The Time Keeper Part 23

They stepped inside the clock shop and laid the body on the floor.

"Who is he?" Victor asked the old man.

"His name is Dor."

"He was sent here for us?"

"And for himself."

"Is he dying?"

"Yes."

"Are we dying?"

"Yes."

The old man saw the fear on their faces. His expression softened. "All who are born are always dying."

Victor looked at Dor, who was barely conscious, and realized he had been wrong about who he was, but he had been wrong about so many things, even about the pocket watch, which Dor had chosen not for its antique value but for the painted reminder of a family-father, mother, child-hoping Victor would realize what he had with Grace before it was too late.

"Why was he punished?" Victor asked.

"He was never punished."

"The cave? All those years?"

"That was a blessing."

"A blessing?"

"Yes. He learned to appreciate the life he had led."

"But it took so long," Sarah said.

The old man removed a ring from the throat of the hourgla.s.s.

"What is long?" he said.

He slipped the ring onto Dor's finger. A single grain of sand floated out of Dor's grip.

"What's going to happen to him?" Sarah asked.

"He will finish his story. As will you."

Dor was motionless, his eyes closed. His hands were limp on the floor.

"Is it too late?" Sarah whispered.

The old man took the empty hourgla.s.s and turned it upside down. He held the grain of sand above it.

"Never too late or too soon," he said.

And he let it go.

79.

We do not realize the sound the world makes-unless, of course, it comes to a stop. Then, when it starts, it sounds like an orchestra.

Breaking waves. Whipping wind. Falling rain. Squawking birds. All throughout the universe, time resumed and nature sang.

Dor felt his head spin and his body drop. He awoke coughing in the dirt. A high, strong sun hung in the sky.

He knew immediately.

He was home.

He struggled to stand up. Ahead of him was Nim's tower, its top in the clouds. The path beneath his feet would take him to it.

He inhaled deeply, then turned the other way. With the chance to do what none in life ever get to do, he did not waver. He changed the history of his footsteps.

He ran back to her.

Through waves of heat and fits of choking, he pushed on, driven by desperation. Although the exertion would speed his death, he would not slow down. A phrase came to his memory-time flies-and he recited it over and over, driving him on through the hills and into the high plains. Only when the rocks looked familiar, only when he saw the hut made of reeds, did he slow his pace, as man does when he approaches what he desires, uncertain if it can possibly be all he hoped. Dare he look? All that he had dreamed of? All that had sustained him for an eternity?

His chest was heaving. He was drenched in sweat.

"Alli?" he cried.

He stepped around the hut.

She lay on a blanket.

"My love," she whispered.

Her voice was how he had always remembered it, and none of the billions of voices he had heard in that cave ever matched its sweetness or the way it made him feel.

"I am here," he said, kneeling down.

She saw his face.

"You are stricken."

"No more than you."

"Where did you go?"

He tried to answer, but he could no longer see his thoughts. Images were fading. An old man? A girl? He was back on his own path, and the memory of his eternal life was fading away.

"I tried to stop your suffering," he said.

"We cannot stop what Heaven chooses."

She smiled weakly.

"Stay with me."

"Forever."

He touched her hair. She turned her head.

"Look," she whispered.

The sky before them was painted by a stunning sunset, orange and violet and cranberry red. Dor lay down beside her. Their labored breathing overlapped. Once, Dor would have counted those breaths. Now he merely listened, absorbing the sound. He looked at everything. He took it all in. His hand drooped, and he found himself drawing a shape in the sand, wide at the top, narrow in the middle, wide at the bottom. What was it?

A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.

As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared soul, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky.

EPILOGUE.

80.

Sarah Lemon was rushed to the hospital.

She stayed there overnight. Her lungs cleared and her head stopped throbbing and she reminded herself how lucky she had been that her phone had rung with a loud, heavy-metal guitar riff-programmed by Ethan-which signaled her mother, calling to wish her a Happy New Year.

The noise had startled Sarah just enough to realize what was happening, and she pressed the garage opener and pulled the car door handle and fell out. She crawled along the concrete floor, coughing violently, until she reached the outside air. A neighbor spotted her sprawled in the snow and called 911.

She was admitted to the emergency room as the clock struck twelve and people up and down the coast screamed in celebration.

On the gurney next to Sarah was a man named Victor Delamonte.

He'd been admitted moments earlier, suffering from cancer and kidney disease. He apparently had been off his dialysis, which was addressed with a blood transfusion, although the man who brought him in said only that he'd been complaining of abdominal pain.

What was never revealed was how Victor altered his end-of-life plans. As he was lifted for immersion into ice, his eyes popped opened and he saw Roger. Victor had instructed Roger, in the whispered conversation earlier that evening, that if for some reason, any reason, he changed his mind about this idea, he would signal it by saying a single word, and Roger would abort the plan.

Do you understand? No hesitation if that happens?

I understand.

It happened. A word was spoken. Upon hearing it, Roger screamed, "Hold it right now!" He forced the coroner and doctor to back away, then immediately called for an ambulance. He followed his boss's orders, as he always did, because he'd listened for the word and the word was clear: "Grace."

81.

This is a story about the meaning of time, and it begins long ago, but it ends years from now, in a crowded ballroom, where a respected research doctor is applauded by a crowd. She credits her colleagues. She calls it "a team effort." But the man who introduces her expresses the worldwide opinion that Dr. Sarah Lemon has found a cure for the most dreaded disease of our time; it will save millions of people, and life will never be the same.

"Take a bow," the man says.

She lowers her head. She waves meekly. She thanks her teachers and research partners and she introduces her mother, Lorraine, who stands, holding her handbag, and smiles. Sarah also notes that this would never have been possible if not for a benefactor named Victor Delamonte, who, back when she was applying to colleges, had generously bequeathed her entire tuition costs to an Ivy League university-undergraduate, medical school, as far as she could go-in his last will and testament, a doc.u.ment that was changed drastically just before he died from the very disease for which Sarah had now found a cure. He had survived only three months beyond their night together in the emergency room. But his wife, Grace, said those were the most precious months of their marriage.

"Thank you all very much," Sarah concludes.

The crowd rises in an ovation.

Meanwhile, at the same time, on a cobblestone street in lower Manhattan, a new tenant is moving into One Forty-Three Orchard. A construction crew is knocking down walls, as per the blueprints.

"Whoa," one of them says.

"What?" says another.

Flashlights shine into a cavernous s.p.a.ce, previously hidden below floor level. On the walls are carvings, every shape and symbol imaginable. In the corner is an hourgla.s.s, holding a single grain of sand.

And as that gla.s.s is lifted by curious workers, someplace far away-someplace indescribable in the pages of a book-a man named Dor and a woman named Alli run barefoot up a hillside, tossing stones, laughing with their children, and time never crosses their minds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.