The Man From Primrose Lane Part 37

"Something about the machine shifting from backwards to forwards again causes a weird noise. Not quite a sonic boom. Deeper. Heavier. Been thinking about that a lot. I think, if you recorded an explosion and played it backwards at the slowest speed, with the ba.s.s turned up real loud, it might sound like that. Anyway, this guy calls me whenever he hears it and I send down one of my Sherlock ruffians."

I nodded. I knew what he meant. "How many trips to Loveland since you've been here?"

The Man from Primrose Lane said, "Eight. But sometimes there's no one there."

"I don't want to think about that."

"No. I know."

"So what do you do now?"

"I'm still looking for him."

"I'm familiar with Elaine O'Donnell's case," I told him. "It's quite possible there's a connection."

"I'm sure he'll kill again if he gets the right opportunity."

"Do you want to help me get him?"

The Man from Primrose Lane didn't say anything for the span of thirty seconds, a long time in a room like that; I could hear the squirrels in the walls. "I don't know if I can trust you," he said.

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean? You're me."

"No," he said. "Not quite. Very different experiences shaped us following the events of 1989, when I saved Elizabeth and the universe split in two."

"Well, how different could we be?"

"How's Cleveland?"

"Empty."

He nodded.

"Why don't you trust me?"

"Been thinking about that day in the park when I tried to save the two little girls. I had all the time in the world to prepare. I thought I had plenty of time. I was still late. Though it's possible he was early. And if he was early, the only explanation is that he knew about me. I think..."

"What?"

"I think it's possible we're tracking a time traveler. I think it's possible I might be tracking myself."

"Come on. We couldn't do that. We wouldn't."

"I don't know how else to explain it."

"Didn't you see the guy?"

"Briefly."

"Did he look like us?"

"I don't know. Maybe not. But I couldn't see him well enough to tell if he was wearing makeup. h.e.l.l, if he came from the future, he could have used one of those Morph-tronic plugs Hollywood was abuzz about in the twenties."

"Well, it's not me."

"No. I mean, I don't really think so, I guess."

"Besides, it's never that complicated."

"Right."

"It's got to be someone you've overlooked. Some regular Joe with a deep dark side."

"I know the profile," he said. "But I should have had plenty of time to save the girls. I don't know how to explain that."

"How did the other us's do? Did they stop their crimes from happening?"

He shrugged. "Dunno. They never came back to tell me how it went. We tend to keep our distance."

"I've got another problem."

"Yeah," he said, looking at my knee. "You'll need ID before you go to the hospital. Can it wait?"

"The bleeding's stopped because of that black junk, I think. But it hurts like a motherf.u.c.ker."

"You're three years early, too. Those eggs don't work so well over long spans. Something gets jiggered in the process. There's like turbulence or something. One fella we picked up was actually two days too late. Imagine that. Poor guy. Jumped off the Y-Bridge."

"Do you have someone who can help with identification?" I asked.

The Man from Primrose Lane held up his mitten-covered hands. "Got a man in Pennsylvania. It'll cost you. Course, I could lend you some money. Would that be a soft-money exchange? Would they call it laundering if the feds knew?" He giggled. "The only thing all those movies and books got right is time travelers really can make a killing on the stock market."

"When can we..."

"I'll have Albert take you in the morning," he said. "Let me show you to your room."

"Actually," I said, "do they still make ham and pineapple pizza around here?"

"Of course," said the Man from Primrose Lane. "I've got a deliveryman who leaves it on my doorstep if I set out the right amount plus a five-spot. I think he thinks I'm a leper. I always see him wiping his hands when he walks back to his car."

Uncle Ira lay in a beige hospital bed inside the wing of Akron General reserved for the hopeless. I stood with David in the hall, peering through a large window into his room, at our mother, sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. This sight, I should say, struck me as quite odd, given the fact that our mother was not his kin. I had always believed Uncle Ira was a Neff, our grandfather's brother. This day, we were learning, was full of revelation.

On the drive to the hospital, David had called our father to see how he was dealing with the news, only to be greeted with indifference.

"Is the rest of the family already there?" David had asked.

"Why would they be?" our father had responded.

"It sounds pretty serious. I believe he's brain-dead. Someone from the family should be there to make decisions. Why wouldn't you guys want to be there? He was your uncle, for G.o.d's sake."

"What?"

"What, what?"

"He's not my uncle."

"What are you talking about?"

"We're not related."

"But we called him 'Uncle Ira.'"

"He was a good friend of your mother's a long time ago, when you were born. Your mom told you to call him 'Uncle Ira.'"

"But he looks like a Neff. That nose."

"Yeah, I guess," he said. "But we're from Ravenna, David. Everyone from Ravenna looks pretty much the same."

David and I didn't discuss it but I'm pretty sure we were thinking the same thing and wishing it wasn't, couldn't, be true.

Our mother looked up, saw David, and came to the door, shaking her head and her long raven hair as if to compose herself.

"Come in," she said.

David stepped toward the door and I remained in place, glancing around at the hospital art.

"Both of you," she said.

"Excuse me?" I asked. My good knee suddenly felt as wobbly as the lame one.

"I know who you are," she said.

I tried to speak, but something caught in my throat. Once, many years ago, I had sat in this hospital and watched our mother die from the effects of an aneurysm that would occur in March of 2016. I missed her so, even if I sometimes wondered if she wasn't the real reason I fell in love with women I could never save.

"Then I would very much like a hug," I said.

"Of course, David," she said. "Of course."

