He heard a familiar voice softly calling him in the darkness, repeating his name over and over, across light-years of time and distance, before he began to swim back toward the light. Four years had passed since his last transition to BeforeTime; he had forgotten how sluggish, thick-headed, and dazed he would be.

It was Ann calling to him, and gradually he came awake. When he opened his eyes, he realized that he was in a dark room, in bed, with Ann hovering over him. She was in bed, too —their bed, he sensed instinctively. You always know your own bed, he thought, even when you've been away from it for years.

She was holding a phone in one hand, and was gently shaking his shoulder. "AJ," she kept saying, "AJ — it's for you."

"Whazzuh?" he mumbled. He could not form any coherent words.

"It's Stuart," she said, softly. "He's calling from the hospital — about your mother."

Stuart, he thought. Not Lucas. Hah! I'm back! He reached his hand out from under the covers to take the phone from Ann, and found that he was still clutching the photograph he had taken from his mother, several years and several thousand miles away.

"Ho ah a secah," he mumbled again, sticking his right hand back under the covers, in order to transfer the picture to his left hand, which was tightly clutching Darth Vader.

"I think you had too much wine," said Ann. "Are you OK?"

"Umphh," he replied, and took the phone from her hand. He could barely see her face, but it looked a little more tired and lined than he remembered. A soft glow from the corner of the room reinforced his belief that he was back in his own time: it was from one of the tiny night-lights they had installed in electrical outlets up and down the hallway when the children were little, so they could find their way to their parents' bedroom.

He took the phone and said to Norma's new husband, "Huwwo?"

"AJ, is that you? Listen, I'm sorry to be calling in the middle of the night ... "

"S'ok," he said, trying desperately to sound like he was sober. Jesus, this is all happening too fast, he thought. I need a quiet day alone to get myself together again.

"Well, I wouldn't have called, except your Mom is in the hospital — I thought you should know."

"Mom? Hospital?" he asked. Keeping his replies to single words made it a little easier. "Whazza problem?"

"She's having shortness of breath — can't seem to breathe well at all. It's been getting steadily worse, ever since that attack of the flu back in December."

"Oh," he said. He didn't remember any flu incident in December, but he was still disoriented: when he thought of December, his first thought was of December, 1954, in NowTime. But Stuart was obviously talking about this December, and he couldn't remember clearly what was happening in December before his last BeforeTime-NowTime transition.

"Well, anyway, she woke up tonight gasping for air," Stuart continued, sounding very far away, "and I got worried. So I called the ambulance, and here we are."

"Whaddoo thuh doctors say?" AJ asked.

"Well, they're not sure — they're running tests. But with her history of smoking, she probably has emphysema. They've got her on oxygen, and they're doing an X-ray of her lungs." His voice sounded bleak.

"Oh ... okay," he replied, sobered by the news. Emphysema was no laughing matter, he realized, and there was a hint that it might even be worse. Serves her right, an errant thought intruded into his brain, after she flipped out and went batshit on me. But that was in California, he remembered, thirty years ago. Whatever was happening to her now was something entirely different. He felt ashamed of himself, and tried to sound more sympathetic.

"Listen," he said, concentrating hard to produce a complete sentence, "why don't you call me in the morning when the doctors have a better idea of what's going on. If it's really serious, I'll come on down there." Wherever the hell there is, he appended mentally. I can't even remember where she lives with this guy.

"Okay, I'll do that. And I apologize again for waking you up — it's just that it was pretty scary at the time, and you're the only family she has left. Go back to sleep."

And with that, he hung up. AJ handed the phone back to Ann, who had overheard the conversation. She looked at him curiously, and muttered, "You're a mess." Then she rolled over, hunched under her down quilt, and went back to sleep.

Well, thanks for the big welcome home, he thought grumpily. The news about Norma was disconcerting, but he was having trouble sorting out his feelings about her. I'm not sure if she knew what she was saying when I showed her that picture, he thought. And if she did know what she was saying, it's even more confusing.

Ann's breathing was deep and regular, and he assumed that she had fallen back asleep. He placed the small photograph and the Darth Vader doll in the shirt pocket of his pajamas, and lay awake, listening to the noises around him. He could tell it was raining, but he had to concentrate to figure out how he knew it was raining. But gradually, he pin-pointed some familiar noises: the tap-tap, tap of water droplets landing on the metal top of the air-conditioner that protruded out the window; the hiss of car tires squee-geeing rain from the streets below; the gentle, almost indistinguishable patter of raindrops striking against the windows. A different set of noises than he had heard each night in suburban California — noises whose details he had to dredge from his memory of what New York was like when he left four years ago.

In the distance, he heard an ambulance racing along the street. God, I bet the Park Avenue matrons hate that, he thought. A few minutes later, he heard the whine and banging of a garbage truck outside. It was a familiar sound in Manhattan, but it struck him as odd: It's right outside the building. I didn't think they were allowed to drive up Park Avenue. It was confusing, but he was too sleepy to consider getting out of bed to investigate.

The confusion deepened the next morning. The curtains were down, but a soft light flowed around the edges, making the contours of the room visible. Everything was fuzzy and blurred — until he reached, by instinct, for the glasses on the bedside table next to him. Aha, he thought, I really am back. Back to my goddamned nearsighted vision.

The glasses brought everything into sharp focus — but nothing looked familiar. The far wall, across from the bed, should have contained nothing but a door into the hallway on the right hand side, a television table in the middle, and the door into the bathroom on the left side. But this wall contained a series of closet doors with a television recessed into the wall midway between the windows to his right and a doorway on the left. The entire left wall of the room was glass, from floor to ceiling, with a glass-lined door leading into a bathroom. And instead of a neutral, off-white color, the walls were painted a soft pink. Maybe it's just the morning light doing this, he thought.

He turned back the covers quietly to avoid waking Ann, and padded noiselessly out of the room into the hallway. On the way out of the room, he noticed that the clock on the night stand displayed 6:53 in angry, red digits — which meant that if Ann wasn't up, it was a weekend. But that makes sense, he thought. I left here on a Saturday. So that would give him an hour or two to check things out before the household began to stir.

More serious surprises awaited him outside the bedroom: nothing in the apartment was familiar. He expected to find two adjacent bedrooms, with Zack and Danny quietly sleeping, connected by a long, narrow hallway to the living room, office-den, kitchen, and Sarah's bedroom in the front of the apartment. But this was different: immediately outside his bedroom were two offices — one small, and the other expansive, looking out through a window to an unfamiliar skyline. Not only was the skyline unfamiliar, but he could tell he was looking at the roof of several buildings. We live on the third floor, he thought, and that sure doesn't look like a third-floor view.

The master bedroom and two offices formed a suite, with a doorway leading into a foyer and several more hallways beyond it. Off the foyer to the right was a much larger room — a living room filled with sofas he had never seen. Another room had a long, heavy table surrounded by a dozen upholstered chairs — a real dining room, he thought. At the far end of the foyer was a large door, complete with the familiar bolts and chains that New Yorkers use to keep the world out. And from there, another hallway led off toward a dining area, kitchen, and three rooms with closed doors.

This is spooky, he thought. There was not a sound in the apartment, and not a thing that looked familiar. Suddenly a clock struck the hour and he jumped with fright, whirling around to see where the noise came from. But then he smiled in recognition: It was Ann's small grandfather clock, faithfully intoning the hour of seven o'clock. But he had last heard it when it was sitting atop the fireplace mantle in their Park Avenue apartment, as he walked out the door to time-warp into NowTime2; now it was stuck in a bookshelf that lined the wall of a TV-room and lounge area adjacent to an old oak dining table he had never seen.

