“Is it the one where Rachel shows up wearing her wedding dress?” she asks with plausible interest. It is, but better not to acknowledge it.
“It’s nice to receive a visit, I say. “By anyone,” I add.
“Want to go for a ride?”
“I want to do anything that’s gets me out of this tin hut,” I reply. I follow her and we’re soon seated in her maroon, beat-up Volvo wagon.
“Thanks for being patient,” she says after a couple of miles.
“You’re thanking me for being something I’m not,” I reply. We cross miles of desert and eventually enter the outskirts of town.
“How familiar is it all?” she asks. “Is it as you remembered it?” We’re southbound toward the center of Risley, to the extent that one big suburb has a center.
“Sort of. There are things I’d forgotten I’d remembered.” I see the ice cream parlor where my friends and I used to congregate after school to exchange outrageous and false stories of sexual adventure.
“I guessed there’d be things you wanted to see,” she says. We exchange a glance and she smiles. I notice for the first time the soft, musical timbre of her voice. Maybe it’s a voice she doesn’t use when Prasad and Zhivov are in earshot.
“There are. But more than that, I want to know what happens next,” I say. I’ve surprised myself by getting back to business because I was enjoying that moment in which the steel cords under my skin were beginning to melt. “Are you going to help me make all of this right?” She raises her eyebrows at thisbut doesn’t reply, and no more is said until we turn the corner onto Walla Walla Street.
I see that the shingles on my single story house have a fresh coat of yellow paint. There are two boys in the front yard behind the chain-link fence playing catch. They’re wearing swimsuits and catchers mitts, and they’re laughing hysterically as they try to outrun the rotating sprinkler while making their catch. I take a deep breath. One of them is me. My little brother Tom is the other. Galois pulls in to park on the opposite side of the street. We’re both so lean; no, we’re plain skinny. Tom screams as my pitch forces him into the sprinkler spray. I laugh with joy and exhilaration.
“Thank you, Jane” I whisper.
“Everyone calls me Gallie.” Gallie, I echo distractedly, without turning. “This must feel very weird.”
“It feels like Christmas Carol when Scrooge visits himself as the young man without a care.”
“Does that make me the Ghost of Christmas Past?” I’m about to reply when a woman steps out from the house, sits on the front steps and joins in the laughter. Her hazelnut hair is pulled into a ponytail and she’s wearing a pale green tank top, khaki shorts and is barefoot. She puts on a blue baseball cap and pulls her ponytail through the back. How did I forget that? That was her favorite Mariners cap. She’s so young. Why do I never remember her this way? “She’s beautiful,” Gallie says and I nod.
“Think it’s okay if I get out?” I ask.
“Better not.”
I want to run over to her. Hug her. But she probably wouldn’t take that well. We watch them play for a while, then without warning Joad looks my way and our eyes lock. What can he be seeing? Then the sprinkler spray hits him and there are peels of laughter. I laugh too. But when I exhale, the air takes the joy with it. “She’ll be dead within five years,” I say, not really to Gallie.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Not a happy life. You’d never know it looking at her now, would you?” We sit and watch for a few minutes longer before I ask Gallie to drive on. I thank her and we sit in silence as I stare out of the side window to conceal myself.
“Joad,” Gallie says eventually, “there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Then tell me.”
“Your TMA team are alive,” she says. “And we need to get them back.” I turn to her.
“Back from where?” She hesitates.
“Centuries away, but we can get them.” Centuries away?
“What–”
“You’re right to be cynical about temporal logic, Joad. It is a dark art, but we know a lot more than we used to. We know that when things get messed up, there are some strategies to fix them that aren’t going to work without making everything worse, and there are others ways with a better chance.” I now remember the cluster of green lights centered on southeastern Washington just before the wall map shattered into a thousand shards and rained down. Those green lights were the TMA team being flung–centuries away.
“Tell me what’s going on Gallie,” I plead.
“Soon,” she says. “I can’t yet. I’m sorry. I just can’t.” I look back out of the side window. “But hey,” she says, “I’ve got a suggestion. You must be going slightly crazy in your jail cell. How would you like to move out?”
“Where to? And yes, whatever your answer is.”
“Well, Boris has offered you his spare bedroom.”
“Zhivov?”
“Yes, he has a nice little house down on the Yakima River with plenty of room. What do you think?” I think back to Joe Alvarez’s house down on the Yakima where I hid out after the site explosion. “Hey, don’t embarrass yourself. Rein in your excitement.”
“I didn’t think he liked me.”
FIFTEEN
Zhivov’s home becomes my home. It’s in surprisingly good taste for a man I’d assumed lived under his parents’ stairs. At first the routine didn’t call for us being in much contact. Day at TMA, pick up a carry-out on the way home, eat mainly in silence then
