Saturday, August 31, 1985 — 6:58 PM

The reward is the journey. Jonathan's index finger hunted, circled, and stroked each character on the keyboard. He stared at the monitor, shook his head with a puzzled frown; the words felt wrong. He hunched over his desk, ready to erase the phrase from the screen and try again, when Ann murmured in his ear, "Look what I found."

Startled, Jonathan flinched and looked up. He had been unaware of his wife's presence; the hum of the computer drowned the whisper of her bare feet against the wide planks that formed the floor of his makeshift office.

Ann placed a scrap of paper on the corner of Jonathan's desk. "You know those photo albums your parents left behind?" She smiled. "Well, this page fell out when I was carrying them up to the bedroom. I think it's something you drew as a child."

Reluctantly abandoning the computer, Jonathan frowned as he examined the paper: the unevenly-spaced blue lines on the paper reminded him of grade-school penmanship classes. The lines had faded, and the paper's edges had turned a dingy yellow. It was creased and wrinkled, as if someone had crumpled it into a tight ball then unfolded and smoothed it out. A faint memory stirred as he traced his finger over the writing on the paper; it held a pattern of stars, the colors pale but still distinguishable:

 

 

Jonathan shrugged, and looked up at Ann again, wondering why she had interrupted his work for this. Family scrapbooks were nothing more than a coffin for dead memories, as far as Jonathan was concerned: he rarely looked at pictures from his childhood. The past is the past. Better to just leave it alone.

"This must be from a long time ago," he said slowly. "I don't remember it, but maybe it got left behind when we moved out of this house. I wonder how many other odd little ghosts are hiding in the closets."

Jonathan remembered little about his childhood, and he didn't know why his parents had chosen this house in a nondescript Long Island village [1]; they had moved on to Texas a few months later, at the end of the summer. Years later, after numerous summers with his own children on Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, and the New Jersey beaches, he and Ann had decided to brave the social scene of the Hamptons. A real estate agent showed them dozens of garish houses on quarter-acre sand-lots. They were tempted by a few with tennis courts and pools, but the prices were outrageous. They were ready to abandon the Hamptons when the frustrated agent brought them to a sprawling, unpretentious house at the end of Mecox Road, just south of Highway 27 [2].

Jonathan had recognized the house with a visceral jolt. It seemed an odd coincidence, but when he mentioned it to Ann, she shrugged. Everything about his childhood seemed strange and mysterious to her, but he knew that she had given up asking about most of the details. Except for odd and utterly unexpected coincidences like this one, he simply didn't remember any of the details. Maybe I was subconsciously manipulating the real-estate agent by rejecting all the other houses, he had thought at the time. But it was an ephemeral thought, and he let it go.

The house had a vast dining room and a kitchen that looked out over a deck opening onto a sprawling, grassy back yard and pool. One master bedroom, on the ground floor, was set aside for guests, but Ann decided to settle the family into the four bedrooms upstairs. She and Jonathan took the largest upstairs bedroom, with windows on three sides; it opened onto a deck that crossed above the downstairs laundry room to an off above the garage that Jonathan appropriated for himself.

Jonathan had been entranced by the opportunity to re-live a summer from his childhood. More than anything else, he remembered the wild geese that nested in the nearby ponds. Watching them each morning became a link to a past that was otherwise forgotten and irrelevant in adulthood. On weekend mornings, when the sky was still rosy pink, Sarah, Zachary, and Daniel joined him on the second-floor deck to watch the geese fly over in wave after wave of V formations, heading toward Mecox Bay. Sometimes they took a different pattern: a long snake line undulating lazily as it passed overhead. Occasionally, two or three would fly so low they could hear the sound of their wings beating against the wind and clearly make out the features of their feathers, heads and eyes. The sound of the birds came to him in his dreams.