And where are the kids? he wondered. The three closed doors along the edges of the family-room/dining area were the obvious place to look. He quietly opened the first door and peeked inside to see a long, narrow bedroom filled with a television, computer, stereo, electronic gadgets, and a variety of unfamiliar artifacts. Two beds were lined up, end to end, along one wall, and he could see the back of Danny's head protruding slightly from the tangle of covers and pillows.

Satisfied, he turned to the next room; it was larger than the first, with windows on two walls and the other two walls lined with posters of rock bands known only to the teenage generation. He had not remembered Sarah being the kind who adorned her walls this way, and he could imagine the battle she must have had with Ann to get permission. Or maybe she didn't bother getting permission, he thought, as he looked at the inert lump buried under a quilt in a double bed adjacent to the wall by the door.

The third bedroom was empty; it had a single bed and a TV, but the bed was carefully made and the room had a very definite sense of not being lived in. More like a guest room, he thought. Some laundry and dry cleaning had been carefully laid out on the bed, and a Nintendo set and several dozen game cartridges were stacked neatly beside the television. So where is Zack? he thought. Maybe sleeping over at a friend's house?

A kitchen, laundry room, and guest bathroom completed the tour of the strange apartment. He recognized some of the dishes, a few of the books in the book shelf of the stylishly decorated lounge area, and some of his old jackets in the foyer closet But none of the furniture bore any resemblance to the assortment of sofas and chairs he had lived in, and the style was so different that he knew it wasn't just a case of new upholstering.

Wandering back into the living room, he looked out the windows. This definitely isn't Park Avenue, he thought, as he tried to get his bearings. But at least it looks like Manhattan. The view looked across a broad avenue, directly at another building; neither the street nor the building looked familiar. But when he opened the window and stuck his head out into the cool, hazy morning, he smiled at the sight of something very familiar off to his right: the empty part of the skyline formed by the Hudson River, and the distant, indistinct shape of trees and buildings on the far side. New Jersey, he thought. So that's west.

A rumble of noise below caught his attention, and he looked down. His building was near an intersection with a broad avenue running north and south. He couldn't retrieve the location from memory, but the bank on the corner was one that looked familiar. Then he saw a bus heading uptown, coming toward him; a large, yellow digital sign flashed its destination above the driver's window: Broadway and 125th Street. As it reached the corner, he noticed a street sign that he had overlooked: 86th Street.

So I'm at Broadway and 86th. But what the hell am I doing here? He couldn't imagine that his family was staying overnight at a friend's house; they simply didn't do that when visiting neighbors in the city. But if this is where I live, why don't I recognize any of it?

A thump pulled him out of his reverie; it sounded vaguely familiar. But he couldn't place it right away; it wasn't a NowTime sound. It's going to take a while to switch gears and recognize these noises, he thought. He forced himself to stand perfectly still and let the pulse of an early morning New York City wash over him. He could hear the tick-tock of the clock from the dining area down the hall, the rattle of taxis and the rumble of a subway outside. And then it came back to him: the thump was the sound of the Sunday New York Times being delivered outside their door.

But before he could react to it, he suddenly heard a loud bang! and a deafening racket of grinding; it lasted twenty seconds, and then stopped. Nobody else was stirring in the house; the grinding noise had made his heart leap into his throat, but he gradually calmed down. He tip-toed toward the kitchen, where the noise had originated; as he drew closer, he heard a gurgling, hissing sound. The goddamned coffee machine, he muttered, as he discovered the culprit next to the refrigerator. It was a shock to see one again; Ann must have set it for their normal weekday schedule, assuming that the coffee would simply percolate and stay warm until someone got up to drink it on the weekend.

He waited until coffee began dribbling into the empty pot, then interrupted it and filled a mug that he found in the dish rack. The mug was familiar: it was one of several they had picked up in a Greenwich Village pottery shop. The steaming mug of coffee was like an old friend; it was laced with cinnamon, and the aroma was delicious. Walking back toward the living room, he stopped at the front door and retrieved the paper, before finding a comfortable seat in the sofa by the window.

The paper made no sense. The lead headline announced that Nelson Mandela had died of a heart attack in prison, a mere two weeks before he was scheduled for release as part of an amnesty declaration by F.W. de Klerk in South Africa. Riots had broken out across the country, and de Klerk had been forced to bring in troops to prevent Johannesburg from being burned to the ground.

I'm still thinking about Eisenhower and the Cold War and the Brooklyn Dodgers, he thought. It's going to take a while to tune into Reagan and South Africa and the Los Angeles Dodgers. He smiled at the notion that the Dodgers were moving back and forth from coast to coast, just like he had — but then he stopped abruptly as he looked at the top of the paper, below the masthead of the New York Times. A cold chill settled into his shoulder blades as he saw the date: Sunday, March 18th, 1990.

What the hell is this? he thought desperately. I zapped out of BeforeTime2 in 1986. What am I doing back here in 1990?

Assuming the paper isn't lying, it means that four years have disappeared, he thought. He had timewarped himself from March, 1955 to March, 1990, rather than the time-zone in BeforeTime2 to which he expected to return. So that means I'm in some new place. Elsewhen, he thought, remembering a phrase from the Columbia University scientist he had visited. This is BeforeTime3.

It made sense in a weird kind of way. He had spent four years in NowTime, from 1951 through 1955; and now four years had vanished upon his return. Maybe it's a conservation-of-energy principle, he thought. Or conservation of time.

The date on the newspaper explained everything, and yet nothing. It explained why he was in an unfamiliar apartment, but not how he had gotten there. It explained why old furniture had been replaced by new, but gave him no clue as to where he had been during the past four years of BeforeTime.

Where the hell have I been for the past four years? he thought. And why didn't this happen to me the first time I zapped back from NowTime1 to BeforeTime2? That transition had taken him straight back, from March 1951 in a Texas school yard, to the very same day in 1985 when all of this craziness began in Water Mill. It made no sense; nor could he come up with a logical explanation of where he had been from May, 1986 until now. Was I asleep? he wondered In a coma? In a state of suspended animation? Did I simply vanish and then magically reappear last night?

But Ann acted like I've been here all along, he thought. If I had been a comatose vegetable these past four years, she wouldn't have accepted my presence in her bed. And if I had been completely missing, and then suddenly popped up on the far side of the bed, she would have called the cops. So I must have been here in some form. Or maybe it was another me, and I just pushed him out of the way, into the twilight zone, when this me came back. But if I've been here all along, then what happened after the lightning hit me in Central Park?

He realized that he was faced with a dilemma: he had no idea what had been going on the BeforeTime world during the past four years, and he had no plausible explanation for the gap in his knowledge. The simple solution was to sit Ann down and explain everything — but he had tried that once before, with no success. He now had a mysterious photograph with him, as his only evidence of time travel to a different world, but it was unlikely that she would accept it for what it was. Maybe I could do some carbon dating to prove where it came from, he thought. But assuming that the process was so advanced that it could tell the difference between decades as easily as millennia, what would it prove? Who could tell whether such a picture originated in NowTime or BeforeTime?

His conclusion, after thirty minutes of thought in the quiet living room, was simple: I'll just fake it, he thought. No one will quiz me on world events from 1987 anyway; once a news item is a week old, it's ancient history. There would be myriad details of his family life he would have to fake his way through, but he already had an exaggerated reputation with Ann and the kids for being absent-minded and forgetful. If I don't know the date of a school play, or the name of Sarah's current boyfriend, or the sexual persuasion of Ann's favorite actor, he thought, I'll just shrug and grin sheepishly, as if I had just forgotten it.

For now, he decided, a thorough reading of the Sunday paper would help bring him up to date. He scanned the news section, the metropolitan section, arts and leisure, sports, business, employment ads, and even the book review section. He wasn't sure what he should be looking for, or even what was significant. Many of the names were still familiar: politicians, movie stars, authors, and celebrities had not changed that much in four years. It was the details that were so different from what he had known before; he did his best to memorize them all.

