Chapter 7

"You look tired, Al."

"You don't say, Sam." Al Calavicci's eyebrows went up and he released a gravelly laugh as he sat down. At first, it looked as if he'd chosen to sit nowhere, and would fall to the floor, but the second that he touched the plastic chair in the Imaging Room Chamber, it appeared beneath him. By contrast, his cane disappeared when he let it fall to the floor.

Sam Beckett—alone, locked in a jail cell while the local authorities in Kansas City tried to I.D. their trespassing suspect—watched him for a moment with some concern.

"The leg's still giving you trouble?"

Al waved a hand. "Ah, it's always gonna give me trouble," he replied. "I've been busy, so I haven't been doing rehab like I should. Things have gone backwards a bit, so I'm limping more. This is just how I am now, I guess."

"I'm sorry."

"No, I am. I'm sorry for you, that you're doing this again. Still. Whatever."

Sam shrugged and sat down on the narrow bed built into the wall, then gripped the edge of the thin mattress. "Leaping is… how I am now, I guess. And It's my own fault. I made the choice to do it."

"Yea, but things are different now," Al pointed out. "You're not inhabiting someone else's space. You're not able to hide who you are."

Sam reached up and rubbed at his forehead. "Yea, and that's going to be a big problem. They're running my prints. What's going to happen then? I mean, obviously I'm not the twenty-six-year-old version of myself that's going to come up on their search."

"Hell, Sam, it's 1979. Most law enforcement agencies are still putting out 'Wanted' posters at the local post office. If you didn't commit a crime, you're not going to be in their system." He paused. "You haven't, have you?"

"No, I'm clean," he reassured Al. "But then what do I do? The longer I sit here, the harder it's going to be to get out of this situation."

Al pondered the small cell for a moment. "I'd suggest a jail break. You're a genius. You must've come up with a dozen different ways to break out of here by now."

Sam hummed and moved his head back and forth. "Well, a few things have come to mind."

He smiled. "That's my boy."

"But that might not help me in terms of Leaping. After all, we don't know why I'm here," Sam pointed out. "At least I don't have a Swiss-cheese memory anymore." He clapped his hands together, then grasped the mattress again. "Although sometimes I think that wasn't such a bad thing. It let me act on instinct, without 'me' getting in the way."

The two men sat in silence for a while, before Al looked around again.

"So, when are you gonna break outta this hoosegow?"

"Any time is a good time. I was just waiting for your take on the situation."

"You have my take. Take off."

Sam smiled and stood up. "Okay, then. Dinner is in another couple of hours. I'll, ah… work on the situation then." He crossed over to the barred window and peered outside, then glanced back at Al with a look of concern. "How are things going with Sammi Jo?"

Al shook his head. "No change. She's still Leaping. She is displacing people, at least, so we're back to having Visitors in the Waiting Room."

"Good. It'll help keep her a little safer. How's she handling it?"

"Pretty damned well, all in all. Then again, unlike you, she knew what to expect."

"Well," Sam said with a sigh, "knowing something and experiencing it are two different things. As she's no doubt learning." He paused. "Do we have any idea why she did it?"

"No," he replied with a note of frustration in his voice. "All I can figure is maybe because she wanted to make sure the Project stayed open. If the government loses one top-notch scientist, well, that's kind of the risk in a top-secret experiment like this. But two? No way they're going to pack up their toys and leave now."

After a few more minutes of idle conversation, Al departed the Imaging Chamber and left Sam to his own devices. It didn't occur to him until almost two hours later that Sam didn't mention Deanna, at all, and that thought bothered him for the rest of the afternoon—because it didn't occur to him until then that he'd told Sam nothing about what had been going on with her.

As always, the Project came first, and those developments took precedent. Losing Sammi Jo in the Accelerator Chamber felt like a professional blow to Al, although he'd had no warning about what she'd planned to do. As a result, a lot of their conversations focused on Sam's daughter and how she seemed to be faring in her travels. Al's medical emergencies couldn't go unremarked-upon, either, and so they talked about those incidents as well; in the times where Deanna needed to fill in for her father, Sam accepted Deanna's capable presence in Al's absence with both relief and praise.

But Al never brought up her car accident with Sam.

"I should've," he chastised himself over dinner with Beth. "I should've mentioned it. He said I looked tired today, and I didn't even tell him why."

Beth helped herself to another scoop of mashed potatoes and gave him a baleful look as she replaced the spoon in the bowl.

"You do look tired," she remarked.

"I'm doing double duty. It's a lot to take on." He scooped the last forkful of beans-and-corn off the dinner plate and into his mouth. "But he doesn't know that, either," he added as he chewed. "Beth, I don't understand. It's not like I'm deliberately trying to keep all of this a secret from him."

"Of course not."

"I just don't get around to mentioning any of it, somehow." Al sighed and wiped his mouth. "And now I'd have to backtrack a few months on the whole story just to fill him in about Deanna."

"How's she doing today?" Beth inquired.

"Dunno. Ziggy says she's fine. I thought it'd be best to leave it at that, especially since she's tired of me looking over her shoulder every five minutes."

"You're just looking out for her."

He shook his head and put his elbows on the table, then rubbed at his temples. "No, I'm hounding her. I'm keeping tabs on her now, even worse than when she was a teenager. And I don't know if it's because she's my only backup for the Imaging Chamber, or if I'm just worried about her condition, or… maybe it's something else. Something…"

Beth reached over and pulled his hand away from his face, then cradled it in hers. He dropped his other hand into his lap and sighed again.

"Al," she said softly, "I know that look."

He gave a reluctant nod. "Yea. I can feel that instinct kicking in on me. Something's about to change again, and it feels like she's going to be behind it. Again." He exhaled and rocked his head from side to side, then gave Beth a half-smile. "The good thing is, I think it's going to be a change for the better."

"Again," they said in unison.

She squeezed his hand. She knew all that had been lost, and how their daughter helped to fix their lives so that they could be together again.

"Then trust her a little more, Al," she urged him as she leaned in his direction. "You're right, you know. You're not giving her the space that she needs. You weren't doing it before the crash either."

"He hit her," Al blurted out. "At the New Year's party last year. I saw it. She should've left him then."

"That's what I told her, several times," Beth replied patiently. "But it was her choice to make. Not ours. And God knows she's been through enough alredy. She doesn't need any more pressure from us."

"I know."

"Then act like you know it."

He leaned forward and gave Beth a quick kiss on the cheek. "Yes, dear."

They cleaned up the table in silence, and Al reflected on the situation. Although the medical doctors all signed off on her, Doctor Verbeena Beeks still didn't believe that Deanna had healed from the trauma—not just of the accident, but also from the abusive relationship she'd been in with Steven Boyd. Al trusted Beeks' instincts, respected her professional opinion, and had promised himself that he would be patient.

However, that patience had begun to wear thin as he grew more exhausted from his duties as Observer. He wondered if, perhaps, it would be in the Project's best interests to discuss Deanna's status with Verbeena, and to see what (if anything) she could tell him.