Ann's voice jerked him from his reverie. "Sometimes I wonder if you remember anything from the past," she laughed. "But look what's on the back of the paper." She flipped the page with her finger, as if it were a pancake on the skillet. In a faded pencil script, someone had written:

not what he seems. He is a Communist

 

"Isn't that bizarre?" asked Ann. "You must have been a weird little kid! Very bright, maybe, but definitely weird!"

She's thinks I wrote those words. Jonathan shivered: the handwriting was his mother's tight script, with familiar loops and curly-cues. Who was a Communist? he wondered. Not me, that's for sure.

Ann grabbed the paper and waved it at him. "You don't get it, do you?" she asked in an exasperated tone.

"What?"

"They look like the stars on Sarah's necklace."

What's this got to do with Sarah? Jonathan shook his head slowly. Their daughter had received a necklace of golden stars on a thin gold chain from an anonymous admirer on her last birthday. Jonathan had dismissed it as an innocent gift from a bashful boyfriend, but he knew that it annoyed Ann. Sarah wore the necklace 24 hours a day and refused to let anyone touch it.

"Are you sure it wasn't you who gave it to Sarah?" Ann asked, waggling a finger at him. "Was that bracelet something else from your childhood that you don't remember?"

Before Jonathan could respond, a yell from the back yard interrupted him. He shoved paper aside and they both looked out the office window to see what the children were up to.

"Do overs! Do overs!" eight-year-old Zachary screeched, his thin, piping voice carrying across the yard and through the office window. "I wasn't ready when you threw the ball, Sarah, so you hafta do it over!" Jonathan surmised that Zachary had hit a pop fly, and was outraged when his teenaged sister caught it.

"Yeah, Sarah, it's do overs! Do overs!" squealed five-year-old Daniel, as he danced a jig near the pool. Jonathan was just teaching him the rules of softball, but Daniel never missed a chance to join forces with his older brother against Sarah. They had been playing in the sticky heat for an hour, since the family finished dinner. and Daniel's blond hair lay matted down on his head. He still wore his orange Speedo swimsuit, and his legs, once short and plump, had grown noticeably longer during the summer; soon he would be as lanky as his older brother.

Thunder rumbled as Jonathan looked down from his office above the garage. The sky over Mecox Bay was black, and a lightning bolt shot down out on the western side of the bay. He nodded at the warning of a storm to come: it would be good to wash away the humidity.

In the back yard, Sarah yelled as loudly as Zachary. "You can't have do-overs just because you don't like the way things worked out! I can't help it if you swung at the ball and hit a pop fly. If you weren't ready, you shouldn't have swung! Anyway, you're out! Danny's up now!"

"Dad! Dad!" Daniel squealed, his voice an octave higher than before. "Sarah's cheating! It's not fair!" He looked up at the second floor window and shouted again: "Dad!! Zack wants to do his last hit over again, and Sarah won't let him! She's cheating!"

Jonathan winced at the accusation. Daniel's reference to cheating was a reminder of a blunder he had made earlier that evening. He had been in the midst of writing a book on the history of computers, and he insisted on talking about it at the dinner table. Ann had tried to change the subject by reporting the political news of the day; the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had just announced he was withdrawing medium-range missiles from Eastern Europe [3]. Sarah had raised her eyebrows at the news, but Jonathan would not be distracted.

"Big deal!" he had responded. "Five years from now, nobody will even remember. And besides: you can never trust a Communist — I learned that much as a kid." Gorbachev had been appointed President in 1984 after the death of Andropov [4], and people were expecting big things from the youthful leader. But Jonathan wasn't impressed; he launched into an explanation of the chapter he was working on: the impending "down-sizing" movement from mainframe computers to networks of PC's.

"Look," he had said to them, grasping for a metaphor that might explain the concept. "Let's imagine that I'm a mainframe computer, and I'm trying to single-handedly control the way all of you little computers behave."

"But I'm not a computer," Daniel squeaked.

"I know, piglet." Jonathan had tousled his hair in an affectionate way that Zachary and Sarah no longer tolerated. "But pretend you are. And you have to follow the commands of the big computer, that's me, whenever I give them. Okay?"