Around 9:15, Ann shuffled out of the bedroom in her familiar bathrobe, heading straight for the coffee machine. At least that much hasn't changed, he thought, giving her a wide berth until she had had a decent chance to wake up. He didn't know if she saw him sitting in the living room, but he watched her carefully as she crossed the foyer facing the living room and then turned down the hallway to the kitchen. She looked the same, even though four years had passed; they were now both in their mid-forties, if the newspaper date was to be believed, but she still looked exactly the way he remembered her from 1986. Amazing, he thought. My ten year old friends in Riverside would have thought anyone this old had one foot in the grave.

After a diplomatic 15 minutes, he followed her into the kitchen, wondering what to expect. He had not examined himself in the mirror, and had no idea what he looked like; he still felt stiff and sore. He could see enough of his physical features to know that he had not returned as a four foot midget; he felt like his normal six foot height, and all the familiar middle-aged bumps and warts and flab were back; in fact, it felt like he had gained an extra ten pounds since he disappeared from BeforeTime2. It was a depressing change, and he wasn't sure he wanted it back — but he assumed it was the kind of physique Ann was accustomed to.

His major concern had nothing to do with physical appearance, but rather the possibility of being questioned on some detail that had occurred last night, or last week, or last month — something he knew nothing about. But Ann was interested only in the paper, which he had brought back with him from the living room; after perusing the front page for a moment, she looked at him sideways and asked sympathetically, "Did Stuart call back yet?"

"No, not yet." He looked up and noticed a complicated phone system attached to the kitchen wall. It was a shock, after living with simple black rotary phones for four years.

"Well, I suppose you would have heard it," she said, with a sigh. "God, it's a good thing Stuart didn't call back again last night — I wouldn't even have bothered trying to wake you again."

He said nothing to this, but walked over to her, took her in his arms and gave her an all-enveloping hug. I'm back, he thought. I missed you. She said nothing; he remembered that she was used to morning hugs when both of them were too tired to speak.

While they were standing silently in their protective huddle, AJ heard footsteps behind him. He turned in time to see the back of someone in pajamas, disappearing through the kitchen area, into a short passageway that led past a washing machine and utility sink, into a bathroom. He turned back to Ann, and raised his eyebrows in question.

"Even on weekends," she said, shaking her head, "Danny never talks to anyone, until he's gone to the bathroom."

"Oh," he said, dumbly. "Right." I don't remember Danny being so temperamental, he thought, but it's been a few years.

Just how long it had been became evident when Danny emerged from the bathroom. The baby with the blonde page-boy haircut was now a foot taller, with a thin, elfin face covered with shaggy brown hair. He's ten, AJ, thought, in shock. He's the same age I was in Riverside. Is that what I looked like to my parents?

Danny accepted a quick hug from him, but still wasn't speaking. He grabbed orange juice and a bagel, then shuffled back into his bedroom to watch Sunday morning cartoons. It's just as well, AJ thought. I wouldn't have known what to say to him. Danny was his son, no question about that; and he could see the resemblance between the six year old he had last seen in 1986, and this gangling youth in 1990. But it was still a shock. And if Danny is ten, that means Zack is 14. I wonder how big he is?

"Is Zack up yet?" he asked Ann, who was standing by the kitchen sink, flipping idly through the sections of newspaper.

"Zack? Are you kidding?" she snorted, leaning closer to a picture in the society page to see if she recognized any movie stars. "You'll be lucky to see him by lunch-time."

"Lunch time? He sleeps that late?" AJ asked, bewildered.

"AJ, what's the matter with you?" she asked, peering at him with a quizzical frown. "When was the last time you saw Zack up early on a weekend? For that matter, when was the last time you saw any teenager get up — willingly, that is — before noon?"

When was the last time I saw any of them at all? he countered mentally. But she had reminded him of something: Zack wasn't the only teenager; there had been another one in BeforeTime2. "And what about Sarah? I noticed the other bedroom was empty."

"Do you know something I don't know?" asked Ann, with exaggerated patience. "Did Sarah pass through town last night without my being aware of it? The last I heard, she was still up at college. You could call her dorm to see if she's awake, but I don't think she'd appreciate it."

Sarah is in college? I suppose that makes sense — she must be 18 or 19 now, he thought, suddenly feeling lost and adrift in this strange, new world. Ann shook her head and muttered to herself, then went back to her paper.

When he finally appeared just before noon, Zack turned out to be the biggest shock of all: he was only three inches shorter than AJ, and his voice had deepened to a husky baritone. Some of it was just the frogginess of sleep in his throat, AJ suspected, as Zack mumbled, "H'lo, Dad," on his way to the refrigerator. Like Danny and Ann, he apparently preferred not to talk until fortified with orange juice and a bowl of cereal. I've got a house full of zombies here, AJ thought, as he watched from the kitchen table.

Zack disappeared back into his bedroom with his breakfast, and slammed the door. Seconds later, AJ jumped at the sound of a screech, a metallic twang, and then a steady thump, thump, thump that resonated through the walls and made his coffee mug vibrate slowly on the dining room table. "What in God's name is that?" he asked Ann in alarm.

"I think it's a new group called Screaming Trees," she sighed, as she poured another cup of coffee. "It just means that he's doing his homework now."

"He studies with that in the background?" AJ asked, aghast.

"Oh, he's not studying," Ann laughed. "If he were studying, he would have the television going, too. And," she said, pointing at the phone on the wall, "he would be on the phone, too. AJ, where have you been lately? This is what he's always like."

He decided to retreat with part of the paper for some quiet time to think, but as he rose from the table, the phone rang. It was Stuart, and his tone was grim. "The news isn't good," he said, without preamble. "They found a spot on your mother's lung."

"A spot?" he asked. "What's that? Like a liver spot?"

Ann rolled her eyes at him while she put the orange juice and milk back in the refrigerator. She mouthed the words, "Not good," and shook her head in sorrow.

"Several spots, actually," Stuart continued. "They say they're going to do a biopsy right away. I don't mean to alarm you, but I think it may be cancer."

"Cancer?" he asked. The last time he had seen his mother, she was 34 years old and healthy as a horse. Now she was in the hospital, suffering from emphysema. And cancer too? he thought.

Stuart said that Norma was resting comfortably, sleeping most of the time, and that she would be on oxygen full-time while they waited for the biopsy results. He promised to call back the next day or two, but suggested that AJ should plan on coming down to Charlotte later in the week, if possible.

Sundays had always been a lazy day in their family, but AJ didn't feel he could stay in pajamas all day. He retreated back into the bedroom and explored the closet to see what kind of clothes he was now wearing. Unfamiliar suits were mixed in with some old sport jackets that he remembered from BeforeTime2; and he found a familiar collection of shirts, jeans, and shoes.

As he dressed, he removed from his pajama shirt pocket the Darth Vader action figure and the photograph he had taken from Riverside. He had planned to give Darth back to Danny, but he now seemed too old for it. And besides, he thought, it's traveled with me through space and time, from New York to Texas, through Colorado, New Mexico, and California before coming back with me to New York once again. He decided that Darth would be a permanent companion. If I can figure out where my drill is stored in this new house, he thought, I'll just drill a hole through his little wooden head, and attach him to my key chain.

As for the photograph, he wasn't sure what to do. He thought he knew who it was — but he didn't know how to pursue the idea. It wasn't something he could discuss with Ann — and since there was no name attached to a picture that was at least thirty years old, he had no idea how to track it down on any of the databases he could access from his computer. But there is one person I can ask, he thought. He was still shaken by Norma's furious outburst from the day before. But even though it felt like it happened just last yesterday, he mused, she would remember it as something that happened thirty years ago. Assuming that she even remembers what this picture is all about, maybe she'll tell me now. It was something he would have to do: though he was now a time-warp away from Joanna's mysterious star-codes, he felt an obligation to find an explanation for the bizarre events that had happened in his NowTime childhood. Maybe Joanna is watching me even now, he mused.

