Chapter 41

My life continued on placidly after that.

I still wasn’t that old, only in my late sixties, and I felt a good deal younger than that. By now I had given up virtually all rock climbing except for giving an occasional bit of instruction on the simplest walls and rocks; the high-risk things were beyond me now, and I was probably just as well off for it. If I had thought that Cat and I had been around some crazy people in places like Yosemite Valley, I knew that things were really crazy there now; I could only shake my head at things I heard of and saw there.

As the years passed I tried to stay active; while I was never a great surfer, I spent some time at it when conditions were right and enjoyed it. I still did alpine hiking and climbing, but only on easier routes, and most of them I’d done before. I still enjoyed getting out in the mountains, and never wanted to give that up.

After I turned sixty I took up scuba diving again after letting it go for many years. It was something that Dave had always wanted to try but somehow we had never gotten around to it. In spite of my age I could still wear a bikini and I at least thought I looked good wearing it. I never did a lot of diving and very little that could be considered risky, but it was a new experience and I enjoyed it.

About two years after that Mom had a stroke and quickly died as a result. She felt no pain as far as I knew; the stroke had been so massive that it cut her down without warning, and that was that. Joey was out on a run to the coast in his truck like usual. When Cindy called me I got on a plane and beat him back home. We buried her next to Dad in the Simsville Maple Grove Cemetery, and another tie to my past was gone.

I don’t want to say I was scared of my mother in the days when I was first recovering from the accident that had dumped me on this timeline, and I was trying to learn how to pretend to be Joanie. My great fear in those days was that someone would realize that I was faking it, and that I would be considered insane, or worse, sane – and that I’d spend the rest of my life being studied without my having any say in it. I managed to evade that, but mostly by doing the best I could to evade Mom.

Though I managed to accomplish what I’d needed to do, habit had set in, and there were times in my younger years when I didn’t make it home even though I could have, and usually stayed home less than I would have liked to. Cat and I probably would never have gone to Europe the first time, or made the tour out west, if I hadn’t been trying to stay away from home.

Fortunately in later years I was able to make that up a little, especially by the trips I made home, and by the motor home trips that Mom, Jayde, and I made before Jayde headed off to college. By then, all of my fear of discovery was gone and no one would have believed either of us anyway, so we became the best friends that we had ever been, at least in Timeline Two.

Mom had stayed in her home clear up through her eighties, but now it was empty. Joey took a week off from his continual transcontinental runs, and the two of us spent hours going through the house, finding and remembering keepsakes, and then getting the place ready to sell. It hurt to have to let the old place go, but I had no use for it and Joey had a perfectly satisfactory house of his own. Still, it was hard to see the “For Sale” sign go up in the yard.

I really didn’t keep a great deal from Mom and Dad, except the memories, which were too valuable to let go of. After a few days, I returned to my home in Sausalito, and wondered just what I was going to do next; another link to my past had been broken. I resolved to stop by to see Joey and Cindy from time to time, but suspected that it wouldn’t be very often.

Jayde went on to graduate from medical school, and then got an oncology internship and then a residency at one of the premiere facilities in the country. I was terribly proud of her, and I knew that her father would be, too. Unfortunately, she was so busy that I rarely saw her. Since I knew how serious she was about her self-proclaimed mission, I tried to stay out of her life as much as I could while supporting her the best way I knew how.

It was three years since I had last been in Simsville to see Joey and Cindy, and I probably would not have gone there in the spring of 2015 if it hadn’t been for my fiftieth class reunion. That was a little strange; I had memories of those kids, but my memories of them in the current timeline were limited since I had spent so very little time in school with them after the incident that put Joe into Joanie’s body. However, I still retained my Joe memories of those days, even though they were a century old now.

I debated hard over going to the reunion; after all, I had done it before, as Joe. But Joey called me up and said there were a lot of the old group who would like to see me, and a couple days later Patty did the same. With the exception of Patty, who I had seen a handful of times over the years since my college days, I hadn’t seen much of any of them in my current existence. In the end I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to touch base with my past and see Joey and Cindy while I was at it, so I made the trip.

