This is how it begins ...
Chapter One
Paul shuffled toward the ticket counter, maintaining his place in line. He gave a momentary acknowledgment to the idea that he could have gotten a first-class ticket, been able to avoid the line and have a roomier seat, but only for a brief instant, because really, he didn’t care. He didn’t care about much of anything now.
The bag at his feet didn’t contain a lot. Some basic toiletries, a change of clothes and two changes of underwear, his iPod — and the box containing his wife Moira’s ashes, which she’d wanted to have scattered in the sea off Hawaii. He’d do that. It was the last thing he could do for the woman he’d loved for years.
One of the two women.
The other was his best friend, at least by email, other than Moira. He and Angelina had dated some during their freshman year of college, decades earlier. They’d corresponded over the next couple of years while he was in the army, then lost touch with each other until a fortuitous reconnection via email a few years ago. Much too far apart to see each other, they remained long-distance friends and became very close over the years and across the miles.
She was gone now, too, killed in an accident on the same day as he’d lost Moira. It had easily been the worst day of his life. His face was utterly expressionless, all of his anguish and despair securely bottled up inside. When he reached the counter, he produced his e-ticket and tucked the second copy, in case it was needed for his return trip, back into the pocket of his bag. He didn’t care if he came back; he had nothing to come back to, now. Nothing at all. The thought of returning to that empty house left him utterly unmoved. What was going to happen in the future was not even a question in his mind.
When boarding was finally announced, once again he took a place in line and shuffled along until he could finally claim his seat. He dug out his iPod and stowed his bag in the overhead compartment.
After the plane reached cruising altitude, he listened to one tune on the iPod, then put it away. One cup of coffee, then he reclined his seat a bit and dropped off.
Paul didn’t sleep well on airplanes. This time, his sleep was bothered by a dream in which Moira and Angelina were jumbled together.
Normally, sleep had been the only time in the last five days when he hadn’t been in pain. Not physical pain; for that, he could have taken something. No, this was a pain deep in his heart. A pain that made his very soul weep. Losses in combination so painful that he could not escape them in any waking moment. Despite his outward expression, he wasn’t unemotional. Quite the contrary. He felt these losses more deeply than he could ever remember feeling anything before. Pain throughout his being, but keeping it bottled up, contained and away from view was the only way he could avert a total meltdown.
Now, though, he couldn’t escape his pain even in his sleep.
A gentle hand shook his shoulder. “Sir, you need to put your tray table up for landing.” Paul’s eyelids opened momentarily and then slammed shut again. Tears were welling in his eyes and he refused to let them be seen. He fumbled his tray table up, out of the way, eyes still closed, and then turned his head so he could look out the window as he wiped them surreptitiously. Farmland to the side as far as the eye could see, while off in the distance ahead of the plane, a mountain range loomed blue-gray out of the haze. Everything looked so quiet and peaceful.
Suddenly his eyes widened. Land? Mountains? I’m on a non-stop flight from San Francisco to Honolulu! Ocean! Islands! More ocean! There’s no mountain range or farmland like that anywhere near Hawaii! What in the hell is going on? Where am I?
He closed his eyes for several moments, willing himself back to reality, then opened them again. Farmland and mountains, just as before. He pushed his head back into the headrest and stared, unseeing, at the bulkhead before him. This is crazy. Absolutely, totally crazy. I’m on my way to Hawaii. I got on the right plane. I put the carry-on with Moira’s ashes right above me. I know I did. The only things I should be seeing are either Oahu or open ocean. Maybe one of the other islands. That’s it!
Firmly he stepped on his rising panic. Going off the deep end wouldn’t solve anything. Remain calm, don’t lose it. There’s got to be a rational explanation for this. Or at least some sort of explanation, even if it’s not rational.
An old-fashioned paper ticket wallet was sticking halfway out of the pocket on the bulkhead to his front. As he reached for it, his gaze fell on his arm. That’s not my arm! My arm has a big scab right there, purple marks all around it and a couple of good-sized scars! And I don’t wear a watch! He twisted the arm experimentally. The skin remained smooth instead of developing the crepe-paper pattern of ridges he’d gotten so familiar with in recent years.
Panic again tried to grow inside him. He struggled with it, refusing to let it take over. As sanity, or at least the appearance of sanity, finally prevailed, he tried to stretch out his legs, only to find that something was keeping them contained. He looked down to see a guitar case at his feet. Where did that come from? Can you even take one on an airplane any more? Anyway, I haven’t played the guitar in almost forty years! He ran his left thumb across the fingertips on that hand and felt the calluses.
Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When that didn’t work, he tried again. Finally he opened his eyes and took a look at the boarding pass in the wallet. Froze.
If that slip of paper was to be believed, this flight was about to land at Stapleton Airport in Denver. In 1966! He was on his way to college again! He closed his eyes.
What the hell happened to Hawaii? And to my life? I’m about to hear a voice welcoming me to the Twilight Zone, bet on it. Although it sure would explain the farmland and mountains. But Stapleton’s gone! It’s condo, and shops now, and ...
I’ve got sweat dripping down my arms and I absolutely want to panic. I will not! I’m not going to let myself go off the deep end. I’m too old for that. Well, my mind still is, anyway.
Motors whined as the plane’s flaps extended for the final approach. Paul let his memory range back over the last five days as he braced himself — not just for landing, but for whatever lay ahead.
Chapter Two
Five days ago, he had awakened in the darkness of his wife’s sickroom to utter and complete silence. The long, drawn-out time of her slipping away had ended. Her spirit was finally free to soar, loosed from her failing body.
Her death meant other things had to be done, other processes had to be set in motion.
By the time Moira’s body had been taken from the house, the sun was well up in the east. More chores, more calls would be necessary, but they could wait until he had gotten some real sleep in his own bed.
Equipment had to be removed from the house, various rooms had to be cleaned. Some groceries were needed. Paul had been doing little except caring for Moira, never leaving the house, for well over a week. By the evening of the second day after her death, Paul had begun to think about eating, but he still couldn’t muster the interest to actually do so. He’d had nothing except coffee since the last day he had tried to offer Moira food. She hadn’t taken any of it. Neither had he.
On the third day, he took his first mug of coffee out onto the west-facing deck. In his favorite chair, looking at the Pacific Ocean in the distance, he at last made the effort to actually deal with his pain. If nothing else, his own life was still going on. He simply couldn’t continue giving in to the depression as he had been doing.
Presuming that the steady diet of nothing but coffee for days didn’t kill him first, there were still things that absolutely had to be done. The light on the answering machine was blinking steadily, as it had been since ... was it yesterday? Or the day before? He probably had a hundred or more emails waiting, too.
He pulled a pad over by the answering machine. Phone calls were probably more important. Emails could wait. Most of all, he needed a friend to talk to, someone who could help him deal with the grief and turmoil. There was one such friend, way across the country, and he’d email her as soon as he’d taken care of all the messages that had to be waiting.
He and Angelina had settled into an email friendship years before. All those years of not being in touch, then almost as soon as she had emailed him on a whim, they grew closer than they had been way back when. Not frustrated lovers, not really. By now, simply important, close friends.
Actually, he could talk to her on the phone now. She’d invited him to once, years before, when they were still setting the boundaries for their relationship. He’d wanted to — but he also recognized that he wanted to hear her voice too much, so he had begged off. Now, he didn’t even have a phone number for her. He’d make sure to ask for it with the next email he sent. Maybe they could even see each other face-to-face now. That would go a long way toward easing his pain. No matter what else came — or didn’t come — of it.
She had been widowed two years ago. Misery, sympathy, tears, an electronic shoulder to cry on from a distance, advice — they all flowed back and forth across the miles. Both of them understood by then that what they were missing was not something that could be repaired, replaced, or regained now; they were both regretting choices made years before, choices unable to be undone. Right or wrong at the time, those choices had been made nevertheless. Time only flows one way. They could still be friends and were. He had been there for her. Now he was the one in need, and she was the one to whom he could turn.
When he was finally able to get to his email, he scanned what had come in. Those from Moira’s friends could wait. So could the ones from almost everybody he knew. Mostly he was looking for one from Angelina.
But ... among all of the ones he’d expected, there was one other, from a name he didn’t immediately recognize. The sender was Paul McBride. Where did he know that name from? The subject was Angelina Ruddick. His heart raced and then skipped a beat. He opened that email first.
Mr. Grainger: You don’t know me, and you may not know my name, but I am the son of Angelina Carson McBride Ruddick, and I understand from my mother that you and she have been friends for many years. She asked me to contact you in the event that something happened to her. There is no easy way to say this, but I am very sorry to have to tell you that she was killed in an automobile accident two days ago.
Chapter Three
The memory of his reaction to that message was still just as painful as it had been two days ago, yet he could not stop replaying it in his mind, keeping the wound open and fresh. There had been more to the message, but he had stopped reading right there. Automatically he had checked the date on the message as soon as he had read that deadly initial paragraph; it had been sent the day before. Two days before that made it the same day his wife had died. In one day, one much-too-short day, he had lost both of the women in his life.
Right then, something shriveled inside him. Today, five days after their deaths, it continued to weigh in his mind as though it were still now. After reading that paragraph, he had been immobile, unable to move. At the time, his heart continued to beat, unbidden, but only because the heartbreak could not still it. Only because his pain did not, could not stop its inexorable metronome beat. Finally the tears had begun to flow.
Even now, he still felt the anguish, the hollow at the pit of his being that he had felt then as he eventually rose from the chair and stumbled to the bar. With exquisite clarity, he remembered pouring himself a stiff Scotch. He had drained the glass in one long, throat-searing swallow. When that failed to help, he poured another. Raised it to his lips before setting it down again, untasted. He then dropped to his knees, oblivious to the shock of landing on them. Slowly, tears falling freely, he bent over, ever so slowly, until his elbows were on the floor and his face was against the carpet. He had remained huddled there, shaking with the sobs and grief, tears flowing silently and soaking the carpet, until he was completely spent. Tears for Moira, for Angelina, for himself — did it really matter?
Now — he had been taking his wife on her last flight, the one he’d dreaded ever since she had fallen ill and it had finally become clear that no recovery was going to be in sight. There would be no last-minute miracle to restore her to health. When he’d boarded the plane, between the loss of his wife and Angelina, he had no idea how he was going to go on. Truth to tell, he had had no interest in doing so. This trip had been a duty to Moira. But now ...
