Entr'acte (8 page)

ENTR’ACTE

* * * *

Maybe I’ve hypnotized myself into thinking I’ve gone back in time somehow, she thought. Maybe I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up now, she decided, and did her best to rouse herself, slapping and pulling at her arms.

The ward nurse still pushed the same white enameled cart down the row of beds, filling water glasses from an earthenware pitcher. This nurse wore a cap that reminded Joyce of those wrinkled paper cups fruit ices are sold in.

In the bed across from her, a woman was reading a Photoplay magazine. Leslie Howard beamed at Joyce from the cover.

Okay, it’s not a dream, Joyce continued her interior monologue. Maybe I did suffer some kind of brain injury when I got hit by the car, and this is some kind of delusion.

Maybe I’m having a seizure, Joyce suddenly thought. She hadn’t had her medication yet, she planned to take it at lunch.

When the disorder was first diagnosed, when Joyce was a teenager, she would have auditory hallucinations. Low voices barely indistinct would invade and interrupt her thoughts.

For more than a year before she was treated, Joyce dealt with the voices herself by ordering them to speak up or shut up. They always stopped then.

She also got an aura, a sharp headache centered between and above her eyes, just before an episode. Both symptoms completely disappeared when she began taking the Depakote.

Joyce hadn’t had a seizure at all in years, and when she did they were very mild, barely noticeable to all but her closest friends and family. She would become confused, unable to concentrate.

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Thoughts would be like birds in her mind, soaring off before Joyce could grasp them or was ready to let them go. Her judgment was impaired; she once signed the family up for over $200 of magazines from a salesperson lucky enough to find her home alone during one of these episodes.

But Joyce knew that the level of the drug in her blood would still be in therapeutic range. She had in fact gone without her pills for days before without any recurrences, and at least one neurologist who consulted on her case felt that Joyce no longer needed the drug.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, she thought. This may be a full-blown psychotic episode, Joyce thought sadly. I may be losing my mind.

But just in case I’ve really slipped back in time—what was it Professor Collins had said about wormholes?—I’d better not tell anyone about the seizures. How would they deal with those here, exorcism or the more-enlightened lobotomy?

Whenever Joyce had tried to test the reality of the situation, by challenging the idea that it was 1939, the nurse just said, “We’ll have to ask the doctor, dear.”

Joyce had asked for ibuprofen for her pain, knowing it wouldn’t have been invented yet, and had gotten the same response.

“Amnesia,” the staff would whisper to each other whenever they had to pass by Joyce’s bed.

She had the nurses open her wallet and examine the items in it.

“A video rental card, do you know what that is?” Joyce sat up on her elbows and glared, but the nurse just smiled placidly back at her.

“How did I get the U.S. government to cooperate in this if it is just an hysterical fantasy?” Joyce challenged again. “Look at my money.”

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Several staff people went through her billfold, rubbing the paper money between their fingers and handling the coins. They were fascinated with what they found.

“See! Now let me out of here,” Joyce said.

“Counterfeiting is illegal,” the head nurse said stiffly. The others, taking their cue from her, began tsk-tsking behind her.

“These aren’t even very good fakes. What is this material in this quarter, instead of silver?”

Joyce lowered herself back onto the bed with a resigned sigh.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed one of the aides pocketing the small tube of hypoallergenic makeup Joyce kept in the change purse.

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The musician who brought her to the hospital came to visit, with a box under his arm. “I’m Bart McCauley,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember me…”

“She remembers you, it’s the past she’s having trouble with,”

one nurse snapped.

Joyce smiled weakly at him and said, “What’s in the box?”

“I never visited anybody in a hospital before. I figured candy and flowers are boring, so I got you some magazines and this,”

he said,” opening a backgammon set with a flourish. “Do you play?”

Joyce shook her head no.

“Neither do I.” Bart looked at the wooden disks and the board forlornly. “Do you know how to set them up?”

Joyce shook her head no again, an amused smile playing on her lips. “Aren’t there instructions?”

