TIME AND TIME AGAIN The sequel to 3037 (7 page)

“Okay, if you picture time and space as
both
floors
and rooms
in a high rise building
, so that, besides being able to go from room to room on one floor, you can also go up and down from floor to floor.
  Think of all the possibilities there are.

“Most people consider time as linear, so that you would be born on th
e first floor, in one room,
and move to the second and third floor
, always in the room directly above,
etc. as you age.  That’s why bel
ieving in heaven is so easy for someone who believes time is linear
.  You would go
to the very top floor before you die and then move on up to heaven.

“I don’t believe time is linear and, after the experiences you’ve both had, I don’t think you believe it either.  I think both of you, and especially you, Ashley, have been moving up, down, sideways
and back and forth like that.”

Joe interrupted her, “I think I get what you’re saying.  With all the moving we’ve been doing, back and forth and sideways, we’ve somehow gotten out of phase.”  He laughed, “I wrote a song
by that title, ‘Out Of Phase.’
It’s the song that made our band and
Josie
popular.”

“Can you get us back together in the same time,
Deliliah
?
” I asked.

“I don’t know about that.  I wish I could say yes, but understanding and doing something about it are two different things.”

CHAPTER 13

I wouldn’t leave.  I stayed with Joe and told the other two I would wait and see
Josie
.  The staff tried to make me leave but Joe asked them, as a favor to him, to let me stay and see
Josie
when she came later that night to see her daddy.

I was nervous about seeing
Josie
.  It was going to be weird to see a woman age 71 and kn
o
w I gave birth to her.

After Delia and
Deliliah
left, Joe reached inside his vest pocket and pulled out a small item that looked like a tiny black box.

“What is that thing, Joe?”

He laughed, “It’s a cell phone,” he said and proceeded to show me how it worked.

“That’s remarkable!” I said, “I want one.”

“Honey, just wait
til
you see what all has been invented.  You won’t believe it.  Didn’t you notice the TV when you came in?
”

I walked closer and looked.  I had only glanced at it when I came in and thought maybe they had shoved it into the wall so that only the screen was visible.  But when I got closer, I noticed that the screen was flat.

“Do you get good reception?” I asked.

He laughed, “It’s like being there,” and picked up another gadget that look like his phone and pointed it at the TV and the TV came on.

There was a beautiful blond girl dancing and singing and she could have been live.  “That’s Brittany Spears,” he said.  “The singers nowadays move a lot while they sing.”

I watched in amazement.  There was no snow and the colors were beautiful.  I could have watched all night but Joe turned the TV off and started punching numbers in his phone.

While it was ringing, he looked up at me, “I’m calling
Josie
.  I think I should try to prepare her before she sees you.”

“How can you possibly prepare her for this?”

“Hey,
Josie
?
  Hi, honey.  I need to tell you something and I want you to prepare yourself.  Why don’t you sit down?  Oh, how did you know?  Are you all right?  Okay, I’ll let you talk to her.”

He handed me the weird phone and I tried to get the front toward my mouth.  Joe started to tell me what to do and then I heard
Josie
and I moved the ear part to my ear.

“Mom?”
  She was crying and it made me start crying.

“I’m here, darling.  Are you coming over?”

“I’ll be right there.  Put dad back on.”

I handed the phone back to Joe and they talked some more but I couldn’t
concentrate on what they were saying.  My mind was going off in all directions.

It wasn’t a half hour later that
Josie
showed up.  When she saw me she started crying and I joined in.  We held each other and then she hugged her daddy.  I watched her as she asked how he was doing and it felt so weird to be the mother of a woman in her seventies.

Joe told her about meeting Delia and
Deliliah
and what
Deliliah
had to say about the time phase shifts and she said she was going to see if she could find anything out on the internet.

“What is an internet,
Josie
?” I asked and she laughed, “Mom, you have so much to catch up on.  When we leave here, we’ll go to my house and I’ll show you how to look up stuff.

“It’s the most remarkable thing.  There is so much information that you’ll feel overwhelmed at first.”

Josie
and I stayed and talked to Joe until one of the nurses came by and insisted that we leave.
  We both kissed Joe goodbye and got into
Josie
’s car.

“This is a weird automobile.  You have to climb up to get in and there’s so much room inside.  What do you call it,
Josie
?”

She laughed, “It’s an SUV, a sports utility vehicle, mom.  Everyone drives them now.  This one is a Lexus.”

I watched her feet as she drove, “No clutch?” I asked.

“No one wants
a stick shift anymore.  This
has automatic transmission.  It’s easier to drive.  And I can fit all my kids and grandkids in here.”

“I can’t wait to meet your kids and grandkids.”  I laughed, “I’ll bet I’m the youngest great grandmother that ever lived.”

Josie
drove back across The Greater New Orleans Bridge, down Canal Street and into an area she called Old Metairie.  She pulled onto a driveway
of a huge old
two-story
frame house.
  It was painted light pink and trimmed in red.

The street out front was lined with huge oak trees and they grew over the top to form a canopy.