He decided to spend Sunday afternoon looking more closely at the details of his life to see if there was anything that would take him by surprise. He began with his office, the large room he had passed by on the first morning's exploration of his new habitat. A new Macintosh, one he had never seen before, sat on his desk with two large display screens; a smaller computer, which looked very much like his old 1986 model, sat beside it. The mysterious occupant of this office had carefully organized dozens of programs and files on his hard disk, and it took only a few moments to figure what was contained on the elaborate computer system. One of the programs on his new computer looked particularly useful: a calendar program showing his appointments. Luckily, the calendar showed no assignments for the upcoming week; he didn't know what the old-AJ intended to do with his free time, but the calendar entries were left blank.

Also visible in the computer directory was the manuscript for his computer history book; the computer indicated that no changes had been made to the manuscript since July, 1986. The manuscript had been somewhere in the production process at the publisher when he time-warped out of BeforeTime in May, 1986; the old-AJ must have made some last-minute changes and corrections as the book was being edited. He looked on the bookshelf against the wall to find the book, and spent a few moments idly thumbing through its pages; to his surprise, the section on Russian computing had been reduced to a single paragraph, and the appendix on John Mauchly's problems with the FBI had been eliminated altogether. I wonder why the editors did that? he wondered.

On a whim, he decided to look at his royalty statements to see how many copies had been sold. He was pleased to see that the old-AJ kept his file cabinet organized just as he would have done; the thick folder with royalty statements from all his past books was right where it should have been. But the results were depressing: The History of Computing: from abacus to microchip had sold only 2,000 copies in the four years since its publication. It was a sobering reminder: nobody cares about history. But then, nobody else has had a chance to live history twice, he thought.

Sunday evening, Ann left the evening news program running while the family sat down to dinner. AJ remembered that she normally insisted that the television be turned off so that they could have a civilized conversation; but Zack had lobbied hard for permission to watch a new comedy show, which was due to begin as soon as Tom Brokaw finished wrapping up the day's litany of bombings, shootings, political scandals, fires and earthquakes.

The final 60 seconds of news was an announcement from a gray, anonymous face in Moscow indicating that the Soviet Union now officially regretted an act that it had denied for 50 years: the massacre by its secret police of 15,000 Polish officers in Katyn in 1940. It was chilling news, but disconnected from their daily lives; still, Brokaw seemed to think that it was a big deal for the Russians to acknowledge their culpability.

"Who's that guy?" AJ asked, gesturing at the face on screen.

"That's Bershensky, dummy," Ann replied. "The Prime Minister, or the Chief Banana, or whatever they call it. Who did you think it was: Margaret Thatcher?"

It was a mystery: AJ had never seen the man. Admittedly, all Russian politicians looked like washed-out derelicts to him, but still ... "What ever happened to Gorbachev?" he asked. At least he was recognizable, with the purple splotch on his bald pate.

"Who?" she asked. She was pushing pieces of chicken around in a skillet, and AJ wasn't sure if she had heard his question.

"Gorby," he replied. "You know, the guy who had the big summit with Reagan back in 1985."

"85?" Zack exclaimed, in a voice that was still too baritone for his comfort. He sat at the dinner table, naked except for boxer shorts; apparently, this was his standard dress style at home. "Jeez, Dad, that's like ... well, like ancient history. I don't even know if any of these guys were alive back then."

"It was only five years ago," AJ retorted. "The world hasn't changed that much. So what happened to Gorby?"

Both boys looked at him blankly. Then Danny, who sat at the other end of the table, gave him an exaggerated shrug that lifted his shoulder up to his ears, and said, "I give up, Dad — what is this: some kind of Trivial Pursuit question?"

Ann frowned and squinted her eyes as she carried the plates of food to the table. "Gorbachev ... Gorbachev. I think he was the Minister of Agriculture, or something like that, when they had that big purge that brought in the hard-liners in 1985. He was one of the bright young liberals the CIA was hoping would shake things up ... but Zack is right: that's a long time ago, the way new crises keep popping up on the news each night."

"No summit meeting with Reagan? Am I imagining that?"

"Yup, Dad, the old gray cells are wearing out. You're hallucinating," chortled Zack absently, as he focused intently on a television commercial advertising a new brand of toothpaste. Danny sang the commercial loudly, in an off-key harmony with the television; it was apparently a constant technique that he used to annoy his older brother, and Zack swatted him on the head in an unsuccessful attempt to silence him.

"I don't know what Gorbachev would have done, but that guy," Ann said, pointing at the screen with her fork, "would rather bury us — like Krushchev used to threaten — than talk to us. Anyone who says he'll fight us in Panama if we lift a finger against Noriega is not the kind of guy Bush wants to have a summit with."

"So there hasn't been any glasnost? No perestroika?" AJ asked. Meanwhile, he was cataloging the fact that George Bush was now President; he remembered Bush as Reagan's Vice President, but had no idea what he stood for, if anything.

"Perestroika? What's that — some new kind of vodka?" asked Ann. She was dressed in her standard weekend uniform of jeans and a t-shirt, and he was intrigued at the thought that while she was now older than the mother he had left behind in Riverside, she looked much younger. But her reference to vodka snapped him back.

"Yeah," he said, dumbfounded. "Some kind of vodka. I thought Gorbachev was going to export it to us."

"Dad, Dad," piped up Danny, whose photographic memory was legendary in the family, as AJ remembered from BeforeTime1 and BeforeTime2. "I remember that name now. Gorbachev was one of the guys who got executed by the KGB when they had that purge. A bunch of them, boom, boom, boom: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Shevardnadze, I don't even know how to say all the rest of the names."

"Oh," said AJ quietly. "Well, like Zack says, I must have been hallucinating. Don't worry about it."

By now, Brokaw had disappeared, four consecutive commercials had flashed before their eyes, and Zack's comedy show was starting up. Ann shook her head, but both boys sat slack-jawed, staring at the screen while they shoveled food into their mouth. AJ, too, sat silently, but his mind was far away from the canned laughter.

Gorbachev was real, he thought desperately. I know he was real. Who could forget that purple splotch? And I know he had a summit meeting with Reagan in 1985, before I left BeforeTime2 for Texas. And he was the Premier or Prime Minister or some damn thing — he wasn't just a low-level Agriculture Minister.

The conclusion was obvious: he had returned to a world in which events had unfolded slightly differently than the world he had known before. Most of it was the same: everyone still had two arms and legs, the country still existed, he still had the right wife and the right number of children. But a new leader in the Soviet Union: that was a major change. And it was an ominous discovery that there had been no summit conferences and that the general relations between the US and USSR had turned frosty.

But all it would have taken is one or two minor events to have turned out differently, in order for a different political regime to gain power, he thought. He had no more of a detailed understanding of Politburo politics than he did of Washington politics, but he assumed it was a constant process of intrigue, back-biting, plots, and cabals. Maybe the Gorbachev who had come to power in his old BeforeTime2 world had messed up somehow in this BeforeTime3 world: maybe he had stepped on the wrong toes, formed the wrong alliances, or whispered the wrong indiscretions to the wrong mistress. I wonder if Gorby asked for do-overs, he thought as they cleared away the dishes from the dinner table. Zack and Danny had disappeared from the table; after the slam, slam of the bedroom doors closing, AJ concluded that he wouldn't see them again until breakfast.

How many other things are different? he wondered. There would never be any way of knowing, of course: the mind-boggling thought was that, somehow, the entire universe had had a chance at "do-overs" while he was playing in Colorado, New Mexico, and California ... and things had come out slightly differently.

