A Betrayal of Time Read online

  Then she nodded, hard, convincing herself as much as her dad across the line. “Okay, Dad. I’ll be there.”

  Now she was there. Her little hatchback made it up the driveway without bottoming out. The driver’s side door creaked noisily as she opened it and took in the sights of home.

  Her father kept the house up pretty well despite all the time her mother’s care demanded of him. The yard was a little unkempt, but it was winter anyway.

  Vivienne left all her belongings in the car, rapped on the kitchen door lightly, and opened it.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had been inside when it was day out and the curtains were still drawn. But then, that was her mother’s job. She always let the light in.

  Vivienne pulled open the curtains as she went, banishing the dimness that didn’t belong. She took the stairs one at a time, aware of a heaviness that descended upon her with each step, even as she rose.

  She reached her parents’ bedroom and watched from the threshold. Her father either hadn’t heard her or wasn’t capable of reacting.

  Her mother was too far gone to notice.

  Even before she reached the bedside, Vivienne knew that if she had waited any longer to come, she would have been too late. It was evident everywhere she looked, not just on her mother’s drawn face and in her father’s resignation. It was as if the bedding and the drapes knew too. The family photos seemed to droop and wish they could look away.

  “Mom,” Vivienne whispered. She couldn’t tell if her parents were awake or asleep.

  Her dad opened his eyes to look up at her, but her mom didn’t. Vivienne’s heart beat in her ears so loudly that she couldn’t feel herself think.

  “Mom?” Vivienne spoke softly, because the dead can listen better than those alive.

  Her father’s eyes bulged. “Martha,” he said, squeezing his wife’s hand. “Martha,” louder this time. He pressed her hand harder, then let it drop.

  He placed his palm on the side of her face, with the tenderness of final touches. Vivienne stood, frozen, at the foot of the bed. She had been denied the opportunity to say goodbye to Ray. She couldn’t handle the thought of being denied the same with her mother.

  She rounded the bed. “No, no, no, no, no” she said all the way around. She touched her mother’s other hand. It was too thin and limp, but it was warm. She reached two fingers for her mother’s neck.

  She didn’t breathe while she held them there. Waiting for it. Waiting. Waiting too long.

  But then there it was. Vivienne’s fingers bounced with a pulse.

  “Dad! She’s alive.”

  “Oh thank God.” Her father sank to the edge of the bed where he hadn’t sat for a long while, not wanting to bother his wife; every movement seemed to hurt her.

  Vivienne squeezed her mother’s shoulders hard. Her mother was barely there; she didn’t react. Vivienne watched her chest and didn’t see it rise or fall. Her body was shutting down.

  There was nothing they could do to revive her. Her mother had been adamant about that, and Vivienne understood and agreed. But she couldn’t let her mother go without a goodbye. She couldn’t take it. She feared she might break after too many swallowed goodbyes that had been meant to be said. They were always meant to be said.

  Vivienne lifted her mother’s eyelids only to find her eyes rolled back in her head. Vivienne raced her fingers back to her mother’s neck. Had she been wrong about the pulse?

  Vivienne found no pulse but still she yelled, “Mom!”

  Her mother snorted in a half breath. Her husband jumped up, his face beside hers. “It’s okay, honey. I’m here. Viv’s here too. We’re both here, my darling.”

  Mother’s chest rose and fell under Vivienne’s watch, but the breaths were shallow and raspy. They were the breaths of death.

  It was lucky for her mother that she managed to open her eyes one last time. Her husband beamed more love for her than when she had first become his bride. His love for her had grown deeper over the years, through the many ups and downs. His love for her would transcend her death. And they both knew it.

  She didn’t waste the short breath she had left to tell her husband what she had already told him many times before it came to the end. Instead, she turned near-lifeless eyes to her daughter, to their miracle, returned from the place she was now headed, or something like that. She never had understood what exactly happened after death, and now she didn’t need to.

  So quietly that Vivienne had to bring her ear right next to her mother’s lips, her mother spoke three sentences. It was more than she thought she had in her, and she was grateful to get it out.

  With her husband’s hand resting in her right hand and her daughter’s resting in her left, Martha Walshe prepared to leave the world.

  “I love you, Mom, so much,” Vivienne said, surprised that she could still function. “I’ll do what you asked, but you tell Ray that I love him and that I miss him every moment of every day.”

  After one concluding look of lucidity, Martha’s eyes glazed over. Her eyelids dropped slowly, like the curtains of a theater. It was the final act of Martha’s show.

  She breathed out for the last time and left, happy to feel the hands of her loved ones in hers.

  “What did she say to you?” her father asked, more stoically than Vivienne expected.

  “She told me not to wait for Ray any longer. To find a nice boy and have a family. That having a family was the best thing that ever happened to her.”

  Her father stared ahead at a face he knew by heart, squeezing a hand that still felt alive, but soon wouldn’t. Tears poured down his face, but he didn’t break his stare.

  “That’s my girl,” he said to his wife. “That’s my girl.”

  Then he stood and walked out of the room he and Martha had shared for a month short of fifty years.

  Vivienne didn’t follow. She would be able to trace the echoes of his cries for years to come.

