James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

“Yeah,” I said. “The years have treated me well.”

I made the call. She’s in a nursing home in San Francisco. Moved to America in ’57. I was afraid. The phone rang for a long time. Not many nurses on Christmas morning, and then someone answered.

I asked for Gina. Gina who, she said, and I told her. “I’m new here,” she said. “I don’t know that patient.” Papers shuffled around on her end. She put the phone down, and someone mumbled to her in the background.

You’ve got to understand. I’ve never known anyone for more than a day. A day is all I get. I don’t understand why. When the morning comes, I wake up, and it’s Christmas. Sometimes I won’t sleep for a couple of days, but everyone sleeps. It can’t be avoided. Maybe I vanish in the night. Maybe a year later I appear when no one is looking. Who can tell? I always wake up in a place where a stranger could go unremarked, an army, a hospital, a festival, a flop house and soup kitchen like this one. I don’t know if it’s a curse—there’s lots I don’t know—but all I get is a day a year, and I’m a stranger that no one knows.

Then Gina came on the line. It was her voice. I’ve heard her grow old. “Hello, old friend,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

Each year she’s been there. Each year. She’s ninety-six now. I’m twenty-one today. It’s my birthday. In three-hundred and sixty-five years for you, I’ll be twenty-two, but I want to tell you something. It’s important I think.

I hear rumors of bad things in the world. I hear about wars; I’ve even seen some, but in my experience, human beings are good. They’re generous. They share with strangers, and they reach out to someone they’ve only talked to on the phone once a year for eighty years. If you could just see things from my perspective, you’d understand, even without friends, people are good. There are reasons to hope.

You shouldn’t give up. People will help.

And you know what else? I wonder if you could do me a favor. You could? Great. I wonder—would you mind if I phoned you next year, here? Do you think you could find your way back here on Christmas to take my phone call? It would mean a lot to me.

J uly 31, Friday Afternoon: Moving In

In space’s far reaches, red-shifted radiation marks the universe’s beginning, a microwave ghost forever lingering after the Big Bang. When amateur astronomer Meadoe Omura puts her eye to the telescope to see her favorite nebulas, she travels backward in time, and light travels both ways. On August 6, 1945, a great flash illuminated Hiroshima. Photons, radiation, a radio pulse blasted into space. Years and years later, an attentive observer on one of Earth’s nearer star systems might catch the twinkle. The past made present, living in the eye.

What has passed does not disappear; it recedes, ever fainter, but never gone, remaining, a ghost. Like what lived in the old house in Harriston that Meadoe bought, like what lived in Meadoe.

In 1945 her grandfather worked a job on Hiroshima’s outskirts, excavating defense bunkers, when the sky turned bright, so terribly bright, and seconds later the dirt buried him and the others. The story stuck with Meadoe and when she was a little girl she had nuclear nightmares: a bomber’s high altitude roar, the peace of an early morning city, a mushroom cloud rising and rising. She thought about Hiroshima a lot, as she studied the stars, when she read quantum physics.

But today Meadoe wondered, should I have bought the house? She stood on the porch, the new key unfamiliar to her touch. It cost so much. The apartment was fine. I could have taken another path than this one, like an electron. She thought about uncertainty. In quantum physics it meant that one could never tell both where an electron was and how fast it was going. It seemed an electron was in all the possible places at the same time. She’d tried to explain that to Joan, her therapist, once, but by the time she got to tachyons, a particle that appeared to travel backwards in time, Joan’s eyes glazed over.

Of course, in my case, she thought, the uncertainty principle just means should I have signed a thirty-year mortgage?

What had looked like pleasant landscaping swallowed the house, and the house itself leaned over her, large and quiet.

Her radio was already unpacked—the movers must have set it up—so she turned it on and an oldies station playing a big band number crackled into life. She opened boxes until late.

After eating part of a casserole, after screwing in the new deadbolts, after finding a nightshirt and blankets and a bedroom lamp, Meadoe went to bed.

She fell asleep before she had a chance to hear any sounds her new house made.

At 4:30 a.m. Meadoe woke. For a while she lay still, trying to figure out where she was and why she was so warm. Her blanket felt pounds too heavy, and her arm under the pillow buzzed with the numbness of sleeping on it wrong. A streetlight cast a pale white shaft alive with dust motes through her window. She decided she was awake for good and might as well unpack some more.

Meadoe sat. “What the heck?” she said into the strange room. Her nightshirt clung to her, and when she pushed the blanket aside, it was soaked. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. When she stood by the bed and looked down, there, in sweat, was her outline.

August 1, Saturday Morning: Therapy

Joan said, “The key to your present is in your past.” She consulted her notes, her briefcase open on the couch. Curtains still weren’t hung, but the house had begun to look like home. Books were dusted and in the bookcase; her antique hook rug covered most of the living room floor.

Joan flipped to a new page and clicked her pen. “You’re still virgin.”

“Thirty-two years and not a tumble.” Meadoe kept her hands still in her lap. Old ground it might be, but she didn’t feel comfortable discussing it.

“You told me something happened in high school.” Joan flicked back a few pages. “Christopher Towne. Basketball player. You knew him from church. He liked the same books you did. On the third date at the Deer Trail Park picnic area he tried…”

“Yes, but he stopped.”

“Before he started, did you want him to?”

“What?”

“Start.”

Joan hadn’t asked that question before. Deer Trail Park sat at the end of a long dirt road south of town. When they’d pulled into the parking lot, Christopher dimmed his lights to keep them from shining into other cars. She picked out Ursa Major and Minor through the front windshield. Beyond the city, the stars glittered so clearly. Meadoe shut her eyes.

“I knew kids made out there. I suppose I wanted to.”

“You suppose?”

“I wasn’t really sure what making out involved. I was fifteen. Nobody had talked to me about it. I thought it would be like Wuthering Heights . I never thought about sex. I still don’t.”

Joan coughed. Meadoe knew she did that to cover a snicker. “So, you thought one of you would die and the other would pine forever? That’s ambitious for a third date.”

It had been in early November, a few days before her birthday, which is why she remembered—the first cold night of the fall. Windows were fogged in the other cars. Chris had taken her to a movie, then headed to the park without asking.

“No, what I like about Wuthering Heights is the second part anyway, after Catherine dies and Heathcliff keeps searching for her. Wuthering Heights is a bad example. Maybe I thought we’d hold hands. You know, and then kiss on the porch when he dropped me off.”

Joan wrote in the notebook. “Sheesh, were we ever that young? Hadn’t you ever had a sexual fantasy with Christopher in it before? You knew you were going on the date; you’d been out with him twice already; didn’t you think about anything more extensive than holding hands?”