Flowers grew thick along the path to the nursing home's door as the afternoon shift came in on that high summer Friday. One of the aides who was leaving held the door for Mestral. Maggie's room was halfway down the hall, one of the few singles. She was sleeping, crumpled in her sheets and disappearing into them as if she were evaporating, and he was holding her hand. Had he really looked that worn and worried? He didn't remember; he hadn't wasted much time with mirrors in that last week two hundred years ago. He didn't even notice when he came in. That called for a solid hand on his own shoulder. "Hey, me."
He looked up, haunted and stunned. "Oh, hey, thanks for coming."
"Least I can do for me, isn't it? I'm glad the Guardians of Forever see it that way too." He pulled up the room's other chair. "I got this watch. You know the drill."
"Lena was in twenty-seven minutes ago. Well, you know that." He sounded utterly miserable, and had been. "It won't be too much longer. I need to go get the kids, but it could be, while I'm gone-"
"It won't be. You'll be here." It would be seven fifty-eight that evening, to be exact, four hours from now, plenty of time and still never enough.
Present-he was on his feet, putting on his baseball cap, looking wary, and he asked what would be ridiculous for anyone who didn't time-travel the way some people commuted. "Me or you-me?"
"You. Present-day you will be right here with her in your arms. Her katra will do just fine."
No matter how hard present-he tried to go back behind the stone wall of Vulcan, he'd been on earth too long and this was Maggie, after all. The nurses wouldn't see what future-he did in that face, the bare edge of control hanging by a thread. "It'll transfer? Humans do have katras?"
"Trust you. It will. I wouldn't lie to me. Long as you're around she'll live right here." He tapped his chest. "Even when you do like she told you, she'll still be there."
"I don't even want to think about that." No, he hadn't wanted to think about the inevitable need to remarry. There had been times when he'd been curious about other human women, but never curious enough to be with anyone but Maggie. Her bedside table had a tablet with a slideshow to remind her who she'd been when Alzheimer's stole the last years first. It was a good thing Vulcans aged slowly compared to humans; when Maggie was lucid she thought they were still forty-five. The pictures were from when the kids were little and John's first son was a baby. "Oh. Her music." He reached over and restarted the songs she remembered from those mid-century days, old country for the most part.
"Like I say, I got this. Go get Bud from the airport and see if John made it in yet. Patty's going to get here in an hour and thirty-five minutes and Lena's seeing her other patients right now. She'll be here after you leave. I know she realizes, but she doesn't like to think about both of me being here."
"Well..." he took one more long doubtful look, "all right,but..."
"Go. Bud will need to talk to you. John should be at the house by now, but if he isn't he will be in a couple of minutes and you know he never could remember where you left the key."
He turned once more at the door, looked down at Maggie and blew out along slow breath. "Well. All right, but if you think I need to be here..."
"You know I would, but you'll be here when she wants you."
Would he have wanted to know, back when, the exact time and all? No, he wouldn't have; knowing he'd have time to go get the kids—grown, all of them, well into middle age with careers and families—and drive back from the Amtrak station and the airport would have been enough. He waited to see his own car drive by the window, then leaned over,fingertips to Maggie's psi points.
He hadn't known how, back then, and it was good to have a future self with a very skilled healer for a t'hy'la. Solkar had coached him on exactly how to boost this and calm that. "It won't last more than eight hours at most and it won't work twice, so don't do it until you know there isn't going to be much more time." There wasn't; Lena had already told him, and even if she hadn't, he could feel the heart barely flickering and nothing else working enough to keep going for long.
He nudged her consciousness awake and propped up what he could as much as he could, and when he was done he called softly "Maggie?"
"Oh, hi, Nicky!" Her voice was a feather on the wind.
"I put your music on for you. What you in the mood for today?"
"Oh...whatever." It wasn't her old brightness, but by the time present-he got back, she would still have her eyes open and have that word or two for everyone that had meant so much.
She had taught him that it mattered; he'd been brought up to believe it shouldn't. On Vulcan, the family might gather out of respect if an elder was dying, but it wasn't supposed to have any other meaning and no one would have gone out of their way. After all, why try to help someone die happy when happiness wasn't supposed to exist? Love wasn't either, but he'd thrown that idea out about a month into his stay in Carbon Creek.
Maggie's dad was the one who started calling him Nick. It was a good name for a Serbian coal miner, Mike said, and since Mike was a Serbian coal miner, Mestral took it as a compliment. He rather liked the way a first and last name looked on his paperwork. It wasn't hard to pass his citizenship test, and back then a birth certificate cribbed from his father-in-law's with plausible dates was good enough to get the job done. After that, Maggie could say "Of course he's a little odd; he wasn't born around here, he's from that little town at the foot of the mountains below Gol," and no one questioned it.
He had intended to go around the world sampling Earth culture, and he had, more or less, only he took Maggie with him and eventually the kids. They scrimped all year so that come the two-week miners' vacation in July they could take off for an interesting spot. There were pictures on the tablet from those adventures. One year they had found a cheap European vacation where they seemed to spend the entire time careening around on a series of trains and buses. The kids, half Vulcan as they were, loved it. Maggie had been a little less sanguine, but began to appreciate the humor after he got into the Swiss chocolate and the kids finally fell asleep. Everything he'd learned had come through her, because of her, often for her.