How on earth can I explain this to Ann? he wondered. Even for him, it was difficult: there were dozens of questions he simply couldn't answer. How did I recover after the lightning hit me in Central Park? Did the ghost-AJ who took my place know that he was here and I was there? Too many questions, he sighed. I'll just have to accept it for what it is.

Maybe someday she'll just accept it on faith, too, he thought later that evening as they watched the 10 o'clock news.

"AJ?" Ann asked. "Are you okay?"

"Hmmm?" he responded. "Yeah, sure ... but you know, I do have one small question: why is it you call me AJ?"

"You have a problem with that?" Ann snorted. "You want me to call you 'Prince,' or 'Exalted One'?"

"No," he laughed. "I was just curious: you used to call me Jonathan, I thought. AJ is what my family called me as a kid."

"Boy, you must have had a tough day today," Ann sighed, shaking her head. "Or you've taken up drugs without letting me know. I've always called you AJ — your Mom told me that nickname when we first met, back in high school."

"Oh, yeah" he said. Another little change. "Yeah, I guess you're right. I'm sorry — I didn't mean to make a big deal of it. Call me whatever you want."

"Righto, Your Highness," said Ann, rolling off the bed to go check whether Danny had brushed his teeth before going to sleep. "Listen, no wine for you tonight. I think you're still wiped out from last night — you need a good night's sleep."

She returned a few moments later; Zack and Danny were in bed, and they had a few minutes' peace to watch the news before turning in themselves. The weather reporter came on last, and Ann turned off the bedroom lights. The TV weather map showed cold fronts attacking from the north, warm fronts coming in from the south, clashing with moist air currents from the west. "Yechh," said Ann, "it looks like we're going to have miserable weather all week."

"And miserable weather all up and down the coast," AJ agreed. "That is, if you can believe that idiot. I hope I don't have to fly down to Charlotte in the middle of all that crap."

"Well," sighed Ann, "the only thing you can usually count on is that the weather men don't know what they're talking about — especially a bozo called Fire Storm. If he says it's going to be sunny tomorrow, you better take your umbrella."

"Umphh," he said, snuggling down under the covers and taking off his glasses. He shared her opinion of weather reporters; as far as he could tell, they were all KGB agents, making them crazy over weather patterns that never worked out as predicted.

"AJ," said Ann, as she turned off the television and settled under her covers in the darkened room, "Danny asked me a funny question when I put him to bed."

"What's that?" he asked dreamily.

"He said that I always called you AJ," she laughed. "Which just goes to prove what I was saying to you before."

"Terrific," he said, "great minds think alike."

"Well, anyway, what he asked me was why nobody knows what the 'A' stands for. You always tell people your name is Jonathan, and I've never seen your official first name spelled out."

"Well, maybe it's just supposed to be an initial. Like that double-jointed rap singer guy I saw on Zack's television — M C Hammer, or whoever it was."

"I'm serious," laughed Ann. "Or at least, Danny was serious."

"I'm a rap singer," he chuckled. "Wanna see me dance?"

"Please," sighed Ann. "Spare me. But are you telling me the 'A' really doesn't stand for anything?"

"Not that I know of," he responded in exasperation. "That's why I was always so annoyed that Mom and Dad called me that. If every kid in every school I attended around the country had heard them call me 'AJ', I would have spent my entire childhood try to explain away that non-existent 'A' name."

"Okay, okay," said Ann, turning on her side. "Don't get huffy. I'll tell Danny. He won't call you that, don't worry. I'm the only one — beside your mother, of course."

"Yeah, poor old Mom," AJ sighed, as he turned on his side and closed his eyes. "I guess it's okay for her to call me AJ, if it makes her feel any better."

A second good night's sleep restored most of his physical fitness, though he found it depressing to see how much less fit a 46 year old man was than a 10 year old boy. No more running, or jumping, or climbing up trees he thought. No more stretching my body with a quick jerk or snap. No more ducking under fences, squeezing between fat adults blocking my way.

He still had not adjusted to the fact that so much time had disappeared; it was depressing to think that he had missed four of the best years of his children's lives. Having gone through four years of childhood himself, he had a voyeuristic understanding of what they were living — but he had missed Sarah's high school graduation, had not participated in her search for a college, and had missed untold numbers of small events in the boys' lives.

On the other hand, he gradually learned, he had also missed some of the unpleasant parts of raising a teenager, as Sarah had gone through the last of her high school years before moving on to college. Sarah had fought every rule, crossed every line, challenged every restriction, and ignored every constraint that society, school authorities, and parents had attempted to impose upon her. My ghost-counterpart must not have enjoyed that part, he thought. Hopefully, it will be easier with Zack and Danny.

From what Stuart had told him, he expected he would have to fly down to Charlotte to visit Norma by the middle of the week; it meant he would have a couple of days to explore his new world. He decided to spend the first day in the library, catching up on recent events so that he would be able to fake his way through life a little more easily. Ann greeted his announcement without any comment; he told her he was doing some research, and would be back from the library by dinnertime. Her daily routine was busy with school activities, volunteer work, shopping, and managing the house; she was actually happier when he was out of the way, and had long since lost interest in the computer work he was doing.

In the reference section of the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library, AJ found a thick book summarizing the major events of world history for the twentieth century, from the first day of 1900 through the last day of 1989. It was both amazing and depressing to see how compact the summaries were: each of his missing four years had been boiled down to a single page of salient names, dates, and critical events.

One of the news summaries was especially depressing, for it showed that the Cold War was still far from over. Thousands of East Germans had escaped to West Germany via Hungary, before the East Germans had decisively closed the border; several dozen had been shot attempting to storm the barricades at the exit gates. A huge rally had protested the action, and it appeared that an uprising would force President Erich Honecker to resign; there was even talk that the Berlin Wall might come down. But at a critical moment, hard-liners in Moscow had thrown their support behind Honecker, and had sent battalions of tanks into key East German cities to put down the protests by force. Remembering the debacle of Hungary 34 years earlier, a new generation of rebellious students had slunk back to their university classes. The protest collapsed, and the Berlin Wall remained standing.

Though the historical summaries had little to say about science and technology, aside from listing the names of Nobel Prize winners each year, one small note caught his eye: in 1988, the Russians had announced the development of a supercomputer four times more powerful than the American Cray machines — suddenly and unexpectedly taking a definitive lead in the world race for super-powerful number-crunchers that could be used to design new generations of nuclear weapons, as well as myriad other civilian and defense applications. AJ couldn't help remembering Lucas's comments about the Russians back in Texas and Denver, while thinking I'll bet this has scared the pants off the computer jocks in this country. Not to mention the Japanese.

By mid-afternoon, he had had enough. He left the library, walked over to Broadway and looked around to see how much of the neighborhood had changed. For all I know, he thought, Zabar's might be gone. But to his intense relief, the extraordinary specialty deli was still there, with cars triple-parked outside. By the time he reached the corner of 86th Street, he decided that whatever changes had taken place were small enough that he could handle them. But New York was dirtier and noisier than he remembered; there were many more homeless people than he recalled from 1986, and they were far more aggressive; one of them followed him half way up the block, persistently asking him for money.

If BeforeTime3 is different, he thought, as he took the elevator up to the apartment, maybe BeforeTime2 was different, too. He had never considered the possibility at the time. Maybe I just didn't see anything different, because I was only gone a few months in NowTime1. Arghhh! It's all too confusing.

He had not heard anyone talking about time travel; none of the TV commercials were advertising timewarps to Elizabethan England or 23rd century lunar colonies. So whatever he was going through, it appeared to be his own private experience. Unless, he thought, a few other people here in the city are going slightly crazy trying to figure out their time travel experiences. There were, as he remembered from Sarah's BeforeTime2 science report, eight million lightning bolts around the world every day. I can't be the only one who's ever been through a time-warp, he thought.

