Saturday, September 2, 1995

"It was ten years ago, you know," Ann said, "when all of this started. Ten years ago this weekend."

Joanna looked at her quizzically.

"That's when the lightning hit me for the first time," AJ explained, "Ten years ago, on the Saturday before Labor Day. Just about this same time of day, too."

He looked out over the yard, from the rear deck where they were sitting. The grassy lawn off to the right of the swimming pool was lush green; there were no scars, nothing to show that anything unusual had ever happened. In the ensuing ten years, the only change was the appearance of a cluster of ugly houses in the meadow leading out to Mecox Bay. But Joanna will never know what this place was like in 1985, he thought, when the lightning lifted me away and Zack waited for a pitch that never came.

Joanna had agreed to fly back to New York with him to explain everything to Ann, which had led to a major commotion when Ann met them at the Hampton Jitney in Bridgehampton late Friday evening. AJ managed to convince Ann to accept, on pure faith, the idea that Joanna was a long-lost twin sister, but they got no further before they decided to call it a night and turn in. After a late brunch the next morning, he explained the basics, but it was clear that Ann still wasn't sure what was going on.

"You know," Ann mused, as she sat down between them in a deck chair that had grown tattered and threadbare since 1985, "there's one thing I don't understand ... "

"What's that?" AJ asked.

"Well, actually, there's a lot that I don't understand," she said. "But if I accept the basic premise of your story for the moment, there are these niggling details that don't make sense."

"Like what?" Joanna prompted, sipping on her iced tea.

"Well, if you were supposed to be twins, then you were the same age, right?"

"We still are," AJ reassured her.

"Well, in that case," Ann continued, "why is it you were never able to find her in all the schools you attended? How come she was always one or two grades behind you?"

Joanna smiled and reached over to put her glass down. "Like I told AJ in Northport at the end," she said to Ann. "The clues were there — he just didn't see them."

"That's easy to say," AJ snorted. "But what did you really mean by that?"

"Well never mind what I was thinking about then," Joanna replied. "Let me apply the same point to Ann's question."

"What clue?" Ann asked.

"Well, hasn't AJ told you dozens of times how he skipped a grade in school, so he was always a year ahead of himself?"

"Of course," he said, with a wry grin. "It was there all along — though you have to admit that there was no reason, all through those years, that I should have known I was supposed to look for someone exactly my age."

"Actually, the frustrating thing," Joanna continued, "is that it was all a fluke. Remember? That idiot administrator in the Glen Oaks school decided, on a whim, that because your birthday fell on an arbitrary day, she would stick you into second grade rather than shoving you into one of the overcrowded first grades!"

"So?" Ann asked.

"So? So I was in the same school, and I had the same birthday as him," Joanna said, her voice animated. "I checked into that same school no more than half an hour before he did — and the same damn woman plopped me into a first grade class."

"Well, that explains that," Ann said. She was a stickler for details, and AJ knew that before the weekend was over, she would grill both of them on all the tiny parts of his travels between NowTime and BeforeTime.

The mention of the Glen Oaks school brought back a memory. "All those years," AJ said to Joanna, "I knew my parents were worried about being followed by someone. And now that I think back on it, the very first time I saw Mom looking frightened was that same day — the day she took me to the Glen Oaks school to register for classes."

"I assume that wasn't you," Ann said, turning to Joanna.

"No," Joanna replied sadly. "That was Grandpa. He was the most distraught of any of us when AJ was taken away, and he tended to skulk around, spying on him even when we told him not to."

"Whose Grandpa?" AJ asked. "Which side of the family? I'm confused."

"It is confusing," Joanna smiled. "It takes some getting used to. But Grandpa Jock was your grandfather on your mother's side of the family. Your real mother, that is."

AJ sighed and looked out over the bay as the sun touched down on the horizon. There had been clouds overhead earlier, but they had moved west; it would be a spectacular sunset, and a clear, starry night. Somewhere out over the bay, he could hear the faint sound of honking: the geese were on their way back from the ponds and marshes north of the highway where they had spent the day.

Ann had barbecued hamburgers, Vidalia onions, and small new potatoes on the grill behind the house. The hamburgers had a smoky, charcoaly taste; the onions were sweet, and the potatoes were crunchy; and slices of large, fresh tomatoes from Babinsky's market were served with enough ears of fresh corn to feed a small army. They busied themselves cooking, serving, eating, and cleaning up for an hour as the sun sank beneath the horizon, leaving the sky a rosy pink.