After the kids had left home, they had kept roaming. He had filed his reports duly for the observing ships to pick up, whether or not they realized they were moving through time more than space; the High Command would keep telling people there was no time travel long after he returned. On one of his future-self visits, he had made Maggie howl with laughter (and himself chuckle, which was more or less the same thing) when he described the sequence of Earth history as seen by Vulcan observers as listening to an audiobook with the chapters on shuffle. He knew better, sliding through sixty-five years with Maggie.
His first marriage, after all, had been a dazed ceremony up on Mount Seleya, some frantic, fruitless coupling and a total bond failure that led his would-be wife to walk off in disgust. His second took place before that first Christmas, quietly, in the county clerk's office after his shift and before hers. They had gone away for the weekend and gone back to work on Monday, but the whole world was new to both of them. So was a woman's body undiscovered country to him; for the first time, he was allowed to touch when he wasn't on fire and look when he could see. It was a cold, snowy winter, and after the decorations were all back in the boxes and her son John went back to college there was nothing to do but lie in bed and learn everything.
She was almost forty, they hadn't thought anything would happen and it didn't for the first few months, but one evening at a ball game in Forbes she turned down the offer of a hot dog, and the next day she was woozy in the morning. In those days there were no early tests and no ultrasound, so she was surprised when he knew and told her they had a son on the way. Hadn't Bud all but announced himself? Nine months—wasn't that too early? He expected her to go off to the hospital and come back in a couple of hours with the baby, but she couldn't drive herself there. The pain nearly drove her crazy even as she lay with her head on his shoulder so he could take some of it for her until they came and knocked her out for the delivery as was usual then. Bud, Nicholas Junior, came out with round ears and reddish blood, much to their friend Doc's relief as well as theirs; he hadn't been looking forward to explaining that to the nursing staff.
He wouldn't have expected Maggie to talk to him again after that, let alone think sex was a good idea, but she started suggesting it again, and a year later she was pregnant with their twins, Patty and Lena. He couldn't get why he wasn't supposed to call her Maria Magdalena Junior the way Bud was Nicholas George Junior, but Maggie said it wasn't done for girls. All three of them looked human, only a little yellowish in the wrong light or when they were wearing odd-colored clothing, so they grew up that way, rowdy healthy kids bouncing around.
Mestral could have told Doc their last baby girl was in trouble from the start, her heart not quite right and not repairable on Earth in the 1960s. In his own time and place, it was marginally possible to fix; with a little more time in the distant future, it might be easily mended, but her skin and ears and blood would always have made her stand out on Earth. They talked about what to name her and came up with a good old family name from both sides, Zorana, dawn light—most Vulcans would shorten it to Rana, but it was the same word, the way so many were. The little coffin was actually a stasis chamber. Doc had no way of knowing she was in a heavy trance and not dead, not quite; he was listening for a heartbeat, and hers was far too soft and fast to hear with a regular stethoscope. They laid her away the way they'd pack summer clothes in the fall, in faith that warmer days would come. Maggie's heart was as broken as their daughter's and there were days when he didn't feel like getting out of bed. He had thought he knew grief when his father-in-law died. He hadn't touched the edges of it yet. Even knowing there was a chance of Zorana someday didn't make up for their being no her right then.
There were no more after that; Maggie was forty-four when Zorana was born, and her body was done with the idea even though she wasn't. John's children by then and his younger half-brother and sisters all went through school together. They were raised in the local church. Mestral hadn't been too sure about it at first, but he was sure about Maggie, and by and by it became part of him too. The kids grew up and went to high school, fell in and out of love and moved out of the house. There wasn't enough work in the mine after a couple of years, so Bud went to college and became a civil engineer, then Patty moved out to the oil fields in Oklahoma with a boy she'd met at Penn State, Bud followed her, and Lena divorced her first husband and went to medical school. Most of all, they were normal. The kids he had been so nervous about were perfectly ordinary, if a little brighter than most humans. They were all through college, so he suggested Maggie quit her job at the diner that she had held onto out of some residual fear that he would leave the way John's father had. "I won't," he said a hundred times, "you'll see, I won't, I'll be here."
Empty-nest Mestral and Maggie had time together again. They lay in bed at night talking about where they would go once he retired—retirement, a blissful word for a man who wasn't even middle-aged yet. They danced at weddings and stole kisses in public while he thought about what looks he'd have gotten on Vulcan for doing any of the things he took for granted. Two hard winters in the late 1970s took them back to that first cold winter together, and they lay together in their sleeping bag in front of the fireplace the night after the big blizzard when the power went out and the furnace wouldn't run. She warmed his ears in her hands, teasing: "Can't let your best parts get frostbitten," and in the firelight he noticed for the first time how much frost there was in her blonde hair.
