Two

 

Then, as some imaginary song on an imaginary record started to play, there was a shimmering in front of the jukebox, or actually more accurately right over the jukebox, and the image of flowers and colors and bubbles appeared surrounding a beautiful woman.

She looked almost see-through and she was wearing what looked like sound-dampening headphones.

She smiled and started to speak, but I couldn’t hear her because of the earplugs. She indicated I should take them out.

Trying to think of the best memory I could, I eased the plug out of my right ear.

There was no song. No music at all, just this image of a woman shimmering over the jukebox, sort of fading in and out.

“It’s clear!” I shouted to the others and everyone pulled out their earplugs. They were all looking as stunned as I was feeling.

All of us had seen people disappear and then reappear as the jukebox took them back to a memory and then brought them back when the song ended. But only once before had a song brought a person to us.

And never had someone come to the jukebox without it being plugged in and with no actual song playing.

The woman floating over the jukebox smiled and the area around her sort of radiated the joy of her smile, the colors becoming brighter and the swirling lines moving faster.

She did not take off her headphones.

“Hi, Stout,” she said, nodding to me.

I had never met her before that I could remember, and she was attractive enough I’m sure I would have remembered.

Then she turned to Richard and the look in her eyes changed slightly in a way I couldn’t tell. “Thank you for giving me this chance. It looks like it worked, at least the first part of this.”

I glanced around at my friend.

Richard just sat there, looking shocked, his mouth slightly open as he stared at the beautiful woman floating above the jukebox.

I finally managed to swallow, then through a very dry mouth asked the obvious first questions.

“Who are you and where are you coming from?”

I wanted to ask how, but figured I needed the first two questions answered first.

 

“My name is Donna Neff. I’m thirty-seven and you don’t know me yet. I am coming back from a future I hope to change.”

I nodded, tried to swallow again without much success. She was a young-looking thirty-seven.

She smiled and answered my next question. “I don’t know how this is being done either. In the future Richard figures some of this sort of stuff out about this fantastic jukebox.”

Again I glanced at my friend, but he wasn’t moving. His gaze was just locked on the woman.

“The song is half over,” she said, glancing down at the jukebox and where the arm was in its position on the imaginary record.

“What can we do to help you?” I asked. “And why should we?”

“The why is the easy part, sort of,” she said. “To save the world, to put it bluntly.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I just let her go on. I didn’t much like any of this at this point.

“Please don’t ask me how I know, I just do, just as I know about this wonderful jukebox. Time travel is very possible, as you all know. My son Danny will invent a device when he is in college that will eventually solve a lot of the energy problems of the world. That’s all I can say because it’s pretty much all I know.”

I nodded and glanced at the jukebox. Whatever song that had sent her was getting close to being over.

“Go on,” I said.

“I am told that in about ten minutes a girlfriend and I will come through the front door of the Garden looking for a cool drink and you all will treat us wonderfully, since you are all great people. And we will become regulars, using the Garden as a sanctuary away from our children and divorces and crummy ex-husbands.”

“And you changed your past, right?” I asked. I knew the answer because she said that she had been told. She had gone through the jukebox at some point in the future and changed her past.

She nodded. “One Christmas, because I was slightly drunk and not really thinking, I went back through the jukebox and said something to my future and ex-husband on our first date.”

“And you never got married and Danny was never born to save the world.”

She nods. “That’s what I am told by others from yet another future.”

“You and Richard found me again, because I had never come into the Garden in my new life, and invited me back to the Garden and I met my old friend and she told me everything, since she was touching the Jukebox when I left.”

I still didn’t understand the part about her son inventing something in a future that no longer existed. How could anyone come back from that future, that timeline to tell her anything?

She smiled at Richard. “A while after you found me again, Richard, you got a visit from a son you had in my first world, our son, actually, a son that somehow crossed over time lines to warn us.”

She smiled. “In the timeline I changed, you and I were talking about getting married and we had had a child. But you didn’t remember it either because you hadn’t been touching the jukebox when I screwed up.”

As she started to fade, she glanced at me and then looked directly at Richard. “Please don’t let that happen to my first son, and to our son. Don’t ever let me go through the jukebox. Ever.”

And then she was gone.