When all the dishes were cleared away, they settled back in the deck chairs. AJ opened a bottle of Bridgehampton Chardonnay and poured everyone a glass. Joanna was unaware that Long Island was even capable of producing wine. "The only thing I remember growing around here is potatoes," she said, but she acknowledged the oaky tang of the wine and leaned back in her chair.

"There's one more thing I don't understand," said Ann slowly.

"There are probably a million things you don't understand," AJ laughed. "If it's any consolation, there are a million things about this adventure I don't understand, either."

"Chances are we'll never understand," said Joanna dreamily.

"Well, I guess that what I don't understand is pretty major," Ann went on. "Every time I think I've got all these mothers and fathers figured out, it slips away from me. I think you're going to have to draw me a picture."

"It confuses me, too," AJ said, "and I've heard it more times than you have."

"Well, let me try it again," said Joanna. "I'll go real slow this time; stop me if any of it doesn't make sense."

"Okay," Ann and AJ said simultaneously.

"Well, let's start with the basics," Joanna said. "Forget what you know about AJ's parents: they were both step-parents."

"Both?" asked Ann, shaking her head.

"Yeah, mind-boggling, isn't it?" AJ agreed. "Can you imagine how I felt when Jessie showed me that card, with my name on it, but some other random woman as a mother?"

"Not some 'random' woman," corrected Joanna sternly. "That was your mother."

"Okay, okay," AJ said. "So we had a mother named Bernstein."

"Peggy Bernstein," Joanna corrected. "Right."

"And your father?" asked Ann. "I assume that if you had the same mother, then you had the same father."

"Danforth," AJ responded, pointing at Joanna. "That was the name on the birth certificate she gave me."

"That was your name, too, brother dear," Joanna said, primly. "You keep making it sound like it was somebody else who had this mother and father. It wasn't just mine, it was yours, too."

"Okay, okay," AJ conceded. "It just takes a while to get used to — I've lived my whole life under a different set of ground-rules. Not to mention a different name."

"I know," Joanna said, smiling at him, "it's pretty weird. But it will grow on you."

"Don't pay any attention to him," Ann said, dismissing him with a wave. "So we've got Peggy Bernstein married to this Danforth guy. Did he have a first name?"

"Raymond," Joanna replied. "Actually, that was his middle name. He hated his first name so much he just used an initial."

"Right," said Ann. "So we've got Raymond Danforth marrying Peggy Bernstein, presumably sometime at the beginning of the war. They're at Eglin Air Force Base when Peggy gets pregnant. Off she goes to the base hospital, and she has twins — you two. Am I right so far?"

"So far, so good," AJ said. "Even I got that much right."

"But not 'til the end," Joanna reminded him. "You blundered all over the country with no idea of who you really were!"

"Well, you can hardly blame me," AJ said. "I was only a kid!"

"The first time, true," Joanna said, shaking her head. "But the second time, if we believe your story, you had a grown-up mind inside that pint-sized body. You should have been able to figure it out. I have a feeling you were just repressing it all."

"Oh, baloney," AJ grumbled.

"Can we save that for later?" Ann asked. "I want to understand what happened. We've got Raymond and Peggy producing twins — one boy and one girl. Then what?"

"Well, I gather that it was a pretty stormy marriage all along. Lots of fights, yelling, and shouting — or so I'm told. Apparently they each accused the other of having affairs with other people on the base — though I don't see how anyone could have accused Mom of such a thing when she was waddling around nine months pregnant with twins."

"So what happened?" Ann prompted.

"Well, Mom walked out on him at one point just before she delivered us, and Dad threatened that he would divorce her," Joanna sighed, shaking her head. "God knows, neither of them was very rational — but you have to remember that they were both pretty young at the time, probably only 22 or 23. And there was a war going on: Dad's friends were getting killed in accidents on the base, other friends were disappearing off to the front. It must have been a crazy time; I'm in no position to judge them."

"So what happened?" Ann repeated.

"Well, there was a huge blowup right after we were born," she said. "Mom was still in the hospital, and Dad came in yelling and screaming about something — God knows what. He started threatening that he was going to take the two of us right out of the hospital, and they had to call the MP's to get him thrown out."