The mine laid everyone off in 1980, and it was as good a time as any to say he'd called it quits. He'd had a good head for money even back on Vulcan where it didn't matter much. They had enough to travel again, so he sent even more reports from wherever there was a cheap cruise or a standby ticket. They went to Oklahoma a lot and Patty and Bud worried about them getting older in the cold winters. "Daddy, that cough! It's got to be from the cold. Why don't you come stay with us, even if it's just for the winter?" It was black lung from the mine, not the cold, but he appreciated the offer anyway. They became snowbirds well into Maggie's eighties, until traveling got too hard for her and she wanted to spend her time in Carbon Creek.
It wasn't a tiny town any more; computers had come in, the Pittsburgh diaspora had turned into a return and everything high-tech, and Mestral taught computer classes at the senior center even if he often thought of a whole lot of ways he could have improved the clunky Commodores they used. He sold a couple of patents when no one was looking, bought some Apple stock when it was first offered and put all of that into trust for the grandchildren. With what he knew was coming, they'd need it. For their fiftieth anniversary, nearly everyone came home to Carbon Creek on Christmas and they danced to "Crazy Arms" at the community center, then they went off on a Caribbean cruise.
And Maggie, far too soon, grew old and frail. He had watched her go from thin and tough to fragile and tired, then she had begun to forget things, and Lena ran all kids of tests and came up with the answer no one wanted. "Daddy, she's ninety-nine. A lot of humans don't live that long. There is a lot about the body that we can fix, but her brain has a lot of bad spots that we can't."
On Vulcan, few marked the passage of time so, but a hundredth birthday was the entry into middle adulthood, neither young nor old, a point of balance; on Earth, it was still a remarkable event that got a short write up in the newspapers. She began to coast downhill shortly after that. He couldn't leave her alone in the house because she would think she was due at work and would walk off looking for the old building that had been replaced. After four years of staying close by, he had to carry her home one day when she walked for a couple of miles and got too tired to come back. "Daddy," Lena had said, "I know you don't want to think about it, but we can't take care of her at home now."
And so she had gone to live at the nursing home, and he might as well have. He went every day so they could talk and listened to music, and when she was feeling strong enough she would stand and shuffle her feet while he held her by way of dancing. In these last months, he knew full well, she had barely been able to stand, then standing stopped altogether and finally even her birthday party took place with her in a wheelchair braced so she couldn't fall. She wasn't sure who the kids were and didn't recognize the grandchildren, but she always knew Mestral. There were days when she talked to her brother who had gone years before, then she stopped talking altogether, then this morning Lena had said "Daddy, I think it's almost over." Future-him had known exactly when, of course, so future-him had asked the Guardians to put him where he could help and not hurt anything, and they, always glad to serve, did.
Her breathing was so shallow he wondered if he'd altered the timeline by coming, but when he laid a hand on her chest it settled and she opened her eyes again. "Did you fix it, Nicky?"
"I can't fix it all, but I did the best I could for a little while, sweetheart." He had learned the terms of endearment, too; she had taught him love the way she had taught him sex and how to drive a car and how to use Terran kitchen appliances. How surprised she had been, the first time she came home when he'd been there alone in the evening, to find the laundry done, the house cleaned and endmeal ready, even if he'd mostly just thawed it out. A Vulcan wife would have expected it and said nothing. She almost cried with gratitude because she'd been doing everything herself for so long. "Are you scared?"
Her eyes had some hint of their old brightness and she reached for his hand, trying to fold it in her fragile one. "No. If I live in your chest or go on, either way, it's all right."
"Don't go yet. I'm future-me. Present-me went to get Bud and Patty."
"Oh, good. I want to see them and John...Lena was here?"
"She's seeing her other patients and then she'll be here."
"Can I go outside?" Well, why not? She wouldn't be able to sit for long. He lifted her into the wheelchair, propped with her pillows, and rolled her down the hall to the sunroom, then out into the enclosed courtyard. Even that short trip made her tired now, and that even with him holding her together through their old bond. It would be another forty-five minutes before he got back with the kids and it was time for future-him to take his leave again. Was he being selfish and using up too much of what he'd managed to retrieve?
The wind was light, the summer day broiling; she basked in the light and the heat as he did. They said little, nor needed to. As he had suspected, she couldn't sit for more than a half-hour. "Tired," she said, leaning hard into his chest. "Take me back."
He did, and he was about to lift her back into the bed when she giggled and pointed to the tablet they'd forgotten and left playing. "Listen. 'Crazy Arms.' Do you remember? I do remember. I do. The first time I saw you. The first time we danced."
And so he danced with her, one more time, holding her and twirling slowly across the floor. The song was near its last verse when he felt a hand on his shoulder, present-him. "May I cut in?"
"You sure can." He moved her to his present arms. "You're just in time."
Lena smuggled him out the staff entrance and kissed him on the cheek as she handed him her car keys. "Till I get there, Daddy."
"Gotcha, kid." He drove the couple of miles to the Carbon Creek house, glad no one was with him so he could let the grateful tears fall.
The Guardians of Forever at the portal in the back of the garage were as kind and understanding as always. "You took care of your business in a good way?"
"I think so, thank you." That was another of Maggie's lessons, giving thanks out loud. "With your help I got one more dance with Maggie."