Much was the same as I had remembered from the last time that I’d been to the fiftieth reunion, fifty years before. Diana was tall with a heavily lined face, just like I’d remembered from the last reunion; Barb was very heavy, and had gone from being the slim girl I’d remembered from my original trip through high school to weighing three times what I did. Patty was still the bright, smiling, chubby person she had always been, and once again I was struck by what a mistake I had made as Joe by passing her by.

We were starting to lose a few of the class now, and in fact had lost some. Jerry Sawyer, the draft dodger who had run off to Canada, had come back after the pardon, and while celebrating had wrapped his car around a tree drunk out of his mind. I only heard about it this evening – somehow I must have missed it the last time, but it could have been a discontinuity between the timelines. Either way, I still resented him and didn’t mourn his passing; as far as I was concerned he got what was coming to him.

The only thing that was different at the reunion was me: I hadn’t been there before as Joan on the other timeline. It turned out that Patty had kept better track of me than I had of her, probably through the tales my mother told her. She knew – and had told others – of my being a donut dolly in Vietnam, of my international teaching, of my mountain climbing all over the world. By comparison most of the rest of the class had led staid and unremarkable lives, and it made me somehow one of the more illustrious and exciting members of the class.

“You sure never turned out the way anyone expected you to,” one of my classmates said. “You were always the quiet little kid who sat in the back of the class and never said much, but you sure have led an adventurous life by comparison.”

“People change,” I told him. “I never expected that things would turn out the way they did either. But I just did the next thing when it came along, and look where it came out.” It certainly had been different than the life I had led as Joe, and I only had to look at Joey to prove it.

In the end I was glad I had gone to the reunion, but I also knew it was most likely going to be the last time I saw most of those people. They had mostly been a part of my past long before I drove away to Venable College the first time, and that past was increasingly distant.

I was still friendly with Cat and Steve, although I also rarely saw them either since they lived clear across the country from me. Cat and I talked on the phone every now and then, perhaps every week to every month, even though sometimes there wasn’t much to say. Sometimes, even most of the time, our conversations consisted of “Do you remember when . . .” and go on into some of the adventures we had shared together back when we were young and foolish. Cat was the only person I talked about Phan Loc with very much; those were memories that only she and I could share, and everyone else, even Moose and Dave, when he had been alive, had only been peripheral to Cat’s and my experiences.

Cat and Steve were retired by now; they were still trying to figure out if they wanted to move to Florida or stay where they were. Their kids were grown, married, and moved away; one of them even lived in San Jose, so he was much closer to me geographically than they were, although I never saw him.

I had been aware for some time that Cat’s health wasn’t what it could have been, but I wasn’t aware of the details other than in the fact that she sometimes mentioned that she was listless, and doctor’s appointments sometimes briefly made it into our conversations. Then one day not long after the reunion she called me up, and sadly said, “Jo, I have bad news for you. I have cancer, and it doesn’t look good.”

It floored me. Not Cat now, too!

“Are you sure?”

“Unfortunately,” she sighed. “It’s probably inoperable, so at most I only have a few more months.”

It took some wrangling, more with Cat than anyone else, but hoping against hope I arranged for a second opinion with the best oncology doctor I knew of, which is to say Jayde. She was still a resident, but she had access to some of the top people in the world. They ran Cat through a long series of tests, but the upshot was the same thing. Jayde couldn’t tell me due to patient confidentiality, but Cat herself confirmed it: there was no way of telling for sure, but there was a good chance that the cause once again was Agent Orange.

I was guilt-stricken by that. I had been the one to talk Cat into going to Vietnam as a donut dolly with me, and now it was going to be the death of her!

Steve was beside himself. He was supportive, but he was having trouble dealing with it, and it was very clear that Cat was going to need a lot of help in the next few months. There wasn’t much I could do about it, but I resolved to do what I could.