That ticket, that unbelievable boarding pass. How could they be correct? If they were, that would mean ...
That would mean that this was almost fifty years in the past. His past. His earlier life. Doing it all over again — while remembering close to fifty years of what seemed now to be the future!
The whole idea was utterly ridiculous.
He raised his arm and looked at it again. Twisted it this way and that, watched the skin as it moved, flexed and remained smooth. Then he bent forward slightly and regarded the guitar case. The case that now lacked the Tolkien elvish script he’d had painted on it some time ... several months from now, actually. Straightening back up, he sat very, very still.
Am I dead? Did I just drift away in my sleep? If I’m dead and on my way to Boulder, then is that heaven or hell? Or is this even real? If it’s an afterlife, then it’s one I’ve already lived, which makes no sense. As for whether it’s heaven or hell, that probably depends on whether Angelina is here or not, doesn’t it? But — Jeez! Boulder as heaven? I can’t manage that. No way. Nor hell either, come to think of it.
His mind ran on, mostly in circles. If he was here now, then what had happened to the future him that was on a plane to Hawaii, that had his carry-on with Moira’s ashes? For that matter, what had happened to those ashes? What — Whoa. Either he was really here, in which case that hadn’t happened yet and the box of ashes, like the rest of his things from then, was off in some future Never-Never Land, or he wasn’t really here, in which case he was simply dreaming.
Or maybe there were other possibilities (a padded room? Let’s hope not!), but — again he forcibly stopped himself. Unless he woke up and found he was still there, he had to figure he really was here. About to start college all over again. Or at least act that way.
Since he seemed to remember the intervening years, maybe he could avoid making some of the mistakes he’d made earlier, like flunking out and winding up in Vietnam. Like not having any idea what he was going to do with his life. Like marrying his first wife. Like not — like not making more of an effort that year with Angelina. She should be there, too.
She’s gone!, a part of his mind wailed in denial of his hope. Firmly he stopped that line of thought. He’d have to assume that she was here, just as she had been. There was simply no bearable alternative. And perhaps this time ...
Chapter Four
Boulder, Colorado. 1966. Was it really? It felt right, as far as Paul could be certain. As far as he could recall. Those were some old memories from his distant past. Well, they had been, anyway. Sure felt like the present, now. The resemblance was — no, resemblance wasn’t the right word if this really was his dim and distant past. Or should that be the dim and distant present? There ought to be a better word than resemblance, if only he could find it. The machines in the airport had looked like they had the right newspapers in them, not that he’d paid a lot of attention to them the first time around. He looked around the dormitory complex.
He had found a concrete bench on the east side of Kittredge Commons that commanded a view of the entire dormitory complex. He looked around, working at simply remembering everything that he was seeing. At least as a newly-arrived freshman, he wouldn’t be expected to be familiar with any of it. Paul could see all four of the dorms, each in glass and buff sandstone, surrounding the pair of ponds, although Arnett, the farther men’s dorm, was almost eclipsed by Andrews, the one to his immediate left, where he now lived. His gaze traveled slowly along the textured concrete walkway system around the complex. Several mallard ducks were paddling in the far pond, without a care in the world. They hadn’t just awakened almost fifty years in their past, had they? Two more nestled in the grass on the shore of the pond. For a moment, Paul envied them. No more worries than whether some student would approach them, no more concerns than food and weather. Such a simpler existence.
At some point, Paul realized that he was unconsciously, automatically, squinting against the brilliant Rocky Mountain light. The intense sunlight, which in his previous experience had been such a change from that in suburban New York where Paul had grown up, was an even greater change from coastal Oregon. For that matter, everything looked sharp and in focus compared to how his eyes had been just — Jeez! Just this morning! A bit of a wry smile that would have puzzled anyone watching crept across his face. I guess I don’t need glasses any more. Good thing, since they’re gone now, too. Everything looked just as it had when he last saw it in ... well, in May of next year. Oh, brother. If this is real, if this isn’t me already way around the bend, then the grammar alone is going to drive me crazy!
Firmly he took hold of himself. It’s way too easy to overthink this. Let’s assume it really is what it looks like. After all, if it isn’t really what it looks like, then I’m definitely a candidate for one of those jackets with the too-long sleeves that buckle in the back. Assuming I’m not in one already, that is. At some level, Paul could feel panic trying to build within him. He refused to let it. If it really is what it looks like, then I definitely have to act properly.
There’s another question. Or series of questions. Why? Why me, why now, why here?
Landing at Stapleton, retrieving his luggage and finding a way to get to Boulder — those had been comparatively easy. Significantly easier, in fact, than they had been originally, if only because age and experience had made him much more comfortable with the process of getting out of an airport and making his way to strange places, much less one that wasn’t a total unknown now. The utter lack of any sort of airport security made doing it so easy. In some ways, that, more than almost anything else, had been the critical bit of evidence of the reality of when he was. Where was simple, but when — that was the real stumbling block in his own belief.
Trying to carry a large suitcase, a good-sized carry-on and a guitar case had been a bit of a challenge. Of course if I’d been choosing my luggage, knowing what I’ve learned over the years, this damn carry-on would have been a backpack. Leave me a free hand for the guitar. No such luck here. Happily, Stapleton was close to the city center, close enough that city buses ran through on their regular routes. Paul had managed to get his load outside and figured out where the buses stopped. Arranging everything so he could actually walk, once accomplished, was easily repeated. The bus dropped him at the station downtown where the Denver-Boulder buses started out, and stowing his luggage under the bus was routine at that point.
Chapter Five
Once in Boulder, Paul had found that most of the few taxis in town were rendezvousing at the bus station this day. There were going to be plenty of fares with students coming in from all over, needing to get to wherever they were going to be living for the school year. He caught a ride to Kittredge with two other freshmen and wound up sitting in the back seat, hugging the guitar case upside-down and wedged in beside someone else’s suitcase. Nobody did much talking during the trip. That was fine with Paul. He wasn’t really in a chatty mood.
Checking in, finding his dorm room, stowing the guitar (with a quick glimpse inside the case first, just to make sure it was as he remembered it — it was), hanging up some clothes and arranging the rest — those had been simple. His roommate, just as before, had been pleasant, but Paul’s primary concern was elsewhere. By the time he was able to leave the dorm with a clear conscience, there was less than an hour until the dining hall began serving dinner. No time to go looking around.
Sitting on the bench where almost everyone coming up from the dorms would have to walk right past him, he had time to let his mind consider just what was going on. What the hell had happened? How had he slipped in time? For that matter, how had he managed to hold on to his memories? And why had it happened? Why had it happened to him?
He didn’t think he was going crazy. Had gone crazy. What does crazy feel like? How in hell would I know? The panic tried to move to the fore.
Firmly Paul stepped on it again. No matter what, acting sane couldn’t hurt. Might help. If nothing else, acting crazy definitely would not help, regardless of whether he had actually gone off the deep end or not.
His mind was still running around in circles, and he realized that he absolutely had to control it. Let’s be properly analytical here. What are the possibilities? One: I’m really here, it’s really 1966, and I’ve got the incredible golden chance to do it over again while remembering where I went wrong before. I get to do it right this time, or at least better. Not screw my life up so completely again.
Two: I’m not here, I’m somewhere else. Still on the plane? Still in bed at home, with Moira by my side? Someplace else that I don’t even know? Angrily he squeezed his eyes shut until they hurt, seeking the pain to help validate his consciousness. If I’m dreaming, I’m ready to wake up now. Nothing seemed to change. I’m waking up now, and when I look around, I’ll see the real world around me. Cautiously he opened his eyes. Nothing had changed there, either. Still Boulder. Still (presumably) 1966.
Why me? Why here, why now? How in hell can I answer that? I certainly can’t do it by rational analysis, because it just isn’t rational to begin with. I also can’t keep running around in mental circles like this.
Well, if I’m really here, what next? Obviously, classes. A major, probably a different one than before. And maybe ... dare I hope? Angelina? He looked out over the complex for several minutes, although he wasn’t really noticing anything. Do I know what I’m doing here? Obviously not! If I knew what I was doing here, I’d be a helluva lot more relaxed about all of this. At least I’m not as lost as I was the first time around. So keep on acting normally. That’s a workable choice no matter what’s going on, and face it, it’s loads better than doing something worse.
Normally! I’ve just been dumped almost fifty years in my past, my own past, with my memories, and there’s not one damn thing normal about that! Stay calm and at least pretend to be normal. Fake it until I make it. Better? I’m just one more run-of-the-mill new freshman. Yeah, right. I’m just your run-of-the-mill sixty-five-year-old teenager, about to start college. All over again. Lightly he banged his head a couple of times on the sandstone behind him. Just hard enough to hurt a little. Sort of like pinching himself. Nothing changed.
Chapter Six
At least some of the groups and associations he remembered wouldn’t have formed yet, since the students had just arrived for the new school year. Freshmen had just barely met their new roommates, as he had. Older students probably wouldn’t all have touched base yet. But whether individually or in groups, soon enough all of the students living in Kittredge would be coming up the walk with nothing more than dinner on their minds.
As he continued to watch, outwardly calm and inwardly highly agitated, he exercised all of the patience he’d learned in almost fifty more years of living than he’d had the first time around. Gradually students began to approach. He watched the girls and largely ignored the guys. None of them had really meant that much to him then, and he couldn’t imagine that was going to change. The girls, though — one here, one there. Then a couple of pairs, probably roommates, coming from Smith Hall, the closer girls’ dorm, talking quietly.
Paul spent a few moments considering the fashions. Demure dresses, skirts mostly above the knees but not that far, blouses, a few girls in jeans. Not all that many. No bare midriffs, no obviously braless girls. The weather, were it 2013, would certainly have brought out some of both, but not now. This was still the time when Paul couldn’t have gotten past the common rooms of the girls’ dorms. The girls in those dorms still got locked in at bedtime. Definitely not the world he remembered. Not the recent one, anyway.
A knot of girls coming up the walk from Buckingham. Several more singles, a number of couples. Then another knot of girls from Buckingham and he realized with a start that he knew them. Had dated a couple of them, before. Had been even more involved with one of them then. Oh, my God! That’s ...
He sat up straighter and opened his mouth to say something, but then, abruptly, he remembered that they didn’t know him from Adam at this point. He closed his mouth and slumped back against the stone wall behind him. They glanced at him as they passed, without recognition or any particular interest. He found that it hurt, at some level. Not a lot, but some. Definitely.
