Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (55 page)

“But I am.”

“I hope so,” I said. “But I can believe it a lot easier from where I am.”

She shrugged. “As you wish.”

“I’ve had my wish for the night,” I said.

“Then why don’t we just sit and enjoy the breeze and the scents of the Wisconsin night?”

“Whatever makes you happy,” I said.

“Being here makes me happy. Knowing my book is still being read makes me happy.” She was silent for a moment, staring off into the darkness. “What’s the date, Ethan?”

“April 17.”

“I mean the year.”

“2004.”

She looked surprised. “It’s been
that
long?”

“Since . . . ?” I said hesitantly.

“Since I died,” she said. “Oh, I know I must have died a long time ago. I have no tomorrows, and my yesterdays are all so very long ago. But the new millennium? It seems”—she searched for the right word—“excessive.”

“You were born in 1892, more than a century ago,” I said.

“How did you know that?”

“I had the computer run a search on you.”

“I don’t know what a computer is,” she said. Then, suddenly: “Do you also know when and how I died?”

“I know when, not how.”

“Please don’t tell me,” she said. “I’m thirty-two, and I’ve just written the last page of my book. I don’t know what comes next, and it would be wrong for you to tell me.”

“All right,” I said. Then, borrowing her expression, “As you wish.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

Suddenly the little white cat tensed and looked off across the yard.

“He sees his brother,” said Priscilla.

“It’s probably just the raccoons,” I said. “They can be a nuisance.”

“No,” she insisted. “I know his body language. That’s his brother out there.”

And sure enough, I heard a distinct
meow
a moment later. The white cat leaped off the veranda and headed toward it.

“I’d better go get them before they become completely lost,” said Priscilla, getting to her feet. “It happened once in Brazil, and I didn’t find them for almost two days.”

“I’ll get a flashlight and come with you,” I said.

“No, you might frighten them, and it wouldn’t do to have them run away in strange surroundings.” She stood up and stared at me. “You seem like a very nice man, Ethan Owens. I’m glad we finally met.” She smiled sadly. “I just wish you weren’t so lonely.”

She climbed down to the yard and walked off into the darkness before I could lie and tell her I led a rich full life and wasn’t lonely at all. Suddenly I had a premonition that she wasn’t coming back. “Will we meet again?” I called after her as she vanished from sight.

“That depends on you, doesn’t it?” came her answer out of the darkness.

I sat on the porch swing, waiting for her to reappear with the cats. Finally, despite the cold night air, I fell asleep. I woke up when the sun hit the swing in the morning.

I was alone.

It took me almost half the day to convince myself that what had happened the night before was just a dream. It wasn’t like any other dream I’d ever had, because I remembered every detail of it, every word she’d said, every gesture she’d made. Of course she hadn’t really visited me, but just the same I couldn’t get Priscilla Wallace out of my mind, so I finally stopped working and used my computer to try to learn more about her.

There was nothing more to be found under her name except for that single brief entry. I tried a search on
Travels with My Cats
and came up empty. I checked to see if her father had ever written a book about his explorations; he hadn’t. I even contacted a few of the hotels she had stayed at, alone or with her father, but none of them kept records that far back.

I tried one line of pursuit after another, but none of them proved fruitful. History had swallowed her up almost as completely as it would someday swallow me. Other than the book, the only proof I had that she had ever lived was that one computer entry, consisting of ten words and two dates. Wanted criminals couldn’t hide from the law any better than she’d hidden from posterity.

Finally I looked out the window and realized that night had fallen and everyone else had gone home. (There’s no night shift on a weekly paper.) I stopped by a local diner, grabbed a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, and headed back to the lake.

I watched the ten o’clock news on TV, then sat down and picked up her book again, just to convince myself that she really
had
lived once upon a time. After a couple of minutes I got restless, put the book back on a table, and walked out for a breath of fresh air.

She was sitting on the porch swing, right where she had been the night before. There was a different cat next to her, a black one with white feet and white circles around its eyes.

She noticed me looking at the cat. “This is Goggle,” she said. “I think he’s exceptionally well-named, don’t you?”

“I suppose,” I said distractedly.

“The white one is Giggle, because he loves getting into all sorts of mischief.” I didn’t say anything. Finally she smiled. “Which of them has your tongue?”

“You’re back,” I said at last.

“Of course I am.”

“I was reading your book again,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone who loved life so much.”

“There’s so much to love!”

“For some of us.”

“It’s all around you, Ethan,” she said.

“I prefer seeing it through your eyes. It was like you were born again into a new world each morning,” I said. “I suppose that’s why I kept your book, and why I find myself re-reading it—to share what you see and feel.”

“You can feel things yourself.”

I shook my head. “I prefer what
you
feel.”

“Poor Ethan,” she said sincerely. “You’ve never loved anything, have you?”

“I’ve tried.”