I told Rosa, Moose, and Shirley to keep an eye on the house since I didn’t know when I was going to be back, and flew to North Carolina. I spent the next several months there caring for Cat and trying to keep Steve on an even keel. After all, I had been down that road with Dave, and I knew what to do. Cat had belayed me on some of my toughest climbs when I had been young, and now it was time for me to belay her on the toughest and deadliest climb of her life. I could do no less for her.

If anything, watching Cat fade away was even worse than it had been with Dave. The only saving grace was that Cat went quickly by comparison, which was good since she was in so much pain. Within months she was in hospice care and sinking fast; Steve and I were with her when she died.

Somehow I had managed to be strong for her, but when it came time to bury her I lost it. Not only had my best friend passed on, she had been my only living link to those turbulent, wonderful days of youth. I not only cried at the funeral, but for days afterward and only slowly pulled out of my sorrow.

With Cat gone my life started to feel superfluous. Dave was gone and had been gone for a long time. Mom and Dad were gone, and now Cat was gone too. Joey was still around, but he was mostly lost to the world in the cab of his Kenworth, not looking forward to the future with any degree of anticipation. He was just carrying on by rote the thing that he had done for many years, and that I had done as Joe for many years. Jayde was still alive, but she was about equally lost in her work and her goals, and while we remained friendly we really weren’t part of each other’s lives any longer. Despite some good friends like Moose and Shirley, I began to feel alone, really alone.

 For the first time, I really felt old, aged beyond my years, and although I still didn’t dare tell anyone about it, I really was. I added it up one day, and realized that the combination of Joe’s memories and mine as Joan added up to over a hundred and twenty years. That was the longest trail of memory of anyone alive, unless there was someone else on earth who had taken a zigzag trip across the timelines like I had done.

That could be. Over the years, I had tried to keep my eyes open for someone else like me, but I never found a trace of anyone. I understood why; if there were anyone else they would have had to understand the same thing I had, that no one would believe them even if they told the truth, so if someone like that existed they must have developed a Rule Two – don’t tell anyone – of their own.

In the months following Cat’s death, I thought about what had happened to me a great deal. It was something I hadn’t really considered very much in some time, because I had mostly come to accept it. Rule One – treat it as if it’s real – had mostly been the central point of my life, and sometimes I had trouble remembering that my Joe memories were as real as my Joan ones, just much further back in my past.

But still I wondered. I remembered back to my first Himalayan trek, the one Bruce and I had made up to the Everest base camp. Even though we planned on doing no climbing on the mountain, it is more or less traditional to stop off at the Tengboche Monastery for a blessing, and of course we did. An old monk who didn’t have much English greeted us; he turned to me and said with a smile, “Greetings, Ancient One.”

I certainly did not feel ancient at the time; as Joan I was still under thirty, but Buddhists like that old monk believe in reincarnation. I wondered at the time if he had somehow recognized the Joe in me and it made me uneasy. It was something I often thought about late at night, and when I did the Everest climb several years later I walked right through Tengboche and didn’t speak to a soul. I must have kicked myself a thousand times in the years since for not having a much more thorough conversation with the man on either trip.

In the years since, I have given some study of what I understand to be the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, and while I have some reason to think it holds a grain of truth, somehow it doesn’t quite seem to fit what happened to me.

Other than that one experience, I had no more clues about what really had happened to me than I had theorized while I lay in the hospital bed in Hamford half a century before. While multiple timelines make for a convenient way to describe what happened to me and make it comprehensible, I had no more idea than I had ever had if that was what had happened; after over half a century, that bucket still had a lot of holes in it. I suppose there is a gazillion-to-one shot that it may have been some sort of a natural phenomenon, but that doesn’t seem likely given that I was inserted into the body of a related person who had never existed on Timeline One.

If there was some sort of intelligent intervention, which it almost seems like there had to had to have been, I had no idea of what it was – or worse, why. Why me? Those were questions I had asked myself repeatedly over the years.