Some of the other students seemed familiar. As he saw them, his frustration and pain grew. There were people of both sexes who seemed familiar enough that he felt he should know them, but whom he hadn’t encountered at this point in the school year, whose names he couldn’t remember after close to fifty years. A few girls he knew he had dated once or twice, but hadn’t met yet this time around and until now, had forgotten as well. He would probably never get to know them now. Again, faces he knew but whose names he could not for the life of him recall.
Yet no matter where he looked, there was no head of bright, ash-blonde hair, loosely gathered into a lively, ever-mobile ponytail. Another stab of pain, and the heart-gripping fear that her death then meant she wouldn’t be here now. That probably wasn’t a rational thing to be thinking, but what about this was rational? Here it was 1966, and he was remembering almost fifty years of memories after this! If he was going crazy, was this how it would appear from the inside? Or was its sheer normalcy proof that it really was happening? Or — firmly he took hold of himself. Act as though it’s real, he told himself. Act calm, act rational. If it’s real, I have to. If it’s not real, well, I’ll worry about that later. No matter what’s going on, acting normally won’t make it any worse, after all. Okay? Just relax and ... and go with the flow. Whatever’s flowing.
Finally the trip down memory lane, or whatever this was, especially coupled with the constant strain of restraining the persistent near-hysteria of his mental soundtrack, became too much. Paul had had enough. More than enough. He leaned his head back against the wall and, with eyes closed, quietly began to hum the tune he’d hardly stopped listening to for days, Angelina. Students walked by, unheeding. None of them could hear; the sound of his humming wouldn’t have been audible five feet away.
Chapter Seven
A never-forgotten voice murmured quietly in his ear. “‘You and I, one heart that beats for two. What could go wrong?’ It fits, doesn’t it? I used to think I’d hate that song before long. Then I got here and figured that I’d finally gotten completely away from it. Suddenly, at least from you, it’s the sweetest thing I could possibly hear.”
He turned his head to find her sitting beside him, intently watching his face from inches away. Just as he remembered her. His eyes widened; he was momentarily paralyzed. The same intensely blue eyes, the same — just as beautiful as he remembered. Maybe more — he felt his heart skip a beat.
Then a wave of cold ran down his spine before he collected himself. “You’re here.” Oh, that’s absolutely brilliant. Jeez, Grainger, couldn’t you come up with something better to say? Something memorable? Something ... immortal?
She smiled at him, and the effect was like the sudden warmth of a spring sunrise washing over him. “We’re both here, aren’t we?”
He hesitated, spoke in a whisper. He hardly dared to hope that this was all real. If it turned out that he was actually alone, locked into a room in some sort of mental institution, he was really going to be upset.
“You remember.” His eyes widened in sudden shock. “You do remember?”
He wanted to lean towards her, to kiss her. To verify her solidity. Yet he was frozen in place, held immobile by this last shock. Frightened, almost to the point of being terrified to the very roots of his being that this wasn’t real, that it would all vanish in a great puff of smoke, or some other, equally dramatic and horribly frustrating event, if he took such a daring step. Now, when it suddenly felt as though everything had all come together for him, it would be such monstrous cruelty to lose it all like that. At some level, he truly was terrified of that possibility. Just moments after he’d wished that everything would be ‘back to normal,’ now he desperately wanted it to stay as improbable as it had seemed ever since he awakened on the plane.
Her voice was still soft, inaudible to anyone else. “Of course I do. That’s not an ancient song, is it? Il Divo sang it. How’s that for showing I remember?” She reached for his hand; he still barely dared move for fear she’d disappear into nothing like a soap bubble touched with an incautious fingertip. With a small, almost shy smile, her eyes never leaving his, she picked his hand up off the bench, turned it over and laced their fingers together. Gradually he relaxed. Partway.
Even with their hands together like that, producing a feeling of warmth and solidity that he had never experienced in any dream he could remember, still he hesitated. “And do you remember … ?”
She cocked her head. “Do I remember what? Do I remember dying? Sure. And after that as well, although we can go into that later.” She stood up, pulled his hand until he got to his feet as well. In a more normal voice, she said, “Let’s go get dinner. I’m hungry, and even the uninspired food up there” — she jerked her head towards the door — “is one of the safer things that will satisfy me. If you get my drift.” Her sly smile, her cocked head gave an intimation of something Paul had dreamed of for years. Decades. Something he had never expected to actually experience.
He brought them closer together as they walked up the stairs to the dining hall, side by side. Hand in hand, their arms brushing from time to time. Did he dare put his arm around her? He decided that he wasn’t willing to let her hand go just quite yet. “You mean ... ”
She squeezed his hand. “Yeah, I do. All of my knowledge and experience and a virginal body full of hormones. Jesus! I’d almost completely forgotten about what it felt like. Feels like.” She chuckled quietly. “Pulling you out onto the grass and having my way with you right there probably wouldn’t be the greatest idea in the world.” She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Honestly, I’m not quite ready for that yet, when I think about it rationally.”
Starting to relax, Paul chuckled. “Enjoyable, but you’re right. Hard to admit, but it probably wouldn’t be a good thing to do.” He took a pair of trays off the stack and slid one onto the rails in front of her. “People would talk. As in, ‘You’re expelled.’ Besides, after all these years, I ... I want our first time together to be very special.” She arched an eyebrow in silent question. “Like, say, a weekend at the Brown Palace. Or if that’s too close to home, maybe the Broadmoor.”
Angelina stopped in her tracks, backing up the entire line of students behind them. “That would be absolutely lovely, if either one of them will let a pair of teenagers have a room.” She kissed him on the cheek before turning back to her own tray. “When we’re ready, though. Really ready. Understand?”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Drew another one, let it out slowly. “Yeah, I think I do.” Again he hesitated; he knew that at least when they’d been emailing, she’d been a bit more straight-laced than he. Leaning closer, he spoke quietly, just above a whisper. “I — I could be ready in a half-hour or so.” He smiled in an effort to make it the joke that he had intended, but still feared he had overstepped.
With an almost-coy smile, she looked sidewise at him as she slid her tray along the rails. “Sooner than that, I’d say. I’m sure of it. You’re male. Comes with the territory.” She touched his hand and then held on for a bit longer than required. “When we’re both ready. And that’s not what I mean by ready.”
He reached over to hold her hand in place with his other one, just for a moment.
Chapter Eight
A small table in the far corner of the dining room let them put their heads close together and talk privately. Paul couldn’t tear his gaze away from her hypnotic eyes.
“You’re a lot ... calmer about this than I am.” He sat for a moment, just focusing on the rhythmic movement of his chest as he breathed. “Are we going crazy? Or is it just me?”
She shook her head minutely, then tilted it slightly. “No, we’re not, either one of us. This is all real. I knew what was happening, though, so I had a chance to get used to it. And I made a choice.”
Paul went through a momentary roller coaster of emotion. This was real? He could really live his life over again? Actually be with Angelina? His eyes widened as he realized that yes, that was exactly what was happening.
“A choice? What do you mean, a choice? What sort of choice?” Fearing his voice had gotten too loud, he glanced around, but nobody was paying any attention to them.
Angelina looked down at her plate, not meeting his stare and keeping her voice so low he had to strain to hear her. “When I died, I was ... met. I don’t know who it was, but it was some powerful ... being. I said I wanted to be with you. Wait for you. Or go back and be with you from ... from now. He asked me which I’d choose. I said I wanted to be here, with you, but with our memories, so we wouldn’t make the same mistakes we made in the past. In our past. Pasts.” She pushed her food around on her plate aimlessly. “There’s a — a price. We don’t have all of our memories. We don’t get any head starts in life. But we definitely remember enough to know the bigger mistakes we’d made before. That was the price we’d pay if I took that road.” Cautiously she looked up.
Paul was almost speechless. “He? Someone? Who? Jesus? God?”
She looked him in the eye and shook her head. “I really have no idea who it was. Jesus, God, my guardian angel — whoever. I asked, I really did. The only response was no reply, like I hadn’t asked at all. I got an impression that he was male, but not a strong one. Could have been female, I suppose. Could have been ... above all that. But look at this.” She waved her arm to indicate the room around them. “Whoever it was had the power to do this. Or get this done. I’m sorry I couldn’t ask you first, but — you do remember saying that you’d make a wish like this if you knew a genie, don’t you?”
Several boys came to sit at a neighboring table. They looked at both Paul and Angelina briefly, then mostly ignored them. One stared openly at Angelina, until a brief glare from her had him turn back to his friends.
Paul was nodding slowly, his food forgotten. “Yeah, I remember.” He looked up, said nothing at first.
Worry lines creased Angelina’s forehead. “Should I have just ... waited? Gone on? Was this the right thing for me to do? The right choice to make?” One eye glistened as a tear started to form in it. “Almost as soon as we began ... as we got in contact again, I started wishing I’d grown old with you. I just thought maybe now I could. We could. I never wanted — ”
“No!” In his haste, he spoke loud enough that the guys at the nearby table looked over, but when he didn’t follow up, they returned their attention to their own dinners. Paul took her hands in his own. Quietly, he continued. “No, no. I said I’d make that wish, and I meant it. I still do. I wanted to have grown old with you, too. I still do. I just — Oh, Jesus. It’s really happening.” He took a deep breath, let it out in a shudder. Shook his head sharply. “Well, that answers a bunch of questions. Ever since I woke up ... like this, I’ve been wondering what’s going on, how and why. Most especially why. Why here, why now, why me.”
“Yeah. Me, too. That ‘it’s really happening’ feeling, I mean. Oh, my God. I have to admit that I really never expected it to come true. But I said this was my choice, and this is what we got.” She looked around the room before returning her attention to him. “We’re missing some memories, you know. Like — remember those little music players? They’d fit into a pocket, and you’d listen on those little ear thingies?”
“Oh, sure. They were called ... I had one with me on the plane. When I got on, I mean. I listened to that song on it. They were ... Damn. I can’t remember.”
She nodded. “That’s what I was saying. No head starts. Nothing that would tell us what company to invest in, or what lottery numbers to play, or anything like that. We still have to make our way the same way we did before. Or find a new way, our own way. But I sure remember my marriages. That’s the sort of thing we got to keep.”
Chapter Nine
Paul put his elbows on the table, folded his hands, and rested his chin on them. With a slight smile, he looked at her, just appreciating the view.