"I first met him in 1967, when I was nine," our mother said. "I was walking home from school, down Water Street, and this old man grabs my arm and drags me into this abandoned mill. We were covered in this white dust but he was sweaty, so there were patches of wet around his chest and under his arms. He smelled like ... like spoiled oranges. Something about that smell scared me more than anything else. It was like I could smell his intention and I knew he was going to kill me. After he was done with me.

"But just as he's got me against a wall and started to reach under my skirt, this other man shows up. From nowhere. He grabs the old man, pulls him off me. And I watched..." She paused to stifle a sob. "I watched Ira kill the man. Strangle him. 'He needed killin' or he wouldn't stop,' he told me. 'He would have killed you, but not soon.'

"And he left me there with the dead body and eventually I walked to a pay phone and called home. The police told my parents that it was a couple drifters. One had killed the other. Simple as that. Must have been a drifter that killed him, they said, because the man didn't stick around to explain himself or take credit for it.

"When I was sixteen, I was walking out of a movie theater in Canton when I literally b.u.mped into him again. He was alone, coming out of the same movie. I was with a friend. I recognized him immediately, which he saw. 'Are you living a good life?' he asked me. I told him I was, thanks to him. 'Good,' he said. I asked him out to coffee, the first time in my life I ever asked out a man, and he thought about it. He looked about fifty years old then. Old enough to pa.s.s for my father. He told me that would be okay.

"So we started meeting. Once a month, at Brady's, in Kent. We started sleeping together when I was nineteen. That was my doing. All my doing."

"You were with my dad when you were nineteen," said David.

She laughed in a way that raised the hackles on my neck. "Ira was very clear that if we were going to have that kind of relationship, I still needed to date people my own age, to treat him like he didn't really exist. 'Don't count me in your decisions,' he used to tell me. He should have told me who his father was but we never talked about his personal life. Said it was full of stupid pain, that the only thing he ever did that amounted to anything was saving me.

"Well, everything turned upside down during the blizzard of '77. Your father and I were at your grandmother's cottage out on Berlin Lake. Stranded for three days. Nothing to do but eat, sleep, and, well ... you know. A few weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant. Figured you were conceived during the storm. I was so excited, I went to Ira's house with the news. He was so happy for me that he cared to ask about my boyfriend. When I spoke your father's name his skin went dead white. I thought he'd had a heart attack. I was so frightened by that reaction, and he was so numbed by the ... revelation, that he told me everything.

"He told me he was a time traveler. That he'd been a writer who had obsessed over my unsolved murder for decades and he had traveled back through time, giving up his real life to find the man who had killed me. Except that wasn't enough of a shock, right?"

David's skin was pallid now. My heart beat so loudly I heard it in my ears.

"'Fearful symmetry,' he called it. Ira's own father was my boyfriend. In the timeline he'd come from, Ira's father had married some lady named Mary. Mary had given birth to Ira. By saving me, Ira changed all that. Ira's father, your father, met me instead of this Mary."

David shook his head. "So, Ira is my ... what? Half-brother?"

Our mother ignored David and looked over to me. She a.s.sumed correctly when she figured I had the years and experience to see a little further than my younger self. "I think it's a little worse than that," I said.

She nodded and looked away.

"I don't get it," said David, looking at me. "What?"

"Ira is actually our father," I said. "Isn't he?"

She began to cry. She couldn't look at us. But she gave a m.u.f.fled, "Yes."

The man on the bed, the man who, genetically, was akin to a half-brother, was also our real biological father. Which made the man we had always believed to be our father ... our grandfather? It was enough, I thought, to break my mind.

The slow drone of the machines kept the quiet away until the doctor came by to turn them off. Uncle Ira went with a soft sigh that sounded like relief.

On the way out, David stopped by a kiosk inside that dark wing of the hospital to sign for Uncle Ira's body to be transferred to a funeral home, where it would be cremated without a service. Our mother had it in her mind to spread his remains along the banks of the Little Miami in Loveland, as if it were some ancient rite that might settle the souls traveling backward there. She said she was going to take some sage with her to burn.

David caught up to me in a hallway full of drawings made by the hands of child cancer patients, an unsettling place. "Look at this," he said, holding up a clear plastic bag. Inside were Uncle Ira's personal effects: his bolo tie; a severely wrinkled pack of Marlboros; his wallet, containing a little over $5,000 in cash; one of those pens you can turn upside down to see a woman lose her bikini. Also inside was a sealed envelope labeled: Davids.

"Great," I breathed. "Open it, then."

David did. It was a college-ruled piece of writing paper. His eyes scanned it and he whispered, "Hurm."

"Read it to me," I said.

"'David. Forty-five years ago I let my obsession take my soul. It was as complete as any demonic possession and just as dangerous. I allowed it to happen, piece by piece, welcomed it even, because I thought it was for the greater good. It was not. Too late, much too late, I have come to realize that all I have done was pointless. I thought I was increasing the good of the world, when, if anything, I added to its misery. Everything happens for a reason, David. I now believe that if you try to alter fate, you will be d.a.m.ned just as I am. Let it go. Whatever you're doing, whatever adventure has led you to be charged with murder, let it go. If they lock you away forever, be thankful that your imprisonment might cause this endless cycle to finally quit. I thought you might be different, having solved your case, having Tanner. But it has become clear to me, watching the news, seeing you with that other you, that you have caught the bug that eventually leads us to repeat this all again. Please forgive me. I could not bear the torment. So sweet and so cold.'"

David folded the note and stuck it in his pocket.

"You okay?" I asked.

He smiled, but it was a sad smile that wore down his face and made him look five years older. "Is this where we're all headed?"