Promise Me

  “My old home?”

  He nodded. “You lost the one you have now. Or you would have.”

  “If you hadn’t saved me.”

  “Losing your home really affected you. Charlotte once told me that somewhere between losing your husband and your home, your spirit broke. You said, ‘The next time I move I hope it’s in a pine box.’ ”

  I looked down. “I shouldn’t have said that,” I said, even though I hadn’t yet.

  “When I met Charlotte, you were living in a two-bedroom apartment near the dry cleaner. We got the apartment we did so we could be close to you.”

  He raked his hand back through his hair. “I walked through the storm to the 7-Eleven. I can’t explain how bizarre that was. The magazines on display had pictures on their covers of people that I either didn’t know or who were younger than I knew them, like Tom Hanks looking like a twelve-year-old, or President Ronald Reagan.

  “As I walked in, I picked up a copy of USA Today. The headline was about the Romanian president and his wife being executed. The date on the paper was December 25, 1989.

  “I still believed that it was all just a weird dream and that I would wake up any minute, so I got myself a cup of coffee. I was standing there drinking it when I heard an echo of Charlotte’s voice that said, ‘Promise me.’ I looked over to the door just as you walked in. At first glance I thought you were Charlotte. You’re twenty years younger than the Beth I knew, almost the same age as my wife.”

  It was hard for me to hear him call her that. His wife.

  “I always thought you were pretty, it was obvious to me where Charlotte got her looks, I just didn’t realize how beautiful you were. At that moment I understood why I was there.

  “You were also the only thing in this time that I had to hold on to. I approached you hoping that you would recognize me, but of course you didn’t. You couldn’t have. You hadn’t met me yet.

  “I had no idea what to say to you. I mean, what am I going to do, tell you the truth? You’d have me locked up. I realized the only option I had to get in your life was to court you.

  “I spent the next few days trying to figure out how to survive in 1989. I had credit cards, but there was no account behind them and I didn’t want to explain why I had a card with an expiration date twenty years in the future.

  “Fortunately, I had a little over a hundred dollars in my pocket, which is worth a lot more now than it is in 2008.

  “I found a cheap basement apartment that didn’t require a deposit, got some fake I.D. and started looking for a job. Then one morning I was eating breakfast and reading my landlord’s newspaper when I realized that I remembered most of the results of the football playoff games I was reading about. With fifty dollars left, I hitchhiked out to Wendover and started laying down bets.

  “That’s also where I went after Charlotte was hospitalized, it was Super Bowl Sunday, and I remembered that Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers beat John Elway’s Denver Broncos. That’s how I bought the BMW.”

  “The big deal you were talking about was the boxing match.” As bizarre as it all sounded, suddenly everything made sense.

  “I didn’t really follow boxing,” he said, “but everyone knows about that match. It’s considered one of the biggest upsets of the century.” He took a deep breath. “The night you told me you were going to lose your home, I heard them talking on the radio about the upcoming Tyson-Douglas fight. I knew what I needed to do, I just needed more money than I had to wager. That’s why I asked you to put me on the loan. If I had told you what I was doing, would you have agreed to it?”

  “I would have thought you were crazy,” I said.

  “Exactly. I was just protecting you from yourself.”

  I shook my head. “And I thought you were a crook.”

  “I would have thought the same thing.”

  I rubbed my hand across my forehead. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. What is this voice you keep talking about?”

  “It’s a still, small voice I hear inside my head.”

  “That’s how you know things?”

  “Sometimes. Some things I just know. Like when I have to go back.” He looked at me gravely. “If I’m going back.”

  “What do you mean if?”

  “We have choices.”

  “What kinds of choices?”

  “I can stay or go. It’s like the train comes back to the station and I either get on it or I stay. But it’s the last train. If I board it, I go back to 2008, back to Charlotte, back to whatever I have left.”

  I looked at him for a long time. “Will I remember you?”

  He nodded. “This is now all part of your reality.”

  “Will you remember me?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. In thirteen years, Charlotte will bring me home to meet you. That young man won’t know you. He won’t have crossed this time yet. He’s not me yet. But maybe Christmas Eve in 2008, when we catch up . . .”

  I thought it over. “And if you don’t go?”

  “I stay here with you and the other future disappears. All Charlotte will ever know of me is the man who loves her mother.”

  “So I’m competing with my own daughter for your love.”

  He nodded slowly. “I never meant for it to turn out like this.”

  “How did you think this was supposed to turn out?”

  He raised his hands. “I didn’t know how any of this would turn out. I didn’t plan this when I accepted her promise. I didn’t know I was going to get thrown back in time or caught in some time continuum, or whatever this is. It’s not like they teach this in school, or even Sunday school for that matter. The whole thing is absurd.”

  “If you stay, you would remember being married to Charlotte. Just like you do now.”

  He nodded.

  “You would see someone else take her. You’ll see her fall in love with some other man who will become her husband. Could you do that?”

  He looked at me sadly. “I don’t know.”

  “Just as I’ll have to see someone else take you.” I looked down for a moment, then back up. I said angrily, “How could you let me fall in love with you?”

