Points of Departure (7 page)

Liz felt as if she were watching a replay of her own courtship. In the darkness beyond the figures, she imagined a long line of faces,
each one framed by brown hair, each wearing a twisted smile. Behind her, she could hear music from the party; on an old album, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang: “And it seems like I’ve been here before …”

She ran away, knowing that she was running away. She persuaded Terry to leave the party. She insisted on leaving for New York the next day. Terry did not question Liz’s sudden panic and
Liz knew that her friend interpreted her need to be gone as stemming from a fear that she might be trapped into staying. Liz did not tell her otherwise.

As Liz drove cross-country, speeding along midwestern highways where every town looked the same, she admitted her cowardice to herself. But she kept her foot pressed to the gas pedal, staring at the road until her eyes ached and gripping the
wheel to keep her hands from shaking. At a McDonald’s, she ate a hamburger and gulped coffee that scorched her throat on the way down and burned in her stomach afterward. She spent one night in a roadside motel, sleeping fitfully and waking with the sensation that she was still moving, clutching the wheel and pushing down on the gas pedal. She was leaving them all behind.

A knot of resentment
remained with her: Why did they follow her? Why was she chosen to be the leader, the Pied Piper with a pack of children dancing in her shadow?

She reached New York and began work, spending the first day setting up her office so that it suited her. The secretary for the art department said that Beth, the artist who had quit, would stop by and pick up the sketches that she had left behind.

Liz
settled down to work at her new desk, trying to ignore the constant anger that knotted her stomach. When the door to her office opened, she looked up. The older woman who stepped inside wore her brown hair pinned back. Her mouth was twisted in an ironical grin.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Beth.”

T
HE TEAMSTERS WERE
striking again. The grocery stores were out of fruit and vegetables and were running out of canned goods. The smog hung low and mean in the east.

A woman Michael did not know carried a bushel of oranges up his front steps. When he opened the door to his one-room apartment—opened it just a crack because there had been two knifings down the street that week
she grinned at him through the narrow opening. “I brought you some oranges,” she said. “I’ll see you later.” She swung the bushel basket off her hip and set it on the top step.

He opened the door wider as she turned away. She wore her golden hair piled on her head in an old-fashioned sort of bun. She was a small woman with a tan like no one who lived in the city should have. When she lifted a
hand to smooth back her hair he noticed—with the part of his mind that noted unimportant details—a bruise on her tanned wrist.

Michael recognized her when she was halfway down the stairs to the court. He did not know her name. She lived in one of the tiny street-level apartments that had windows covered with metal grillwork to ward off burglars.

Michael had lived in the apartment complex for
over a year. During that time, a biker, a family of Mexicans, and a hooker had lived in that tiny apartment. A shade-loving plant that the hooker had tried to grow in the window had died from lack of light. Yet this woman had a tan like a girl on a farm.

“Hey,” said Michael. “I don’t understand. Why …”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “They would have gone to waste anyway.”

Michael hesitated,
feeling foolish. As if he had walked in during the second act of a play and was trying to piece together the plot. “I don’t even know your name. I’m Michael.”

“My name’s Karen,” she said. Michael realized as she regarded him with bright blue eyes that she did not fit.

She did not fit the apartment complex; she did not fit the city. She looked like the sort of woman who would bring someone a
basket of oranges. And that brought him back to the question that he had put aside earlier: Where had she gotten the oranges anyway? “I’ll see you later,” she said with certainty. And she walked away.

Michael was on his way back to the apartment from his part-time job at the bookstore. He was an hour later than usual—though the city’s buses had continued to run on the city’s emergency supply
of gasoline, they had grown increasingly unreliable in the last six months.

He turned the corner into the apartment court and almost bumped into Karen. The man who lived in the apartment below Michael stood beside her, holding her wrist tightly with a dirty hand. He held a bottle in his free hand and he was saying, “Come on: We can have a drink together. I need company. I’m sick.”

When Michael
stopped beside them, the man bared his teeth in a sort of territorial grin. Michael could not read the expression on Karen’s face. Distaste? Pity?