It was five o'clock when he walked into to the apartment. Danny was home from school, and had disappeared into his room again; he grunted at AJ when he poked his head into Danny's room to say hello. Ann was cooking dinner in the kitchen, while gossiping on the phone with one of her friends. Zack had stayed after school to practice with the track team, but was due back by dinner-time. Nobody paid any attention to AJ, and he spent the time before dinner exploring the computer equipment that occupied his office.

At dinner, he found out why Danny had locked himself in his room; it was not the urge to watch television cartoons in privacy, but a period of recovery from a trauma at school: one of his teachers had accused him of cheating in a school exam. AJ knew that Danny would never have cheated; not only was he far too bright to need help, but his moral code was far stricter than that of the teachers, let alone the students. He never allowed anyone to help him on his homework, as Ann reminded him, and he was adamant about avoiding even the shadow of a hint of plagiarism in his school reports. So his teacher's suggestion that a stray glance across the room, to see if it was raining outside, might have been intended as an effort to copy someone's answers, was preposterous. Danny was insulted, outraged, and helpless. "How can you prove you weren't cheating," he asked Ann, "if you've got a teacher who says you're guilty until proven innocent?

All of this came out slowly at dinner, pulled from Danny's tightly controlled emotions by Ann, one faltering sentence at a time. It turned out that the teacher was partially convinced by Danny's hot denials in the classroom, but had nevertheless insisted that he take a revised version of the test, alone in the classroom, during his lunch break. He scored a perfect grade — just as he had in the original test. The crowning blow was that the student whose work Danny had been accused of copying flunked the test. All was forgiven, the teacher apologized, and Danny was told to forget the entire incident. But he couldn't, of course; and having so recently been in similar subservience to the absolute authority of an adult in an educational institution, AJ knew how frustrated he was.

"Did you ever cheat, Dad?" Danny asked him at the end of his tale of woe. "In school, I mean, did you ever cheat on a test?"

"No, Danny, I never did," AJ reassured him. "It would be like stealing, or telling a lie. I'm not perfect, and I know that people can make mistakes and sometimes glance at someone else's paper when they don't mean to — but, no, I never cheated."

"Welllll ... " said Ann, reproachfully, "maybe not on a test, AJ. But don't forget that your Dad did cheat one time, Danny."

Zack groaned at the remark, gulped down the last of his milk, and stuck his hand inside his boxer shorts to scratch his nether regions. "Can I be excused, please?"

"What's the matter, Zack?" Ann asked, with an edge to her voice. "Don't you want to hear how your Dad cheated on a school election?"

"I've already heard it a million times, Mom. It's engraved on my chest," Zack mumbled, as he carried his dishes to the sink. AJ could smell the Ben-Gay on his naked torso as Zack walked by his chair; the stretching and sprinting at his track-team practice session had resulted in some aching muscles, and he smelled like a large camphor ball.

I have a feeling that Danny has heard the story a few times too, AJ thought, with a gloomy realization that the incident he had casually mentioned in BeforeTime1 must have festered during the ensuing years, but he's too upset with his own crisis to remember. So Ann proceeded to re-tell the high school saga, when she and AJ had competed, together with a third student, for the presidency of the student council. AJ had won, by the narrow margin of seven votes, in a student population of a thousand.

"But your Dad cheated, Danny," Ann said, "so it just goes to prove that nobody is perfect. He had one of his supporters stuff the ballot box — that's why he won."

"Annie, Annie, come on!" AJ said, wondering how many times the same conversation had taken place during his four-year absence. "It was one of the kids in the previous student council administration, Amy Smith. She was the Student Council Secretary, and she had control of the ballot boxes. I had no idea that she had done it; she didn't tell me about until afterwards."

"Yeah, yeah," Ann snorted, "that's what you say. I think she had a crush on you."

"What ever happened to the third kid?" asked Danny suddenly.

"Third kid?" AJ asked.

"Yeah, Mom said that you and she ran against each other and a third kid. He lost, too, right? So did he think he got cheated out of the election, too?"

There was a moment's silence. Ann sighed, and pushed the her salad to one side of her plate. "Yes, he did, Danny. His name was Russ Mitchell, and he was my boyfriend back then. He thought that he was the one who was going to win the election — and he thought that he had been really cheated when he found out that Dad won."

"Well, what did he do when he found out?" Like a bulldog, Danny wouldn't let go once he got his teeth into an issue. You can't just tell him not to worry about it, AJ thought. Thank goodness this one doesn't involve life-and-death consequences.

"He didn't find out, Danny," AJ said, "because nobody ever told him. He didn't know that it had happened at all, and I didn't even find out about until afterwards, when this Amy person told me about it."

"Oh," said Danny. In his world of black and white values, it wasn't a very tidy ending. He sat at the far end of the table, dressed in pajama pants and an oversize New York Knicks t-shirt, and his large, moonlike eyes stared at him intensely.

"But even if he had known," AJ went on, "it wouldn't have mattered. I'm not even sure if Amy was telling me the truth, or whether she was just joking about the whole thing. But even if she was serious, it would have meant that Mom was the winner, not Russ. He would have lost anyway, no matter what happened."

"Yeah," said Danny, "but what ever happened to him, anyway?"

"Well, he sure didn't grow up to be rich and famous," said Ann with a snort.

AJ raised his eyebrows and stared at Ann. This is news to me, he thought. As far as he was aware, the incident had had no impact on Russ's life, though he didn't remember seeing him more than once or twice after they graduated from his school.

But Ann had a different story to tell. AJ's winning the election, she said, had sent Russ into a tailspin from which he never recovered; his self-confidence shattered, he began to lose the urge to compete in sports, in school contests, and even for decent grades in his academic classes. Before the election, everyone had predicted that he would attend an Ivy League college and find success as a doctor or lawyer. Instead, he had given up on college altogether, and had never left the small town where they attended high school. When she had last heard of him, he was still working in his father's funeral parlor.

Along the way, his relationship with Ann had collapsed; it dawned on AJ that that was what made it such a sore point with Ann. He pointed out to her that if she had won the election, it might have been even more devastating for Russ' ego, and in any case he didn't feel responsible for the tailspin that Russ went into. Ann shrugged: she agreed, but ... she shrugged again.

"I still can't help wondering what would have happened ... " she said, rising abruptly from the table to carry her dishes to the sink. "And even if you weren't to blame for what happened to Russ, I still can't forgive you for cheating."

This wasn't such a big deal in BeforeTime1, AJ thought. It must be something else that's changed. He and Danny were now alone at the table, and Danny continued to stare at him, waiting for an answer. I'll have to work this out with Ann some other time, he thought. But I've got to wrap it up with Danny now, before it gets any worse.

"Well, it's true, Danny, things didn't work out so well for Russ," he said. "But the main point here is that you didn't cheat. And you proved to your teacher that you didn't cheat. And now she'll never accuse you of it again."

And that was that. He sighed, rose from the table, and began walking back to the living room. Danny stopped him with a final question as he swallowed the last of his milk. "Dad, I still don't understand one thing: if you found out that someone else cheated, and won the election for you, how come you never told anyone?"

It was a question for which he had no answer. So he replied, with his back to Danny as he walked away, "It was a long, long time ago, kiddo — I really don't even remember any more. The past is the past; just leave it alone, okay?"

But it wasn't true; he had never forgotten any of the details. If his NowTime existence had continued on from Riverside, and had eventually carried him to New York, he might have had a chance to do-over a wrong that had nagged him, like a minor background headache, for 30 years. But I'm not in NowTime any more, he thought. That's all behind me now. I'm back in BeforeTime. The past is the past. Let it go.

Shortly after midnight, when the household was quiet and AJ had drifted off to sleep, the phone rang. Ann nudged him hard enough to shake him out of a complicated dream about a baseball game with Joanna at the Longfellow school in Riverside, and then shoved the phone in his face.