That coincides with what Jessie told me a few days ago, AJ thought. He nodded his head and filled in the next piece of the jigsaw puzzle for Ann. "And apparently when he found he couldn't physically remove us, he decided to legally remove us."

Ann frowned and opened her mouth to pose a question, but Joanna continued.

"He got a divorce," she said. "And he did it real fast. I don't know what sort of legal system they had in those days, and I don't know what kind of strings he was able to pull. But he did it: he got the divorce, and he got custody of us both."

"Custody?" asked Ann. "Isn't that kind of strange? I thought the courts generally gave custody to the mother."

"Yeah, so did I," said Joanna. "But who knows: maybe he told the court that Mom was really Tokyo Rose in disguise, or that she was so crazy she would physically abuse us."

"Well," Ann shrugged, "I don't understand, and I certainly don't approve of the decision — but it's pretty straightforward. But it's right about here that I got lost when you told all of this to me last night."

"It was the wine," AJ joked. "Here, have some more."

"You always were a smartass," Ann said, holding up her glass.

"Well, it does get a little complicated at this point," said Joanna, accepting a second glass and turning back to watch the sky turning a darker pink. The geese were flying overhead now, snaking back and forth in long, sinuous lines. AJ didn't know if geese ever flew over Brevard, but he could see that Joanna was fascinated by the spectacle.

 

 

 

 

"Anyway," she said, concentrating once again, "what happened next is simple: Dad married his step-mother." She pointed at AJ.

"Norma?" asked Ann. "The mother that AJ grew up with?"

"Yup," AJ answered. "Norma Winslow. The woman I always assumed was my real mother."

"Wait a minute," Ann interrupted, putting her wine glass down and holding her hands to her head. "I'm confused. If that was the case, then why didn't AJ grow up with a last name of Danforth? I would have liked that a lot better than Halifax!"

She turned and looked at AJ. "Do you realize what a screw-up you are?" she asked, jokingly. "Here you could have had a perfectly reasonable name like Danforth — sounds like a Senator, or head of the World Bank, or something respectable. You might have even ended up being Student Council President in high school, instead of me!"

Aha! AJ thought. So BeforeTime4 did end up being different than BeforeTime1. But outwardly, he ignored Ann's jibe. "The other obvious question is: why didn't Joanna and I grow up together, if Dad got custody of us both after the divorce?"

"But we did!" exclaimed Joanna, so vehemently that a bit of wine sloshed out of her glass. "That's what makes me so mad at you, AJ! We did grow up together for the first two or three years, and you can't even remember it!"

"Hold on a minute," said Ann, holding up her hand. "Explain."

"Norma Winslow, now Norma Winslow Danforth, raised the two of us there in Florida for two or three years, while Dad spent his time teaching all those high school kids how to fly bombers so they could go wipe out the bad guys."

"And where was your Mom during all this?" asked Ann. "Your real Mom, I mean."

"She was devastated," said Joanna sadly. "She didn't know what hit her. When she got out of the hospital, she found that she had no kids, no husband, no home, and no support. He had just cut her off."

"What a bastard!" Ann said.

"Who knows?" Joanna shrugged. "I can't judge him. Anyway, Mom hung around Florida for a few months, and then finally gave up and moved back to Washington."

"Why Washington?" asked Ann.

"That's where she was from originally," Joanna replied. "Actually, that's where they were all from: Dad, Mom, and Norma."

"The plot thickens," said Ann darkly. "Did they all know each other in Washington — before the war, that is?"

"I don't know," said Joanna, shaking her head. "Mom never did say. But I wouldn't be surprised if Dad was messin' around with Norma before they got divorced."

"He did not!" AJ said suddenly.

"Oh, yeah?" said Joanna sarcastically. "When did you become the expert? You didn't even know that Norma was your step-mother!"

"Okay, okay," said Ann, trying to calm them down. "it hardly matters at this point. Let's just stick with the facts, okay? Like Sergeant Friday used to do on Dragnet."

"Okay," agreed Joanna, sticking out her tongue at AJ. "So anyway, Mom moved back to Washington. The war wasn't over when she got home, and she went back to work. There were lots of eligible young men dashing around Washington those days, and one thing led to another: she remarried."

"Dare I ask who?"

"A really nice guy," said Joanna fondly. "A guy by the name of Armstrong. George Armstrong. I often think he was the real victim in all this."

"Armstrong ... that's your name," said Ann. "I mean, that's your name now. I'm lost again."

