Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

“Tony Gallagher,” the man said by way of introduction, his heavy Texas drawl turning the pronunciation of his Christian name into Toe-Knee.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gallagher,” Jim started. “This is my associate Mina Belkov and my name is—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Baston,” Gallagher said with a smirk. “I’ve heard a lot about you, man. A lot about you.”

Before Jim could question Gallagher about how he knew so much about him, the second newcomer stepped out of the back of the van and walked over to the reception committee.

He was the exact opposite of Gallagher: reed thin, in his early twenties and clean-shaven, his sandy blond hair a carefully arranged masterpiece of physics. A sky blue designer—shirt, its look ruined by dark sweat stains under each armpit, clung to a body that probably weighed less than a hundred-and—twenty pounds when dripping wet.

“Justin Beaumont,” the skinny man said, extending his own bony hand. Beaumont’s handshake was every bit as limp as Jim expected for such a birdlike physique, but the man’s voice was deep and sonorous, and Jim had a problem matching it to the skinny young man he saw in front of him.

The third and final member of the Church’s monitoring team stepped around from the back of the van.

Almost as tall as Gallagher, she wore a sleeveless summer—dress that stopped just above her shapely knees and showed off her lithe calves and well-toned arms. Her abundant blond hair would have reached to the middle of her back had it not been tied back in a French bun exposing her sleek, long, throat and the beautiful curve of her jawline. High cheekbones accentuated her round opalescent blue eyes and the strawberry red of her full lips.

“Hello, James,” the woman said as she stepped up onto the curb next to the other new arrivals. “How have you been?”

There was no name for the gamut of emotions that seized Jim Baston at that moment. It was a strange cocktail of intense rage bordering on murderous fury and disbelief; two different strands of emotion woven together to form a rough cord of sorrow that tied up his soul. It felt as though every atom of his body was vibrating, and that at any moment he would simply shake himself into his constituent parts, leaving nothing but a bubbling pool on the steaming sidewalk. Jim’s vision narrowed to the exclusion of all else but the beautiful perspiring woman standing in front of him.

The words tumbled from his mouth before he even knew he would speak them: “Is. She. Alive?” he spat.

Biting her lower lip, the woman glanced at Gallagher who nodded once to her.

“Yes, she’s alive,” said Simone Baston, “Lark is fine.”

“ God damn it ,” yelled Jim Baston, “ Son of a Goddamn-bitch .”

Absolutely irate, he paced back and forth in the living room of his apartment, hands clasped firmly on top of his head as if to stop it flying off from the force of his rage. The knuckles on his right hand glowed red where he had punched the door to his apartment, leaving a fist shaped dent in the wood.

He had been like this for five minutes now—since he had stormed away from the reception area, leaving a shocked Mina Belkov to deal with the new arrivals. I had to , he reasoned, otherwise I might very well have strangled her right there on the steps.

Tears of frustration threatened like storm clouds at the corner of Jim’s eyes, but each time he felt the tears about to flow, the anger would surge through him again, subsuming the sorrow and he was ready to kill again. Dear God , he was going to explode .

“Are you okay?”

The voice surprised Jim and he stopped where he was, halfway between the bedroom and the kitchen, and slowly raised his head towards its source.

Rebecca; standing in the open doorway, her face bright with empathy and concern.

“I don’t know,” he said, his anger falling away at the sight of her and exposing the raw pain that had left him wallowing in his own emotional vomit.

“My little girl, I killed her and now… now she’s alive again.” His voice fluctuated between sorrow and anger and disbelief as the words tumbled from him, the imminent tears finally welling up, soaking his cheeks with their warmth before he even knew he was crying. “My wife, she’s alive and she has my baby girl,” he stuttered. “She kept her from me for all this time. Why the Hell would she do that? Why?”

Rebecca took a step toward him, and as Jim crumpled to his knees, she knelt down beside him, enfolding him in her arms. “Hush!” she said, her cheek pressed tightly against his forehead, her own tears dampening his hair. “It’s all right,” she whispered as she gently rocked him in her arms.

Later, Jim used his left hand to rap gently on Simone’s door. His right hand was still swollen and sore from punching his own door earlier.

With Rebecca’s help, he had finally pulled himself together. She had left him to go find a first-aid kit from the women’s communal lavatory. After checking nothing was broken, she slathered antiseptic cream onto his raw knuckles, quietly chastising him for being a big baby when he winced at the sting of the cream on his broken and bloodied skin. She wrapped a thick, padded, bandage over his hand, which did nothing to alleviate the disinfectant smell from the cream, a smell he had never enjoyed, bringing back memories of scraped knees and cut elbows from when he was a kid.

Over a pot of coffee, he talked for almost three hours; recounting his whole history with Simone and Lark and how, after Lark’s death, he had checked-out of the human race and hidden away for almost a year. He told her he was lost, that he had been since the Slip had happened. The pain of losing his child and his wife for a second time—it had eaten him up.

Then suddenly, this: Simone had arrived out of nowhere, carrying the news that not only was she alive, but Lark was too. All those months and months of worry and pain. How could she have done this to him? Why didn’t she try to contact him? Christ! He’d lived at her parents for a while, hoping against hope that they were alive. It seemed the logical place for her to contact, she could have called, sent a letter, email—anything—just to let him know she was okay. And to top it all, she’s working for the Church of Second Redemption ? It just didn’t add up to the sum total of the woman he had once known. To the woman he had once loved.

Rebecca listened quietly, offering no opinion, no criticism of his actions. She had simply listened, holding his hand gently in her own and, when he was finished, she told him the only way he was going to get an answer to all those painful questions was to go and ask the one person who could answer them.

So that was why he was standing here now, waiting for Simone to answer her door; hoping against hope that there would be some good reason for all this confusion and deception, his anger at her still simmering just below the surface.

He rapped again and waited.

Simone answered the door in a white terry—towel dressing gown, the lingering smell of her shampoo or bodywash filling his nostrils with the scent of gardenias and patchouli. Simone looked like a Bedouin princess, her perfect features framed by a towel, wrapped in a twirl around her wet hair. A single strand of hair had escaped the towel’s grasp, and Jim fought the urge to reach out and tuck it back under for her.

Simone was almost as he remembered her. Her unembellished beauty flawed now by worry lines that creased her forehead and turned her lips up in a halfhearted attempt at a smile.

“Hello James,” she said quietly.