Fast Backward Read online

  “Good,” Mom says.

  “I need to stay healthy,” Cocoa says. “But I don’t need sleep.” She glances at the counter. “Robert, is that the newspaper I carried here?”

  “The Albuquerque Journal. I bring one home every day. And I go by Bobby.”

  “It has news of the war?” she says.

  “It’s hard to escape news of the war,” Dad says, scowling. He brings her the Journal.

  I pull up a chair close to Cocoa. Leo was wrong about a shortage of stories on the war with Germany. Headlines trumpet battle reports from both Europe and the Pacific. Cocoa reads quickly, working her way through the rest of the paper.

  “The Nazis have not yet given up,” she says.

  “A matter of time,” I say.

  “Hitler is still alive,” she says.

  Dad nods. “A few weeks ago, there were rumors that he’d committed suicide. Since then he’s appeared at a rally in Berlin, looking healthy and unexpectedly confident. The speech was filmed, and witnessed by neutral observers. He’s still alive, continuing to cast doubt on the existence of a loving God.”

  “The devil,” Cocoa says. “His war.”

  “He started it,” I say. “We’ll finish it.”

  Cocoa gives me a look, like I’d just begun a serious conversation about Santa Claus.

  “The base camp,” I say. “Where I deliver the papers. There’s a bunch of smart fellows working on something for the Army out there.” A big, scary something, I think, although, like the cooks, I don’t know. “Some kind of surprise that Hitler and Hirohito won’t like, is my guess. It’s just a guess, of course,” I add, mindful of the posters I’ve seen at the camp and elsewhere: Loose lips sink ships! He’s watching you! Careless words! The enemy is listening! Someone talked! Shhh!

  “Hitler has his own smart fellows,” Cocoa says.

  “Some of the brains at the base camp sound kind of like you,” I say.

  “Yes, Robert,” she says, no sign of surprise in her words or on her face. But she seems agitated. “Your uncle—”

  “Pete,” I say.

  “Pete,” she repeats. “Peter. Could he give the important people a message?”

  “What do you have to tell my kid brother, honey?” Mom says. Lolly is back at the door, wanting out. Mom frees him.

  “My mind is plagued by mist and shadows,” Cocoa says. “But things are beginning to emerge. Events. History. I know something horrible is going to happen. I know it. And when I have more detailed information, I need someone to give it to. Someone who can take action.”

  She’s not giving up on this. My parents aren’t looking at Cocoa. They’re looking at each other, and then me again. Mom frowns. Dad’s eyebrows rise. Holy shit! I think.

  Cocoa ignores our reactions to her oddball but chilling comments. “When the time comes,” she says to Mom, “will you ask your kid brother to listen to me?”

  “Of course, dear. But what is it you’re so worried about?”

  “The world,” Cocoa says. “Humanity.”

  More frowning and raised eyebrows. More holy shit.

  “I would tell you more if I knew more,” she adds.

  I yawn. “Want to say hi to some animals, Cocoa?” I ask. Dad usually feeds our barnyard friends in the mornings, but he hasn’t made a move in that direction, and I need air.

  “What time will the doctor come?” Cocoa asks.

  “I’ll call him now,” Mom says. “But it won’t be for a while. Go meet the animals. But stay out of the sun.”

  SIX

  We head for the barn, which is far enough away that the house isn’t exposed to the smell of cow and pig shit (unless the wind is blowing from the east). On the way, Cocoa asks me about my parents—what they do that allows us to have a house and car and animals and food and clothing. She makes it sound like we’re rich or something.

  “Nothing special,” I say. “My dad’s a former newspaper reporter who’s trying to be a freelance writer but mostly does odd jobs, and my mom works evenings in a bank. The farm makes us a little money and keeps us in as much milk, butter, and eggs as we want.”

  We pass the chicken coop and pen, where about half of our two dozen hens are out scratching and pecking at the dust, searching for bugs and creating shit of their own and avoiding the urges of Franklin, our rooster, who must be in the coop harassing the rest of his harem.

