glass.

Will saw a calendar. A cartoon cowgirl. all legs and perfectly rounded bottom.

October 1965.

“Here you go,” the bartender said, returning with a glass with a foamy inch-tall head.

Will reached for his wallet.

Which wasn’t there.

James had told him that too.

Bring nothing that ties you to this time.

Nothing that could keep you here.

A wallet could do that. It holds your life, your identification, your money. your credit cards. Photos.

“Oh, sorry,” Will said. “I —”

The bartender’s smile faded. He saw Will’s arm slinking back from the futile grab at his back pocket. He noticed the crusty blood on Will’s knuckles.

“I don’t —” Will started to say.

But then the bartender — as if seeing something in Will’s eye — -said, “Hey. Don’t worry, mac.” The bartender tapped the heavy wood bar. “It’s on th’ house.”

Will nodded and said, “Thanks.”

He took the sip.

He let the beer rest on his tongue, burning. Then he swallowed it.

The Paar show ended and the news came on. The newscasters were unfamiliar, and both looked goofily modish. The man was dressed in a suit with flaring lapels way too wide, and his tie glowed an otherworldly red. His hair was long, cut into a silly-looking page boy.

His woman partner had perfectly straight hair pulled back and she wore brilliant red lipstick.

The first story was about Americans bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And a videotape of General Westmoreland flashed onto the screen, his shirt sleeves rolled up, arms folded in front of him.

He explained that the raid was “surgical.”

That it would end any Cong initiative for the rest of the year. No doubt about it.

We could be out of here by Christmas, he said, grinning.

Right, Will thought. Will took another sip of beer.

I feel like laughing, Will thought. A giddy feeling. Right, sure .
 
.
 
. out of here by Christmas .
 
.
 
.

He felt the bartender looking at him, standing at the other end of the bar talking to his regulars.

Best move on, Will thought.

He looked down at his jeans. He looked at his leather jacket. Nothing too out of the ordinary there, he thought.

But I better leave …

He finished the beer.

Got up and started for the door.

The bartender called out to him.

“Hey. Fella? You looking for a job?”

Will stopped. Turned around.

And — he rubbed his chin. He guessed he was.

So Will nodded, and he walked back to find out what he’d be doing the rest of his life.

2.

It was a life, he guessed.

The job was clerking in a small grocery, a small market not much larger than a deli. Stock work at the beginning, but then — as the owner got to know and trust him — Will ran the store. He got friendly with the customers. They liked him.

He was paid cash. And that made things easy.

The only difficult times were when people got too close, like the owner or regular customers. And they wanted to know where he came from. Where had he been? What had he done?

Will guessed what they suspected.

They think I’m an ex-con.

And that was pretty useful.

So he’d just smile and say, “Oh, I’ve worked out West, did lots of things. I was married once .
 
.
 
.”

And the sad look in his eyes was usually enough to close down any further questions. Most people assumed that he was divorced.

There were women, just friends mostly, but women near his age who were looking for someone just to talk to, and perhaps sleep with.

He’d take them fishing out on Sheepshead Bay, and he almost enjoyed this lost world, a safer world, before graffiti, before crack, before the world changed.

But there was one thing he had promised himself that he’d never do. James had told him that it would be wrong. Perhaps dangerous. Will figured he was just trying to spare his feelings.

Will couldn’t keep that promise.

So as soon as he had a license and a car, he started watching.

Becca, in college at Russell Sage.

Sometimes he’d drive up and watch her on the streets of Troy, New York, walking with her friends, laughing, years before she would meet him. .

And sometimes she’d stop and look in his direction.

He’d slide down in the car seat, hoping that the sun’s glare on the windshield would hide him. Hide the man watching her.

Then she’d move on.

And he watched himself.

A young man. Carousing through the sixties. So full of life that he couldn’t relate to that person at all.

That’s not me, he thought. That’s someone else.
But he was wrong
.

And when he came back to his small studio apartment in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, only a block from the elevated subway, he’d sit in the dark and think about the life he’d lost.

He got older. Middle age took a firm hold, and he was fifty.

Will and Becca got married .
 
.
 
.

And he was amazed that all the details were the same.

As if nothing had changed.

But he knew it had. He knew it, because this Will still saw his old school friends. He went to reunions where Kiff was still a crazy man, and Tim Hanna was doing pretty well in real estate — no great shakes, but not bad. Whalen and Narrio both moved to California, but they flew back for the occasional reunion.

I changed it all, Will thought. Things were different.

And his apartment grew to be filled with the history of these people’s lives .
 
.
 
. photographs that he took secretly .
 
.
 
. the articles from local newspapers, while the seventies unrolled like an old, badly scripted movie.

Then one night, drunk, sick with the pain that never went away, he pulled all the pictures down and threw his collection into a big box, intending to throw it into the garbage.

Which he never did.

Instead he put everything in a closet.

Knowing that he’d have to stop this shadow life, watching the others, the real people, live their lives that he had given them.

He stopped spying on Becca and Will. Feeling too sick every lime he did it.

He stopped.

3.

But when the first baby was born —

When Sharon was born —

Will went to the hospital and he walked up to the giant window that showed the parents and the relatives a sea of squirming babies, all of them identical.

He had to tilt his head to read the card.

Sharon Dunnigan.

He put his hands against the glass.

That’s my baby, he thought.

His lips pressed against the glass.

My little girl.

And he sobbed against the glass, heaving, looking at the tightly swaddled infant asleep.

And he was there for Beth too.

Now he couldn’t stop.

He went to their school plays, seeing them again, rows behind their parents, and he felt crazy, loonish.

Once he thought about visiting Joshua James. Because — all the time — he felt this need to talk with someone, anyone, about what had happened. Someone who would understand, who could say, “You did good, Will Dunnigan.”

He went so far as to go to the Fordham campus.

A place that the other Will would never have to visit now. And sometimes, after a lot of drinking, Will hoped that maybe, if he went to see him, Dr. James would know him, that somehow he’d have this memory of what he and Will had done.