“That isn’t what I said.” She stared at me curiously. “Have you ever married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I decided I might as well give her an honest answer. “Probably because none of them ever measured up to you.”

“I’m not that special,” she said.

“To me you are. You always have been.”

She frowned. “I wanted my book to enrich your life, Ethan, not ruin it.”

“You didn’t ruin it,” I said. “You made it a little more bearable.”

“I wonder . . .” she mused.

“About what?”

“My being here. It’s puzzling.”

“Puzzling is an understatement,” I said. “Unbelievable is more the word for it.”

She shook her head distractedly. “You don’t understand. I remember last night.”

“So do I—every second of it.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She stroked the cat absently. “I was never brought back before last night. I wasn’t sure then. I thought perhaps I forgot after each episode. But today I remember last night.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“You can’t be the only person to read my book since I died. Or even if you were, I’ve never been called back before, not even by you.” She stared at me for a long moment. “Maybe I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“Maybe what brought me here wasn’t the fact that
I
needed to be read. Maybe it’s because
you
so desperately need someone.”

“I—” I began heatedly, and then stopped. For a moment it seemed like the whole world had stopped with me. Then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and an owl hooted off to the left.

“What is it?”

“I was about to tell you that I’m not that lonely,” I said. “But it would have been a lie.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ethan.”

“It’s nothing to brag about, either.” There was something about her that made me say things I’d never said to anyone else, including myself. “I had such high hopes when I was a boy. I was going to love my work, and I was going to be good at it. I was going to find a woman to love and spend the rest of my life with. I was going to see all the places you described. Over the years I saw each of those hopes die. Now I settle for paying my bills and getting regular check-ups at the doctor’s.” I sighed deeply. “I think my life can be described as a fully-realized diminished expectation.”

“You have to take risks, Ethan,” she said gently.

“I’m not like you,” I said. “I wish I was, but I’m not. Besides, there aren’t any wild places left.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Love involves risk. You have to risk getting hurt.”

“I’ve
been
hurt,” I said. “It’s nothing to write home about.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m here. You can’t be hurt by a ghost.”

The hell I can’t,
I thought. Aloud I said: “
Are
you a ghost?”

“I don’t feel like one.”

“You don’t look like one.”

“How
do
I look?” she asked.

“As lovely as I always knew you were.”

“Fashions change.”

“But beauty doesn’t,” I said.

“That’s very kind of you to say, but I must look very old-fashioned. In fact, the world I knew must seem primitive to you.” Her face brightened. “It’s a new millennium. Tell me what’s happened.”

“We’ve walked on the moon—and we’ve landed ships on Mars and Venus.”

She looked up into the night sky. “The moon!” she exclaimed. Then: “Why are you here when you could be there?”

“I’m not a risk-taker, remember?”

“What an exciting time to be alive!” she said enthusiastically. “I always wanted to see what lay beyond the next hill. But
you
—you get to see what’s beyond the next star!”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“But it will be,” she persisted.

“Someday,” I agreed. “Not during my lifetime, but someday.”

“Then you should die with the greatest reluctance,” she said. “I’m sure I did.” She looked up at the stars, as if envisioning herself flying to each of them. “Tell me more about the future.”

“I don’t know anything about the future,” I said.

“
My
future. Your present.”

I told her what I could. She seemed amazed that hundreds of millions of people now traveled by air, that I didn’t know anyone who didn’t own a car, and that train travel had almost disappeared in America. The thought of television fascinated her; I decided not to tell her what a vast wasteland it had been since its inception. Color movies, sound movies, computers—she wanted to know all about them. She was eager to learn if zoos had become more humane, if
people
had become more humane. She couldn’t believe that heart transplants were actually routine.

I spoke for hours. Finally I just got so dry I told her I was going to have to take a break for a couple of minutes while I went into the kitchen and got us some drinks. She’d never heard of Fanta or Dr Pepper, which is what I had, and she didn’t like beer, so I made her an iced tea and popped open a Bud for me. When I brought them out to the porch she and Goggle were gone.

I didn’t even bother looking for her. I knew she had returned to the
somewhere
from which she had come.

She was back again the next three nights, sometimes with one cat, sometimes with both. She told me about her travels, about her overwhelming urge to see what there was to see in the little window of time allotted us humans, and I told her about the various wonders she would never see.

It was strange, conversing with a phantom every night. She kept assuring me she was real, and I believed it when she said it, but I was still afraid to touch her and discover that she was just a dream after all. Somehow, as if they knew my fears, the cats kept their distance too; not once in all those evenings did either of them ever so much as brush against me.

“I wish I’d seen all the sights
they’ve
seen,” I said on the third night, nodding toward the cats.

“Some people thought it was cruel to take them all over the world with me,” replied Priscilla, absently running her hand over Goggle’s back as he purred contentedly. “I think it would have been more cruel to leave them behind.”