“Is he here?” Paul remembered what Angelina had told him, years before, about her first husband. How she’d been taken advantage of. How good-looking he’d been.
Shaking her head sharply, she said, “No idea. He didn’t live here. I think he was on the other side of campus this year. He can stay there for all of me. Your first wife?”
Paul shook his head in turn. “I didn’t meet her here. And I’ve no intention of meeting her at all, this time around.” He reached across the table as she extended her hand to meet his. Their fingers intertwined. “Can we — do you think we can do this?”
“Do you want to try?”
“With all my heart.” He could feel the sudden pounding in his chest as his heart was suddenly beating so strongly that he wondered if she could hear it.
“Me, too. No guarantees, but it sounds like a great plan to me.”
Paul smiled at her before setting their rolls aside. She raised an eyebrow in question. “The ducks. Remember?”
A small smile from her. “The ducks. Yes, absolutely. That was one of the things I used to love doing with you.”
“Just used to?”
The smile remained. “Well, you were gone the next year. I fed them a couple of times, but it wasn’t the same alone. I — I never wanted to do it with anyone else, so I quit.”
“Then we’ll have to do it again. Over again. Starting now. And what was that you said to me at first? Something about you and me?”
“The first lines of the song. ‘You and I, one heart that beats for two. What could go wrong?’ Angelina. Some of the translation strikes me as a bit odd, but that part is lovely. I’d — I’d like to see if we can make it work that way.”
God, I could lose myself in those eyes. “Me, too. That song always made me think of you, every time I heard it. I just never understood what they were singing. The language didn’t quite sound like anything I recognized.”
She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “That’s because they were singing in Spanish. Real Spanish, Castilian Spanish. If you speak Mexican Spanish, you can understand a lot of it, but over and above the slightly different vocabulary, the accent’s way different. It sounds sort of like you’re hearing someone speaking with a serious lisp.”
Fighting the urge to use the back of his hand, Paul wiped his own lips with his napkin. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
Angelina stood up. “Mama’s from Spain, a little ways outside of Madrid. Papa’s American, but he’s a scholar of Iberian history and literature. Mama’s a linguist and dialectician, primarily in Spanish. They met right after the war, when Papa was spending a year at the Universidad de Madrid. They always chattered back and forth in English and Castilian as I was growing up. Sometimes they’d switch back and forth repeatedly in one conversation.”
Chapter Ten
“If you break that into smaller pieces, it’ll go farther,” Angelina said.
Paul glanced at the remains of the dinner roll in his hand. He only had enough for two or three more pieces. “Does it matter?”
Angelina’s delighted laughter at the antics of the birds clustering around diverted him from any real concern about the bread. “Hey! Stop that! No fighting, I’ll see you all get some.” Most of the ducks were clustered around her where the two of them were sitting on the grass by the upper pond. A couple of birds at the back of the press kept an eye on Paul, hoping for a bigger piece from him. She broke off another little piece and tossed it over the flock to one smaller duck that was holding back.
“Angelina, I love — ”
“Don’t!” The single word was spoken loudly, explosively. It startled him, but she merely looked around to see if anyone were near enough to hear more than that one word. If it had been heard, it wouldn’t have raised any suspicions in anyone else, sitting apart as they were. The birds all jumped, but when nothing more came, they resumed crowding in. Satisfied of their privacy, Angelina continued in a quieter tone. “I understand, Paul. There’s a part of me that wants to say it, too. All gloves are off now, all those boundaries we had to observe for years are down. But — when we met here, the first time around, we were eighteen years old. The last time we saw each other we were, um, what, twenty? Twenty-one?” She looked around again, but there was still nobody near. “For all practical purposes, we’ve lived more than three times that long now, and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge in that time. For both of us. Even with all of the emails, in some ways we’re more strangers to each other now than we were then. I want us to know each other better before we proclaim that sort of feeling for each other.” She whipped her head back to the front as she felt the sudden tug at her fingers.
“Hey! Thief!” A particularly daring duck stood about three feet from her, trying to choke down the entire remaining piece of roll that Angelina had still held until the bird had closed in to snatch it from her hand while she was distracted. Three other ducks tried to crowd in for a share, shying back as she dusted her hands, then the entire flock scattered as the two of them stood up. She reached for his hand and, facing him, looked intently into his eyes.
“Don’t worry.” Her tone was soothing. “I still have every bit of those feelings for you that we never spoke of. That we didn’t dare speak of, even though we both knew we had them. I just — I’ve been hurt in the past, badly, by someone who claimed to love me.” She shook her head sharply. “I don’t for a moment think that you’d do anything like that. But ... let’s just take our time, okay? Together.” She shook their joined hands in emphasis. “There is nobody else and I don’t want there to be. When it’s said, though, I want it to be special. More special, that is, because by now it would always be special to me, coming from you.”
Paul’s face showed a wry smile. “Okay, I’ll try. Any idea how long it’ll take?”
She turned to him and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “No. No fixed time limits. We’ll both know when it’s right. Until then — ” She turned to walk, pulling him along. “We’ll just have to hold our impulses back.” Hand in hand, they began walking towards her dorm. A few minutes later, she asked, “How about the guitar?”
Paul looked at her sideways. “Hm? It’s back in my room.”
“Are you going to bring it out and play it again?”
Paul shook his head. “I don’t know that I can. I haven’t touched a guitar in more than thirty years. Even if I can muster the muscle memory to remember how to play, most of the music I know now hasn’t even been written yet.”
“Betcha you can remember how to play. There are also a couple of places I know where we can even sing the ones that nobody else has heard yet.”
He looked at her, not quite frowning. “You know about those rooms upstairs in — ”
She gave him a not-quite coy smile. “I was here before, too. I, um, had some experiences.” He shook his head as they continued.
A few steps later she asked, “What if I hadn’t had my memories? What would you have done?”
Paul shrugged. “Come looking for you, I guess. Then ... then I’d have tried very hard to strike up a conversation, start some sort of relationship. It would have been a lot harder.”
She had a wry expression. “Yes, it would have been. At that point, I wasn’t really up for the sort of relationship I hope we’re going to develop here.” She favored him with her most dazzling smile. “At the very least, though, I would have thought you were awfully sweet. Who knows? A nice, mature fellow like you? Might’ve succeeded.”
Paul smiled in return.
Chapter Eleven
They met each day for breakfast and then spent the day together. They signed up for the same freshman classes, so their schedules coincided. Late afternoon study sessions usually meant checking each other’s assignments. As long as it was warm, evenings were spent outside on the grass. Otherwise they’d be sitting in the common room of one dorm or the other, or, especially as it began getting dark earlier, hiding away somewhere, playing music that wouldn’t be written for years.
This was still a time when the girls’ dorms were completely man-free, outside of the common rooms, but the two of them adjusted quickly. A lot of their time was spent talking, catching up on their prior lives. Gradually the other students in the complex, especially the ones in Buckingham, Angelina’s dormitory, came to understand that the two of them were an item. It took mere days more for them to understand that Paul and Angelina didn’t quite fit the mold of immature teenagers. Once that got around, they found themselves being sought out for their counsel and advice, more so in many cases than the Sophomore Advisors and Resident Advisors in the dorm. It was freely given.
Several weeks into the semester they were sitting on the grass by the pond during an unseasonably warm afternoon, Paul with his guitar and Angelina sitting close by, mostly listening to his efforts to remember a not-so-old tune.
“You once told me there were two girls you regretted never waking up next to. Who was the other?”
Paul stopped trying to puzzle out the tune. “Are you sure you want to know?”
She cocked her head. “Is it a then thing or a now thing?”
Paul shook his head to emphasize his point as he checked the tuning of one string. “Definitely a then thing. There’s nothing there now.” He looked directly at her. “You’re the only woman I want to be with.”
“Then why not tell me who?”
He took a deep breath. “You probably don’t know her. Her name’s Joan Vincent.”
Angelina’s eyes widened. “Joanie Vincent? Really?” She snickered. “Oh, I know her, all right. She’s the Sophomore Advisor on my floor. Have you met her this time?”
Paul snorted. “Not likely. Last time around I was out at Timber Tavern the very first night, getting as plowed as I could on the stuff they call beer, and she was there with a group of her friends. The guy I was with, the only other guy here from my prep school class, went over to talk to them and she came to sit with me. This time you and I were together that night, and I’ve no interest in going out and drinking like that now.”
“So you haven’t met her this time.”
“Nope.” He rechecked the tuning on the rest of the guitar strings.
“Well, you’re about to. Here she comes.”
“Huh?” His head turned. “Oh, shit!” he muttered quietly.
“Hi, Angelina. Would you introduce me to your friend? I’ve seen the two of you out here almost every day, and he seems to be quite the accomplished player.”
Awkwardly because of the instrument, Paul scrambled to his feet.
Angelina smiled. “Of course. Joanie, this is Paul Grainger. Paul, Joan Vincent, my Sophomore Advisor.” A twinkle in her eyes suggested that she was enjoying watching him squirm, just a bit. Or maybe she was just assessing his reaction in light of his earlier statement.
Paul swallowed. His momentary hesitation was hardly apparent to anyone other than himself and Angelina. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Joan. Do you play?” Mentally he kicked himself; he knew damn well she didn’t.
The conversation was brief. Joan indicated how much she enjoyed the little she had heard of his playing. Paul downplayed his ability as much as he dared. Finally she was gone and he breathed a sigh of relief as he sat back down.
“I thought you handled that very well.” Angelina wasn’t grinning. Quite.
Paul put his hands flat on the side of his guitar and let his chin rest on top of them as he looked off into the distance while Angelina let him think. “It wasn’t easy. I know enough about her that I had to keep hidden, but I thought I did well enough.”
She touched his cheek. “You did. Now that you’ve actually faced her and spoken with her, is there still anything there?”
Lifting his chin, he shook his head slowly. “No, not really. It’s ... interesting. I still remember how I felt then, and I can tell how I feel now. Very differently. I mean, there’s something there, but it’s just a distant and faint regret.” He squeezed her hand. “There’s nothing significant there now beyond, well, beyond my own nerves. Not that they’re inconsiderable ... ” His voice trailed off.
Angelina smiled. “I understand. I’ve seen a couple of guys I dated before. You’re right, it’s a most ... interesting sort of feeling.” She gave his hand an answering squeeze. “Now there’s just you. I’m quite satisfied. More than satisfied.”