  Impossible Promises

  1990

  There was a knock against one of the counters of the open lab, on one of the few spaces free of equipment or notes. “Dr. Walshe? A man who says he’s your father is here to see you.”

  “My father?” Vivienne said, her surprise overshadowing her assistant’s implication that the man might not be whom he said he was. She pulled her eye away from the scope she’d been peering into, examining the effects time travel might have on organic particles.

  Vivienne watched her father round the corner through the glass of the laboratory, noticing how much he’d aged since she’d last seen him. She’d intended to make it home to Danville often since her mother’s funeral, but she hadn’t. There was always so much to do here, and every progress, however slight, narrowed the chasm between her and the possibility of seeing Ray again.

  Her father entered the lab hesitantly. “Dad? Is everything okay?”

  “Could we maybe talk alone for a bit?” he asked, fidgety under the curiosity of those around them.

  All eyes in the lab trained on her. “Why don’t you guys go ahead and take an early lunch break? We’ll resume work on this after lunch, say, at 1?” Vivienne’s eyebrows rose, seeking confirmation. The heads of five undergraduate students nodded before filing out. They left quietly, picking up whatever belongings they needed while they went.

  When they pulled the door of the science room closed behind them, Vivienne came out from behind the microscope. She hugged her father. His shoulders, always broad, were stooped, and his hair, chestnut brown like hers, was as much gray as it was brown.

  “Dad? Are you feeling all right? Is everything okay?” But even as she said it, she knew he wasn’t all right. She had known he wouldn’t be after his wife’s death. She should have gone to Danville no matter what projects she put on the laboratory calendar.

  “Let’s sit down.” Vivienne steered her father over to a small lounge area.

  He sunk into one of the beat-up couches that the lab assistants sometimes slept on when they were
in the middle of big projects. Vivienne never did, however. She was motivated in a way that superseded any course credit or letter of recommendation. She worked tirelessly.

  Vivienne unbuttoned her lab coat and leaned closer to her father. “How have you been, Dad?” She noticed the weariness in his eyes with a pang of guilt.

  “Oh, I’ve been fine.”

  His eyes traveled the large lab with its many desks and counter tops, cluttered with equipment mostly foreign to him, and finally to the window next to him that looked out onto the quad. Students milled around on the grass outside, but Vivienne hardly noticed them. When she was down here, she largely forgot about the world that surrounded her. Always, she was trying to get somewhere else—somewhen else.

  “It took me a while to find you,” Vivienne’s father said. “But finally I found a student willing to draw me a map of the campus.”

  “I wish you’d let me know you were coming. I would have come to meet you.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now. I got to see the campus. It’s really nice here, the green coming back after winter, all the trees starting to bloom. I haven’t been here in years.”

  Vivienne waited, her remorse at not checking in on her father mounting. She knew he was here for more than observation of spring foliage.

  He was looking out the window again. Students, bare feet in the grass, tossed a Frisbee right outside. She knew they must be loud, yet they were barely audible through the thick reflective glass. “I hope you get outside to enjoy the fresh air and get some exercise. Every time I call you at home, you’re not there to answer. It seems like you’re always here at the lab.”

  She was hardly at her apartment at all. The lab was her home. “I get plenty of fresh air, Dad. Don’t worry.”

  John’s gaze traveled what he could see of the lab before finding her again. “Well, you look good, so I guess you must be doing something right.”

  Vivienne had noticed this too. She had aged since returning to Danville in 1979, but not much. It seemed that traveling through time and leaping across twenty years had somehow interfered with her natural biological processes. She looked barely twenty, if that, instead of nearing thirty.

  “This lab is all yours?” Even though John had no idea what all the equipment did, it looked impressive.

  “Yeah, I got lucky. The university is very interested in my work. I have all the funding I need from them and a few additional grants.”

  “Aren’t you pretty young to have a lab of your own already?” John didn’t know much about science departments or universities, but he had the impression that academics with their own research teams were quite a lot older and more experienced than her.

  “Yeah. I’m the youngest by far here at the university. But I’m the only scientist working on the conundrum of time travel who has actually traveled through time—at least that I know of. That gives me some special qualifications. I have a unique perspective, along with memories that might someday give me an interpretation of experiment results that someone else might miss. And I have the determination to get the job done. I am as motivated as they come.”

  “It’s still about Ray, isn’t it?”

  “If you mean, is it still about finding the way to travel through time like I already did, back to 1959 to find Ray? Then yes, it is.”

  He sighed. It was a big, long, loud sigh that left John with little desire to say anything about anything at all. But he had to. He had to at least try.

  “Viv, what about what your mom told you? What about her dying advice to you?”

  “I know, Dad. I really do. I’ve been trying. Really I have. But it’s no use.”

  “It was the very last thing she said to either of us. She knew she was dying, and she used the last of her strength to tell you to move on. That’s how important she thought it was.”

  “I was there, Dad. I know. How could I ever forget? Don’t you think I want to honor Mom’s final request to me? But I can’t. I just can’t. I’m as in love with Ray now as I was before the event. Nothing has changed, no matter how much I try. There’s no room to love anyone else when my heart is still his.”

