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“Christ almighty,” I said.
He looked at me levelly. “Heard enough history, son?”
Enough to last me a lifetime.
4
“I have to go,” I said. “Will you be all right?”
“Until I’m not. Same as everyone else.” He looked at me closely. “Jake, where did you drop from?
And why the hell should I feel like I know you?”
“Maybe because we always know our good angels?”
“Bullshit.”
I wanted to be gone. All in all, I thought my life after the next reset was going to be much simpler.
But first, because this was a good man who had suffered greatly in all three of his incarnations, I
approached the mantelpiece again, and took down one of the framed pictures.
“Be careful with that,” Harry said tetchily. “It’s my family.”
“I know.” I put it in his gnarled and age-spotted hands, a black-and-white photo that had, by the
faintly fuzzy look of the image, been blown up from a Kodak snap. “Did your dad take this? I ask,
because he’s the only one not in it.”
He looked at me curiously, then back down at the picture. “No,” he said. “This was taken by a
neighbor-lady in the summer of 1958. My dad and mom were separated by then.”
I wondered if the neighbor-lady had been the one I’d seen smoking a cigarette as she alternated
washing the family car and spraying the family dog. Somehow I was sure it had been. From far down
in my mind, like a sound heard coming up from a deep well, came the chanting voices of the jumprope
girls: my old man drives a sub-ma-rine.
“He had a drinking problem. That wasn’t such a big deal back then, lots of men drank too much
and stayed under the same roofs with their wives, but he got mean when he drank.”
“I bet he did,” I said.
He looked at me again, more sharply, then smiled. Most of his teeth were gone, but the smile was
still pleasant enough. “I doubt if you know what you’re talking about. How old are you, Jake?”
“Forty.” Although I was sure I looked older that night.
“Which means you were born in 1971.”
Actually it had been ’76, but there was no way I could tell him that without discussing the five
missing years that had fallen down the rabbit-hole, like Alice into Wonderland. “Close enough,” I
said. “That photo was taken at the house on Kossuth Street.” Spoken the Derry way: Cossut.
I tapped Ellen, who was standing to the left of her mother, thinking of the grown-up version I’d
spoken to on the phone—call that one Ellen 2.0. Also thinking—it was inevitable—of Ellen
Dockerty, the harmonic version I’d known in Jodie.
“Can’t tell from this, but she was a little carrot-top, wasn’t she? A pint-sized Lucille Ball.”
Harry said nothing, only gaped.
“Did she go into comedy? Or something else? Radio or TV?”
“She does a DJ show on Province of Maine CBC,” he said faintly. “But how . . .”
“Here’s Troy . . . and Arthur, also known as Tugga . . . and here’s you, with your mother’s arm
around you.” I smiled. “Just the way God planned it.” If only it could stay that way. If only.
“I . . . you . . .”
“Your father was murdered, wasn’t he?”