“If it’s about coming to the show tonight, I don’t think I could manage that twice.”
“It’s something else. But since you mention it, what exactly did Ellie say to you?”
“That it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and rejoin the parade.”
“Pretty harsh.”
Sadie stroked her hair against the wounded side of her face — that automatic gesture. “Miz Ellie’s not known for delicacy and tact. Did she shock me, busting in here and telling me it was time to quit lollygagging? Yes she did. Was she right? Yes she was.” She stopped stroking her hair and abruptly pushed it back with the heel of her hand. “This is what I’m going to look like from now on — with some improvements — so I guess I better get used to it. Sadie’s going to find out if that old saw about beauty only being skin deep is actually true.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“All right.” She jetted smoke from her nostrils.
“Suppose I could take you to a place where the doctors could fix the damage to your face — not perfectly, but far better than Dr. Ellerton and his team ever could. Would you go? Even if you knew we could never come back here?”
She frowned. “Are we speaking hypothetically?”
“Actually we’re not.”
She crushed her cigarette out slowly and deliberately, thinking it over. “Is this like Miz Mimi going to Mexico for experimental cancer treatments? Because I don’t think—”
“I’m talking about America, hon.”
“Well, if it’s America, I don’t understand why we couldn’t—”
“Here’s the rest of it:
“And never come back?” She looked alarmed.
“Never. Neither one of us could, for reasons that are difficult to explain. I suppose you think I’m crazy.”
“I know you’re not.” Her eyes were troubled, but she spoke without hesitation.
“I may have to do something that would look very bad to law-enforcement types. It’s
“Is this… Jake, does this have anything to do with that thing you told me about Adlai Stevenson? What he said about hell freezing over?”
“In a way. But here’s the rub. Even if I’m able to do what I have to without being caught — and I think I can — that doesn’t change
“But we could never come back.” She wasn’t speaking to me; she was trying to get it straight in her mind.
“No.” All else aside, if we came back to September ninth of 1958, the original version of Sadie Dunning would already exist. That was a mind-bender I didn’t even want to consider.
She got up and went to the window. She stood there with her back to me for a long time. I waited.
“Jake?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Can you predict the future? You can, can’t you?”
I said nothing.
In a small voice she said, “Did you come here
I said nothing.
She turned from the window. Her face was very pale. “Jake, did you?”
“Yes.” It was as if a seventy-pound rock had rolled off my chest. At the same time I was terrified. For both of us, but mostly for her.
“How… how far?”
“Honey, are you sure you—”
“Yes.
“Almost forty-eight years.”
“Am I… dead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. This is now. And this is us.”
She thought about that. The skin around the red marks of her injuries had turned very white and I wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to move. What if she screamed and ran from me?
“Why did you come?”
“To stop a man from doing something. I’ll kill him if I have to. If I can make absolutely sure he deserves killing, that is. So far I haven’t been able to do that.”
“What’s the something?”
“In four months, I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill the president. He’s going to kill John Ken—”
I saw her knees start to buckle, but she managed to stay on her feet just long enough to allow me to catch her before she fell.
I carried her to the bedroom and went into the bathroom to wet a cloth in cold water. When I returned, her eyes were already open. She looked at me with an expression I could not decipher.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Maybe not,” she said, but she didn’t flinch when I sat down next to her on the bed, and made a little sighing noise of pleasure when I began to stroke her face with the cold cloth, detouring around the bad place, where all sensation except for a deep, dull pain was now gone. When I was done, she looked at me solemnly. “Tell me one thing that’s going to happen. I think if I’m going to believe you, you have to do that. Something like Adlai Stevenson and hell freezing over.”
“I can’t. I majored in English, not American History. I studied Maine history in high school — it was a requirement — but I know next to nothing about Texas. I don’t—” But I realized I did know one thing. I knew the last thing in the betting section of Al Templeton’s notebook, because I’d double-checked.
“Jake?”
