Chapter Five

"San Diego was good for us," Beth murmured against his shoulder.

Al Calavicci smiled and hugged his wife closer. The news that her youngest daughter had decided to spend the weekend in southern California came as a relief, more to Al than to Beth. Al hadn't been sure that Deanna would even leave the Project facility, much less the state. Before he'd gone down to talk to her at the ice rink, he'd checked her security card movements throughout the building, and it disturbed him to learn that she hadn't been outside once in the past two months. Not even just to stand and watch the beautiful sunsets over the desert, as he liked to do. He thought it best not to tell that to his wife, though.

Beth also had no idea—and he and Deanna swore they would never tell her—how different their future together would've been if Sam Beckett hadn't changed her life. When Sam Leaped and redirected a young Edward St. John to California instead of New York in the 1950s, they had no idea what would happen; their only goal had been to change something to preserve Project Quantum Leap and to keep Sam Beckett alive. As things turned out, Edward St. John the Fifth became the first husband of Beth Lynn Ansell, in a marriage that began in Los Angeles, ran its course in less than ten years, and had been ready to end by the time she met a young pilot named Al Calavicci, rescued as a P.O.W. from the jungles of Vietnam.

The convoluted and complicated timelines that only Al, Sam, Sammi Jo, Deanna and Ziggy harbored in their memories (and memory banks) bound them together in a special way. Trying to explain it all to anyone else…

Al sighed and glanced over at Beth, who had just drifted off to sleep against him, and restrained the urge to give her a kiss on the forehead so as not to wake her again.

She'd been right, though: San Diego had been good for them. For Al, it meant rest and recovery at a sun-filled Navy hospital where the best care in the country could be provided (with the help of some pretty, young nurses). As for Beth, falling in love with Al in San Diego had provided her with yet another good reason to go through with her divorce from Edward St. John. As for Edward…

Al let out a low hum, then slowly extricated himself from his wife, who rolled over onto her side and let him get up. He pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of boxers from the floor, stuck his feet into his slippers, then made his way out of the bedroom and down the hall to his office. Once there, he turned on his computer and began to search.

The answers came up quickly enough. He already knew that Edward St. John the Fifth performed under the stage name of "Eddie Frauken"—although not quite a Hollywood legend, he did have an impressive IMDB listing of credits to his name, as well as a history of stage performances and even a few record releases in the Sixties.

Al chuckled. "Yea, well, everyone from David McCallum to Leonard Nimoy was releasing albums back then," he mumbled to himself.

He fumbled around, looked at a few video interviews and quick clips from Eddie's movies, then went back into a few biography pages. While San Diego might've been good for Al and Beth, it almost led to the downfall of the career for Eddie Frauken. The movie magazines slammed him for divorcing "his darling little wife Beth, the most wonderful woman that a guy like Eddie could've ever asked for—and didn't deserve," and the bad press continued a month later, after an unspecified incident at a department store parking lot. All that anyone knew is that he'd been arrested in the back seat of his car "while engaged in unlawful public behavior."

Somebody must've known somebody down at the police station, Al surmised, because the details of that arrest did not seem to have leaked out.

He scanned the rest of the biography, which outlined some drinking and heroin problems in the 1970s and early 1980s, which he overcame by the late '80s when he got his career back on track with some blockbuster movies under his belt. By all accounts, he'd become clean, sober and successful since then.

Al sat back in his chair and pondered the situation. Why had he never looked him up on the internet before, after all these years? Surely, with the actor being his ex-wife's husband, it would've occurred to him to at least check out the competition…

"Oh." Al puffed out a breath and put one hand to his face. A whole host of reasons surged into his thoughts—recovering from Vietnam, his focus on his Navy career, family activities, medical issues—but, primarily, it occurred to him that only a short time had gone by since the big shift at Project Quantum Leap. Edward St. John's forced volunteerism, and putting his DNA into Ziggy, had only redirected history less than a year ago. In that time, he hadn't given the guy a second thought. Too many other, more important things occupied his time to think about his wife's ex.

He looked down at his exposed legs and sighed. They both looked normal, but the left one had never returned to full mobility. His attention went to the crook of the cane, hooked into the half-open desk drawer to his right, where he'd left it just before going to bed. He supposed that he should follow the doctor's advice and rely on the cane more, but some stubborn and/or desperate hope remained that he might gain full use of his weaker left side again. Thus far, nothing indicated that any slice of reality lay in that hope.

He looked at the clock in the corner of the computer screen and winced.

I should go to bed now, he told himself. It's gonna be a long weekend without Deanna here.

But he didn't move right away. Different thoughts still plagued him, mostly about the situation that he and his daughter had found themselves in. He felt a frustrated, low-grade anger over Sammi Jo's spontaneous (and selfish) decision to sneak into the Imaging Chamber and to Leap, at a time when trying to keep Sam Beckett alive had just gotten that much more difficult. Al had tolerated the constant hostility between Deanna and Sammi Jo as just a "thing" between the two of them, but Sammi Jo's Leap changed his neutral opinion. She made the Project's situation even worse.

Not that the current staffing situation wouldn't have become a problem over time, he admitted. But if she hadn't Leaped, we could've definitely used her as another Observer. Split up between the three of us, we could've tripled the odds of bringing Sam home. Damn it.

With some reluctance, he pulled the cane to him, got to his feet and made his way back down the hallway to his bedroom.

"It's an untenable situation," he whispered as he walk-limped back to the bedroom, careful to move the cane across the floor as quietly as possible.