  Lolly trots out of the barn, shaking hay and dust from his yellow coat, raising a cloud. I think of another cloud, rising above the desert floor. And maybe the sight prompts a memory in Cocoa, too. She shuffles to a stop and presses her palms against her temples. Lolly circles us, perhaps trying to herd us out of the sun. Like me, he’s never seen a girl as skinny and sickly as Cocoa.

  What is it that makes me want to get past all the surface weirdness—the nakedness and scrawniness and aloneness and foreign accent and mysterious statements—and get to know her?

  There’s no explanation.

  But I don’t care.

  “What’s the matter?”

  No answer. I take her pointy elbow and get her walking again. But she stops once more. She squints into the sun, well above the hills now. “It is so blue.”

  She’s right. The rainstorm has cleared away everything but the deep turquoise. The sky is cloudless. Nothing God-made or manmade to blemish it. “It’s New Mexico.”

  She locks me in a stare. “For now, Robert.”

  “If you don’t want people to think you’re crazy, you have to quit saying shit like that.”

  “It is okay if you think I am crazy.”

  “Because I don’t matter?”

  “Because you do. Because I feel comfortable talking to you. Because I do not want you to become comfortable with . . .” Her eyes take in our surroundings—house, outbuildings, car, fences, hills, mountains, sky—before returning to me. “. . . all of this.”

  “You keep talking in riddles.”

  “They are all I have for now.”

  I decide to take her at her word. “You’re not ever going to call me Bobby, are you?”

  “It is a little boy’s name. You are no longer a little boy. You have seen me naked.” I have. And I can’t forget it. “Besides, I prefer Robert.”

  I glance back up at her turquoise sky, deciding that Robert isn’t so bad. “What does the sky look like where you come from?”

  “Until today, I have never seen blue sky. I have seen murky clouds dangling cobwebs of poisonous vapor. The glare of overheated sunlight. Dying birds dropping to the earth. Your heart would break, Robert.”

  “Sorry I asked.” Where on earth could such a place be? Has she really come here from Germany, where by now bombs must have turned the sky inside out? “You must be glad to be here.”

  “Yes. And no.”

  Another riddle. But I keep my mouth shut, afraid to feed her wild imagination.

  We reach the cool barn. She breathes in the thick and maybe—to her—strange stew of smells. She stares at the barrel-shaped body of our sow and the uneven row of frantic piglets tugging at her teats. Their enclosure is clean, there’s fresh hay and slop. Dad—or Mom—has already been here. Farther along, the heads of the Andrews sisters, our three Jersey cows, overhang their stall doors. They stare at us uncomplainingly. Someone has already milked them.

  “This is all like déjà vu, Robert,” she says. “Pieces of life coming to me that seem familiar. But not just as they happen. Before they happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nobody can explain déjà vu,” she says. “But with this kind of déjà vu, there is an explanation.”

  She sits on a bale of hay and I join her, close enough that her smell holds its own with the sharp odors of huge animals and hay. Lolly plops on the dirt between us.

  “Which is?” She’s already dropped hints, but they only made me question her sanity.

  “I am not crazy,” she says.

  “I didn’t say you were.” But I thought it. I thought it.

&nbs
p; “Your face gives you away.” She grins, making her look normal and almost healthy. “Your innocent baby face.”

  My baby face heats up. She tells me I’m not a little boy, then she makes me feel like one. “Mom says I’ll be happy to have this face when I’m older.”

  “There was . . .” She pauses, and I can see the cogwheels spinning in her head. “. . . is a writer called H. G. Wells.”

  She pronounces the name Vells, but I know him. “The War of the Worlds is on my nightstand. I’ve read it three times.”

  “Always war.”

  “You sound like my dad. But The War of the Worlds was different.”

  “Was it?”

  “We were attacked by monsters from Mars.”

  “Always monsters.” I fill in the blanks, picturing newsreels of Hitler ranting in front of thousands of his robotic fools. I think of his extermination squads and death camps and boys my age dying for his bullshit causes. “I was thinking of another H. G. Wells book.”

  “The World Set Free?” I say. “The one about a war fought with atomic bombs?” I have war, and bombs, on the brain.

