'Yes,' he lied. 'It’s a girl from Emory; her family lives in Westport. They invited me up to stay for a week or so.'
'Which girl is this? I don’t remember your mentioning anybody from Connecticut. I thought you were still going out with that cute little girl from Tennessee, Judy.'
'Not anymore,' Jeff said. 'We broke up right before finals.'
His mother looked concerned. 'You never told me; is that why you haven’t been eating right since you’ve been home?'
'No, Mom, I’m fine. It’s no big deal; we just broke up, that’s all. Now I really like this girl in Westport, and I need to go see her. So can you help me out?'
'Won’t she be back in school in September? Can’t you wait till then to see her again?'
'I’d really like to see her now. And I’ve never been to New England. She said we might drive up to Boston. Her and her folks,' he added quickly, remembering the mores of the time and his mother’s own sense of propriety.
'Well, I don’t know…'
'Please, Mom. It would mean a lot to me. This is really important.'
She shook her head in exasperation. 'At your age, everything is important; everything has to happen right now. Your father was counting on that fishing trip next week. You know how much—'
'We’ll go fishing when I get back. Look, I have to go up there one way or the other; I just wanted to let you know where I was going to be, and it would be a big help if you could lend me a little extra money. If you don’t want to, then—'
'Well, you’re old enough to be in college, so you’re old enough to go wherever you please. I just worry about you, that’s all. It’s what mothers are for … besides lending money.' She winked, and opened her purse.
Jeff threw some clothes in a suitcase, put the two hundred dollars his mother had given him into a pair of rolled-up socks. He was out of the house before his father or sister got up.
The old Chevy was parked in the curved driveway, behind his father’s big Buick Electra and his mother’s Pontiac. The car gave a familiar cough when Jeff started it up, then came rumbling to life.
He pulled out of the suburban development where his parents lived, skirted Little Lake Conway, and sat for a moment with the engine idling when he came to the intersection of Hoffner Road and Orange Avenue. Had the Beeline Expressway to the Cape been built yet? He couldn’t remember. If it had, that’d be a straighter shot to 1-95 north. There hadn’t been anything in the paper about a launch this morning, so the traffic around Cocoa and Titusville shouldn’t be too bad; but if the expressway hadn’t been built yet, he’d find himself stuck for too long on a pitted old two-lane road. He decided to play it safe, go on into town, and take 1-4 up to Daytona.
Jeff drove through the sleepy little city, still untouched by the Disney boom to come and only just beginning to feel the spillover development of the NASA presence forty miles away. He picked up I-95 sooner than he’d expected, tuned the radio to WAPE in Jacksonville: 'Little' Stevie Wonder doing 'Fingertips, Part II,' then Marvin Gaye belting out 'Pride and Joy.'
Three months. How the hell could he have lost three months this time? What did it mean? Well, there was no use worrying about it now; it was beyond his control. Pamela would be upset, with good reason, but at least he’d see her soon. Concentrate on that, he told himself as he sped north through the long stretches of pine woods and scrub brush.
He made Savannah by noon; there was a brief gap in the interstate there, slowing his progress, and the streets of the gracious old city were incongruously lined with scowling, helmeted police. Jeff made his way past the barricades cautiously, aware of the demonstrations and subsequent racist violence that had broken out here this week. It was sad to see that all begin yet again, but there was nothing he could do other than avoid the bloody confrontations.
He stopped for a quick sandwich a little after three, at a Howard Johnson’s outside Florence, South Carolina. The flatlands of Florida and coastal Georgia were behind him now, and he drove through rural hill country, keeping the speedometer of the powerful old V-8 a notch above the posted 70 mile-per-hour speed limit.
It was dark when he drove past the turnoff to his boarding school in Virginia, where he’d made that unplanned pilgrimage so many years ago to see the little bridge that had become to him the very icon of loss and futility. He could see the lights of the Rendells' house from the highway; his pretty young former teacher and object of his onetime adulation would be preparing dinner for her husband, and for the child whose birth had sparked Jeff’s adolescent jealous rage. Love your family well, he wished her silently as he sped past the peaceful home on its scenic ridge; there’s enough pain in the world as it is.
He had a late meal of fried chicken and sweet potatoes at a truck stop north of Richmond, bought a thermos, and had the waitress fill it with black coffee. The Beltway took him around Washington, and he made it to Baltimore just after midnight. At Wilmington, Delaware, he switched from 1-95 to the Jersey Turnpike, avoiding whatever predawn traffic there might be through Philadelphia and Trenton. As the night wore on he marveled again, as he always did at the beginning of each replay, at his own youthful stamina; in his thirties and forties, he’d have needed to break this drive up into at least two days, and even that pace would have been exhausting.
The George Washington Bridge was all but deserted at 4:00 a.m., and Jeff kept the radio jacked up to full volume as Cousin Brucie whooped and wailed along with the Essex on 'Easier Said than Done.' Driving through New Rochelle on the New England Thruway, images of a Pamela he had never known filled his mind: She had lived here in her first existence, raised a family … died here, assuming it was the end of her life, unaware that her many lives had just begun.
What had death been like for her this time, he wondered, there on Majorca? Calmer, he hoped, more accepting, as it had been for him at the cabin near Montgomery Creek, knowing that this time they’d have each other to come back to. But he didn’t want to dwell on the thought of her agony, however short-lived. That part was over, for now, and they had a limitless future together to look forward to.
The first light of day was beginning to tinge the eastern sky as Jeff reached Westport. He located the address of Pamela’s family in a phone book at a Shell station. It was much too early in the morning for him to show up at her house yet. He found a twenty-four-hour coffee shop, forced himself to go through the New York Times from front page to last, just to kill time. Things were still tense in Savannah, he read; Ralph Ginzburg was appealing his obscenity conviction for publishing Eros magazine, and controversy was growing over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against compulsory school prayer.
Jeff looked at his watch: 7:25. Would 8:00 A.M. be too early? The family ought to be up by then, maybe having breakfast.
Should he interrupt them while they were eating? What difference did it make, he thought? Pamela would introduce him as a friend, and they’d invite him to join them. He dawdled nervously over his coffee until twenty to eight, then asked the coffee-shop cashier for directions to the address he’d written down.
The Phillipses' house was a two-story neo-colonial on a shaded, upper-middle-class street. Nothing to differentiate it from a thousand other homes in a thousand other towns across the country; only Jeff knew of the miraculous event that had taken place there.
He rang the doorbell, tucking his T-shirt into his jeans. It suddenly occurred to him that he should have changed; he should have at least found a rest room where he could shave—
'Yes?'
The woman bore a startling resemblance to Pamela; only the hairstyle was different, a moderate bouffant instead of the straight, Dutch-boy cut Jeff had grown so fond of. She was about the same age Pamela had been when he’d seen her last, and the impression was unsettling.
'Is, uh, Pamela Phillips home, ma’am?'
The woman frowned, pursing her lips slightly in the same expression of mild consternation Jeff had seen so frequently on Pamela’s face. 'She’s not up yet. Are you a friend of hers from school?'
'Not exactly from school, but I do—'