Paul shuffled toward the ticket counter, maintaining his place in line. He gave a momentary acknowledgment to the idea that he could have gotten a first-class ticket, been able to avoid the line and have a roomier seat, but only for a brief instant, because really, he didn’t care. He didn’t care about much of anything now.
The bag at his feet didn’t contain a lot. Some basic toiletries, a change of clothes and two changes of underwear, his iPod — and the box containing his wife Moira’s ashes, which she’d wanted to have scattered in the sea off Hawaii. He’d do that. It was the last thing he could do for the woman he’d loved for years.
One of the two women.
The other was his best friend, at least by email, other than Moira. He and Angelina had dated some during their freshman year of college, decades earlier. They’d corresponded over the next couple of years while he was in the army, then lost touch with each other until a fortuitous reconnection via email a few years ago. Much too far apart to see each other, they remained long-distance friends and became very close over the years and across the miles.
She was gone now, too, killed in an accident on the same day as he’d lost Moira. It had easily been the worst day of his life. His face was utterly expressionless, all of his anguish and despair securely bottled up inside. When he reached the counter, he produced his e-ticket and tucked the second copy, in case it was needed for his return trip, back into the pocket of his bag. He didn’t care if he came back; he had nothing to come back to, now. Nothing at all. The thought of returning to that empty house left him utterly unmoved. What was going to happen in the future was not even a question in his mind.
When boarding was finally announced, once again he took a place in line and shuffled along until he could finally claim his seat. He dug out his iPod and stowed his bag in the overhead compartment.
After the plane reached cruising altitude, he listened to one tune on the iPod, then put it away. One cup of coffee, then he reclined his seat a bit and dropped off.
Paul didn’t sleep well on airplanes. This time, his sleep was bothered by a dream in which Moira and Angelina were jumbled together.
Normally, sleep had been the only time in the last five days when he hadn’t been in pain. Not physical pain; for that, he could have taken something. No, this was a pain deep in his heart. A pain that made his very soul weep. Losses in combination so painful that he could not escape them in any waking moment. Despite his outward expression, he wasn’t unemotional. Quite the contrary. He felt these losses more deeply than he could ever remember feeling anything before. Pain throughout his being, but keeping it bottled up, contained and away from view was the only way he could avert a total meltdown.
Now, though, he couldn’t escape his pain even in his sleep.
A gentle hand shook his shoulder. “Sir, you need to put your tray table up for landing.” Paul’s eyelids opened momentarily and then slammed shut again. Tears were welling in his eyes and he refused to let them be seen. He fumbled his tray table up, out of the way, eyes still closed, and then turned his head so he could look out the window as he wiped them surreptitiously. Farmland to the side as far as the eye could see, while off in the distance ahead of the plane, a mountain range loomed blue-gray out of the haze. Everything looked so quiet and peaceful.
Suddenly his eyes widened. Land? Mountains? I’m on a non-stop flight from San Francisco to Honolulu! Ocean! Islands! More ocean! There’s no mountain range or farmland like that anywhere near Hawaii! What in the hell is going on? Where am I?
He closed his eyes for several moments, willing himself back to reality, then opened them again. Farmland and mountains, just as before. He pushed his head back into the headrest and stared, unseeing, at the bulkhead before him. This is crazy. Absolutely, totally crazy. I’m on my way to Hawaii. I got on the right plane. I put the carry-on with Moira’s ashes right above me. I know I did. The only things I should be seeing are either Oahu or open ocean. Maybe one of the other islands. That’s it!
Firmly he stepped on his rising panic. Going off the deep end wouldn’t solve anything. Remain calm, don’t lose it. There’s got to be a rational explanation for this. Or at least some sort of explanation, even if it’s not rational.
An old-fashioned paper ticket wallet was sticking halfway out of the pocket on the bulkhead to his front. As he reached for it, his gaze fell on his arm. That’s not my arm! My arm has a big scab right there, purple marks all around it and a couple of good-sized scars! And I don’t wear a watch! He twisted the arm experimentally. The skin remained smooth instead of developing the crepe-paper pattern of ridges he’d gotten so familiar with in recent years.
Panic again tried to grow inside him. He struggled with it, refusing to let it take over. As sanity, or at least the appearance of sanity, finally prevailed, he tried to stretch out his legs, only to find that something was keeping them contained. He looked down to see a guitar case at his feet. Where did that come from? Can you even take one on an airplane any more? Anyway, I haven’t played the guitar in almost forty years! He ran his left thumb across the fingertips on that hand and felt the calluses.
Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When that didn’t work, he tried again. Finally he opened his eyes and took a look at the boarding pass in the wallet. Froze.
If that slip of paper was to be believed, this flight was about to land at Stapleton Airport in Denver. In 1966! He was on his way to college again! He closed his eyes.
What the hell happened to Hawaii? And to my life? I’m about to hear a voice welcoming me to the Twilight Zone, bet on it. Although it sure would explain the farmland and mountains. But Stapleton’s gone! It’s condo, and shops now, and ...
I’ve got sweat dripping down my arms and I absolutely want to panic. I will not! I’m not going to let myself go off the deep end. I’m too old for that. Well, my mind still is, anyway.
Motors whined as the plane’s flaps extended for the final approach. Paul let his memory range back over the last five days as he braced himself — not just for landing, but for whatever lay ahead.
Chapter Two
Five days ago, he had awakened in the darkness of his wife’s sickroom to utter and complete silence. The long, drawn-out time of her slipping away had ended. Her spirit was finally free to soar, loosed from her failing body.
Her death meant other things had to be done, other processes had to be set in motion.
By the time Moira’s body had been taken from the house, the sun was well up in the east. More chores, more calls would be necessary, but they could wait until he had gotten some real sleep in his own bed.
Equipment had to be removed from the house, various rooms had to be cleaned. Some groceries were needed. Paul had been doing little except caring for Moira, never leaving the house, for well over a week. By the evening of the second day after her death, Paul had begun to think about eating, but he still couldn’t muster the interest to actually do so. He’d had nothing except coffee since the last day he had tried to offer Moira food. She hadn’t taken any of it. Neither had he.
On the third day, he took his first mug of coffee out onto the west-facing deck. In his favorite chair, looking at the Pacific Ocean in the distance, he at last made the effort to actually deal with his pain. If nothing else, his own life was still going on. He simply couldn’t continue giving in to the depression as he had been doing.
Presuming that the steady diet of nothing but coffee for days didn’t kill him first, there were still things that absolutely had to be done. The light on the answering machine was blinking steadily, as it had been since ... was it yesterday? Or the day before? He probably had a hundred or more emails waiting, too.
He pulled a pad over by the answering machine. Phone calls were probably more important. Emails could wait. Most of all, he needed a friend to talk to, someone who could help him deal with the grief and turmoil. There was one such friend, way across the country, and he’d email her as soon as he’d taken care of all the messages that had to be waiting.
He and Angelina had settled into an email friendship years before. All those years of not being in touch, then almost as soon as she had emailed him on a whim, they grew closer than they had been way back when. Not frustrated lovers, not really. By now, simply important, close friends.
Actually, he could talk to her on the phone now. She’d invited him to once, years before, when they were still setting the boundaries for their relationship. He’d wanted to — but he also recognized that he wanted to hear her voice too much, so he had begged off. Now, he didn’t even have a phone number for her. He’d make sure to ask for it with the next email he sent. Maybe they could even see each other face-to-face now. That would go a long way toward easing his pain. No matter what else came — or didn’t come — of it.
She had been widowed two years ago. Misery, sympathy, tears, an electronic shoulder to cry on from a distance, advice — they all flowed back and forth across the miles. Both of them understood by then that what they were missing was not something that could be repaired, replaced, or regained now; they were both regretting choices made years before, choices unable to be undone. Right or wrong at the time, those choices had been made nevertheless. Time only flows one way. They could still be friends and were. He had been there for her. Now he was the one in need, and she was the one to whom he could turn.
When he was finally able to get to his email, he scanned what had come in. Those from Moira’s friends could wait. So could the ones from almost everybody he knew. Mostly he was looking for one from Angelina.
But ... among all of the ones he’d expected, there was one other, from a name he didn’t immediately recognize. The sender was Paul McBride. Where did he know that name from? The subject was Angelina Ruddick. His heart raced and then skipped a beat. He opened that email first.
Mr. Grainger: You don’t know me, and you may not know my name, but I am the son of Angelina Carson McBride Ruddick, and I understand from my mother that you and she have been friends for many years. She asked me to contact you in the event that something happened to her. There is no easy way to say this, but I am very sorry to have to tell you that she was killed in an automobile accident two days ago.
Chapter Three
The memory of his reaction to that message was still just as painful as it had been two days ago, yet he could not stop replaying it in his mind, keeping the wound open and fresh. There had been more to the message, but he had stopped reading right there. Automatically he had checked the date on the message as soon as he had read that deadly initial paragraph; it had been sent the day before. Two days before that made it the same day his wife had died. In one day, one much-too-short day, he had lost both of the women in his life.
Right then, something shriveled inside him. Today, five days after their deaths, it continued to weigh in his mind as though it were still now. After reading that paragraph, he had been immobile, unable to move. At the time, his heart continued to beat, unbidden, but only because the heartbreak could not still it. Only because his pain did not, could not stop its inexorable metronome beat. Finally the tears had begun to flow.
Even now, he still felt the anguish, the hollow at the pit of his being that he had felt then as he eventually rose from the chair and stumbled to the bar. With exquisite clarity, he remembered pouring himself a stiff Scotch. He had drained the glass in one long, throat-searing swallow. When that failed to help, he poured another. Raised it to his lips before setting it down again, untasted. He then dropped to his knees, oblivious to the shock of landing on them. Slowly, tears falling freely, he bent over, ever so slowly, until his elbows were on the floor and his face was against the carpet. He had remained huddled there, shaking with the sobs and grief, tears flowing silently and soaking the carpet, until he was completely spent. Tears for Moira, for Angelina, for himself — did it really matter?
Now — he had been taking his wife on her last flight, the one he’d dreaded ever since she had fallen ill and it had finally become clear that no recovery was going to be in sight. There would be no last-minute miracle to restore her to health. When he’d boarded the plane, between the loss of his wife and Angelina, he had no idea how he was going to go on. Truth to tell, he had had no interest in doing so. This trip had been a duty to Moira. But now ...