“Dad bought this house when our band started doing so well.  Now it’s mine…I guess I should say it’s yours.”

“Why don’t we say it’s ours,
Josie
?”

We walked up onto a big wrap-around porch that was painted light gray and entered a hallway.  There were portraits lining the wall and I stopped
to look.  I had a beautiful family and I got tears in my eyes thinking about how much I had missed.

She pointed them out, “This is my oldest son, Seth.  Yeah, I named him after my brother.  I don’t know what I would have done without dad, after you disappeared and then the cave left with Seth.  It was a horrible time.

“This is his wife,
Cloe
and their son and daughter, Ginger and Sandy.  And this is my daughter, Christine and her husband George, and their twin girls, Zen and Zoe, after you know who.”

We continued down the
hall
and came to a group of photos of all ages of children and she proceeded to tell me
who was who.  There were several photos of each child at different ages.

I lost track of them and who they belonged to, and I’m ashamed to say that I felt no connection to these kids, I just felt a great sense of loss.

After showing me to my room and fixing us something to eat, we cleaned up the kitchen together and she told me about her life.  She was a widow.

“My husband died six years ago.  I miss him so much.  You remember him mom, I married George from the band.  He was quite a bit older than me
and dad didn’t approve at first but, we loved each other very much and he couldn’t argue with that.
”

As I listened to her talk, I felt so disconnected from everything and I felt so hopeless.  She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and hugged me, “Come on, mom.  Let me show you how to look something up on the internet.”

CHAPTER 14

I thought I had felt overwhelmed when Joe showed me the cell phone and the TV with
the young woman dancing and singing without many clothes on, but the computer made me feel like I had stepped into some unknown world where miracles were possible
.

“All of this information at our fingertips,
Josie
, it’s amazing.  How do I know what I want to look up?”

“You can just type in a question and it will give you all kinds of information.”

So I typed in, “Is it possible to get caught in a time phase shift?”

There was too much information.  There was stuff about some TV show called STAR TREC:
THE NEXT GENERATION, some articles on witchcraft, one article about phase shifts in seismic waves, and I saw that there were ten more pages of article titles.

Josie
was looking over my shoulder, “Let’s try something else,” she said.  “I have an idea.  Let me try something.”

I got up and let her sit and I saw her typing in
,
“D
isappearances of people into thin air.
”

There was a case about a prisoner in Prussia who had been chained to other prisoners and disappeared by slowly fading and becoming more and more transparent.  This was in 1815.

There was another case in England, in 1873 where a man had made a bet with friends that he could run 16 miles.  They took him up on the bet and followed him in horse drawn cart and he vanished into thin air in the same way.

There was one article about a place called Bennington, Vermont where, between 1920 and 1950, several people disappeared in front of witnesses.

Josie
went back and changed her search to, “People wh
o disappeared into thin air in N
ew Orleans,” and got my story.

It was an article in the Times P
icayune and I read it out loud, “
Today, a woman disappeared into
thin air in front of a club in the French quarter.  Her name was Ashley Verona and she is the wife of Joe Verona who will be playing, along with his band, in the club where she disappeared.  Joe said she began to fade and grow more transparent right before his eyes.”

I turned away.  I couldn’t read anymore.  I stood before the window and stared out.  I felt so alone.  I felt
Josie
put her arm around me and I turned into her and we held each other.

“What am I going to do,
Josie
?  No one can help me, no one.”

“At least we have each other now, mom, it could be worse.  I have an idea, why don’t I have everyone over for supper tonight and you can meet you grandchildren and great grandchildren.”

“How are you going to explain me?
  It’s going to be confusing to the younger ones.  Hell it will
be
confusing to everyone.”

“I know, let’s tell them you’re my new friend I met at the hospital where I volunteer, that you just started volunteering today.”

And that’s what we did.  I enjoyed being with my grandchildren and great grandchildren but there was one great grandson who looked so much like my son, Seth, that it broke my heart.  He was
only two and he crawled into my lap and stayed there the whole time.

CHAPTER 15

Josie
and I talked well into the night and slept late the next morning.  She was fixing breakfast when I got up.  I had slept like a log.

“Hi, mom,” she said when she saw me.  “I have an idea. 
Here, let me pour you some coffee.  Sit down right here.  Okay, here’s my idea.  Let’s go back down there in front of the club where you disappeared and see if we can re-create the same conditions and maybe try to send you back.”

“I appreciate it, honey, but how are we going to create the same conditions.  I don’t think that just by going down there, we can reverse what’s been done, do you?”

“I don’t know, but we have to try something.”

It had been around two in the afternoon when I had faded out in front of Joe and so we walked over to Royal Street to look at some of the art galleries in order to kill time. 
In the window of
one of the galleries, I saw a painting of a young girl of about age 16 wearing a long white gown an
d standing in front of a huge daisy
.  The card said it was a self-portrait.

“Look at this,
Josie
.  Can you imagine someone that young painting like that?” I asked as I studied the portrait.