"Understandably," agreed Joanna. "I was still in Florida, with toad-face here, running around the beach at Fort Walton with Dad and Norma."

"And then ... " AJ started to fill in.

"And then," Joanna continued for him, "calamity struck. Not that we didn't have a calamity already at that point, but at least all of the players were physically intact. But in the summer of 1946, Dad was killed in a plane crash over Eglin field."

"Oh, God," said Ann.

"Do you know how it happened?" AJ asked Joanna.

"No," replied Joanna. "If anyone knew — aside from the military authorities, who probably didn't say squat to anyone — it would have been your mother. Step-mother, I mean: Norma was the one married to him at the time, remember?"

"Right," AJ agreed. Step-mom most definitely did not tell me how my real father died, he thought. No wonder she was so upset whenever I asked.

"So there's Norma," said Ann, continuing the thread, "now a widow, with two young children. Step-children — they weren't hers, really. So what did she do at that point?"

"Well, this is where — if you'll pardon the phrase — the shit hit the fan," said Joanna. "Norma hung around Florida long enough to realize that nobody gives two hoots for a pilot's widow — they've got bad karma, and none of the other pilots, or their wives, want to have anything to do with them. So she packed her bags, and took the next train back to Washington, along with AJ and me."

"Back to Washington," Ann said, with a wicked smile. "Back to where Peggy had already staked out her turf."

"You got it," said Joanna. "And no sooner had she arrived than she found a new husband. One whose name your dear husband is pretty familiar with."

"Halifax," AJ said. "Lucas Halifax."

"Righteo," said Joanna. "So now you've got a step-mother, two kids, and a brand-new husband. Guess how that made Mom feel?"

"Peggy?" asked Ann, just to make sure she was following things properly.

"Yeah, Peggy," confirmed Joanna. "I don't know if she and Norma ever knew each other before any of this started, or what they thought of each other after it started. But there was Mom — my Mom, that is, and AJ's, too — watching the enemy, and there's no worse enemy than your ex-husband's new wife, raising your kids with some new bozo who had dropped in out of nowhere."

"Well, let's not get too carried away — Lucas wasn't the only new bozo: your Mom married a new bozo, too," AJ protested.

"Quiet, AJ," hushed Ann. "So then what happened?"

"Simple, really," said Joanna. "Or at least, it should have been simple: Mom took Norma to court, and sued to get custody of her kids back again."

"But hadn't that been decided once already?"

"Yeah, of course," agreed Joanna. "But it was a different court — and it was during the war. When Mom went to court in Washington, it was after the war. Plus the fact that the father who had gotten custody in the first place was now dead."

"A whole different ball game," AJ chipped in. "But even so, you would think the judge would try to figure out what was best for the two kids —us two kids — and just make a decision. Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am."

"Ah, but they got King Solomon," said Joanna. "That was the fly in the ointment."

King Solomon, AJ thought. When did Mom flip out on that name?

Ann shook her head and laughed. "King who?"

"It was a judge named Solomon," Joanna explained, "and he was notorious for making outrageous decisions in nasty divorce cases like this."

"And this one was nasty?"

"You better believe it," said Joanna. "Mom, Peggy-Mom that is, saved all the newspaper clippings. It was a real doozy, lots of mud-slinging. Mom's parents had some money, apparently, and they tried to throw their weight around; that didn't help much."

"And after a while, the Judge got fed up with it all," AJ continued, "and decided to make one of his decisions like the old King Solomon in Israel."

"Like what?" asked Ann, sarcastically. "Chop the kids in two and give each mother half a boy and half a girl?"

"Well, you're close," Joanna said grimly. "He finally told Norma and Peggy that they could each have one kid, and then get the hell out of his court. And if they couldn't choose, he would choose for them!"

"And did they?" asked Ann, incredulously.

"What do you think?" AJ asked softly. "Remember Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice? Suppose you had to make a choice like that: suppose some judge told you to choose between Zack and Danny, or Danny and Sarah."

"Never!" Ann exclaimed. "So the Judge made the choice?"

"Yup," sighed Joanna. "He did. To make it fair, he said he would make it a 'blind' choice. We both had the same initials — J. Danforth — so he just stuck the letter 'A' in front of one of our names and 'B' in front of the other."

"So that's where AJ comes from!" exclaimed Ann with a whoop.