  “That’s not something I have control over.”

  “Then how could you fall in love with me?”

  “How could I not?” He took my hand. “I fell in love with Charlotte because she’s beautiful and caring and strong. She’s like pure, sweet water. But you’re the spring. How could I not have fallen in love with you?”

  “This is wrong.” I got up and walked out of the bar to the parking lot. Matthew followed me out. When I got to my car, I leaned against it. Matthew walked up behind me and put his arms around my waist. “I never meant to fall in love with you, Beth. It just happened. It doesn’t mean I don’t love Charlotte.”

  I turned around. “I can’t take you from my daughter, Matthew. No matter how much losing you hurts.”

  “I know.” He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I should have just left. It would have been easier.”

  “Not for me. I would have blamed myself for losing you. I would have mourned you for the rest of my life.”

  For the next few moments we just stood there, the world passing around us, two people caught between two worlds. I touched his cheek. “How long do we have until you have to go back?”

  “Christmas Eve.”

  “What happens on Christmas Eve?”

  “I go back to the apartment. Back to 2008 to finish up what I left undone.”

  “Back to see Charlotte . . .” I couldn’t say it. I looked down at the ground. “Three days ago I thought I was going to marry you.” My eyes began to well up. I looked up into his eyes. “You knew all along.”

  “I’m sorry. I tried not to . . .”

  I put my finger on his lips. “It’s not your fault. It’s what I wanted.” I reached over and took his hand. “Why don’t I feel guilty?”

  “Because you haven’t done anything wrong. Charlotte’
s not my wife yet.”

  I pressed into him, laying my head against his chest, and he wrapped his arms around me. “I know why she falls in love with you,” I said.

  He kissed the top of my head.

  After a few minutes I said, “Christmas Eve is ten months away. What do we do with ten months?”

  Neither of us spoke for a moment, then suddenly he pushed back from me. To my surprise he looked happy, as if he’d just solved some great dilemma. “What would you do if you only had ten months to live and money was no object?”

  “I would spend every moment with those I love. And I would travel. I would see everything I’ve always wanted to see.”

  “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll cheat time. We’ll live more in ten months than most people do in a lifetime. We’ll spend every moment together and we’ll see everything.”

  “What about Charlotte’s schooling?”

  “What better education could she receive?”

  “Cheat time,” I said. “I like that.” I looked into his face and also smiled. “The clock’s ticking. What are we waiting for?”

  We have accumulated nothing but memories. How happy we are.

  Beth Cardall’s Diary

  Ironically, one of the things Marc said to me last summer had now become my personal mantra: I’m not going to waste a single day. It’s a shame most people don’t have the advantage of knowing when their time’s up. If they did, they would probably live differently. They would stop trading time for trinkets. They would live like they were dying.

  We had 314 days until Christmas Eve—7,536 hours. I meant to live them all.

  That afternoon I sat down with Matthew and a steno pad, and we began making a list of everything we wanted to do in the time we had left. What people today call a “bucket list.”

  “I want to go to New York City,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty and watch a real Broadway play.”

  “Nineteen eighty-nine,” he said, searching his memories. “I think Phantom of the Opera has opened. You’ll want to see that.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You will. You’ll like it. It will become the longest-running Broadway musical in history.” He wrote it down on our list. “What else do you want to do?”

  “I want to see Europe, or at least some of it. London, Paris, the Eiffel Tower. And Italy . . .” I paused, waiting for his scribbling to catch up. “I want to do what you did. I want to live in Italy.” From his expression I could see this pleased him.

  “When was the last time you were there?” I asked.

  “Four years ago. We went there on our honeymoon.”

  It was still weird for me to hear him say things like that. It was weird imagining my six-year-old on a honeymoon.

  “In June we’ll fly to Monaco. The food is amazing and I need to put down a bet.”

  “On what?”

  “It’s the NBA finals. The Detroit Pistons beat the Portland Trailblazers four games to one.”

  I grinned. “It’s so funny how you do that.”

  “It’s like having the answers to the test in your back pocket. Fortunately, I was a young sports geek and have a head full of worthless sports trivia. But, if I was really smart, I would have learned how to make an iPod.”

  “What’s an iPod?”

  “It’s an MP3 player. It plays digitized music.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll give you one someday,” he said. “So we will travel the world, and when we are weary of traveling, we’ll rent a villa in Anacapri, the small village at the top of Capri and we’ll drink limoncello and go for long walks and do nothing all day but look down over the water and watch the boats come and go.” He looked at me. “How does that sound?”

  “Let’s pack.”

  “Now?”

  “There is only now. We have three hundred and fourteen days. I don’t want to waste a single one of them.”

  Matthew, Charlotte and I were on a plane to New York just two days later. New York was cold and rainy and everything I hoped for. I had the best steak of my life at the famous Keens Chophouse, then, after dinner, we took a horse carriage to Broadway, where we saw the musical Phantom of the Opera. I thought it was the most beautiful music I had ever heard. Maybe it was just that the theme of unrequited love was so relevant to me, but I was so moved by the production that Matthew insisted we go back the next night and see it again.

