The shock of seeing Erasmus in this condition reminded Jeffy that the man in police custody was not exactly his friend but an alternate-world version of the man. He found it difficult to credit that anyone as good and reliable as Erasmus might, in another life of different experiences and pressures, have become someone of
lower character than he was on Earth Prime. But of course this might be the case. Nevertheless, he told Amity to stay close, and he took a step toward the curb, intending to cross the highway—until a man in black fatigues and a knitted black cap exited the gallery behind its owner and the two cops.
“Another one,” Amity whispered, as if even the noise of passing traffic would not mask her voice from those on the far side of the street. “I don’t like these guys, and not just ’cause of the freaky way they dress. They’re like human cockroaches or something, the way they scuttle into sight when you least expect them.”
This particular human cockroach was more formidable than the specimen who accosted them in the library. About six feet two. Maybe two hundred pounds. He carried a police baton, a modern version of a billy club, which perhaps he had used on Erasmus’s head. His broad, flat face might as well have had the word barbarian stamped on his forehead. Maybe it did, under the hem of the snugly fit knitted cap.
The policemen didn’t conduct Erasmus into the patrol car. At the direction of the barbarian, who obviously outranked them, they frog-marched Erasmus to the back of the black van. Another human cockroach stepped out of that vehicle and roughly shoved Erasmus into it.
“Daddy, he’s staring at us,” Amity warned.
The barbarian with the club stood on the sidewalk, between the patrol car and the van, focusing intently on them as they watched the gallery owner being arrested. Maybe the social norms of this world required citizens to ignore scenes like this or face serious consequences if they couldn’t repress their curiosity. Not one driver among those in the passing traffic slowed to have a better look.
“Head down,” Jeffy said, “as if there’s something fascinating on the sidewalk. Head down and keep moving to the corner.”
Although this Erasmus Gifford was not, strictly speaking, the man he knew, Jeffy was embarrassed to turn away from him. With Amity to be concerned about, with mounting evidence that they had landed in an authoritarian or even totalitarian state, discretion was the best course, the only rational response. Yet rationality felt too much like cowardice.
At the end of the block, they kept moving southward, crossed the intersection, and only then dared to glance back. The patrol car, its flashing lightbar flinging rhythmic redness through the drab day, pulled away from the curb, heading north, downhill, and the van followed it.
“From now on, stay close by my side,” Jeffy said. “Don’t even think about getting more than an arm’s reach away from me.”
19
The birds that for a while braved the forbidding sky now returned once more to nests and roosts.
The breeze withered away. The low heavens lowered farther. No clouds had ever before looked so heavy, as though they might shed lead pellets instead of rain.
This residential neighborhood was eerily quiet, no one coming or going, no one attending to any chores, as if many of the houses might be empty.
Jeffy felt as though he were moving through something thicker than air, the day resisting him like a hundred fathoms of water would resist a deep-sea diver making his way across an ocean floor.
The house on Bastoncherry Lane wasn’t stucco like many houses in Suavidad Beach, wasn’t in any genre of Spanish architecture or in the craftsman style, or mid-century modern, or faux Tuscan, or of a soft contemporary design. For a Southern California beach town, the residence appeared unique: a two-story white-clapboard home with forest-green shutters flanking the windows, so traditional that it could have been the home of almost any family in any TV sitcom from the 1950s and ’60s. It was a house where you imagined there was much love and laughter, where the family’s few problems were small and resolved in thirty minutes between station breaks.
The front walk of herringbone-pattern brick led to brick steps and a brick-floored porch added during a remodel, years after the house was built, replacing a concrete walk and stoop. No other brickwork than this could have inspired such intense sentimental memories in Jeffy. In the world from which he’d come—evidently in this world as well—his dad had been the masonry contractor on the job, and Jeffy had worked with him that summer. He’d been sixteen. He had first seen Michelle Jamison while on that project. She was fifteen, and he adored her, although in secret. He was shy, she vivacious. He was enchanted with the world as it had been decades earlier; she cared little for the past, was versed in all the latest music and movies, wrote songs, and had a plan to shape the future to her desires. Nonetheless, in retrospect, he could not justify to himself why he’d taken more than four years to ask her for a date.
With Amity at his side, he climbed the brick steps and went to the front door and hesitated, heart quickening with the prospect of love reborn, and then he rang the bell.
Amity took his hand and squeezed it. “Her name’s still Jamison. She never married.”
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did. We don’t know anything about her life in this world.”
“I look a little like her. If she sees herself in me, maybe she’ll believe our story, believe there’s a better world than this. Then she’ll come with us.”
“Don’t wish so hard,” he advised. “Soft wishes are more likely to come true.”
She let go of his hand and blotted her palms on her jeans.
The door opened, and Michelle Jamison stood before them, as lovely as ever. The seven years since he’d last seen her had taken more of a toll than Jeffy expected: a new leanness in her features that suggested hardship; fans of small lines at the corners of her eyes; and something in the eyes themselves that hadn’t been there before, perhaps a weary resignation.
She frowned at Amity, as if in fact a quality in the girl’s countenance affected her. After that fleeting look of puzzlement, when she turned her attention to Jeffy, she evinced no recognition. “Can I help you?”
For a moment, words failed him. Seven years of yearning, of aching loss and regret were an impediment to speech. He had never forgotten that he loved her, but time had faded his memory of the intensity of that love, which possessed him now as fully as ever before. He wanted to take her in his arms, but he could do no such thing, not in this timeline where they had never made love, never married, never conceived a daughter.
His voice sounded strange to him when he said, “You won’t remember me. I’m Jeffy Coltrane. I worked with my dad and his crew the summer when we laid the brick for your walkways and porch and back patio. I was sixteen then, eighteen years ago.”
Shadows pooled in the room behind her, and from them emerged a pale-faced raven-haired boy of about Amity’s age. “Mother?” Standing at Michelle’s side, he didn’t resemble her at all. His posture and expression suggested a treasured sense of superiority; he regarded their visitors with thin-lipped contempt.
The boy wore brown shoes, khaki pants, and a matching shirt. The breast pocket of the shirt featured the face of a wolf with glaring yellow eyes, and there were epaulets on the shoulders. It appeared to be a uniform.