"And that's how Joanna got stuck with the nick-name of BJ," AJ said. "The judge tossed a coin — Norma-Mom got AJ, and Peggy-Mom got BJ."

"And there was nothing they could do about it?" Ann asked Joanna.

"Not a damn thing," Joanna replied, "though both women made quite a stink about, and it got lots of coverage in the local newspapers."

"From what little I do know of your background, AJ," said Ann, turning to him, "I gather that your step-Mom and her new husband left town right after this happened."

"Yeah, so it would seem," AJ said, with a sigh. "The worst part of the judge's decision was a decree that neither of the women could see the other child again. There were no visitation rights of any kind — he wanted a clean break."

"You know, it's funny," AJ continued, "but now that I've heard all this from Joanna, everything else makes sense. I could never get Mom to tell me why we abandoned Washington, but that must have been it. The official reason was that Dad had been admitted to college at the University of Denver on a G.I. Bill ... "

"And what did your Mom do at that point?" asked Ann, turning back to Joanna.

"Well, she was heartbroken, as you can imagine," said Joanna. "And her parents were beside themselves. They swore to follow the Halifax family wherever they tried to hide, anywhere they went in the country."

"And I gather they did," said Ann. "But why? Wasn't it better to just try to get on with their lives at that point?"

"Who knows what I would have done?" shrugged Joanna. "And I don't really know what Mom would have done if she were left alone — maybe her new husband, the Dad I grew up with, would have persuaded her to try to start over."

"But the grandparents wouldn't let it rest," AJ said. "So it was Grandpa who tracked us Halifaxes to Denver? And Grandpa who was following Mom and me in Glen Oaks?"

"The funny thing is that if you had stayed in Denver, it might have all blown over," said Joanna. "But when your family suddenly bolted out of Denver, Grandpa went crazy. And he started driving Mom crazy — saying that Norma and what's-his-name Halifax were trying to spirit you away, and hide you somewhere so nobody would ever see you again."

"And that's where the hunt really began," AJ explained to Ann. "Grandpa eventually traced us to New York and found out where we lived. I don't know if Mom and Dad were actually running from him in Denver, but they certainly had a sense they were being followed by the time they got to New York."

"Wait a minute, time out!" said Ann. "Another small detail doesn't fit here."

"What's that?" asked Joanna.

"Well, you said that you went to the same school in Glen Oaks that AJ attended. Was your Grandpa dragging you around to all these places?"

"No," said Joanna, with a smile. "But when he found AJ in New York, he badgered and harassed and cajoled until he got Mom and Dad, Armstrong-Dad that is, to move up to New York to be closer to him."

"And when they moved from New York to Texas?"

"We went right behind them," said Joanna proudly. "And from there to Denver, and from there to Roswell ... boy, you guys really did pick some miserable places to live!" she said, smiling at AJ.

"Don't blame me, I was just along for the ride," AJ said. "But there's something I don't understand either: how was your Dad able to swing all these transfers so conveniently? Did he work for the Air Force or something?"

"No, nothing like that," Joanna smiled. "He was a newspaper reporter. He was pretty good, too — who knows, maybe he would have gotten a Pulitzer if he had ever managed to stay in one place for more than a year. As it was, he almost did get a Pulitzer for stumbling onto the spy network that Lucas was involved in."

"But he just picked up and moved whenever your Mom told him to?" asked Ann.

"Apparently so," said Joanna. "They didn't talk about it very much — and of course, I was too young to understand most of what was going on."

"Wait a minute!" AJ broke in. "Jesus! How did your Dad know that Lucas was a spy? I was pretty suspicious of him, but I never did have any proof. Half the time, I thought you were just making all of that up with your crazy star-codes."

"Spy?" asked Ann. She had not heard that part of Lucas's background, and was shaking her head in disbelief.

"It sounds like a fairy tale now, with the USSR completely disintegrated," said Joanna, with a sigh. "But it was a different world back then. It was all deadly serious. And, yes, Lucas Halifax was a bona fide spy. Right up to his eyeballs."

"But what proof did you have?" AJ repeated.

"You forget, AJ," Joanna responded, turning back to him. "Dad was a reporter — and a good one. He was already tracking Lucas wherever he went, just to have a handle on where you were. I don't know whether Lucas was naive or over-confident, but it never seemed to occur to him that someone was watching his midnight rendezvouses and intercepting all those dead-letter drops."