  She shakes her head. “Do you know The Time Machine?”

  “I can accept the possibility of creatures from outer space and atomic bombs,” I say. “But going back and forth in time? I think H. G. Wells was drunk when he wrote that one.”

  She smiles. “I used to think so, too.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I no longer believe the idea of time travel is farfetched.”

  “Then you must be drunk.”

  “I tried drinking once. I thought it would be good for the pain.”

  “Pain?”

  “Where do you think I came from?” she says. “Before you discovered me on the side of the road?” As if they’re holding their breath for the answer, the Andrews sisters stop chewing and tail-swishing and scratching their hides against the walls.

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

  “I am waiting also.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “Previously, for my mind to clear. Now, for yours to open.”

  “It’s open.”

  “I wish it were,” she says. “If I do not have the courage to talk to you, when will I feel brave enough to talk to the people who matter?”

  “I thought you said I matter.”

  “Of course, you do. I have seen the way your parents look at you.” Her expression grows wistful, her eyes watery. I want to hug her, but there’s no way I would. “But I must talk to people who are influential in your government, who have the capability to listen and believe and act. Then perhaps I will have my chance to matter, also.”

  “You can practice on me.”

  She stares at the dirt. “I am tired, Robert. Your mother suggested I sleep, and I am going to try. When I awake, maybe I will tell you my story.”

  SEVEN

  Mom escorts Cocoa to the bedroom. Dad sits at the kitchen table, typing. He thinks and pecks, thinks and pecks. His fingers are too wide for the keys.

  I pour three glasses of iced tea and sit. I wonder if Dad even knows I’m here. But when Mom returns, he notices her right away. They’ve been married forever, but they often create little scenes I’m more used to seeing on a school dance floor or at the drugstore fountain—a couple not much older than me sharing a soda and a look and a history and plans.

  Mom sits, gives Dad, then me, a smile. The smiles are similar, but different. Cocoa says I matter to my parents, but I wonder how that compares to what they mean to each other. I was the stray, after all.

  “Thanks for the tea, Bobby,” Mom says. “The heat is already catching up to me.”

  Dad resumes typing with his sausage fingers but stops suddenly when I throw out a question meant for both of them. “What do you think about time travel?”

  An awkward pause precedes Dad’s answer. “I don’t believe I’ve thought of it at all.”

  “You’ve read The Time Machine.”

  “When I was your age, Bobby. I had a richer imagination then.”

  “Einstein believes in it,” Mom says.

  “True,” Dad says. “But there’s no way to prove his theory.”

  “Why time travel, Bobby?” Mom asks. “Do you wish you were somewhere else?” She takes a long drink of tea, preparing herself, maybe, for the possibility that I don’t want to be here.

  “Cocoa,” I say. “She brought up H. G. Wells and The Time Machine. She said she used to not believe in time travel, but now she does.”

  “Her imagination is still intact,” Dad says.

  “We’ll hope that’s all it is,” Mom says.

  “Why would she change her mind?” I say. “With her next breath, she asked me where I think she came from. Is she telling me she’s from another time?”

  “She’s obviously disoriented,” Mom says after a delay. “I think we should leave it to Doctor Kersey to look into her wellbeing. She might open up to him.” Mom grins. Doctor Kersey isn’t some old country doctor. He’s only three years out of Harvard medical school. “When he smiles, he looks like Tyrone Power,” she adds.

  “I don’t think Cocoa is in any condition to be impressed by Doctor Kersey’s looks,” Dad says. “But I hope she notices. It could mean she’s not as bad off as she appears.”

  I let Dad’s words sink in, realizing I’m torn between wanting her to look at Doctor Kersey the way she’d look at an old country doctor, and wanting her to react like a regular girl meeting a Tyrone Power lookalike. I settle on hoping for mild interest—as if my hopes could have any effect on how she’ll feel.

  “I’ll also ask Doctor Kersey if he thinks we should notify the sheriff about Cocoa’s appearance here,” Mom says. “She could have loved ones frantically searching for her.”

  “She says she doesn’t,” I say.

  “She’s said a lot of things,” Dad says.

