"I obey your law of gravity
This is the fate you've carved on me
The law of gravity"
- Vienna Teng, Gravity
"Ever wonder what we're doin' here?"
"Excuse me?" She takes the beer from his outstretched hand, and he gestures towards the barracks.
"I mean, do you ever wonder what we're doin' here. Dinner with Horace, aptitude tests…hell, even this damn jumpsuit. Few years, these people are all gonna be dead anyway."
He expects a patented sideways glare, thinly pressed lips, rolling eyes. Instead, she shrugs and leans forward, wrapping her hands around her knees.
"Everybody dies, James."
He waits it out at first, spends a few days trying to convince himself otherwise before realizing that he's never going to be able to, drives a car the full cross-country way throughout, tries not to mind the distance or the inevitable stops in cheap hotels.
(Driving's annoying as all hell, traffic and stop lights and winding roads, but it beats flying by a mile.)
He watches families come in and out, businessmen who spend the night and women with gossipy friends. He only stays at each place long enough to eat breakfast, sits at a table in the corner, usually by the window and usually by himself.
Being alone, it's something he's dealt with for most of his life; it's not the worst thing in the world.
Being along with his thoughts, that's a different story.
He gets the address with help from the white pages and a careful web search, then calls a few times just to make sure. Doesn't ask much, just pretends he's doing a survey on her neighborhood and how long has she lived around here and does she having any siblings that might be able to help him out? Playing the con game feels dirty on his tongue, on his conscious, used to lie for a living and he imagines how disappointed she would be if she knew he was choosing to go about this in that way.
Thing is, this ain't no ordinary situation. This requires careful precision and making sure you've got people where you want them.
Trust.
(James knows all about trust, has first hand experience with trust, and yet he every time he thinks about what he's doing he feels like he's going to be sick.)
The day of, he drives around the block at least ten times before parking on the opposite end of the street, in full view of a house that seems far too welcoming. There's a pit in his stomach that's been growing for the past few days and now it sits like a boulder, weighing down his entire body, anchoring him to the seat of the car.
He likes to think his conman skills have prepared him for acting cool under pressure, for reacting to situations that there's just no goddamn way to predict an outcome of, for reacting to situations just like this.
He likes to think his life prepared him for a lot of things, but the truth is, he learned more from her in three years than he learned from himself in twenty.
When she breaks a glass in the kitchen, he swears he hears her mutter "sonofabitch" under her breath.
He thinks maybe it shouldn't be a big deal, the fact that she's picked up on his verbal habits after only a month, but it makes him happy anyway.
By day he's calm and collected, working odd jobs and taking his daughter to the park. By night, he's a goddamn mess who spends more time listening to oldies radio stations and drinking too much beer.
(Three years too early, thirty years too late, and he still sleeps on the right side of the bed because he can't sleep on the left side. It just feels too damn strange.)
He does things that he knows she would have wanted him to do, like reconcile with Cassidy and see her sister and take care of her cousin. The first time Clementine calls him "daddy" he wishes he could tell her. He remembers too late that he can't.
But he tells her anyway.
Their first fight is something of a disaster and when he comes home after half the night on the rec room couch he tells her that she looks like shit.
It's when she replies that she doesn't sleep well without him that he starts to wonder if maybe he's taking all of this for granted.
The year moves quickly when he's not looking, birthday parties and paychecks and at one point, another notch on the ladder of life. He doesn't feel like being overly celebratory about that fact and since he knows Miles understands better than anyone, James doesn't protest when his friend shows up at the door with a six-pack and Chinese take out.
On a Tuesday in November, Rachel invites him for Thanksgiving dinner. Cassidy invites him the next day, and he feels wanted for the first time since he was seven, or maybe since 1977.
He goes to Rachel's, drops by Cassidy's afterwards, and tries not to think about how he has to do this all of this alone.
Somewhere between high and drunk, while dancing to a Fleetwood Mac LP fresh off the sub, he tells her he loves her.
It's the first time he thinks she might have cracked a genuine smile since that night on the dock, that night when he convinced her to stay.
They all move, eventually.
Claire decides she doesn't want to raise Aaron in Los Angeles. Kate flits between states and he only knows where she is at any given time from the messages on his phone. Miles takes a job in Arizona and sends post cards with the corners half bent, his scrawled writing promising cheap beer and wings "if you ever get your ass out here."
James spends his time alone, takes trips that they would have wanted to take and sees things they would've liked to see if they were together. At the end of the day, he writes it all down in a lined notebook, memories and experiences that blend together like runny watercolor, a book of mental photographs that make him happy and sad at the same time.
It's a tool to help him remember, and to help him not to forget.
He carefully flattens the wrinkles of the black pouch and there's a part of him that thinks this is all so goddamn crazy. After all, it's 1976, and they're actually seven or eight somewhere, and this is not their life, not really.
Except for James, it is.
He doesn't tell Cassidy he can't be a grandfather and he doesn't tell Rachel he can't be an uncle because maybe once he couldn't, but now he can. And so he reads baby books and goes to the movies and sings holiday carols and buys presents for birthdays, and he lives because he's here and even though she's not I wanted you to be able to go home.
There are too many notebooks now and they're all piled in a neat stack on the side of his dresser, next to the telephone, next to a faded polaroid. He reads them from time to time when he feels like he needs a reminder.
They make him smile.
He never forgets about the fact that there's something better out there and it makes him wonder if she ever regrets it, or this, or them.
She closes her book, reaches for his hand, and tells him she'd never change a thing.