"So what happened?" The memory of that fateful night in Northport had come back to him. Lucas did have a file, AJ remembered, but I never got it away from him.

"We never did get the proof we needed in order to have him put away for good," Joanna said, shaking her head. "But ultimately, it didn't matter. I think we had a friend helping us that we hadn't counted on."

"What do you mean — it didn't matter?" asked Ann. AJ could tell that she was completely lost at this point. I'll have to tell her the story of the odd clues and the strange arguments I had with Lucas over the years, he thought, sometime when she has the patience to hear all the details.

"Well, look what happened," Joanna said. "Even if the Soviet Union hadn't disintegrated, what did they ever do with computers?"

"Well, I sure as hell don't know," AJ retorted. "I've been out of the picture for the past ten years. When I popped back into BeforeTime in 1990, they had a supercomputer better than ours. But I don't know what they've done since."

Joanna frowned. "1990? Supercomputer? I don't think so ... that must have been one of those parallel time-lines, or whatever you were trying to explain to me."

"Well, what about their computers?" Ann asked.

"Nada!" said Joanna emphatically. "Zip. Zero. Oh, they managed to build a few — though I'm sure they never got as far as a supercomputer. But even if they had, it would have been irrelevant. The point is: they never got the idea of microcomputers and networks. They never got the idea of hooking them all together, and they never would have allowed their citizens to have them."

"That's what I was trying to tell Dad — I mean, Lucas — all along," AJ said. The son of a bitch should have listened to me, he thought indignantly.

"Hush, AJ," Ann insisted. "Joanna, I hate to be an idiot — but so what?"

"Even if their government hadn't collapsed," said Joanna, proudly, "they would still be in the Dark Ages when it comes to computers. In fact, you could make a pretty good argument that it's precisely because they were in the Dark Ages, technology-wise, with no chance of catching up, that their political crisis became inevitable. That's why Gorbachev tried to introduce perestroika ten years ago."

"You skipped over one small detail a few minutes ago," AJ reminded her. "You said that you had a friend helping you. Who was that?"

Joanna smiled at him. "Norma."

"Mom?" AJ exclaimed, thunderstruck.

"Norma," Joanna repeated, emphatically.

"Okay — Norma, Mom, whatever," he said, unwilling to argue about her identity. "But what's she got to do with all of this?"

"Well, we know that Norma was aware of the computer file that Lucas had been compiling for the Russians. And we know that you didn't get it," she said, smiling at him.

"Well, I sure as hell tried," he responded huffily. "But you're right — I almost had a heart attack when I went into their bedroom that last night in Northport and saw that Mom had the file. But wait a minute: doesn't that make her an accomplice?"

"That would be the logical conclusion," agreed Joanna. "And that's what my Dad had been assuming all along. But there's one small thing you're not aware of ... "

"What?" he and Ann asked simultaneously.

"Lucas never delivered the file to the Russians," Joanna said, tapping her finger on her wine glass for emphasis. "And that was crucial: that file had every bit of technology the U.S. military had invested in computers since day one; if they had gotten that, they might well have built the supercomputer AJ seems to remember from 1990. Dad knew that Lucas was planning to take the file to the Russian embassy in Glen Cove that same night AJ left town. You know the one I mean? The big mansion where the Russians keep all their UN people?"

"So?" AJ asked.

"Well, the only way Dad could get him out of the house — in order to give you the time to steal the file — was to confront him with a phony story on the whole child custody issue. He knew that it would drive Lucas crazy, because it would mean that Norma might find out — and off they would go, whisking you off to another part of the country."

"Yeah, well, that's great," AJ said, "but what's that got to do with the file?"

"Well, Dad was sure Lucas would never suspect that his intrusion had anything to do with the Russian situation. And sure enough: an hour after he dropped Lucas off at your house, he ran out of the house and drove off like a bat out of hell, straight for the Russian embassy."

"So?" AJ asked again.

"So Dad followed him," Joanna responded. "And he didn't go into the embassy — maybe he figured he would have been spotted by FBI observers, or maybe he figured the Russians would never let him out again. Anyway, he met two Russians in a bar in downtown Glen Cove. And Dad followed them."

"And?" prodded Ann.

"And Dad was able to overhear Lucas tell them that the file was gone. Gone! Apparently the Russians were incredibly angry, but there was nothing they could do."