  We took a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty and afterward toured Ellis Island. Charlotte ate a bunless hot dog from a street vendor, had frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3 and spent two hours in the Barbie section of FAO Schwarz.

  When we finished with New York, we flew to London. We toured Westminster Abbey and watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. We visited a handful of museums, the British Museum in Bloomsbury, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Winston Churchill war cabinet rooms. We bought Charlotte a new dress and took her for afternoon tea at the Ritz. We rode a red double-decker bus through the city and sat on top even though it rained. My favorite afternoon in London was spent wandering through the market on Portobello Road in Notting Hill. (Matthew told me that in ten years, Notting Hill would become the scene of one of Charlotte’s and my favorite movies.)

  At the end of the week we took a train to Stratford-upon-Avon, where we watched a presentation of King Lear by the Royal Shakespeare Company, ate authentic fish and chips in an English pub and stayed at a Stratford bed and breakfast.

  These were the happiest of days. We had plenty of money and the only things we wanted to own were our lives. We did nothing in haste and we frequently lost track of days.

  Sometime in April we headed south and crossed the channel to France. We rented a car and visited Normandy and the Omaha Beach Memorial before making our way east to Paris where we climbed both the Eiffel Tower and the bell tower at the Notre Dame Cathedral. We spent several days at the Louvre and if it hadn’t been for Charlotte (how much art can a six-year-old stand?), we would have spent many more. I got to see the Mona Lisa, which thrilled me. I suppose it was like meeting a celebrity.

  We drove through the vineyards of Bordeaux, staying in small inns and dining in family-run restaurants, and continued south to Madrid where, after we’d done all we wanted, we abandoned our car and flew to Portugal, spending two relaxing weeks in Lisbon.

  In June we flew to Monte Carlo, where we stayed at the luxurious Hôtel de Paris and lived in opulence I had only read about. Matthew put money down on the basketball playoffs, and we stayed to watch the televised tournament, though we spent most of our time at the beach.

  When the tournament was over (and we had made substantially more than we had spent since we had left the States), we headed to Italy, flying directly into Florence. It wasn’t until we were on Italian soil that I realized Matthew was more Italian than American. It was joyful to watch. He became more passionate and could no longer speak without using his hands. I had bought an Italian phrase book before leaving the States, and Matthew taught Charlotte and me Italian between cities.

  Our first Italian destination was the small, medieval town of Arezzo, just southeast of Florence, to watch the jousting of the Saraceno. Knights in colorful armor paraded their horses into Piazza Grande preceded by flag wavers, acrobats and trumpeters. Charlotte clapped as the knights charged across the square toward their target, the Buratto, a metal armored dummy holding a shield.

  We bought Charlotte colorful flags that represented each of the city’s competing teams so she could wave each one in turn. Afterward, she gave them away to the Italian children seated on the bleachers around us.

  The next day we took a train north to Venice, where I had my first gondola ride and taste of gelato. We went to Murano and watched them blow glass, then to Burano, where we had the most amazing seafood.

  Leaving Venice, we traveled west to Verona, where Charlotte and I stood on the marble balcony of Juliet Capulet’s house and
waved down to Matthew, who was being our Romeo. There is a bronze statue of Juliet in the small courtyard and, as is the custom, Matthew rubbed Juliet’s breast for good luck, though all he got from it was a playful slap from me.

  Next we traveled to La Spezia and hiked through the five cat-infested, Kodachrome hill towns of the Cinque Terre.

  In late July we went south again to Florence and spent several days visiting the sites: the Duomo and Baptistery, the Uffizi Gallery, the Accademia with Michelangelo’s David, and the Ponte Vecchio. We stayed in a Tuscan bed and breakfast—an agriturismo—where the proprietor gave us bottles of his home-pressed olive oil and we sampled Tuscan cheeses to our hearts’ delight.

  Everywhere we went the food was extraordinary, and Matthew made sure I tried it all, from ravioli alla crema di noci (ravioli with cream of nut sauce) to arancina (little oranges). There was plenty for Charlotte to eat as well, though her favorite food was always gelato.

  In Florence we rented a Vespa and the three of us drove out to the medieval town of San Gimignano, the “city of beautiful towers.” Over the next week we traveled the countryside on our little scooter, stopping wherever we pleased on our way to Siena. We arrived in Siena in time to watch the Palio horse race and celebrate Charlotte’s seventh birthday.

  Two days later we took the Eurostar train south to Rome. We began our Roman holiday in lo Stato della città del Vaticano (Vatican City), where we toured St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, then, after lunch, took a tour through the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and Piazza Venezia. It was a full day, and I was exhausted when we finally settled down for dinner at a tourist-free, subterranean restaurant called Alle due Fontanelle. The food was spectacular though I was almost too tired to eat. I don’t think my exhaustion was due just to the day; I think it was the accumulation of the last five months.

  I was poking at my tiramisu when Matthew said, “Vatican City is the smallest country in the world. And Monaco is the second. I wonder what the third is.”

  “The Pitcairn Islands,” I said.