End of an Era

Boundary Layer

Tess gave me a big hug and a kiss when I got back to Toronto from Vancouver. I squeezed her, but my mind was elsewhere. We’d had a good marriage, as far as I could tell. We’d enjoyed each other’s company. Both of our careers had prospered. And the lack of children? Well, she had always said that it didn’t bother her, that she, too, felt they’d be an inconvenience, at odds with our lifestyle. And yet, in that other, original iteration of the timeline, she had left me for Miles Jordan. Klicks had always wanted kids. Was that part of the reason?

I wished to God that I’d never found that alternative diary. Ignorance really can be bliss. To think that my personal life was as tenuous and unstable as Ching-Mei said the universe itself was—it was enough to drive me crazy.

Ching-Mei had tried to explain how that other diary had come to be in my possession, how the memory wafer in my palmtop could have somehow swapped contents with the one the time-traveling Brandy had taken to the past with him. She spoke about shunting and Huang-Effect reversals and chaos theory, but she was guessing, really. It didn’t matter. The damage was done.

“How was the flight?” asked Tess, removing her arms from me.

“Typical Air Canada.” My tone was cold, dry.

Tess’s eyes flicked across my face, looking, I guess, for the emotion underlying the weariness in my voice. “Sorry to hear that,” she said at last.

I hung my coat in the hall closet and we made our way up to the living room. We sat together on the L-shaped couch, beneath a framed landscape painting done by Tess’s uncle, a not-bad artist who lived in Michigan. “Anything exciting happen while I was away?”

“Not really,” she said. “Wednesday, I went to see that new James Bond film—I must say Macaulay Culkin makes a surprisingly good 007. And last night I had Miles over for dinner.”

Klicks here? While I was away? “Oh.”

“By the way, I balanced our bank account while you were gone. Why’d you charge your plane tickets on your MasterCard? Shouldn’t the museum have paid for those?”

Oh, crap. “Uh, well, the research was personal.”

Tess blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, it’s not important.”

She looked up at me, searching. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. Just fine.”

Silence for a time, and then, softly: “I think I’m entitled to a better answer than that.”

“Look,” I said, and instantly regretted it, “I’m not giving you the third degree about what you did while I was away.”

Tess smiled with her mouth, but I could see by the corners of her eyes that the smile was forced. “Sorry, honey,” she said, false sun in her voice. “It’s just that I worry about you.” Her eyes flicked over my face again. “I wouldn’t want you to have a midlife crisis and go running off with somebody else.”

“I’m not the one who’s likely to do that, am I?”

She went stiff. “What do you mean by that?”

Christ, I was saying things that I shouldn’t. But if what we had wasn’t as special to her as it was to me, I had to know. I had to. “How was Klicks?” I said.

She was bristling. “He was fine, thank you very much. Pleasant. Nonargumentative. A damn sight nicer than you’ve been of late.”

“I see. Well, if you prefer his company—”

“I didn’t say that.” She slapped the arm of the couch, air forcing its way out of the plush armrest with a soft whoompf. “Jesus, you’re a frustrating man sometimes. You run off on some junket clear to the other side of the country. You’ve accused me twice now of, of infidelity. What in God’s name is wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.” The same weary tone I’d used to describe the flight from Vancouver.

“The hell there isn’t.” She looked up at me again and this time her eyes locked on mine. Those lovely green eyes, the same two haunting orbs that had fueled my fantasies before I’d worked up the courage to ask her out; the same two compassionate orbs that had helped me through the death of my mother, through the loss of that job in Ottawa, through so many tragedies; the same two intelligent orbs that had danced as we had held real discussions about things that had seemed oh so very important in our youth—war and peace and love and international relations and great moral controversies, she always quick with a point of view, me ponderously weighing the evidence, trying to decide what was right and what was wrong. Physically the eyes had changed only slightly over the years: their color was bluer now and there were fine wrinkles at their corners. But where once they had been great expansive windows for me, and me alone, to peer into her very soul, they now seemed silvered over, mirrored, reflecting back my own doubts and fears and insecurities, while revealing nothing of the mind that dwelt behind them.

“Do you still love me?” she said at last, a slight quaver to the words.

The question hit me with unexpected force. We didn’t speak of love, not openly, not anymore. That was a topic for those who were still young. We lived a peaceful coexistence: old friends who didn’t have to say much to each other; old shoes that grew more comfortable each time you put them on. Did I still love her? Had I ever loved her—the real her, the actual Tess—or had I only loved an image of someone else, someone I’d created in my mind, sculpted in my dreams? I realized, fast enough, fortunately, that this was one of those moments of truth, one of those significant butterflies, one of those decisions that could bend the timeline so severely that I’d never be able to correct its course.

“More than life itself,” I said at last, and it was only when I heard the words free in the room that I realized how right and true they were. “I love you with all my heart.” I swept her tiny body into my arms and squeezed so hard that it hurt us both. Who said that I had to give her up without a fight? “Come on, Lambchop. Let’s go upstairs.” And then I thought, screw that, that’s what old people do. “No, on second thought, let’s stay right here. It’s been years since we gave this couch a proper workout.”