JOAN'S FLASHFORWARD

Chapter 11 The Revelation to Will

For Will Girardi, the last few years had been painful.

The big tragedy, of course, had been the death of Kevin, his firstborn. Sheer grief had been followed by guilt. The death was caused by Kevin's poor health, caused by the auto accident, caused by --- what? Was there something that Will could have done differently, bringing Kevin up? Some days, the answer was no; other days, yes.

Getting back to normal life had been difficult because normal life itself kept shifting. The surviving children, Joan and Luke, were already away at college. They didn't always come back for vacations, either. Joan and Adam frequently went on long trips whose purposes seemed mysterious to Will, though Helen always seemed to take them in stride. Luke had spent one summer working with his beloved Grace at her famine relief agency in Africa. They kept in touch by Email, of course, but Will was an older generation and could not get very sentimental over words on a computer screen.

There was Lily and little Terry, of course; Will loved seeing his granddaughter every day. But Lily's continual presence in the house was a reminder of Kevin's absence.

A far more subtle problem was that even when everybody was there in the Girardi home, they weren't all there.

Once again Will was haunted by the feeling that everybody in the family was hiding something from him. Kevin had noticed it, too, when he was still alive, though he tended to make a joke of it. Now Kevin was gone, and Will seemed to be alone outside the pale.

In his experience as a policeman, secrets in a family often had to with sexual scandal. But concerning whom?

They had already thrashed out the matter of Lily and Henry. Joan seemed devoted to Adam. Could Luke be sleeping with a girl at Harvard and not telling Grace? Maybe, but Grace was a hard-headed modern girl and probably wouldn't be too shocked that her distant boyfriend wasn't celibate; although Will had a tough time believing anyone would be okay with being cheated on, even Grace. Besides, why lock Will out of the discussion?

That left Helen. Did she have a lover? Somebody involved in the Flashforwards?

It seemed incredible that a mother would admit infidelity to her children and get them to help in a cover-up. But when he had confronted her, she told a wild story about a gift from God—

"Your mother mentioned God, too," Will said.

"She was covering for me," Joan said. "I was the one who got the warning about the Flashforward and spread it around."

"So YOU had a vision from God?" Will looked at her skeptically.

"Not exactly. I bumped into an avatar---"

"A what?"

"Avatar. Hindu term for God in human guise. I've seen Him in a number of forms, sometimes as girls, and avatar seemed to be the convenient term for them."

Will didn't know about Hindu terminology, but he was suffering from déjà vu. Sometime recently he had heard about avatars. Then he remembered his Flashforward. Unlike normal dreams, Flashforwards did not seem to fail in the memory.

The day I met Henry at the shelter, we were both helping an elderly, bearded man. I never saw that particular man again. Joan said it may have been the avatar she calls Homeless Man God.

"Give me the names of some avatars."

"They usually don't use names, I've given them nicknames. Old Lady God, Little Girl God, Dog-walker God, Goth God. Grace often sees a girl riding a horse; calls her Diana or Cowgirl God. I don't know whether the horse is part of God or not. The first time it happened to me, it was in a form I call Cute Boy God."

Cute Boy God. Déjà vu again. I just spotted Cute Boy God, among the guests, Helen had said.

"Dad, why are you looking so odd?" Joan asked, worried about how Will was reacting.

In interrogations you were not supposed to reveal your own feelings; it gave the other side too much information. But this was not an interrogation, it was a conversation with his daughter! "I heard people talk about Cute Boy God (what a name!) and other avatars in my FlashForward. And the future me seemed to understand what they were talking about."

Joan lit up. The transformation was astonishing; Will didn't know if he had ever seen his daughter so happy. "Dad, that's marvelous! If you only knew how often we wished we could be honest in front of you! And now we can!"

The emotions of the situation utterly confused Will. Joan had basically confessed to a conspiracy to hide information from him, yet seemed overjoyed that it was over. "Who's 'we'? Obviously you, Helen, and Lily. Who else?"

"Adam, Luke, and Grace. Judith knew before she died. Veronica Mars. A girl in Europe, some friends in college. Not everybody is entirely cool with the idea."

"I can imagine. And nobody told me?" He sounded a little angry and hurt.

"You're a skeptic, Dad. We never had enough evidence to convince you. But now you know that you'll accept it in the future, so you can accept it now!"

"Exactly what are you asking me to accept? That there's a God? Joan, I could just barely accept Kevin's death as bad luck. Now you're telling me that there's a God who could have stopped it, and didn't? Why didn't God prevent all the deaths of innocents during the Flash?"

"I-I don't know." Joan felt her heart drop. Her father wasn't accepting it as well as she thought he would.

"I've noticed that religious people say 'I don't know' a lot. 'I don't know and I can't be bothered to investigate and find out'. God knows and that's sufficient. You gotta have faith. Ignorance is bliss."

"Daddy---!" Joan seemed about to cry. A few feet away, baby Terry, almost forgotten by the pair, started wailing. That was a sign to Will to get his bitterness under control.

"I'm not talking about you, Joan." And certainly his description didn't fit Luke or Grace, who were also in the secret according to Joan. Something weird there. "I'm just explaining why I can't just accept that God is going to give me all the answers and I should just 'wait patiently for him'." Will rubbed his head. "Joan, you've given me a ton of stuff to think about, and maybe I should think it through before I say anything else. Where is everybody?"

"Mom's at a museum gathering. Lily's on a date." Joan picked up her niece and tried to soothe her. "Just one thing, Dad. The only thing Mom did wrong was try to keep a secret I gave her. Please, you guys gotta get back together."

"All right." As soon as he figured out how to react to the whole story. Will lacked the temperament to simply paper over a problem for the sake of peace. He reached the top stair and took a deep breath.

Life had thrown him another boomerang.

TO BE CONTINUED