Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

“Can I come in?” he asked, half expecting her to say no.

Her answer was slow in coming, but finally she stepped aside, opened the door wide and said “Sure. Come on in.”

A set of green luggage sat unopened on the living room sofa. She grabbed the bags and carried toward the bedroom. “Let me get rid of these. Have a seat,” she said, nodding in the direction of the sofa. When she returned to the living room, Jim was still standing nervously in the center of the room.

“Do you want a drink?”

“Please. Water would be fine,” Jim replied, suddenly aware his throat was parched and rough as an emery stone.

Simone moved into the kitchen. “I guess we have a lot to talk about.” Her voice filtered back to him like a long lost memory.

“I… I just need to know why,” he said, as Simone handed him the glass of water which he immediately set down on the nearby coffee table, his hand shaking so much he thought he might drop it.

Simone’s head tilted slightly as she bit down on her lower lip, an unconscious tell of nervousness Jim recognized from their years together. She was gathering her thoughts together—zoning for just a second while she organized what she was going to say. She sat down on the sofa and gazed up at Jim. “I was at a conference in Baltimore. The station I was working for—did you know I was working as a producer again? Anyway, they wanted me to cover it for them. I’d never been to Baltimore before—always wanted to—so when the conference was over I decided to stay a couple of extra days to look around. I was heading back to Baltimore-Washington airport to catch the flight back home. I remember there was a tailback from the off-ramp down to the link-road and I was sitting in the queue listening to the radio, it was an oldie. I’d just put the car’s AI on auto so I could finish reading over my notes from the conference, when… everything changed.”

Jim had witnessed Simone’s next reaction in virtually everybody he had met since the Slip. When the conversation inevitably turned to the question of where were you when the Slip happened? People got a certain look in their eyes, as though they were still trying to come to grips with that moment of change. Her blue eyes focused off into infinity as her brain reran the movie of the instantaneous jump from normality to this surreal version of reality.

A lopsided smile broke over Simone’s face and her voice took on a reverent quality as she continued. “…and then I was leaning out the window of our old Chevy, the yellow one you hated so much, you called it the puke mobile, remember? I had a lunch box in my hand and I was saying don’t forget your lunch . I was talking to a little girl. Oh! God forgive me but I didn’t recognize her at first. She was running away from me toward a building, it was her kindergarten, there were other kids all around us, and there was the sound of children yelling and chattering, and parents talking. Normal stuff. Normal, human stuff. And… and… then everybody froze and there was a deathly silence.”

Jim did not remember when he had sat down next to his ex-wife, he did not recall where the anger had gone, and he did not recollect when he had taken his Simone’s hand in his own.

There were tears in her eyes now. “And then she turned and looked at me. She said ‘Mommy?’ with this look of surprise on her face. I just stared and stared at her. I thought I was dreaming. Then overhead, this jet came screaming in low, almost at treetop level and it disappeared behind me. I couldn’t follow it, my eyes were fixed on Lark but I saw the other kids turn their heads, and I heard the explosion but I couldn’t do anything but stare at my daughter because I knew that this had to be a dream. I’d fallen asleep at the wheel on the way to the airport and this was just a dream. So it wasn’t a real plane that had just crashed behind us and if I took my eyes off her for even a second, I just knew I would wake up and she would be gone.

“Then this stuff started falling from the sky, bits of metal and burning things. It started like a rainstorm, little pieces first, just pattering on the pavement, it made everybody look up. Then it was raining chunks of metal and the other kids started screaming and shouting. The parents just grabbed their own and started running. It was pandemonium.”

Jim handed Simone a paper handkerchief from his pocket. She took it gratefully and patted away the dampness from her cheeks.

“Lark started crying and I just reacted, I jumped out of the car and grabbed her. Threw her in the back seat and drove.” Simone took a long swig from her own glass of water. “It was like a meteor storm, bits of debris smashing into the ground all around us, bouncing off the roof of the car. There were houses on either side that were already burning and I was trying to drive and calm Lark because she kept repeating over-and-over ‘ Where’s Benjamin? Where’s Benjamin? ’ and I took my eyes off the road for one second to look back at her… just one second.”

“When I turned back there was an old man standing in the middle of the road. His mouth was wide open and he was staring into the sky, back toward where we had just come from. I tried to swerve past him, I really did—Christ, he was standing in the middle of the road and I had my dead daughter in the back and I…” The words were tumbling from her now, cascading out of her mouth. “… and I hit him. I killed him.”

“You don’t know that for certain,” said Jim quietly.

“I killed him,” she repeated with certainty. “And God forgive me, I didn’t stop.”

“Well there you go; you didn’t stop, so you don’t know for certain that—”

She looked across at him and stared directly into his eyes. “I was doing close to sixty and I hit him straight on. It took me an hour to wash the blood and… stuff off the car. I killed him.” Simone stared at her feet, her elbows resting on her knees and her head bowed deeply.

“Who’s Benjamin?” asked Jim, attempting to change the subject away from the morbid tale.

“Who? Oh! I don’t know, maybe one of her softies?” A softie was the name Lark had given to her stuffed toys. She had names for all her toys, so Benjamin was probably one of them, Jim reasoned.

“So where did you go? Why didn’t you come to your parents? I was waiting there for you.”

“I started to head to the house, but there was so much confusion and the smoke and the fire from the crash. It was right there where our old house used to be in West Hills. I knew it wouldn’t be any good trying to get home. Besides, I had a little girl in the back of my car that I thought was my dead daughter.”

“What do you mean you thought it was your daughter, of course it was our daughter.”

“For all I knew, I was suffering some kind of psychotic episode and I’d just kidnapped this child off the side of a street in Baltimore because she looked like Lark.”

“But she called you Mommy .”

“I know. I know; but I was confused and, even after all these years, I missed her so very much. I thought I was over her death, but all I had done was hidden it away in my mind somewhere where I wouldn’t stumble over it very often.”

“We were all confused. I think most of us still are,” said Jim the ghost of his first few hours back in this time still haunted him.

“I drove and I drove and I made it out of the city. The freeways were all on fire and blocked so I took the side streets. I can’t even remember most of it, but I think I got out of LA on pure instinct.”

“You could have come to me at any time, Simone.”

“I wanted to, I really did. You were the first person I thought to get to. But then I thought that maybe you were like you used to be. And it scared me. You… changed, Jim. You became so morose, so very angry and… you left me—”