He was incredulous. “You don’t see why?”
“I’m an equal member of the mission. I can do what’s best for me, and the others must conform to new arrangements. You and I can be happy, David. You’ve been very happy during the time we’ve spent together. Happier than you’ve been since you lost Emily. Don’t throw away that happiness. You’ll regret it. You will deeply regret it.”
He remembered too well what she said before she’d gone away:
Say it again.
This is forever.
It better be.
It is.
It better be. I won’t have anything less. It better be forever.
A thought occurred to him, a desperate hope. He knew it would be dangerous to raise this issue, but he had no choice. “To change the future, you change the past. So change the past. If you love me, really love me, change the past for me.”
After an icy silence, she asked what he meant, though he was sure she must know.
He could see her ghostly form in the window as she came nearer to him and stood close behind his right shoulder.
He spoke to her reflection. “Go back to that night. Take a gun. You’re an assassin, after all. Go back to that rotten night and take a gun and blow Ronny Jessup’s head off when he steps out of the van, before he can touch her.”
| 92 |
The quality of Anna’s silence was such that David knew she would deny him.
When she spoke, his intuition was confirmed. “I wish I could, David. For you, I wish I could. But it’s not possible.”
He couldn’t bear to look at her directly, couldn’t allow himself to love the sight of her, couldn’t permit himself to hate anyone who looked like her. “You could if you wanted.”
“You don’t understand the expense and the effort needed to create the bridge between this house in my time and yours. It was a revolutionary, Herculean effort. The year at this end of the bridge was carefully chosen for the work we need to do. It’s only a bridge, not a time machine, just a bridge between this house in different centuries. I can’t return to yesterday, let alone ten years to that awful night. I’m a prisoner of the present, just like you are, with no power to move anywhere but forward.”
They stood in a long mutual silence as the rain ceaselessly washed the darkness toward a distant dreary dawn.
Softly she said, “Thy eternal summer shall not fade.”
Part of the epitaph on the double-wide gravestone marker. From Emily’s favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
“David, I’m a needy creature. I need affection. I need so much to be loved, and so do you. Until you, I’ve been starved for love all my life. I’m Anna, hideous to behold in my true state, a monster by any standard. I was born of normal parents, sent as an infant to a sanitarium for freaks, as the first of us were, until there were too many of us, until every child was a freak, though every child a unique horror. Human biology was upended by fanatical narcissists grasping for immortality through genetic manipulation. And that’s only one of the horrors. One of many. The world was already dark and cruel, a hard place, off the rails, before we freaks began to be born. I’m fortunate I wasn’t killed. Many were murdered out of fear and ignorance. I was beaten more times than I can remember, mocked and despised and spat on and never loved by anyone. But Emily . . . Emily was beautiful. How glorious it’s been to be Emily Carlino and gaze into a mirror at Nature’s work as it was meant to be, not as it has been undone by fools. You love her, but you can love me, too, if you will only give yourself the chance to discover it.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. He closed his eyes rather than look at the transparent image of her in the window glass.
“Now that you’ve learned the truth,” she prodded, “what relief has it brought you?”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s brought you none, no relief. Emily died. You can’t change that. No one can. And you still blame yourself. You live in torment, and you always will, unless you open your heart to the extraordinary opportunity that lies before you.”
Through his eyelids, each flash of lightning remained visible, dim flickering flares, as though the storm raged not just outside, but also within him. In fact, the one real storm always had been internal; the tempest lashing the California night was a mere reflection of the storm within.
He said, “Because you’re from the future and know the past, you knew the day when Calista would die.”
The hand on his shoulder gripped tighter, as if she meant to encourage him to proceed with this line of thought. “It was only a matter of reviewing the historical obituaries.”