That ticket, that unbelievable boarding pass. How could they be correct? If they were, that would mean ...
That would mean that this was almost fifty years in the past. His past. His earlier life. Doing it all over again — while remembering close to fifty years of what seemed now to be the future!
The whole idea was utterly ridiculous.
He raised his arm and looked at it again. Twisted it this way and that, watched the skin as it moved, flexed and remained smooth. Then he bent forward slightly and regarded the guitar case. The case that now lacked the Tolkien elvish script he’d had painted on it some time ... several months from now, actually. Straightening back up, he sat very, very still.
Am I dead? Did I just drift away in my sleep? If I’m dead and on my way to Boulder, then is that heaven or hell? Or is this even real? If it’s an afterlife, then it’s one I’ve already lived, which makes no sense. As for whether it’s heaven or hell, that probably depends on whether Angelina is here or not, doesn’t it? But — Jeez! Boulder as heaven? I can’t manage that. No way. Nor hell either, come to think of it.
His mind ran on, mostly in circles. If he was here now, then what had happened to the future him that was on a plane to Hawaii, that had his carry-on with Moira’s ashes? For that matter, what had happened to those ashes? What — Whoa. Either he was really here, in which case that hadn’t happened yet and the box of ashes, like the rest of his things from then, was off in some future Never-Never Land, or he wasn’t really here, in which case he was simply dreaming.
Or maybe there were other possibilities (a padded room? Let’s hope not!), but — again he forcibly stopped himself. Unless he woke up and found he was still there, he had to figure he really was here. About to start college all over again. Or at least act that way.
Since he seemed to remember the intervening years, maybe he could avoid making some of the mistakes he’d made earlier, like flunking out and winding up in Vietnam. Like not having any idea what he was going to do with his life. Like marrying his first wife. Like not — like not making more of an effort that year with Angelina. She should be there, too.
She’s gone!, a part of his mind wailed in denial of his hope. Firmly he stopped that line of thought. He’d have to assume that she was here, just as she had been. There was simply no bearable alternative. And perhaps this time ...
Chapter Four
Boulder, Colorado. 1966. Was it really? It felt right, as far as Paul could be certain. As far as he could recall. Those were some old memories from his distant past. Well, they had been, anyway. Sure felt like the present, now. The resemblance was — no, resemblance wasn’t the right word if this really was his dim and distant past. Or should that be the dim and distant present? There ought to be a better word than resemblance, if only he could find it. The machines in the airport had looked like they had the right newspapers in them, not that he’d paid a lot of attention to them the first time around. He looked around the dormitory complex.
He had found a concrete bench on the east side of Kittredge Commons that commanded a view of the entire dormitory complex. He looked around, working at simply remembering everything that he was seeing. At least as a newly-arrived freshman, he wouldn’t be expected to be familiar with any of it. Paul could see all four of the dorms, each in glass and buff sandstone, surrounding the pair of ponds, although Arnett, the farther men’s dorm, was almost eclipsed by Andrews, the one to his immediate left, where he now lived. His gaze traveled slowly along the textured concrete walkway system around the complex. Several mallard ducks were paddling in the far pond, without a care in the world. They hadn’t just awakened almost fifty years in their past, had they? Two more nestled in the grass on the shore of the pond. For a moment, Paul envied them. No more worries than whether some student would approach them, no more concerns than food and weather. Such a simpler existence.
At some point, Paul realized that he was unconsciously, automatically, squinting against the brilliant Rocky Mountain light. The intense sunlight, which in his previous experience had been such a change from that in suburban New York where Paul had grown up, was an even greater change from coastal Oregon. For that matter, everything looked sharp and in focus compared to how his eyes had been just — Jeez! Just this morning! A bit of a wry smile that would have puzzled anyone watching crept across his face. I guess I don’t need glasses any more. Good thing, since they’re gone now, too. Everything looked just as it had when he last saw it in ... well, in May of next year. Oh, brother. If this is real, if this isn’t me already way around the bend, then the grammar alone is going to drive me crazy!
Firmly he took hold of himself. It’s way too easy to overthink this. Let’s assume it really is what it looks like. After all, if it isn’t really what it looks like, then I’m definitely a candidate for one of those jackets with the too-long sleeves that buckle in the back. Assuming I’m not in one already, that is. At some level, Paul could feel panic trying to build within him. He refused to let it. If it really is what it looks like, then I definitely have to act properly.
There’s another question. Or series of questions. Why? Why me, why now, why here?
Landing at Stapleton, retrieving his luggage and finding a way to get to Boulder — those had been comparatively easy. Significantly easier, in fact, than they had been originally, if only because age and experience had made him much more comfortable with the process of getting out of an airport and making his way to strange places, much less one that wasn’t a total unknown now. The utter lack of any sort of airport security made doing it so easy. In some ways, that, more than almost anything else, had been the critical bit of evidence of the reality of when he was. Where was simple, but when — that was the real stumbling block in his own belief.
Trying to carry a large suitcase, a good-sized carry-on and a guitar case had been a bit of a challenge. Of course if I’d been choosing my luggage, knowing what I’ve learned over the years, this damn carry-on would have been a backpack. Leave me a free hand for the guitar. No such luck here. Happily, Stapleton was close to the city center, close enough that city buses ran through on their regular routes. Paul had managed to get his load outside and figured out where the buses stopped. Arranging everything so he could actually walk, once accomplished, was easily repeated. The bus dropped him at the station downtown where the Denver-Boulder buses started out, and stowing his luggage under the bus was routine at that point.
Chapter Five
Once in Boulder, Paul had found that most of the few taxis in town were rendezvousing at the bus station this day. There were going to be plenty of fares with students coming in from all over, needing to get to wherever they were going to be living for the school year. He caught a ride to Kittredge with two other freshmen and wound up sitting in the back seat, hugging the guitar case upside-down and wedged in beside someone else’s suitcase. Nobody did much talking during the trip. That was fine with Paul. He wasn’t really in a chatty mood.
Checking in, finding his dorm room, stowing the guitar (with a quick glimpse inside the case first, just to make sure it was as he remembered it — it was), hanging up some clothes and arranging the rest — those had been simple. His roommate, just as before, had been pleasant, but Paul’s primary concern was elsewhere. By the time he was able to leave the dorm with a clear conscience, there was less than an hour until the dining hall began serving dinner. No time to go looking around.
Sitting on the bench where almost everyone coming up from the dorms would have to walk right past him, he had time to let his mind consider just what was going on. What the hell had happened? How had he slipped in time? For that matter, how had he managed to hold on to his memories? And why had it happened? Why had it happened to him?
He didn’t think he was going crazy. Had gone crazy. What does crazy feel like? How in hell would I know? The panic tried to move to the fore.
Firmly Paul stepped on it again. No matter what, acting sane couldn’t hurt. Might help. If nothing else, acting crazy definitely would not help, regardless of whether he had actually gone off the deep end or not.
His mind was still running around in circles, and he realized that he absolutely had to control it. Let’s be properly analytical here. What are the possibilities? One: I’m really here, it’s really 1966, and I’ve got the incredible golden chance to do it over again while remembering where I went wrong before. I get to do it right this time, or at least better. Not screw my life up so completely again.
Two: I’m not here, I’m somewhere else. Still on the plane? Still in bed at home, with Moira by my side? Someplace else that I don’t even know? Angrily he squeezed his eyes shut until they hurt, seeking the pain to help validate his consciousness. If I’m dreaming, I’m ready to wake up now. Nothing seemed to change. I’m waking up now, and when I look around, I’ll see the real world around me. Cautiously he opened his eyes. Nothing had changed there, either. Still Boulder. Still (presumably) 1966.
Why me? Why here, why now? How in hell can I answer that? I certainly can’t do it by rational analysis, because it just isn’t rational to begin with. I also can’t keep running around in mental circles like this.
Well, if I’m really here, what next? Obviously, classes. A major, probably a different one than before. And maybe ... dare I hope? Angelina? He looked out over the complex for several minutes, although he wasn’t really noticing anything. Do I know what I’m doing here? Obviously not! If I knew what I was doing here, I’d be a helluva lot more relaxed about all of this. At least I’m not as lost as I was the first time around. So keep on acting normally. That’s a workable choice no matter what’s going on, and face it, it’s loads better than doing something worse.
Normally! I’ve just been dumped almost fifty years in my past, my own past, with my memories, and there’s not one damn thing normal about that! Stay calm and at least pretend to be normal. Fake it until I make it. Better? I’m just one more run-of-the-mill new freshman. Yeah, right. I’m just your run-of-the-mill sixty-five-year-old teenager, about to start college. All over again. Lightly he banged his head a couple of times on the sandstone behind him. Just hard enough to hurt a little. Sort of like pinching himself. Nothing changed.
Chapter Six
At least some of the groups and associations he remembered wouldn’t have formed yet, since the students had just arrived for the new school year. Freshmen had just barely met their new roommates, as he had. Older students probably wouldn’t all have touched base yet. But whether individually or in groups, soon enough all of the students living in Kittredge would be coming up the walk with nothing more than dinner on their minds.
As he continued to watch, outwardly calm and inwardly highly agitated, he exercised all of the patience he’d learned in almost fifty more years of living than he’d had the first time around. Gradually students began to approach. He watched the girls and largely ignored the guys. None of them had really meant that much to him then, and he couldn’t imagine that was going to change. The girls, though — one here, one there. Then a couple of pairs, probably roommates, coming from Smith Hall, the closer girls’ dorm, talking quietly.
Paul spent a few moments considering the fashions. Demure dresses, skirts mostly above the knees but not that far, blouses, a few girls in jeans. Not all that many. No bare midriffs, no obviously braless girls. The weather, were it 2013, would certainly have brought out some of both, but not now. This was still the time when Paul couldn’t have gotten past the common rooms of the girls’ dorms. The girls in those dorms still got locked in at bedtime. Definitely not the world he remembered. Not the recent one, anyway.
A knot of girls coming up the walk from Buckingham. Several more singles, a number of couples. Then another knot of girls from Buckingham and he realized with a start that he knew them. Had dated a couple of them, before. Had been even more involved with one of them then. Oh, my God! That’s ...
He sat up straighter and opened his mouth to say something, but then, abruptly, he remembered that they didn’t know him from Adam at this point. He closed his mouth and slumped back against the stone wall behind him. They glanced at him as they passed, without recognition or any particular interest. He found that it hurt, at some level. Not a lot, but some. Definitely.