This time Bart looked perplexed. “It has something to do with having the two colors clash, and if you land on a bar occupied by the other person’s color, the piece that had been there goes all the way back to the beginning.”

They set the board up so that each player started on the 72

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quadrant of the board farthest from the one he’d have to reach to move his pieces safely off.

The doctor came by then, glanced at the board and said,

“that’s not right.” He moved the disks around, and then turned his attention to Joyce, feeling her scalp for bumps.

“Doctor, if I can tell you something that will happen in the future, wouldn’t that prove that somehow I’ve,” Joyce paused hesitantly and then went on quickly, “gone back in time?”

Bart shifted uneasily in his chair and the doctor sat down on the bed, motioning for the nurse. Joyce had the sick feeling that the staff was about to make sport of her again.

“Joyce is going to predict the future for us,” the doctor said.

“Go ahead, dear.”

“Okay,” she said. “On September 1, German troops are going to invade Poland, touching off World War II.”

“My,” the doctor said thoughtfully. “World War II.” Then he smiled and stood up. “I guess we’ll have to talk again in September.”

“Wait!” Joyce commanded. “There will be a big World’s Fair this year, somewhere in New York.”

“Very good, Joyce,” the doctor said condescendingly, patting her on the head as he left. “Get some rest now.”

“What was wrong with that?” Joyce asked Bart.

“It opened last month, in Flushing Meadows. Did you read about it in the papers?” he asked tentatively.

“No, in history class,” she shot back, but when she saw the sad way Bart was looking at her, she softened.

“I thought I was onto something there,” she said ruefully.

“Too bad I couldn’t come up with something that’s going to happen tomorrow. Have Hitler and the British prime minister made their deal on Czechoslovakia yet?”

“Last year,”’ Bart said sadly.

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“The Hindenburg exploded…”

“In 1937,” Bart answered. He leaned so that his face was very close to hers. “You ought to stop this stuff. They are calling you

“Future Girl” and talking about sending you off to Creedmoor.”

“I take it that’s not good,” Joyce said.

“It’s the booby hatch,” Bart said. “You don’t want to end up there, so play along. I don’t think you can convince them anyway.”

“Do you believe me?” she asked.

The musician stroked his chin whiskers thoughtfully before answering. Joyce braced herself for a polite but negative answer.

“I’ve been taking care of your dog,” he began. “A friend of mine who also saw the accident found her there, cowering under a crate, and brought her to me, figuring that I’d get her back to you.”

“Is Amelia all right?” Joyce asked.

“Yea. That dog sure sheds a lot,” Bart smiled. “My place is covered with hair.”

“It’s spring. All dogs do that in spring,” Joyce said loyally. She had had to deal with this complaint before.

“Anyway, I was playing with her and I noticed her tags,” Bart continued slowly. “She has a rabies tag and a license that expires in August, 2007. It struck me that if you were just having some kind of joke, that would be a lot of trouble to have gone through.

Faking money, well anybody would have thought of that.”

“So you do believe me!” Joyce almost shouted in her relief.

“We still have to figure out how to get you out of here,” Bart said. “I still think it would be best if you played along with them for a few days.”

He glanced down at the backgammon board and then up at Joyce. “I like them better the other way, there’s more chances to bump each other.”

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She grinned at him and rearranged the pieces the way they’d had them. “Why can’t you just sign me out of here?”

Bart looked embarrassed, and when Joyce caught the implication of what she’d said, she did too. “I just meant…”

He held up a hand to cut her off. “I know,” he said quickly.

“That wouldn’t be too good for your reputation. Anyway, it has to be a relative, and they know we’re not related. Why don’t you let them call your family?”

“It’s 1939, they don’t have a phone yet,” she said. “I could get them to call Moody’s Diner. They know everyone in town and could get a message to—who? My grandfather is an unmarried farmer, and my grandmother is—somewhere in New York!