A woman's voice, tired and sad, said simply, "Your mother passed away last night, AJ. I thought you should know."

"Oh, my God!" he yelled, startling Ann fully awake. "When?"

But it was too late: the woman had hung up and he was talking to a dial tone. She probably has ten more deaths to announce, the cold-blooded ghoul, he thought.

Before he tried dealing with the hospital again, he decided to call Stuart. He was also asleep — and when AJ finally coaxed him into a state of coherent conversation, he was incredulous.

"But I was just with your mother an hour ago," he said, in a tired voice. "She's not in good shape, God knows, but she wasn't in an emergency situation. There must have been a mistake."

And so it appeared: Stuart hung up, called the hospital, and then rang AJ back to say that nobody on the nursing staff would admit to having called him. After much shouting, he had cajoled the head nurse to go into Norma's room to check her status; the nurse swore on every Bible she owned that Norma was sleeping comfortably, and was very definitely alive. She made no apologies to Stuart: as far as she was concerned, he was a pain in the ass.

But it wasn't just me, AJ thought. Ann was here, and she took the call. I wasn't dreaming. But after a long conversation with Stuart, he finally decided it must have been somebody's idea of a bad joke. He went back to bed and tried to forget the whole thing. There was something else strange about that phone call, his brain tried to tell him, but he couldn't remember what it was, and he was soon asleep.

On Wednesday afternoon, Stuart called again: Norma's biopsy, he said gloomily, showed advanced stages of malignant cancer tumors throughout her body. The spot on her lung was just the tip of iceberg: it had attacked her liver, her spleen, her pancreas, and organs whose names he had completely forgotten. How it had advanced so far without anyone noticing was something AJ found incredible; when he asked, Stuart just sighed.

"I've been trying to get your mother to stop smoking for years," he said sadly. "Her cough has always been bad, and it seems like she's spent the last couple of years constantly recovering from colds and the flu. She had been in bed for a week with some damn kind of bug just before this thing hit her."

"But didn't she have checkups? Didn't anyone notice before it got so serious?"

"Who knows?" Stuart said, in a resigned tone. "She went to the doctors from time to time, but she was more worried about her cholesterol than anything else. Who knows what they told her? They're all quacks anyway."

But the bottom line, as the quacks had put it, was that she was gravely ill and would probably not come out of the hospital. The concept of cancer was not unfamiliar to AJ, but he had had no experience of close friends or immediate members of the family fighting the disease. He had always assumed that even in terminal cases, one would have months to prepare for the outcome; hence it was even more of a shock when Stuart told him the doctors had advised him it might well be a matter of days.

"Days?" he shouted into the phone. "What are you talking about? I can understand that it might not be curable, but how can you be talking about days?"

"I'm not the doctor, AJ," Stuart replied staunchly. "I'm just telling you what they're telling me. Apparently her systems are just shutting down. The last bout of flu that she had must have pushed the emphysema past the critical stage, and maybe her body just figured it was tired of fighting all this stuff."

"Jesus," AJ said, numbly.

"They've got her on oxygen now, of course, because her lungs just can't get enough air into the bloodstream. But they tell me her kidneys may shut down in another day or two; they can hook her up to some life-support systems for a while, but it's going to be a losing battle."

"I better get down there," AJ said quietly.

"Yes, I think you better," Stuart agreed, his voice bleak. "Let me know if you want me to pick you up at the airport."

AJ thanked him, but said that he could to get himself from the airport to the hotel alone. He booked a flight for mid-morning on Thursday, figuring there was no need to leave home at the crack of dawn: the flight from New York to Charlotte was only two hours. Unfortunately, the only connections from LaGuardia were on US Air; it was not an experience he looked forward to. To make matters worse, the television weather reporter had actually been accurate in his predictions; it was not only raining in New York, but bad weather was forecast all the way down the East Coast, with severe thunderstorms in Florida that were slowly moving north. AJ had to allow an hour and a half to get to the airport: the FDR Drive was flooded in sections, and traffic was snarled up on the Triboro Bridge.

The plane eventually took off, and the pilot spent the better part of an hour trying to get above the clouds, around the storm system, and into some clear weather. It was hopeless; AJ resigned himself to a bumpy, unpleasant flight. The flight attendants did their best to carry on as if nothing was happening outside — but when the plane hit an air pocket, and a food tray flew up from a passenger's table, bounced off the ceiling, and sprayed its contents across three rows of passengers, the flight attendants stopped serving and sat down. When lightning bolts began hitting the airplane wings, they stopped talking altogether.

When the plane finally slammed down on the runway at Charlotte, the flight attendants broke into spontaneous applause along with the passengers. The weather on the ground was even worse than it had been in the air; sheets of rain beat against the airport windows as he made his way to the auto rental counter.

When AJ got to the hospital, the receptionist consulted a sheet when he asked for Norma's room, and pointed him down the hall to room 427. His raincoat was drenched from the brief dash from the car into the hospital, and it dripped in a ragged line on the floor as he walked down the hallway to his mother's room.

It had not occurred to him until now how strange the experience would be. On the one hand, it was less than a week since he saw her, in NowTime2; on the other hand, it had been some four years since he had even spoken to her in BeforeTime2, and much longer since he had actually seen her. And the mother I spoke to in BeforeTime2, he thought, was 30 years older than the mother I saw in NowTime2.

The sight was a shock, and he had to sit quickly to recover his rubbery knees. No longer the slim, young, mid-thirties woman, Norma was now shriveled and wasted. Oxygen tubes, an IV, and a variety of beeping, blinking machines surrounded her. Her head was turned slightly to one side, and she was sleeping quietly. He sat in the chair beside her bed and watched her for nearly an hour. It was almost impossible to see the connection between this woman's face, and the woman who had towered over him, hugged him and scolded him, chased him and fed him, just a week ago. On the other hand, at least he had the benefit of seeing the connection: When he had last seen her in 1985, in the midst of his BeforeTime2 period, she was already past middle age, and he had completely forgotten the link between her then-old self and the younger woman who had raised him in childhood. As he thought about all of this — wondering, for example, whether his children would ever remember him in later life as a mid-thirties adult rather than a senile old man — she gradually woke up. Her eyes fluttered briefly, and she coughed a deep, phlegmy spasm.

"How are you, Mom?" he asked softly, when she focused on him.

"AJ, what are you doing here?" she asked, with a smile. "It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you, Mom," he said, fighting back tears. "But I could think of better places to see you than this place."

"Well ... " said Norma, her voice fading. "I guess they were right when they told me smoking would catch up with me some day."

"Maybe this will give you a good excuse for quitting now."

"Oh, it's a little too late for that," she sighed. "Though they sure won't let me light up in here. That nurse outside would probably come after me with a baseball bat if I tried."

As if it were a cue, the nurse marched into the room and shooed AJ out. "She needs her sleep," she commanded. "You can come back tomorrow. Visiting hours are in the morning."

AJ called home from a pay phone in the hospital lobby. Ann was sympathetic; the kids were fine, she said, and there was no need to worry about coming home until he was ready. He checked in with Stuart, too, to let him know that he was in town, and they agreed to meet at the hospital the following morning. Stuart invited him to stay at their house while he was in town, but AJ demurred: their house was tiny. He remembered from earlier visits that whenever he came to town, he stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn.

The next morning, visiting hours were at nine o'clock, and he expected to spend the entire morning with Norma. However, a tall, chunky nurse stopped him at the registration desk and told him that he would have to restrict his time to only fifteen minutes. She was polite when he expressed surprise, but she was quite firm: "The patient, she very sick. We no want her talking so much, she need rest. You not get her excited, not let her talk so much. Okay?" Okay? AJ thought. No, of course it's not okay.

He tiptoed into the room, pulled up a chair, and said softly to Norma, "They'll only let me stay for a few minutes, Mom; they don't want me to tire you out."

