He climbed into the car and drove back toward Belltower.

To the hollow central mystery of his life now: Joyce.

He found her on the Post Road, hiking to the little grocery up by the highway.

He stopped the car and opened the passenger door for her. She climbed inside.

By Tom’s calculation she had turned fifty in February of this year. She’d gained some weight, gained some lines, gained some gray. She wore a pair of faded jeans a little too tight around her thighs; a plain yellow sweatshirt; sneakers for the long hike up the road. The marks of time, Tom thought. Her voice was throaty and pitched lower than he remembered it; maybe time or maybe some hard living had done that. Her eyes suggested the latter.

She looked at him cautiously. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”

“Neither was I.”

“Still planning on leaving town?”

He nodded.

“I was hoping we could talk.”

“We can talk,” Tom said.

“You haven’t been around much. Well, hell. It must be a shock, seeing me like this.”

It was true, but it sounded terrible. He told her she looked fine. She said, “I look my age, for better or worse. Tom, I lived those twenty-seven years. I know what to expect when I look in the mirror. You woke up expecting something else.”

“You left,” he said. “Left before I had a chance to say goodbye.”

“I left as soon as I knew you’d be all right. You want to know how it went?” She settled into the upholstery and stared into the blue September sky. “I left because I didn’t trust the connection between us. I left because I didn’t want to be a freak of nature, here—or make you into one, there. I left because I was scared and I wanted to go home.

“I left because Ben told me the tunnel would be fixed and the choice I made would have to be the final choice. So— back to Manhattan, back to 1962. You always think you can start again, but it turns out you can’t. Lawrence was dead. That changed things. And I’d been here, I’d had a look at the future. Even just a tiny look, it leaves you different. For instance, you remember Jerry Soderman? Wrote books nobody would publish? He did okay as a trade editor, actually got into print in the seventies—literary novels hardly anybody read, but he was real proud of them. Couple of months after I got back, Jerry tells me he’s gay, he might as well be frank about it. Fine, but the only thought I had was, Hey, Jerry, come 1976 or so you better be careful what you do. I actually phoned him around then, hadn’t talked to him for years. I said, Jerry, there’s a disease going around, here’s how to protect yourself. He said no there’s not and how would you know? Anyhow … Jerry died a couple of years back.” I m sorry, Tom said.

“It’s not your fault, not his fault, not my fault. The point is, I couldn’t leave behind what happened with you and me and this place. I tried! I really did. I tried all the good ways of forgetting. And I lived a life. I was married for five years. Nice guy, bad marriage. I did some professional backup vocals, but that was a bad time …I drank for a while, which kind of screwed up my voice. And, you know, I marched for civil rights and I marched against the war and I marched for clean air. When things leveled out I took a secretarial job at a law firm downtown. Nine to five, steady paycheck, annual vacation, and I’d be there today if I hadn’t quit and bought a ticket west. It’s amazing: for the longest time I promised myself I wouldn’t do it. What was done here was finished. I’d left; I’d made my decision. But I remembered the date on the newspaper I read in your back yard. Every August, I marked the anniversary, if you can call it that. Then, for the last couple of years, I started watching calendars the way you might watch a clock. Watching that date crawl closer. On New Year’s Eve last winter I sat home by myself, one lonely lady approaching the half-century mark. I broke open a bottle of champagne and at midnight I said fuck it, I’m going.

“Bought plane tickets six months in advance. Gave notice. I don’t know what I hoped or expected to find, but I wanted it real bad. Well, the flight was delayed. I missed a connection at O’Hare and had to wait overnight in the airport. When I got to Seattle it was already morning; the newspaper, the one I remembered, was sitting in the boxes staring at me. I rented a car and drove too fast down the coast. Blew out a tire and took a long time changing it. Then I got to Belltower and couldn’t find the house. Couldn’t remember the name of the road. I guess I thought there’d be signs posted: THIS WAY TO THE TIME MACHINE. I asked at a couple of gas stations, looked at a map until I thought my eyes would pop out of my head. Finally I stopped at a little all-night restaurant for coffee and when the waitress came I asked her if she knew anybody named Tom Winter or Cathy Simmons and she said no but there was a Peggy Simmons out along the Post Road and didn’t she have a granddaughter named Cathy? I gave her a twenty and came roaring out here. Caught the bad guy in my headlights and I couldn’t help myself, Tom: after all those years he still looked like death. I remembered Lawrence lying in a cheap coffin in some funeral parlor in Brooklyn, where his parents lived, and it still hurt, all these years later. So I turned the wheel. I was crying when I hit him.”

“Saved my life,” Tom said.

“Saved your life and drove on down the road and checked into a hotel room and sat on the bed shaking until noon the next day. By which time my younger self had gone home.”

“Then you came back,” Tom said.

“Scared hell out of Doug and Cathy. Ben didn’t seem too surprised, though.”

“You still wanted something.”

“I don’t know what I wanted. I think I wanted to look at you. Just look. Does that make any sense? For most of thirty years I’d been thinking about you. What we were. What we might have been. Whether I should love you or hate you for all this.”

He heard the weariness in her voice. “Any conclusions?”

“No conclusions. Just memory in the flesh. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”

“I’m the one who should apologize.”

He pulled into the lot in back of the grocery store and parked where a patch of sun came shining through a stand of tall pines. Tom decided this woman was Joyce, unmistakably Joyce despite all the changes; that he had walked into one more miracle, as pitiless and strange as the others.

She squinted at him through a bar of sunlight, smiling. “Catherine said there’s a sale on seed packets here. It’s too late for a garden, obviously, but the seeds stay good if you keep them in a refrigerator.”

“Seeds for Ben to plant? He talked about a garden.”

“For me to plant. I might be staying here. Ben offered me a job.” She paused. “His job.”

Tom turned off the engine, looked at her blankly. “I don’t get it.”

“He’s going home. I think he deserves it, don’t you? He offered me as a replacement. His employers agreed.”

He considered it a moment. “You want this?”

“I think I do. Ben says it’s lonely work. Maybe I need some lonely work for a while.”

“How long a while?”

“Eight years. Then the terminal’s closed for good. There won’t be anything in the basement but Gyproc walls. Weird thought, isn’t it?”

Eight years, Tom thought. 1997. Just shy of the millennium.

“I can do eight years,” she said. “I can hack that.”

“What then? They pension you off?”

“They rebuild me. They make me young.” She shook her head: “No, not young. That’s the wrong word. They make my body young. But I’ll be nearly sixty, no matter what I look like. That might be hard to deal with. My theory is that it shouldn’t matter. On the inside you’re not old or young, you’re just yourself, right? I won’t be a callow youth but I won’t be something monstrous, either. At least that’s what I believe.”