“She’s here, your…grandmother?” Bart said, trying to get used to the idea.

“Yes, but maybe that would screw up my family history or something for us to meet now,” Joyce mused. “Maybe it would be better for them to call Maine.”

They called the nurse over and, pretending Joyce had suddenly become clear-headed, asked them to call the diner and get a message to the Pettits or the Waszlewskis. “Tell them Joyce is stranded in New York,” she instructed.

While they played their game and waited, Joyce confided in Bart that until he came up with the dog-tag clue, she had begun to wonder herself if she was going crazy.

“I do have a disorder, not exactly epilepsy but like it, and I have to take pills every day. Unfortunately, my pills were in my purse when it was stolen,” she told him.

“Can you get more?” he asked.

“I’m sure it hasn’t been invented yet,” she answered grimly.

Backgammon took a lot longer under what they dubbed the McCauley rules, and they laughed while they played. “I have a car parked in a lot that charges $21.50 a day,” Joyce said.

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Bart let out a long, low whistle.

“So, I’m double-parked in another dimension. Do you figure they owe me money?” she laughed.

Joyce explained how most people have medical insurance in 2007 that pays for most of the cost. “It’s incredibly expensive, but the way they try to control it is you have to get charges approved in advance, and your doctor has to authorize your going into the hospital. It can cost thousands. I’d love to be there when the bill for this comes through.”

Bart said that her hospital care would probably come to about $15 per day, “but everybody pays that themselves if they have it.”

The doctor came up to the bed. “The people at the restaurant up in Maine said that Muriel and Connie Pettit, two sisters from there, are here working as showgirls,” the doctor said.

He picked up her watch off the bedside table, flipped the band inside out and read the back of the fob. “So, you’re Muriel. Hello, Muriel. We can let you out of here in a few days.”

When the doctor left, Joyce turned to Bart. “Muriel is my grandmother. She gave me her watch a few years ago when I graduated from high school. Could you go find her for me? I don’t know the address, but it’s near the theater district.”

Bart promised to find Muriel through the phone book, the Player’s Directory or friends he had among theater musicians.

Joyce tried to get some sleep while she waited for him to return, but imagining her meeting her grandmother again had her too excited.

Barely two hours later an attractive dark-haired young woman bounded into the room ahead of a sheepish Bart, and charged up to the bed.

“Connie, I swear! When are you going to stop this crazy living,” the woman demanded.

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Ryerson pulled the rusted clips together and opened the worn manila envelope, pulling out a sheaf of faded papers and several small items. A second box, labeled “Personal effects, Case # 39-2461, C. Pettit” sat next to them on his desk.

“I don’t know what this will do except satisfy some curiosity,”

Ryerson told Doug and Debbie. “Although it’s a baffling coincidence, there is no connection between this woman’s disappearance and the fact that you haven’t heard from your girlfriend.

“You don’t often find a 68-year gap in a case, even when it involves the same family,” the veteran cop said.

Debbie had briefed him that the missing girl, Joyce Waszlewski, had tried to break it off with her boyfriend, the serious, intense man who was reporting her missing.

“He followed her to New York and she didn’t expect that,”

Debbie had told the detective. “She told me yesterday that she had to get rid of him in her own way; I think she’s giving him the slip.”

Ryerson took all this information down, including Debbie’s belief that Joyce may have gone back to Maine for a few days. She 77

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had probably decided against her earlier plan of having Doug stay with them until the weekend, Debbie said.

Doug sorted through the files. First was the missing person’s report. It was dated Oct. 17th, 1939 and said that Connie had last been seen leaving the Empire Theater at 40th and Broadway, on June 4th.

“They sure were casual about this whole thing, weren’t they?”

he asked.

“It says here in Joyce’s grandmother’s statement that Connie often took off for days at a time without telling anybody, and that she’d reappear all of a sudden without any explanation,” Debbie read.

“Maybe that’s what Joyce is doing,” Ryerson suggested helpfully. “The apple never falls far from the tree.”