She reached out and took his hand, bony fingers clasping his wrist. "It's good of you to be here," she wheezed. "But you shouldn't be away from your family so long."

"Don't worry about it, Mom," he reassured her. "They're fine. Annie can look after the kids just fine, and they all send you their love."

She smiled and closed her eyes. "You always were a good boy, AJ. I'm glad I chose you after all."

The words hit him like a thunderbolt. It had been only a short time since she had chased after him in Riverside, yelling at him, while he fled into the mountains, that she had not wanted to choose him. He still had no idea what it was that she could chosen or not chosen. But the words, and the NowTime memories it brought back to him, prompted him to try something he had not even considered doing.

He took the photograph from his wallet, unfolded it, and smoothed out the crease that cut through the toothless girl's bouquet of flowers.

"Mom," he said gently, "I wonder if you would do me a favor."

"I'm not really in any shape to do anyone a favor," she replied, with a croaking laugh. "What is it?"

"I know you don't like to talk about the past," he said, "but this is so long ago that it really doesn't matter."

"The past is the past, AJ," she said with a sad smile. "You know that."

"But Mom, I need to know just this one thing about your past," he persisted. Holding up the picture, he asked quietly, "Who was this little girl?"

Her eyes focused on the picture, and then slowly filled with tears. "Oh, AJ," she whispered, "I'm so ashamed. So ashamed ... "

He had expected anger, or perhaps a stony silence — but not this. He was perplexed. She wept quietly with her eyes closed, tears trickling down her leathery cheeks. She made no reply to him, and he waited silently as the muted sound of her weeping faded and then died; she drifted off to sleep. He sighed and put the picture back in his wallet.

Simple, innocent secrets gradually become dark and fearful, he thought. God knows what Mom thought she was hiding from me all these years. Maybe I was too young back then to know whatever it was that made her threaten to send Lucas after me with a rifle. But the secret had become a leech, and had attached itself so tightly to her soul that she could not release it.

What could Mom have possibly done? he wondered. Did she have an affair with Lucas and run off, leaving my real father behind? Was she forced to make a choice between him and me? He was beginning to think he might never find the answer.

After an hour of small talk and two offers of a mid-day glass of sherry, AJ decided to leave; Stuart apparently needed a drink to calm his nerves, but felt embarrassed about drinking in front of him. As he got up to leave, Stuart suddenly asked, "Did you ever find out what that midnight phone call was about last week?"

"No, I didn't," AJ replied. Something else about that phone call was strange, he thought. But he couldn't remembered what it was, and he focused on Stuart again. "Actually, I was going to ask you the same thing. Did anyone at the hospital ever 'fess up?"

"Not that I could find out," Stuart replied sadly. "I don't understand: you'd think they have enough sadness, without calling you up in the middle of the night and scaring you like that."

After he left, AJ briefly considered driving around Charlotte, but the weather was too miserable; he considered a movie, but couldn't help feeling guilty at the prospect of enjoying himself while his mother laying dying in the hospital. In the end, he didn't have enough energy to do anything but drive back to the hotel and watch the news on CNN.

The next morning, he decided to let Stuart see Norma alone; he waited until mid-afternoon to drive over to the hospital. As it turned out, it was his last chance to see her; the doctors told him that she would probably not last through the night. Stuart was walking to the elevator, head down, snuffling noisily, as AJ checked in at the nurse's desk. He wasn't sure if Stuart had seen him, and he decided not to interfere with his private grief.

Norma's eyes were closed when AJ entered the room. He sat in the chair next to the bed, listening to the monitor beeping her life slowly away. He could hear the hiss of oxygen, but he could not detect any sign of breathing; her chest neither rose nor fell.

An hour must have gone by; he was lost in thoughts of her younger years in NowTime. He wondered what she had been through in all the ensuing years, and whether any of them had been happy after she had finally divorced Lucas. She may not have been the most pure or noble of women, but she led a pretty decent life all in all, AJ thought. And she is my mother.

Her eyes fluttered open, and AJ saw her looking at him. "AJ," she whispered, "are you still ashamed of me?"

"I forgive you, Mom," he answered, taking her hand gently in his. "Whatever it was, I forgive you. The past is the past. I'll let it go; you can, too."

"Thank you, AJ," she sighed. "Thank you. You're a good boy. I'm glad I chose you." Her eyes closed; five minutes later, the monitor stopped beeping. I can only hope she found a release from whatever demons have been tormenting her all these years, he thought. Norma was the only contact he had with the past, and the realization slowly seeped into him: I'm alone now.

The nurse was on her way into the room as he left; she looked at him with a cold stare and put her hand on Norma's forehead. He shrugged at her, turned and walked into the hallway. The elevator was empty; it was late, and visiting hours had been over for some time now. The reception desk was unmanned, and the lobby was silent and dark.

So much for the past, he thought, as he walked out into the heavy rain. I never did find out who she was married to, or what that photograph was all about. There was always the option of flying out to Salt Lake City to confront Lucas, and he could always use his computer contacts to scan through databases, looking for clues to Norma's early life. But what's the point? What would it prove now? he thought. I give up.

His car was parked on the far side of the parking lot; when he arrived, the lot had been nearly full, and there were few empty spaces. Now, it seemed, everyone else had fled the scene; only a handful of Hondas, RVs, and pickup trucks were scattered about. A few forlorn utility poles with feeble yellow street lamps cast small circles of light on the deepening puddles.

A battered old Volkswagen beetle at the near edge of the lot, festooned with peeling bumper stickers from old anti-war rallies, had a New York license plate that read "ME HEAL." He was too numb to laugh, though he could imagine an idealistic doctor, one who had not bought a new car since his medical school days, working frantically somewhere within the bowels of the hospital to save another life. I could have used you in there, Doc, he thought.

He was halfway across the parking lot when the boom of thunder startled him from his meditation; a second later, he smelled ozone in the air as a white streak of lightning shot down fifty feet away and impaled the aging Volkswagen. A horrific boom! hit him with a shock wave; it felt like a bomb had gone off.

He was terrified. "Hey, God!" he yelled, looking up through the driving rain into a pitch black sky. "Leave me out of this one! I've had enough! I'm going home!"

Another lightning bolt shot down, hitting a utility pole ten feet away -- shattering the light, splitting the wooden pole, and leaving him in darkness. I'm too far from the building, he thought, in a panic. But if I can get to the car, I'll be okay.

He began running, zig-zagging across the lot, ignoring the puddles as he splashed through. He thought momentarily of picking any nearby car and hiding beneath it, but there was so much water on the ground that he thought an errant lightning bolt might fry him on the ground. The only safety was inside his car; he assumed, with a New Yorker's instincts, that the other cars would be locked, and that his own car would be his sole refuge.

Another lightning bolt crashed into a bright purple Mazda as he went by. The thunder was deafening; it was like running through a battlefield, dodging stray mortar shells and cannon balls. It was probably only seconds, but it seemed like hours before he reached his own rental car, a nondescript white Taurus.

He was running so fast that he had had no chance to pull the keys from his pocket. Now, standing next to the car and shivering from fear and the cold rain, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of junk: coins, two pieces of gum, his house keys, and the car keys with the Hertz tag attached.

He shifted the coins and the house keys, with Darth Vader attached to the key chain, into his right hand. Holding the car keys with his left hand, he looked up into the sky as he inserted the key into the lock. He should have known better: with every previous timewarp, he had seen the lightning coming. It might have left him alone if he had kept his eyes on the ground.

He could see it heading for him, and there was no time to open the car door. "Leave me alone!" he screamed at it. "I don't want to go back!"

But it was too late: the hot white bolt hit with incredible force, and AJ felt himself being lifted up and carried away.

 

 

Continue to Chapter 10 . . .