Some of the other students seemed familiar. As he saw them, his frustration and pain grew. There were people of both sexes who seemed familiar enough that he felt he should know them, but whom he hadn’t encountered at this point in the school year, whose names he couldn’t remember after close to fifty years. A few girls he knew he had dated once or twice, but hadn’t met yet this time around and until now, had forgotten as well. He would probably never get to know them now. Again, faces he knew but whose names he could not for the life of him recall.
Yet no matter where he looked, there was no head of bright, ash-blonde hair, loosely gathered into a lively, ever-mobile ponytail. Another stab of pain, and the heart-gripping fear that her death then meant she wouldn’t be here now. That probably wasn’t a rational thing to be thinking, but what about this was rational? Here it was 1966, and he was remembering almost fifty years of memories after this! If he was going crazy, was this how it would appear from the inside? Or was its sheer normalcy proof that it really was happening? Or — firmly he took hold of himself. Act as though it’s real, he told himself. Act calm, act rational. If it’s real, I have to. If it’s not real, well, I’ll worry about that later. No matter what’s going on, acting normally won’t make it any worse, after all. Okay? Just relax and ... and go with the flow. Whatever’s flowing.
Finally the trip down memory lane, or whatever this was, especially coupled with the constant strain of restraining the persistent near-hysteria of his mental soundtrack, became too much. Paul had had enough. More than enough. He leaned his head back against the wall and, with eyes closed, quietly began to hum the tune he’d hardly stopped listening to for days, Angelina. Students walked by, unheeding. None of them could hear; the sound of his humming wouldn’t have been audible five feet away.
Chapter Seven
A never-forgotten voice murmured quietly in his ear. “‘You and I, one heart that beats for two. What could go wrong?’ It fits, doesn’t it? I used to think I’d hate that song before long. Then I got here and figured that I’d finally gotten completely away from it. Suddenly, at least from you, it’s the sweetest thing I could possibly hear.”
He turned his head to find her sitting beside him, intently watching his face from inches away. Just as he remembered her. His eyes widened; he was momentarily paralyzed. The same intensely blue eyes, the same — just as beautiful as he remembered. Maybe more — he felt his heart skip a beat.
Then a wave of cold ran down his spine before he collected himself. “You’re here.” Oh, that’s absolutely brilliant. Jeez, Grainger, couldn’t you come up with something better to say? Something memorable? Something ... immortal?
She smiled at him, and the effect was like the sudden warmth of a spring sunrise washing over him. “We’re both here, aren’t we?”
He hesitated, spoke in a whisper. He hardly dared to hope that this was all real. If it turned out that he was actually alone, locked into a room in some sort of mental institution, he was really going to be upset.
“You remember.” His eyes widened in sudden shock. “You do remember?”
He wanted to lean towards her, to kiss her. To verify her solidity. Yet he was frozen in place, held immobile by this last shock. Frightened, almost to the point of being terrified to the very roots of his being that this wasn’t real, that it would all vanish in a great puff of smoke, or some other, equally dramatic and horribly frustrating event, if he took such a daring step. Now, when it suddenly felt as though everything had all come together for him, it would be such monstrous cruelty to lose it all like that. At some level, he truly was terrified of that possibility. Just moments after he’d wished that everything would be ‘back to normal,’ now he desperately wanted it to stay as improbable as it had seemed ever since he awakened on the plane.
Her voice was still soft, inaudible to anyone else. “Of course I do. That’s not an ancient song, is it? Il Divo sang it. How’s that for showing I remember?” She reached for his hand; he still barely dared move for fear she’d disappear into nothing like a soap bubble touched with an incautious fingertip. With a small, almost shy smile, her eyes never leaving his, she picked his hand up off the bench, turned it over and laced their fingers together. Gradually he relaxed. Partway.
Even with their hands together like that, producing a feeling of warmth and solidity that he had never experienced in any dream he could remember, still he hesitated. “And do you remember … ?”
She cocked her head. “Do I remember what? Do I remember dying? Sure. And after that as well, although we can go into that later.” She stood up, pulled his hand until he got to his feet as well. In a more normal voice, she said, “Let’s go get dinner. I’m hungry, and even the uninspired food up there” — she jerked her head towards the door — “is one of the safer things that will satisfy me. If you get my drift.” Her sly smile, her cocked head gave an intimation of something Paul had dreamed of for years. Decades. Something he had never expected to actually experience.
He brought them closer together as they walked up the stairs to the dining hall, side by side. Hand in hand, their arms brushing from time to time. Did he dare put his arm around her? He decided that he wasn’t willing to let her hand go just quite yet. “You mean ... ”
She squeezed his hand. “Yeah, I do. All of my knowledge and experience and a virginal body full of hormones. Jesus! I’d almost completely forgotten about what it felt like. Feels like.” She chuckled quietly. “Pulling you out onto the grass and having my way with you right there probably wouldn’t be the greatest idea in the world.” She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Honestly, I’m not quite ready for that yet, when I think about it rationally.”
Starting to relax, Paul chuckled. “Enjoyable, but you’re right. Hard to admit, but it probably wouldn’t be a good thing to do.” He took a pair of trays off the stack and slid one onto the rails in front of her. “People would talk. As in, ‘You’re expelled.’ Besides, after all these years, I ... I want our first time together to be very special.” She arched an eyebrow in silent question. “Like, say, a weekend at the Brown Palace. Or if that’s too close to home, maybe the Broadmoor.”
Angelina stopped in her tracks, backing up the entire line of students behind them. “That would be absolutely lovely, if either one of them will let a pair of teenagers have a room.” She kissed him on the cheek before turning back to her own tray. “When we’re ready, though. Really ready. Understand?”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Drew another one, let it out slowly. “Yeah, I think I do.” Again he hesitated; he knew that at least when they’d been emailing, she’d been a bit more straight-laced than he. Leaning closer, he spoke quietly, just above a whisper. “I — I could be ready in a half-hour or so.” He smiled in an effort to make it the joke that he had intended, but still feared he had overstepped.
With an almost-coy smile, she looked sidewise at him as she slid her tray along the rails. “Sooner than that, I’d say. I’m sure of it. You’re male. Comes with the territory.” She touched his hand and then held on for a bit longer than required. “When we’re both ready. And that’s not what I mean by ready.”
He reached over to hold her hand in place with his other one, just for a moment.
Chapter Eight
A small table in the far corner of the dining room let them put their heads close together and talk privately. Paul couldn’t tear his gaze away from her hypnotic eyes.
“You’re a lot ... calmer about this than I am.” He sat for a moment, just focusing on the rhythmic movement of his chest as he breathed. “Are we going crazy? Or is it just me?”
She shook her head minutely, then tilted it slightly. “No, we’re not, either one of us. This is all real. I knew what was happening, though, so I had a chance to get used to it. And I made a choice.”
Paul went through a momentary roller coaster of emotion. This was real? He could really live his life over again? Actually be with Angelina? His eyes widened as he realized that yes, that was exactly what was happening.
“A choice? What do you mean, a choice? What sort of choice?” Fearing his voice had gotten too loud, he glanced around, but nobody was paying any attention to them.
Angelina looked down at her plate, not meeting his stare and keeping her voice so low he had to strain to hear her. “When I died, I was ... met. I don’t know who it was, but it was some powerful ... being. I said I wanted to be with you. Wait for you. Or go back and be with you from ... from now. He asked me which I’d choose. I said I wanted to be here, with you, but with our memories, so we wouldn’t make the same mistakes we made in the past. In our past. Pasts.” She pushed her food around on her plate aimlessly. “There’s a — a price. We don’t have all of our memories. We don’t get any head starts in life. But we definitely remember enough to know the bigger mistakes we’d made before. That was the price we’d pay if I took that road.” Cautiously she looked up.
Paul was almost speechless. “He? Someone? Who? Jesus? God?”
She looked him in the eye and shook her head. “I really have no idea who it was. Jesus, God, my guardian angel — whoever. I asked, I really did. The only response was no reply, like I hadn’t asked at all. I got an impression that he was male, but not a strong one. Could have been female, I suppose. Could have been ... above all that. But look at this.” She waved her arm to indicate the room around them. “Whoever it was had the power to do this. Or get this done. I’m sorry I couldn’t ask you first, but — you do remember saying that you’d make a wish like this if you knew a genie, don’t you?”
Several boys came to sit at a neighboring table. They looked at both Paul and Angelina briefly, then mostly ignored them. One stared openly at Angelina, until a brief glare from her had him turn back to his friends.
Paul was nodding slowly, his food forgotten. “Yeah, I remember.” He looked up, said nothing at first.
Worry lines creased Angelina’s forehead. “Should I have just ... waited? Gone on? Was this the right thing for me to do? The right choice to make?” One eye glistened as a tear started to form in it. “Almost as soon as we began ... as we got in contact again, I started wishing I’d grown old with you. I just thought maybe now I could. We could. I never wanted — ”
“No!” In his haste, he spoke loud enough that the guys at the nearby table looked over, but when he didn’t follow up, they returned their attention to their own dinners. Paul took her hands in his own. Quietly, he continued. “No, no. I said I’d make that wish, and I meant it. I still do. I wanted to have grown old with you, too. I still do. I just — Oh, Jesus. It’s really happening.” He took a deep breath, let it out in a shudder. Shook his head sharply. “Well, that answers a bunch of questions. Ever since I woke up ... like this, I’ve been wondering what’s going on, how and why. Most especially why. Why here, why now, why me.”
“Yeah. Me, too. That ‘it’s really happening’ feeling, I mean. Oh, my God. I have to admit that I really never expected it to come true. But I said this was my choice, and this is what we got.” She looked around the room before returning her attention to him. “We’re missing some memories, you know. Like — remember those little music players? They’d fit into a pocket, and you’d listen on those little ear thingies?”
“Oh, sure. They were called ... I had one with me on the plane. When I got on, I mean. I listened to that song on it. They were ... Damn. I can’t remember.”
She nodded. “That’s what I was saying. No head starts. Nothing that would tell us what company to invest in, or what lottery numbers to play, or anything like that. We still have to make our way the same way we did before. Or find a new way, our own way. But I sure remember my marriages. That’s the sort of thing we got to keep.”
Chapter Nine
Paul put his elbows on the table, folded his hands, and rested his chin on them. With a slight smile, he looked at her, just appreciating the view.