Everyone simply stared at him. Zachary twitched in his seat, and Jonathan knew he had only a few seconds before he lost them completely.

"Now, here are my instructions: when I clap my hands, I want all of you to clap your hands at the same time as each together. Ready?"

They continued staring, so Jonathan put his fork down and clapped his hands with a suddenness that made Sarah jump. His clap was followed by a rag-tag sequence of unsynchronized clapping. Daniel was the first to follow his lead, and Ann was the last. The second attempt went no better. Everyone looked disgusted with their performance, with the game, and with Jonathan. The third time, he began the motion of a hand-clap, but stopped abruptly. Every member of the family was fooled, and an explosion of claps ensued.

"Booooo!" Jonathan said, laughing. "You didn't follow my command!"

"You cheated!" yelled Daniel.

"And anyway," said Sarah huffily, "what's the point?"

"Well, the point is simply that it can be awfully hard to have one computer, or one person, attempting to synchronize a group of individual computers, or people."

"So?" Sarah asked, the challenge in her voice indicating that she not only knew this obvious fact, but all other known facts in the universe.

"So, here's the alternative: I'll drop out of the picture as the boss. You guys just clap in sequence by yourselves."

They sat silently, staring at him.

"Go ahead," Jonathan said. "You can do it."

Daniel took the lead; and, as Jonathan expected, they required only three beats of their own rhythm before they compensated for one another and clapped loudly, in perfect synchronicity.

"Cute," Ann acknowledged with a smile. "But would you drop it now, and return to the human race?"

"Did you invent that, Dad?" asked Daniel, the only one still clapping. "Are you going to put that in your book?"

"Yes, Danny," Jonathan acknowledged, "I did invent it, and I am putting it in my book."

"That sounds awful slick, Dad," said Sarah. "Are you sure you didn't steal that idea from someone else? That would be cheating, you know!"

"Dad never cheats," Ann laughed, coming to his defense. "I've known him since high school, and he's as honest as the Pope."

"The Pope? Me?" Jonathan chuckled. "Hardly! Actually, there was one time I cheated in high school. I was always amazed you never found out."

"Really?" said Ann, watching Zachary as he twitched in his seat, his elbow perilously close to a full glass of milk. Daniel, too, had tuned out of the conversation and was whispering to his brother about the continuation of their ball game.

"You remember the high-school election, the one where we ran against each other? Well, it turns out that you should have won, not me," Jonathan said.

"High school? Your high school?" Sarah suddenly interrupted, with a pout in her voice. "Oh, God, not more high school stories! Dad, this is ancient history."

She furrowed her brow and continued, "You probably didn't even have telephones back then. No wonder you cheated — I would, too! Can we be excused now?"

Daniel was staring at Jonathan, mouth wide open, but Zachary pounced on the magic phrase that Sarah had uttered. "Excused! Yeah!" he shouted. "Can we go now? We got more baseball to play!"

"You're going to have to tell me about this, Jonathan," Ann said quietly, as the table erupted with squeals and shouts and chairs being pushed back. "You know what they say: cheaters never prosper."

"Annie, calm down," Jonathan laughed. "It wasn't a big deal. And it wasn't even me who did the cheating. I'll tell you about it tonight, after we put the kids to bed."

What on earth made me remember that incident? he muttered to himself, as they left the table. Maybe it has to do with this house. It really wasn't a big deal, Jonathan thought once again, as another screech from Daniel jolted him back to the present. He shrugged at Ann and thought, I hope she won't be pissed when I tell her. He typed a quick computer command to save the manuscript chapter he was working on, and then strode out of the office, across the deck that connected the garage to the main house, and down the stairs.

As he walked out into the back yard, he heard the first honk honk signaling the beginning of the evening journey of the geese back from Mecox Bay. He looked, but he couldn't see the outline of the tan bird that he knew was up there somewhere. The clouds were so dark that he could tell rain was imminent; another lightning bolt arced downward, somewhere out in the middle of the bay, and he felt the first spatter of rain. At best, he thought, we'll have only a few minutes before we get caught in a downpour.