"Gone?" he asked. "Well, I didn't take it, and the last person I saw with the file was Mom. Are you telling me that Mom destroyed the file?"

Joanna shrugged. "Who else? It sure wasn't me."

Ann was shaking her head; she appeared flabbergasted by the notion of spies running around the quiet village of Northport. "And was that the end of it?"

"Well, it was the end of Lucas' career as a computer spy," responded Joanna. "With the information he overheard, Dad called in the FBI — and while they never had enough proof to do anything to Lucas, it spooked him so badly that he severed all of his contacts with the Russians."

"Mom had decoded half of that file way back in Omaha," AJ pointed out, remembering the pages of neat script he had discovered on her bedside table. "Are you telling me that she knew Lucas was a spy all along?"

"Who knows?" Joanna sighed. "Remember, she had cut herself off from her family when she left town with Lucas back in '47 — and she was already pretty paranoid about you being kidnapped. I don't think she told anyone what she was thinking."

"But she decoded that file," AJ repeated. "Are you telling me that she understood all of that computer stuff?"

Joanna smiled. "Norma may not have been my favorite person, but I think she was a whole lot smarter than anyone realized."

Let me draw an analogy, Norma had said, and explain about computers by clapping my hands. Even when he had heard the metaphor from her own lips in Omaha, he never really focused on what it must have meant about her understanding of technical subjects. Where could she have learned such things? AJ wondered. Did she keep that knowledge a secret from Lucas? Do we ever really know who our parents are? he wondered.

A fragment of Norma's handwriting suddenly popped into his mind, a phrase that he had first seen on that August evening ten years ago, when all of this had begun. "Not what he seems," it had said. "He is a Communist." And Norma had written it on the back of Joanna's first star drawing. That message had been something entirely innocent — something along the lines of "I LOVE YOU" — but one of Joanna's subsequent messages had indeed warned him that Lucas was not what he seemed.

She decoded all of the star messages, too, AJ suddenly realized with a shock. She knew everything. He started to tell Joanna, but then changed his mind; somehow, it seemed too private.

"There's something else I never understood completely," Ann broke in, having decided that it was time to change the topic. "If they kept putting you in the same school as AJ, why did they tell you not to talk to him?"

"Well, I'm sure they never thought any of this through very carefully at the beginning," replied Joanna gravely. "I mean, God knows what would have happened if we had both been in the same first grade class there in New York."

"But we weren't," AJ said, "so that meant we would always be separated by a grade. But still, they were taking an awful risk that someone would eventually recognize you, or one of them."

"And that's exactly what did happen," said Joanna, "back in 1953, at the Ash Grove school in Denver. Don't you remember? It's the day you heard my Mom calling 'BJ'!"

"And we left town two days later," AJ recalled. "That must have freaked your parents out!"

"Yeah, well, that's what led to their strict rule that I was never to talk to you," Joanna replied. "They said I should watch you from a safe distance, to make sure you didn't just disappear — but if I spoke to you, you might be taken away, and I might never see you again."

"Did you believe that?" asked Ann.

"How was I supposed to know what to believe?" exclaimed Joanna. "I was just eight when they packed up and moved to New Mexico. You have no idea how crazy Mom had gotten at that point — she was convinced that if Judge Solomon found out that she was following AJ, he would take me away, too!"

"You know, the truly amazing thing about this," said Ann, turning to smile at him, "is that you were so utterly oblivious. You were just wandering around, shooting your little slingshot at lizards, not even aware that all this craziness was going on behind you."

"Well, I knew that something was crazy," AJ said, "but I could never find out what it was. Now I know ... "

"One more small question," asked Ann.

"Yes?" said Joanna. She held out her glass and AJ filled it again, emptying the bottle. He got up and was heading for the kitchen to get another bottle when he heard Ann's question.

"Five years ago, when AJ's mother was in the hospital, something really strange happened one night," she said. "Someone called him in the middle of the night and said that his mom — his step-mom, that is — had died. It turned out not to be true, and it really upset him. Was that you who made the call?"

Jesus, AJ thought. Who cares? He continued on into the kitchen, found a second cold bottle of Chardonnay, scrounged a corkscrew out of a drawer full of strange utensils, and popped open the cork.

"Did you hear what she said to my question?" asked Ann, when he had flopped back down on the deck chair.

"Nope," AJ sighed. "I was attending to more important matters. Would you like some more wine?"

