carport.
Did she actually do that? Did she? Was that a memory?
Maddy had the distinct impression she’d just made that bit up, like someone joining the dots on a child’s puzzle. Filling in gaps with whatever seemed to fit. Just to hurry up and finish the picture off — damned if it was a hundred per cent right or not.
She noticed the bedroom window above the carport was open and a gentle warm afternoon breeze was teasing a pink curtain in and out. Her bedroom. Now that she was certain of. The front room above the carport, that was hers all right.
But a pink curtain?
I never liked pink… did I?
She shrugged. She’d still been a bit girly at age nine. Torn between being like all the other girls or being a tomboy. Maybe the pink curtain was a phase in her younger life she’d chosen to blot out, to not remember. A phase where she’d made a half-hearted attempt to appear feminine. Beyond that curtain, inside the room, she was pretty sure it was all Star Wars action figures and comic books, Warhammer figurines and models of tanks and guns.
The window being open meant one thing. I must be at home. Maddy stopped before the whitewashed steps leading up to the front door.
I’m at home. I’m in this house somewhere. Me. I’m home from school. Of course she was. It was after three.
It’s me in there. Me, aged nine.
She felt an overpowering rush of emotion. It was going to be so strange meeting herself. Like looking in a peculiar mirror that could filter away years, allow her to look back through ten years of time and see herself with braces still welded to her teeth and that always impossible hair of hers dragged into submission by a brush and pulled tightly into two bobbing Goldilocks ponytails.
She was trembling. It was going to be impossibly weird.
‘And what the hell do I say?’ she muttered.
She took the steps up to the porch slowly. There was the garden gnome with a chainsaw. Her idea of a joke present for Mom, who just hated gardening and could quite happily have taken a chainsaw to all the delicately trimmed bushes up and down Silverdale Crescent. And there, across the porch, was the rocking-chair. She smiled at the memory of the thing. Dad’s favourite chair… where he spent summer evenings smoking a long clay pipe and rocking back and forth.
Again. She had the distinct impression that she was inking in details, filling in gaps in her mind with memories that seemed appropriate, most likely. She was creating mental images to fill her blank memory. Worse still, she suddenly realized, she was borrowing images, scenes, from old movies, from old TV shows. Why the hell was she seeing Dad with long white whiskers? Wearing worn old dungarees and a battered straw hat?
‘That’s not right… that’s The Waltons,’ she whispered. It had been on TV back in the motel room: some old rerun of The Waltons on cable. And now her mind was taking bits of that old show and superimposing it on her scant childhood memories. Filling in. Filling in.
The front door. Now, dammit, she remembered this for sure. Reassuring, a genuine memory this time. Mint green with that brass knocker. How many times had she closed that behind her or watched her mother fumble with shopping bags to find her keys to open it?
She reached for the knocker and hesitated. What the crud was she going to say to Mom? How was she going to explain who she was?
It was going to be difficult. Mom was in there somewhere, probably glued to the TV on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, still watching the news on Fox. Perhaps still crying for her poor older sister who’d lost a wonderful son in that pile of still-smouldering rubble. And Maddy could imagine herself up in her bedroom painting her Warhammer figures. Keeping her mind occupied. Not wanting to think about the fact that Julian was gone for good. Not wanting to pester Mom with difficult questions right now.
This was going to be awkward.
She grabbed the knocker and tapped it firmly against the door.
Hi, Mom. Can you guess who I am?
No, that wouldn’t do.
Hi. I have something really important to tell you… Can I come in?
No. That made her sound like a goddamn Jehovah’s Witness.
Mom, it’s me… Maddy. I’ve come from nine years in the future.
She heard footsteps inside. The squeak of trainers on parquet floor, then the rattle and clack of the latch and the door opened.
‘Yeah?’
A girl. About the age she was expecting, blonde. She was wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt and pink jeans with a glitter pattern down one leg and floral pumps.
God! Is that really me!? It can’t be!
‘Yeah?’ said the girl again with an impatient shrug. ‘Help you?’
Maddy was tongue-tied. ‘I… uh…’
‘You want to speak to my mom?’
Maddy nodded mutely.
‘Mom!’ called out the girl. ‘It’s for you-hoo!’
‘Who is it?’ A woman’s voice from somewhere in the back.
The girl made a wearisome face. ‘Mom says… who is it?’
Maddy felt her resolve beginning to fail her. She wanted to mumble something like I guess I got the wrong house, sorry about that, turn around and walk away. But she couldn’t walk away. Not now. She was past that point, over it. She was here, she’d already knocked and waited and now the door was open and she was just seconds away from speaking to Mom. Too late to run. She was here now and she really needed Mom and Dad’s help. It was now or never.
Maddy hunkered down a little, to the girl’s level. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘My name’s Maddy. Just like yours.’
The girl looked at her sideways. ‘Uh, no, it ain’t.’
‘Nadine!’ called the voice from the back. ‘Who is it?’
‘Your name’s Nadine?’
‘Uh… yeah.’
That flummoxed her. ‘Nadine?’ She wasn’t expecting that. ‘Since… when?’
She shrugged. ‘Like, since, birth.’
Chapter 31
2055, W.G. Systems Research Campus, near Pinedale, Wyoming
Waldstein stared at it. There it was behind the darkened glass, in a carefully controlled and monitored sealed envelope of cool air. A sheet of brittle and age-yellowed newspaper. A page of classified ads: columns of messages from the hopeless, the lonely, the bereft, the bewildered. An ad from someone who’d lost a much-loved bulldog answering to the name of Roosevelt and was offering a reward of $200 for him. Some old soldier looking for a fellow platoon member he served alongside during the Normandy landings, and someone else looking for a missing daughter who might just be living in the Brooklyn area. There an ad from a very lonely widower looking for someone else to share his suddenly empty life with — searching for a friend who might enjoy trips to the theatre, watching matinees of old Bette Davis movies.
This page of forlorn little classified ads was a perfectly preserved record of one day’s worth of misery in Brooklyn in the year 2001. A record of incomplete lives and broken hearts. Of final words that should have been said face to face, but never were.
Waldstein’s heart ached every time he studied this withered page of newspaper. There were words he wished he’d said to his wife, Eleanor, and his son, Gabriel. Words that he’d always felt foolish saying out loud, rather preferring to assume the pair of them knew he loved them very much, to save him saying such things. Words