"What's the problem?" he growled, as he reached the bottom of the stairs, knowing full well that the only problem was simply that all three children were exhausted.

"Daddy," complained Sarah, glistening with sweat from the humidity, "Zack is just impossible! I asked him if he was ready, and then I pitched the ball to him — and now he's mad because he popped out!" Jonathan smiled as he noticed that her hair, though disheveled and matted, was returning to its normal blond color; during a brief period of teenage rebellion earlier in the year, she had dyed her locks a vivid Halloween orange.

"Alllllll right!" he announced, as he strode into the yard, damp grass sliding between his toes. "I'll take care of this."

He knew that Zachary was still young enough to be fooled by fast talking, but Sarah was too savvy to be bamboozled. On the other hand, she was kinder toward her brothers than anyone had a right to expect. Her fierce loyalty to Zachary tugged at Jonathan's heartstrings, as if reminding him of a sibling somewhere that he should be protecting. But it wasn't so; he was an only child, and had always been a loner. Still, he watched in wonderment at the attachment the three children had toward one another; though vastly different in ages and personalities, they leaped to each other's defense in a crisis, and they seemed to have an extra-sensory communication that allowed them to share each other's feelings. Sarah had always been Zachary's guardian angel; Jonathan remembered her draping a protective arm over his shoulders even when she was a little girl. He smiled at the memory.

"Here's what we're going to do," Jonathan announced, in his best umpire's voice. "Zack gets to do his turn at bat over." Zachary whooped with delight, and Sarah opened her mouth to complain. Jonathan held up his hand and yelled, "Wait a minute! That's not all! To make things more fair to Sarah, I'm going to be on her team as the outfielder!"

"Not fair!" yelled Zachary. He was dressed only in faded blue shorts, with no shirt or shoes. His body, from head to toe, was as brown as the wild geese flying overhead; Jonathan could now see not only his ribs, but also stomach muscles and the sinews of his arms and legs. He's going to be taller than me, Jonathan thought proudly. Zachary was, at eight, almost as tall as his sister, and was approaching Ann's height.

Zachary strode up to his father, chin thrust out. "It's not fair that you and Sarah are on the same team. I only have Danny, and he strikes out most of the time!"

Jonathan paused for a moment, then tried a different tack: "Okay, here's what we'll do. Danny and I will be on one team, and we'll play against Sarah and Zack. But you only get one out; Zack's up, and if he makes an out, then Danny and I are up."

Sarah frowned at her brother, and Jonathan's attention was drawn to the tiny stars circling her neck. I should ask her about the drawing Ann found, he thought. But before he could say anything, she surprised him by saying, "I think we should quit, Zack. I don't like this weather — I felt some drops of rain, and I saw some lightning a minute ago. I'm worried about you."

"Ha!" responded Zachary, swinging the bat around his head like a club. "I'm He-Man, Master of the Universe. You should worry about Daddy, not me. And besides, we'll win if I get a hit."

Jonathan shrugged: he didn't care who won, as long as they stopped arguing. Zachary can hit the ball clear out of the yard, he thought, so I should be the outfielder and Danny should pitch. But Danny, he remembered, had never been able to throw the ball consistently; in previous games, most of his so-called pitches had gone into the swimming pool, or — if he forgot to release the ball — into the air behind him. So Jonathan took the ball from Sarah: he would pitch, and Danny would play the outfield.

Sarah relinquished the ball with a sigh, and retreated to the swimming pool, where she watched the action from the diving board. Zack adjusted the Frisbee that was used for home base and was waiting, bat in hand, for Jonathan to toss the ball to him.