"She said she didn't know whether she called you that night!" exclaimed Ann. "I'm sorry, Joanna, I'm sure you're a great sister — but that was a nasty thing of you to do."

"You would understand the reason if you bothered to ask me the one really important question you haven't thought of yet," said Joanna serenely.

"And what question is that?" AJ asked. He thought he had asked them all by now.

"Why didn't I come find you after we were grown up?"

She's right, AJ thought. That is the $64,000 dollar question. If she and her parents followed me all over the country in my younger years, why was there no contact after I grew up?

"Same answer," said Joanna, in response to their puzzled frowns. "The answer is: I don't know."

"I give up," AJ said wearily. "Why don't you know?"

"Because I wasn't here, dummy!" exploded Joanna. "I came back from Northport right after you did!"

"I beg your pardon?" AJ said, thoroughly mystified.

"You think you have a monopoly on lightning bolts?" she said, smiling. "You think there's only one lightning bolt in a storm?"

"Are you trying to tell me that after I disappeared from that park in Northport, you came after me?"

"You bet your sweet bippy!" she said, triumphantly. "And I gotta tell you, it was a hell of a ride!"

"Are you saying," asked Ann, "that you time-zapped, or whatever you call it, from Northport in 1960 to Beantown, North Carolina in 1995? All in one fell swoop?"

"Brevard, dear," Joanna corrected her, primly, "but essentially — yes."

"So you only had to wait for me three months, not thirty years," AJ said, trying to comprehend what she was saying.

"That was long enough, believe me," she said, suddenly serious. "Long enough, and then some!"

AJ was speechless, filled with questions that would never be answered. Why didn't I remember anything about being hit by lighting in Northport the first time I grew up? Was she there all along in BeforeTime1? And what happened in NowTime, he puzzled, after we both had been hit by lightning? Who is there — or was there — to pick us up?

The last of the light was fading from the sky as the three of them sat in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. The breeze had died down; off in the distance, they could barely see the surface of the bay, as smooth as a sheet of glass. The geese were still flying overhead, but it was the tail end of the flight now; soon they would be gone, and the night would be quiet.

"One last question," said Ann. "And this is not a detail."

"I hope not," AJ said. "I don't think I can take any more details."

"What I want to know," said Ann, looking from AJ to Joanna, "is whether it was worth it. Would you do it over again?"

"Worth it?" AJ echoed. "You make it sound like we had a choice. I don't know about Joanna, but I was just the dummy along for the ride — too innocent to realize anything was amiss the first time, and too stupid to figure it out the second time."

"What about you, Joanna?" Ann asked.

"I lost 35 years of my life," Joanna said softly. "I have no memory of anything that happened from 1960 until I reappeared in 1995. But in return, I got a brother back."

"Whew!" AJ said, feeling guilty. "I don't think I'm worth 35 years of anyone's life. You didn't get the best of that bargain."

The last of the geese were weaving overhead, swooping low enough that they could hear the flapping of their wings. Joanna looked up at them in as the darkness fell softly over the yard, and said, "Bargains? Who's to say what's a bargain in life?"

She pointed up at the very last goose in the line, flying a hundred feet behind his brothers, struggling to catch up. "You think they have any sense of what they accomplish? Do they sit around and ask themselves whether it was a good bargain, whether their flight back and forth each day was worth it? I think they just do it."

Ann stood up, stretched her arms at the night sky, and let out a sigh. "Well, I don't know if I'll ever believe this whole story — but if it's true, you two have been on a hell of a trip. Just listening to it all makes me tired. I'm going in."

Joanna followed her in, patting AJ's shoulder as she passed by his deck chair.

AJ was left alone on the back deck, watching as the sky finally turned black and the stars came out. There were no clouds in the sky, nothing to hide the heavens. A lightning storm is one thing I certainly don't have to worry about tonight, he thought.

The world of do-overs had brought him a sister, he realized, and that made all the sacrifices worthwhile. But all through his NowTime journeys, he had been evaluating do-overs from an entirely different point of view: re-living each small experience, good and bad, all over again. From that perspective, AJ thought, if there is another dimension of time — a world where do-overs are possible — I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Yeah, he thought, it could give us a second chance -- but then we'd make the same idiotic mistakes a second time, and a third, and an infinite number of times, every time we had the chance. And we'd be utterly oblivious of most of the events around us — events both big and small, cosmic and trivial. A million