  Vivienne put her hand on John’s knee. “Dad, I’ve tried. But nothing’s changed. I’ve realized that it never will. And I’m okay with that. Ray and I were meant for each other, and that hasn’t changed just because I leapt forward twenty years. Ray is the only man for me.”

  Another deep sigh from John. “It’s the way it is, Dad. I don’t know why this happened. I spend all my waking hours trying to understand it. But whether I understand it or not, I can’t stop loving Ray. It’s just not possible for me. My husband died before becoming my husband.”

  Vivienne patted her dad’s knee, Ray’s class ring as shiny as the day he gave it to her. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s just the way it is.”

  She turned toward the window. Her hand still touched her father, but her mind stared at the Frisbee players, trying to push the sense of loss away, toward thoughts of anything else but the one thing time denied her.

  As usual, it didn’t work too well. “Besides, there is still a chance Ray might just appear one day. Like I did. I’ve made remarkable progress in understanding the event more and why I was the only one to reappear.”

  “Oh? You have?” A spark of enthusiasm flashed in her dad’s dull eyes.

  “From what I can figure, the epicenter of the event was more or less right where I was standing. That’s where the force pulled the Miller’s house apart, sucking me down with it. I was standing pretty close to the point in the earth that drew the house down and pulled it into the ground.

  “Because I was nearest the center of this force, I was outside of its destructive effects. Kind of like the saying that it is calmest in the eye of the storm, you know?” Vivienne was used to lecturing to undergrads about the complex topic of the time space continuum, and she used the same simplified language with her dad.

  “Because I was so close to the center of the force, it swirled around me, as if I were standing in the center of a tornado. The tornado breaks everything around it, everything it touches, but not what’s in the center.

  “Ray was right next to me, reaching for me. He would have been close to the epicenter of this force as well. So it is very possible that he could appear any day, transported through time as I was, just moving at a different rate than me because of the algorithmic delay effect that any distance from the center of the force would have. In other words, the farther he was from the epicenter, the longer it might take him to appear.

  “Ray’s body was never found. Neither was mine. We know why mine wasn’t. And it very well might be the same reason why his wasn’t either.”

  “A lot of bodies were never found. The house caved in with all of you in it, and then it fell into the gaping earth. The ground pulled the house completely under. There were some parts of the inside of the house we could never get to, or that we knew it wasn’t worth getting to. The children were already dead. We stopped searching and just covered in the house, burying everyone together.”

  “Well, it is also possible that a few others might appear over time too. It depends on how wide the epicenter of the force was. Anyone within its circumference would have survived, pulled into the time warp and space-folding of the center, like I was.”

  “But you have no idea if or when they might appear? Any of these possible survivors, in the center of the storm?”

  “Well, the probabilities are very high that anyone within that center would eventually appear at another time, and have no notion of what happened, as if it were still April eleventh, 1959. I was in the bathroom, and Ray was right there trying to get to me. But the bathroom was off the living room where most of the kids were. There might not have been anyone else in the epicenter. Given how the house collapsed in on itself, the center, the eye of it, couldn’t have been all that big.

  “Ray might be the only one traveling through time and space right now. But I can’t rule out that others could too.” Vi
vienne’s voice had changed. Her focus had transferred from loss to possibility. This is why she spent so much time in the lab. Here, she could at least do something. Here, she could at least try to get to Ray. If she didn’t try to get to the one man she loved, anguish would drive her crazy.

  “But could Ray also be dead?” John asked.

  “There is a chance that he could have died with the others, yes. A chance that the eye of the force was not big enough to encompass him, only me. But the chances are just as high that he could be undergoing the same time-travel effect I did, delayed only because his distance to the epicenter was greater than mine.”

  John met his daughter’s eyes, his expression inscrutable. Did his features indicate sadness, resignation, or hope? Or none of them? Vivienne couldn’t tell. “It’s been eleven years since you came back, Viv. How much longer will it take Ray to come back, if he is alive and traveling through time like you think?”

  Vivienne pulled her hand from her dad’s knee, sank into the couch, and sighed with a deeper frustration than her father’s. “I don’t know. I have no way of knowing without more accurate measurements of the event’s parameters. And I may never be able to get them.

  “Ray could come back tomorrow, or he could come back a hundred years from now. Or longer.” She looked down at the ring on her hand with its blue sapphire, the ring she never took off. It was the ring of a widow.

  Now it was John who sat up to reach a hand to his daughter’s knee. “Honey, you can’t wait that long to live, to be happy.”

  Unexpected tears welled up in Vivienne’s eyes. “Dad, I don’t know how to be happy without Ray. I can’t seem to find the way.”

  “You’re going to have to try, baby. Ray may not come back while either one of us are still alive.”

  “I know that, Dad. I’m considered one of the top experts on time travel in the world. I know I might never see him again, or that I might be an old woman when he appears as an eighteen-year-old, no matter how slowly I’m aging.” Vivienne was crying openly now. Since she had returned, it seemed that the crying never fully ceased. “But Dad, Ray would never stop looking for me. You know that. He would never give up on me.”