“Is he here?” Paul remembered what Angelina had told him, years before, about her first husband. How she’d been taken advantage of. How good-looking he’d been.
Shaking her head sharply, she said, “No idea. He didn’t live here. I think he was on the other side of campus this year. He can stay there for all of me. Your first wife?”
Paul shook his head in turn. “I didn’t meet her here. And I’ve no intention of meeting her at all, this time around.” He reached across the table as she extended her hand to meet his. Their fingers intertwined. “Can we — do you think we can do this?”
“Do you want to try?”
“With all my heart.” He could feel the sudden pounding in his chest as his heart was suddenly beating so strongly that he wondered if she could hear it.
“Me, too. No guarantees, but it sounds like a great plan to me.”
Paul smiled at her before setting their rolls aside. She raised an eyebrow in question. “The ducks. Remember?”
A small smile from her. “The ducks. Yes, absolutely. That was one of the things I used to love doing with you.”
“Just used to?”
The smile remained. “Well, you were gone the next year. I fed them a couple of times, but it wasn’t the same alone. I — I never wanted to do it with anyone else, so I quit.”
“Then we’ll have to do it again. Over again. Starting now. And what was that you said to me at first? Something about you and me?”
“The first lines of the song. ‘You and I, one heart that beats for two. What could go wrong?’ Angelina. Some of the translation strikes me as a bit odd, but that part is lovely. I’d — I’d like to see if we can make it work that way.”
God, I could lose myself in those eyes. “Me, too. That song always made me think of you, every time I heard it. I just never understood what they were singing. The language didn’t quite sound like anything I recognized.”
She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “That’s because they were singing in Spanish. Real Spanish, Castilian Spanish. If you speak Mexican Spanish, you can understand a lot of it, but over and above the slightly different vocabulary, the accent’s way different. It sounds sort of like you’re hearing someone speaking with a serious lisp.”
Fighting the urge to use the back of his hand, Paul wiped his own lips with his napkin. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
Angelina stood up. “Mama’s from Spain, a little ways outside of Madrid. Papa’s American, but he’s a scholar of Iberian history and literature. Mama’s a linguist and dialectician, primarily in Spanish. They met right after the war, when Papa was spending a year at the Universidad de Madrid. They always chattered back and forth in English and Castilian as I was growing up. Sometimes they’d switch back and forth repeatedly in one conversation.”
Chapter Ten
“If you break that into smaller pieces, it’ll go farther,” Angelina said.
Paul glanced at the remains of the dinner roll in his hand. He only had enough for two or three more pieces. “Does it matter?”
Angelina’s delighted laughter at the antics of the birds clustering around diverted him from any real concern about the bread. “Hey! Stop that! No fighting, I’ll see you all get some.” Most of the ducks were clustered around her where the two of them were sitting on the grass by the upper pond. A couple of birds at the back of the press kept an eye on Paul, hoping for a bigger piece from him. She broke off another little piece and tossed it over the flock to one smaller duck that was holding back.
“Angelina, I love — ”
“Don’t!” The single word was spoken loudly, explosively. It startled him, but she merely looked around to see if anyone were near enough to hear more than that one word. If it had been heard, it wouldn’t have raised any suspicions in anyone else, sitting apart as they were. The birds all jumped, but when nothing more came, they resumed crowding in. Satisfied of their privacy, Angelina continued in a quieter tone. “I understand, Paul. There’s a part of me that wants to say it, too. All gloves are off now, all those boundaries we had to observe for years are down. But — when we met here, the first time around, we were eighteen years old. The last time we saw each other we were, um, what, twenty? Twenty-one?” She looked around again, but there was still nobody near. “For all practical purposes, we’ve lived more than three times that long now, and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge in that time. For both of us. Even with all of the emails, in some ways we’re more strangers to each other now than we were then. I want us to know each other better before we proclaim that sort of feeling for each other.” She whipped her head back to the front as she felt the sudden tug at her fingers.
“Hey! Thief!” A particularly daring duck stood about three feet from her, trying to choke down the entire remaining piece of roll that Angelina had still held until the bird had closed in to snatch it from her hand while she was distracted. Three other ducks tried to crowd in for a share, shying back as she dusted her hands, then the entire flock scattered as the two of them stood up. She reached for his hand and, facing him, looked intently into his eyes.
“Don’t worry.” Her tone was soothing. “I still have every bit of those feelings for you that we never spoke of. That we didn’t dare speak of, even though we both knew we had them. I just — I’ve been hurt in the past, badly, by someone who claimed to love me.” She shook her head sharply. “I don’t for a moment think that you’d do anything like that. But ... let’s just take our time, okay? Together.” She shook their joined hands in emphasis. “There is nobody else and I don’t want there to be. When it’s said, though, I want it to be special. More special, that is, because by now it would always be special to me, coming from you.”
Paul’s face showed a wry smile. “Okay, I’ll try. Any idea how long it’ll take?”
She turned to him and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “No. No fixed time limits. We’ll both know when it’s right. Until then — ” She turned to walk, pulling him along. “We’ll just have to hold our impulses back.” Hand in hand, they began walking towards her dorm. A few minutes later, she asked, “How about the guitar?”
Paul looked at her sideways. “Hm? It’s back in my room.”
“Are you going to bring it out and play it again?”
Paul shook his head. “I don’t know that I can. I haven’t touched a guitar in more than thirty years. Even if I can muster the muscle memory to remember how to play, most of the music I know now hasn’t even been written yet.”
“Betcha you can remember how to play. There are also a couple of places I know where we can even sing the ones that nobody else has heard yet.”
He looked at her, not quite frowning. “You know about those rooms upstairs in — ”
She gave him a not-quite coy smile. “I was here before, too. I, um, had some experiences.” He shook his head as they continued.
A few steps later she asked, “What if I hadn’t had my memories? What would you have done?”
Paul shrugged. “Come looking for you, I guess. Then ... then I’d have tried very hard to strike up a conversation, start some sort of relationship. It would have been a lot harder.”
She had a wry expression. “Yes, it would have been. At that point, I wasn’t really up for the sort of relationship I hope we’re going to develop here.” She favored him with her most dazzling smile. “At the very least, though, I would have thought you were awfully sweet. Who knows? A nice, mature fellow like you? Might’ve succeeded.”
Paul smiled in return.
Chapter Eleven
They met each day for breakfast and then spent the day together. They signed up for the same freshman classes, so their schedules coincided. Late afternoon study sessions usually meant checking each other’s assignments. As long as it was warm, evenings were spent outside on the grass. Otherwise they’d be sitting in the common room of one dorm or the other, or, especially as it began getting dark earlier, hiding away somewhere, playing music that wouldn’t be written for years.
This was still a time when the girls’ dorms were completely man-free, outside of the common rooms, but the two of them adjusted quickly. A lot of their time was spent talking, catching up on their prior lives. Gradually the other students in the complex, especially the ones in Buckingham, Angelina’s dormitory, came to understand that the two of them were an item. It took mere days more for them to understand that Paul and Angelina didn’t quite fit the mold of immature teenagers. Once that got around, they found themselves being sought out for their counsel and advice, more so in many cases than the Sophomore Advisors and Resident Advisors in the dorm. It was freely given.
Several weeks into the semester they were sitting on the grass by the pond during an unseasonably warm afternoon, Paul with his guitar and Angelina sitting close by, mostly listening to his efforts to remember a not-so-old tune.
“You once told me there were two girls you regretted never waking up next to. Who was the other?”
Paul stopped trying to puzzle out the tune. “Are you sure you want to know?”
She cocked her head. “Is it a then thing or a now thing?”
Paul shook his head to emphasize his point as he checked the tuning of one string. “Definitely a then thing. There’s nothing there now.” He looked directly at her. “You’re the only woman I want to be with.”
“Then why not tell me who?”
He took a deep breath. “You probably don’t know her. Her name’s Joan Vincent.”
Angelina’s eyes widened. “Joanie Vincent? Really?” She snickered. “Oh, I know her, all right. She’s the Sophomore Advisor on my floor. Have you met her this time?”
Paul snorted. “Not likely. Last time around I was out at Timber Tavern the very first night, getting as plowed as I could on the stuff they call beer, and she was there with a group of her friends. The guy I was with, the only other guy here from my prep school class, went over to talk to them and she came to sit with me. This time you and I were together that night, and I’ve no interest in going out and drinking like that now.”
“So you haven’t met her this time.”
“Nope.” He rechecked the tuning on the rest of the guitar strings.
“Well, you’re about to. Here she comes.”
“Huh?” His head turned. “Oh, shit!” he muttered quietly.
“Hi, Angelina. Would you introduce me to your friend? I’ve seen the two of you out here almost every day, and he seems to be quite the accomplished player.”
Awkwardly because of the instrument, Paul scrambled to his feet.
Angelina smiled. “Of course. Joanie, this is Paul Grainger. Paul, Joan Vincent, my Sophomore Advisor.” A twinkle in her eyes suggested that she was enjoying watching him squirm, just a bit. Or maybe she was just assessing his reaction in light of his earlier statement.
Paul swallowed. His momentary hesitation was hardly apparent to anyone other than himself and Angelina. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Joan. Do you play?” Mentally he kicked himself; he knew damn well she didn’t.
The conversation was brief. Joan indicated how much she enjoyed the little she had heard of his playing. Paul downplayed his ability as much as he dared. Finally she was gone and he breathed a sigh of relief as he sat back down.
“I thought you handled that very well.” Angelina wasn’t grinning. Quite.
Paul put his hands flat on the side of his guitar and let his chin rest on top of them as he looked off into the distance while Angelina let him think. “It wasn’t easy. I know enough about her that I had to keep hidden, but I thought I did well enough.”
She touched his cheek. “You did. Now that you’ve actually faced her and spoken with her, is there still anything there?”
Lifting his chin, he shook his head slowly. “No, not really. It’s ... interesting. I still remember how I felt then, and I can tell how I feel now. Very differently. I mean, there’s something there, but it’s just a distant and faint regret.” He squeezed her hand. “There’s nothing significant there now beyond, well, beyond my own nerves. Not that they’re inconsiderable ... ” His voice trailed off.
Angelina smiled. “I understand. I’ve seen a couple of guys I dated before. You’re right, it’s a most ... interesting sort of feeling.” She gave his hand an answering squeeze. “Now there’s just you. I’m quite satisfied. More than satisfied.”
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