12

 

 

Newford, 1973

 

It’s Halloween night and Wendy’s having a party at her place.

Actually, it’s mostly an excuse for her to get to invite this guy she’s been crushing on, but none of us mind. We like hanging out together, and we like seeing our friends happy in love.

But before I go to her place, I have an errand to run. Maybe it’s crazy—I don’t know. If I told anybody I was coming here, and why, they’d think I was crazy. Truth to tell, I think I might be a little crazy too, but here I am all the same, standing at the corner of Norton and Flood.

I look at the watch Sophie gave me a couple of weeks ago and check the time. Watches never work for her, but she keeps buying them anyway and then ends up giving them away. She has this problem with technology—I told her she should call her problem Jinx and make friends with it, then maybe it would be nicer to her. What happens is, if something has electronics, or gears—or any kind of mechanical or electrical parts—it pretty much doesn’t work for her. Watches run backward, radios play weird stations, her phone rings when there’s no one there, or it’s someone talking to her in Japanese, or Flemish.

But the watch works just fine for me.

I don’t believe anything’s going to happen, but I study the street anxiously all the same. I feel like there’s too much traffic, but it’s not like I can do anything about it. All I can do is stare out across the pavement and worry.

And then it happens.

~I honestly thought it wouldn’t. I honestly thought that this obsession I had about coming out here on this day, at this time, was my own Jinx—just a weird mix-up in my DNA that left me with this improbable compulsion.

But there she is, in the middle of the street.

Donna.

Lying there on the pavement, like a body laid out on a gurney.

Which is what she was all those years ago when she got multiple stab wounds in county and ended up dying in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

A car screeches its brakes as she sits up. The car’s going too fast to stop, so the driver whips into the next lane, cutting off a cab with inches to spare. The cabbie leans on his horn, but I’m no longer paying attention. My gaze is riveted on my dead friend as she scrambles to her feet and darts across the intersection, almost getting hit by another car in the process.

She’s on the opposite side of the street from me. I keep my gaze on her as I wait for the light to change. I’m halfway across the intersection before she notices me, her eyes going comically wide.

She’s not the Donna I remember from the Home for Wayward Girls, or from my junkie days. She’s the Donna I thought I’d dreamed up: punky, with a Bettie Page haircut and a swatch of tattoos running down either arm. I know there are more of them on her chest and back, but she’s wearing a leather vest and I can’t see them.

She just stares at me as I finish crossing the street and walk up to her.

“Hey, Donna,” I say.

I am so loving this moment. Partly because it means I’m not crazy. But mostly because now I get the chance to spend a day with Donna, who, for this one day, isn’t dead anymore.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I add.

She’s still just looking at me. Finally she reaches out and touches my shoulder.

“How come you remember?” she says. “Better yet, how did you ever get back? I’ve been hoping that’s what happened, but I had no clue. That’s why I came today—to find out.”

“Well, you’ve answered one question that’s been bothering me,” I say. “For the past year, I was never sure if it was really me who came back, or my shadow.”

“This is just too weird.”

I smile. “What? No hug?”

We embrace and hold each other tightly for a long moment.

When we step apart, I take her arm.

“Let’s go find some place quiet where we can talk,” I say.

She nods. “Yeah, talking would be good.”

 

* * *

 

There’s a diner down the street and we take a window booth. Donna immediately flips through the song selection on the little jukebox at the end of our table.

“I don’t know half these bands,” she says. “Where’s all the rockabilly music?”

“It’s 1973,” I tell her. “Things are different.”

“I’ll say.”

The waitress brings us each a coffee and Donna loads hers up with three spoons of sugar and double cream.

“So how come you’re here?” she asks. “I mean, I know it’s to see me, but how come you remember?”

I take one of the two sketchbooks I’m carrying out of my knapsack. The one I leave inside is my current book. The one I push across the table to her, I found on my bed the morning Geordie woke me with coffee and croissants. The morning after I was supposed to have gone to meet Donna at a club that I later found out didn’t exist.

Except it did. Or it had. For one night.

Donna opens the sketchbook and starts to flip through the pages. She smiles then, recognizing the subjects of many of the drawings.

“I don’t remember,” I say when her gaze lifts up to meet mine. “Not most of the time. But when I’m holding that sketchbook, and especially when I look at the drawings I did, that’s when I do. But if I put it away on a shelf it all just slides away again, right out of my mind.”

“I forgot,” she says. “You were always drawing over there.”

I nod. “And for some reason, the drawings came back with me.”

“So how’d you get back?”

“I’m not really sure.”

I tell her about my last night there, in her world. She listens, but she keeps flipping through the sketchbook. She pauses at one page and puts her finger on a couple of lines I wrote on it. They’re right under the portrait I did of her the last night I was in that other world:

Go to the corner of Norton and Flood on Halloween.

Find out the exact time she died.

Be there at that time!!!!

“How’d you find out the time?” she asks. “Or have you been waiting all day?”

I shake my head. “It wasn’t hard. My friend Angel has connections with the ambulance company.” I smile. “Truth is, I think she has connections everywhere.”

“And so you came here to see me.”

“Thinking I was crazy the whole time.”

“God, this is so amazing.”

I laugh. “You think it’s amazing?”

We just look at each other for a long moment, grinning like a pair of fools.

“So…did you make the right choice?” she asks. “Are you happy here?”

“Mostly. It’s hard. But I feel like anything I accomplish, I’ve earned. That’s a great feeling for a Carter out of Hillbilly Holler.”

“Except you’re not a Carter anymore.”

I nod. “Remember how we used to pretend that we didn’t really belong to the families we came from? How there had to have been some kind of mix-up at the hospital when we were born?”

Now it’s her turn to nod.

“That feels like the true story now.”

“Then I’m happy for you.”

“And what about you? Are you still in your band? How’s Tommy?”

Her eyes cloud briefly, but then she gives me a bright smile that I can see right through. I reach across the table and take her hand.

“What happened?” I ask.

“He went on.”

“Went on where?”

“I don’t know. Wherever people go next, I guess. He…he loved being with me, J.C. I know that. But he was a lot like you. He just didn’t feel like he was supposed to be there. And then one morning I woke up early and I just knew the apartment was empty.”

“Mireya told me that no one had to stay in the city unless they wanted to,” I say. “I guess she let him go, just like she did with me.”

“I guess.”

I squeeze her hand. “So are you okay?”

She shrugs. “Yes and no. I’m thinking…I’m thinking of going myself. I don’t exactly know how you’re supposed to do it. I guess you just let go or something.”

“Oh, Donna…”

“No, it’s cool. I mean, I feel weird, and I miss the both of you like crazy—you and Tommy—but that’s not why. I just feel like I’m ready or something.”

“I wrecked everything for you, didn’t I?”

She shakes her head. “No, you opened my eyes. The city’s great for some people. And it was great for me for a while. But I need to move on. I might have tried to go on sooner, but I needed to come here first. To see you. To make sure you really got back okay.”

“I did. But I still feel—”

“Up for some shenanigans, I hope.”

She’s grinning again, and though there’s something wistful hiding in her eyes, I know she’s mostly in good spirits. She’s always been like that. I was always the worrier and the brooder, but I’ve changed. Because a lot of the time if you act like you’re happy, this funny thing happens and you actually start to feel happy.

I learned that from her.

“Because,” she says, “I’m not going to spend this last night with you moping when we could be having fun.”

I think of my friends waiting for me at Wendy’s. I would so love to share them with Donna.

“Are you up for a party?” I ask.

 

 

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