  “If she had loved ones, she wouldn’t look like a scarecrow,” I tell him.

  “If she’s a runaway, she might,” Mom says. “It won’t hurt to ask the doctor.”

  “When’s he coming?” I ask.

  “Early afternoon,” Mom says. “Before I have to leave for work.”

  “I hope he’s looking his matinee-idol best,” Dad says.

  “Me, too,” I lie.

  I hoped Cocoa would wake up before Doctor Kersey arrived, because she said she might tell me her story. But I still haven’t heard her stir when the sounds of a car approaching ride the hot air through the open windows. There’s no mistaking the tenor voice of the doctor’s ’36 MG.

  I go to the door and watch him park a safe distance from our old DeSoto. The MG seems even more exotic sitting in our yard than when parked in front of his office or whipping around town. The only one I’ve ever seen, it’s dark green with a black convertible top that’s down right now, revealing its wrong-side steering wheel.

  The sun glints off the sparkling chrome of the spoked wheels and the rich polished paint of the driver’s side door as the doctor opens it, unfolds his long, thin frame, and stands. He has to know his wind-tossed hair is standing on end, but he doesn’t seem to care. He waves to me, grabs his black leather satchel, and heads for the house.

  I think I’m in love, and I don’t mean with the doctor. How glorious it would be to take Cocoa for a drive in this car.

  I hear voices behind me, and when I turn, there’s Cocoa, looking sleepy but rested. She’s bookended by Mom and Dad. I expected Cocoa to be nervous, but she seems excited.

  “Hello, Bobby,” the doctor says, halfway up the steps. We shake hands. “How’s your throat doing?”

  “Like new, Doctor Kersey.” I had tonsillitis in the spring, and everyone except the doc was talking surgery. But he gave me a shot and a jug full of some homemade, foul-tasting concoction to gargle twice a day and at the end of a week I was back to normal.

  “Everybody’s inside. Come on in.”

  Studying his face, I shadow him through the door.
He shows no shock, only friendliness, as he greets my parents and they introduce him to Cocoa. Maybe Mom prepared him. He says hello and shakes Cocoa’s hand. She gives him a smile, and he returns it. If she thought Dad was handsome, what does she think of the matinee idol?

  “Is there somewhere Cocoa and I—and you, Dottie, if you’d like—can discuss her history and do a quick exam?” the doctor says.

  “Cocoa asked me if she could talk to you alone,” Mom says. “At least to start with. You’re welcome to any room in the house. But can I speak to you first?”

  They step out to the porch, but I can imagine their conversation—Mom filling him in on whatever she hasn’t told him already. How I found her, her nakedness, her foreign accent, her lack of memory leading to puzzling references to where she’s from and weird comments about wanting to talk to people in the government, and, last but not least, time travel. The doctor will have his hands—and brain—full.

  Looking more apprehensive, Cocoa waits silently at Dad’s side. We smile at her, but her focus is on the door. Doctor Kersey comes back in, and Mom signals Dad and me to remove ourselves from the house.

  “Let’s stretch our legs,” she says when we get outside, and despite the fact that I’ve already gotten in more than my share of exercise, I’m glad to fall in next to her with Dad taking up a spot off her other shoulder.

  Lolly catches up and slows to a trot at my side. We walk to the road and turn left, toward town. There’s no traffic in sight, which isn’t unusual. Few people live anywhere close to us, and gas is rationed, and there’s nowhere to go. So, aside from the crunch of our shoes on the gravel road, and Lolly panting against the heat, and the soft distinctive whoops of a nearby ground dove taking cover, quiet surrounds us.

  But soon my curiosity, directed at Mom, bubbles to the surface. “What did you say to the doc?”

  “He’ll recognize how unhealthy she is, so I stuck to her amnesia, the strange things she’s said, how lost she seems, how her accent means she’s not local even though she claims to be. I told him that even if we don’t know what she’s been through, it must have been big, so she’s got a reason to be off-kilter. I told him about the explosion, that maybe she was too close to it. I told him she seems to have nobody. I asked him if we’re obligated to notify the authorities.”