If I had been taken up from Joe and Tom’s Kenworth outside of Oklahoma City and placed here in Joanie’s body, it had to have been for some reason, but when you get right down to it I hadn’t done much of anything that seemed important or momentous. I had been a donut dolly, of course, and it may have been one of the more important and rewarding things of my life, but there were over six hundred other women who had done it, so it doesn’t seem like anything all that special. The only other thing I could think of was that I was Jayde’s mother, and perhaps putting her on Earth was what I had been sent here to accomplish. But I couldn’t believe that I was exactly a reincarnation of Mother Mary, either.

I suppose it’s possible to think that I was sent here to be a catalyst for some event I had no knowledge of, but in a way that’s true of everyone. There is the butterfly theory: the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Japan can set off a tornado in Oklahoma. Perhaps I was the butterfly in something I did not understand, but again, there was no proof, nor even any clue.

After much thought and contemplation, I came to the conclusion that there was only one possibility of finding a clue, and that was a long shot indeed.

I had often wondered what had happened to Tom, and for that matter, what had happened to Joe after that flash along Interstate 40 west of Oklahoma City. Did Tom survive it? For that matter, did Joe survive it and continue on through his life with no knowledge that he had a mental clone over on another timeline?

Why did Tom ask me those questions he did? They weren’t the kind of thing I would have expected out of him, knowing him as long as I had. Was he led to ask me what he did, or was his body briefly taken over by some unknown force? If he survived the experience, would he have any memory of saying anything at all?

I couldn’t answer any of those questions, because on this timeline it hadn’t happened yet. But maybe, just maybe, I might get a clue of what happened when it happened.

I thought about it long and hard, and finally came to the conclusion that I had to know, or at least I had to try to find out.

Nothing perceptible might happen. That was definitely a possibility – in spite of the power of a lightning bolt, a truck cab makes for a pretty good Faraday cage and routes the force of the strike around the occupants. It doesn’t happen often, but it has happened often enough that there is no question about it. Once upon a time, back when I was teaching for American Schools Worldwide, I was aboard an airliner that flew through a thunderstorm over Africa and took an intense lightning hit. There was little if any damage to the plane, and we flew on to our destination a little shaken but safe.

The lightning bolt in Oklahoma – if that was indeed what it was – might kill or injure Tom, Joe, or both of them without giving any clue of what had happened. It might just be a diversion to camouflage what really went on in that instant. Or, it might give me some sort of a clue.

The date when it happened in the other timeline is only a few days away. After giving it careful consideration, I have decided that I will be there when it happens.

I plan on flying to Oklahoma City, renting a car, and following them so I can be only a short distance away when it happens.

It should be easy to pick up the truck. Both Tom and Joe had their runs eastward down to habit; they took the same route, and stopped at the same place every trip, mostly because they almost always ordered the hot beef sandwich at a particular truck stop near Amarillo. That much hasn’t changed, since I talked to Joey about it and they still did it regularly. Barring some sort of discontinuity, which certainly could happen, my own memory of that day tells me they pulled out of the truck stop about two-thirty and were about two hours out when the incident occurred.

I don’t know what will happen. There is a good possibility that it will be nothing at all; I may just see a big lightning flash that will have no effect. Or, there may be some sort of discontinuity where there is no storm at all.

But if there is a storm, Joey or Tom or both of them may die.

And, honestly, I might die.

If it happens, it happens.

I have made all the preparations I need to make should the worst happen. My will was made out long ago, and Jayde will receive all my possessions and investments. Some time ago I even had a power of attorney made out that will give her the right to dispose of my things should I disappear for whatever reason.

I have worked on this memoir off and on for years to try and sort out a few things in my own mind. Mostly it represents pleasant memories, but there are a few sad ones, and a few painful ones.

I have led a good life as Joan, a satisfying one, one I am pleased and proud of. Back just before the flash on the other timeline, I told Tom that if I had to live life over again, I would do things differently, and I certainly managed that. I have no regrets, none whatsoever.