"Dad," Daniel said, "would you hold my Action Figure for me while I'm in the outfield?" He thrust a small Darth Vader doll into Jonathan's hand; unlike the standard plastic toys, this one was wood, carved by an alcoholic hippie and acquired during a family stroll through Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

Jonathan grunted and started to put it into his pocket. But Daniel yelped, "No, Dad! If you put it away, I'll forget to take it back! Just hold onto it until it's our turn to bat."

Jonathan sighed in exasperation, but he held Darth in his right hand while Daniel sprinted back in the grassy yard, toward the willow tree that stood in the corner. One of the rabbits that habitually came out in the evening to nibble the grass looked up, froze for a moment, then scampered off into the brush beyond the yard. Jonathan looked back over his shoulder to make sure his outfielder was ready; Daniel waved his hands. Sarah paused on the diving board, waiting to see if Zachary would manage, this time, to wallop the home run he desperately wanted. Ann moved out onto the deck, ready to call the boys in when the inning ended. And Zack stood, tense and poised, ready for Jonathan's pitch.

As Jonathan swung his arm behind him, he felt the sky suddenly light up. He looked up, bewildered, and continued the motion of pitching the ball, wondering whether the ball would end up traveling in Zachary's direction, or over his head, or straight up into the air. All he could see was the blinding white lightning bolt forming in the sky, shooting downward, aiming directly at him. The lightning struck. He was gone.

FOOTNOTES

[1] For the sake of artistic veracity, the author wishes to note that he was never in the town of Water Mill, or anywhere near it, during 1950; the summer of 1985 was his first exposure to the community. As for the accuracy of the other dates, times, places, and people mentioned by various characters throughout the story, the reader will have to judge for himself. Some assistance will be given in the notes below, but it is not intended to be complete. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

[2] Status-conscious inhabitants of the Hamptons will spot something wrong with the suggestion that all of the ticky-tacky houses are south of Route 27. The multi-million dollar estates are, in fact, south of the highway; the best locations have such storied addresses as Lily Pond Lane, and front on the Atlantic Ocean along the southernmost shore of Long Island. All of the new houses, built for the enjoyment of the new wave of nouveau-riche Wall Street yuppies, are on the north side. The highway is the Demilitarized Zone between the two worlds. I'm aware of all this from the summers I've spent on both sides of Route 27; it amused me to take advantage of "artistic license" just to be annoying.

[3] Ann claims that Gorbachev announced a decision to withdraw all of the Soviet medium-range missiles from Europe. But in 1985, all he really did was announce that he would halt deployment of such missiles. At the time, the distinction was crucial, and anyone paying attention to the news would have noticed the difference. By the mid-1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nuance would seem trivial; it's unlikely that one person in a hundred, reading the statement now, would noticed the subtle error I've deliberately introduced here. But what would have happened if Gorby had gone further and had made the decision Ann suggested? Would the Red Army hierarchy have revolted? Would Reagan have been pressured into speeding up disarmament in the West? Would Star Wars have been laid to rest? Who knows?

[4] Jonathan claims that Gorbachev was named President of the Soviet Union in 1984, after the death of Andropov. But this is actually wrong on three counts: first, he succeeded Chernenko, not Andropov -- though Chernenko was in power for such a brief period of time after Andropov's death that one could imagine how he might be completely forgotten by the history books. Second, Gorbachev's reign began in 1985, not 1984 (though it is true that Andropov died in 1984). And (perhaps most important), the third error is that Gorbachev initially held the traditional title of Secretary General of the Communist Party; it was not until 1988 that he became Chairman of the Presidium, and functioned as the President of the country. Of course, perhaps the reason for all of this is that the BeforeTime1 world that Jonathan lived in is not quite the same as the world that we lived in ... assuming that you can remember what really did happen in the Soviet Union in 1984-85. In any case, would it have made a difference if events took place as Jonathan suggested? Would an extra year in power have made a difference in Gorby's career? Would it have enabled the process of perestroika to begin early enough to avoid the utter collapse of the Soviet economy half a dozen years later?

 

Continue to Chapter 2 . . .