“Karen. I was hoping I’d run into you,” Michael interrupted the man. A flicker of surprise crossed the woman’s face. Michael continued, “You want to come up to my apartment and have a cup of tea?”

“Hey!” The man swung the bottle at Michael’s head
with a grunt of effort.

Michael had lived in the city since he was young. Street fighting had been a required subject at his high school, though not an officially recognized one. Not a natural fighter, in order to survive, Michael had learned to act rapidly—anticipating his enemy’s moves, analyzing, and countering them.

The man was swaying, already off-balance. Michael caught the arm swinging
the bottle, yanked the man forward, and struck a single, hard punch to the solar plexus. The man’s grip on Karen’s wrist broke and she stumbled back, rubbing her arm. The man fell forward, tripping over his own feet and twisting to one side. The bottle shattered against the asphalt and glass scattered around them. The sweet scent of cheap whiskey rose.

When Michael laid a protective hand on Karen’s
arm, the man scowled and started to get up, but collapsed back when he began to cough. The ragged sound began deep in his chest and seemed to tear his throat as it passed. He lay on the pavement amid bits of glass, immobilized by spasms of coughing.

Michael led Karen away, not looking back. “You’re all right, aren’t you?” he asked her.

“I’m fine.” She hesitated, still looking a little surprised,
a little puzzled. “Thanks for stopping to help. I don’t expect people to do that in a neighborhood like this.”

Michael hesitated, once again feeling foolish. She acted like they had never met. “I wanted to thank you again for the oranges. I was kind of out of it yesterday and—”

“Oranges?” she interrupted.

“The ones you brought me. Where did you get them anyway? All the stores I’ve been to in
the last week have been out of everything but canned stuff.”

Karen smiled tentatively. “The farmer was going to leave them to rot,” she said. “I guess that must have been it.”

The thought passed through Michael’s mind that perhaps she was crazy, but he did not jump to conclusions.

There was a basket of fresh oranges in his kitchen. “You want to come up for a cup of tea?” he asked. “Tea and
oranges? I’m out of everything else.”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s make a date for tomorrow. I just realized that there’s something I have to do today.”

She gently freed her arm from his protective grip and he noticed that her wrist was reddened where the drunk had grabbed her and was starting to bruise.

“But you can’t just walk away by yourself,” he protested.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, and
she walked away by herself.

Michael awoke early the next morning and walked to the grocery store. The windows of Karen’s apartment were still dark when he left the complex. The grocery store was closed and the sign in the window read: Out of Everything.

Someone who had not believed the sign had smashed the plate glass window. Through the shards of broken glass Michael could see that the shelves
had been pulled down and the cash register knocked off the counter. Michael stepped closer to the door and heard a rustling in the litter of paper bags beside the counter. A furtive gray shadow ran from the shelter of the bags across the open floor.

Michael watched the rat disappear into the back of the store and did not investigate further.

From a corner dispenser, he picked up a newspaper.

The headlines talked about the food riots in some sections of the city, about the strike, about an epidemic of a sort of fever-flu, about the ongoing gasoline shortage.

He waited for a bus home, but after an hour he gave up and walked. The trash had not been picked up in the neighborhood for almost a month and the garbage had spilled from cans and bins into the gutter. More than once, he thought
he saw a rat dart into the shadows.

Karen was waiting for him at the door to his apartment.

She wore a lacy blouse that could have been from an era that matched her hairstyle. Under her arm she carried a loaf of bread—a hard-crusted long loaf with the scent of sourdough about it. “This will go better with tea,” she said. “We did have a date to drink tea, didn’t we?”

While the water boiled for
tea, Michael sliced the bread, apologizing for the lack of butter for the bread or sugar for the tea.

“Are you from out in the country?” he asked, trying to keep any note of envy out of his voice.

“I was born in the city,” she said, “but I spend a lot of time outside these days.”

“Where?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere in the city that you can spend time in the sun anymore.”

Karen had picked up a white pawn from the chess set on the coffee table. Michael had played the game regularly with another tenant in the apartment complex, but the man had moved recently. Karen examined the plastic piece in her hand, ignoring his question. “You know,” she said, “when I was a kid I loved reading
Through the Looking Glass,
but I never learned how to play chess.

“The book makes
a lot more sense if you know how the chess pieces move.” He reached out impulsively and took the tanned hand that held the pawn. “I’ll teach you if you like.”

“All right,” she said. “I’d like that.”

He noticed the bruise on the wrist of the hand that he held—dark purple marking the positions of the drunk’s thumb and four fingers. The corner of his mind that cataloged such things recalled the
day she had brought oranges: her hand reaching up to smooth back an escaping curl of hair and on her wrist, marked in purple, the print of a thumb and four fingers.

“Had that guy hassled you before?” he asked, suddenly protective.

“No, that was the first time I had run into him. And I could have handled it myself, I just …” She followed his gaze to the mark on her wrist and fell silent. “I’m
used to taking care of myself.”

“Some other drunk, then,” he persisted. “You had a bruise like that the first time I met you. When you brought the oranges.”

She continued looking down at the chessboard, where the lines ran straight and the squares were neatly ordered.

“You should be more careful,” he continued. “You shouldn’t wander around by yourself. You don’t know what the city is like.”

“I was born here,” she said quietly. “I know what it’s like.” Gently, she freed her hand from his and set the pawn back in place. “Here. Show me how the pieces move.”

She avoided his eyes and he wondered if he had overstepped the bounds of their brief acquaintance. “I didn’t mean to tell you what to do,” he said. “It’s just … my younger sister was killed by a rapist when she was fifteen; my parents
died in a fire set by vandals when I was twenty. The city—”

“The city can’t hurt me,” she interrupted. “I can leave anytime I want.”

He looked at the bruise on her wrist and his voice held a note of angry concern. “Right,” he said. “Two bruises in three days.”

“One bruise,” she said calmly. “I brought you the oranges after you hit the drunk.”

“You brought them the day before.”

She met his
eyes and in an even tone said, “I brought them after. I travel in time.” He remembered that when he first met her he had wondered about her sanity (but the stray part of his mind reserved for vagrant thoughts said—where did she get a loaf of french bread and a bushel of oranges in the city?) “If you had not come along when you did yesterday, I would have just vanished to another time, leaving that
man behind.” She watched him with calm eyes that could have been honest or could have been mad.

“Where did you get the oranges anyway?” he asked, because that question seemed to touch the heart of the matter.

“There were orange groves here once. The farmers would pick the oranges when most were ripe. There were always a few left. If someone were to have taken them, it wouldn’t have mattered
to anyone. They would have rotted anyway.” She shrugged. “I took them.”

“Oh,” he said. And stopped, trying to think of something more to say.

“Look, why don’t you just think that I’m crazy if that’s easier for you,” she suggested. He could tell by the tone of her voice that her indifference was feigned. “Why don’t you show me how the pieces move?”

He showed her the moves and started to teach
her the rules of the game. As they played, he watched her, noting the way her hands touched the pieces and her eyes studied the board. No, she did not seem mad.

After they finished their tea, she stood to leave. “I’ll be back,” she said uncertainly.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said. Then, still caught by confusion, he asked, “Tell me; why are you going to walk away out the door when you
could just vanish?”

She smiled for the first time since she had told him she could leave the city. She lifted a hand in farewell and vanished.

The apartment was empty and he believed her. And that night the city seemed to close in around him. He could smell the smog in the breeze that came through his window. In the apartment below, he could hear someone coughing with a painful, racking repetition.
Unable to sleep, he wondered where and when Karen wandered that night.

She met him when he returned from work the next day with a bottle of red wine made of grapes grown in the Napa Valley in 1908. She explained that it was a very young wine; she had taken it from a cellar where it had been stored in 1909. The cellar was destroyed in a mudslide soon after she took the bottle, so no one missed
it.