If Only in My Dreams Read online

  Or rather, what her subconscious thinks is going on here.

  But she doesn’t wake up.

  So how can she help but wonder if this isn’t a dream?

  Well, if it’s not a dream, then what the heck is it, Clara?

  How the heck should I know? she shoots right back at the inner voice, as irritated by the ridiculous questions riddling her stream of consciousness as she is by the fact that she can’t seem to stop talking to herself.

  But there’s nobody else to talk to. Not about her predicament, anyway.

  Certainly, she can’t ask Jed Landry—regardless of whether he really exists—if he thinks she could possibly have fallen through some kind of cosmic time warp.

  Could such a thing possibly happen?

  I wouldn’t know that, either… I always did suck at science, she recalls grimly. Then she reminds herself that it’s unlikely that her all-time favorite teacher, Mr. Kershaw—who ironically taught her all-time least favorite subject—covered cosmic time warps back in high school physics. If he had, she’d have been paying attention, because time warps are infinitely more interesting than studying tedious formulas all day.

  When it comes to time warps, Clara’s only frame of reference is Hollywood.

  God knows there have been countless time travel movies—including the Back to the Future remake she auditioned for just last year. She didn’t get the part. Last she heard, the movie itself had been scrapped, anyway. Presumably, some studio honcho figured out that not every halfway decent box office hit is begging to be remade. Certainly not a mere twenty years after the first version.

  “Feeling any better?” Jed asks.

  No. She won’t feel better until she’s awake—or returned to her own century, as the case may be.

  Unfortunately, she can’t climb into her DeLorean and accelerate herself back to the future, as Marty McFly did in the old movie.

  However…

  Doesn’t it make sense to assume that since it was the train that delivered her to 1941, the train might just be her means of escape?

  That, or waking up, dammit.

  This is ludicrous.

  Wake up! Wake up, Clara!

  She squeezes her eyes shut, certain that when she opens them, she’ll see Michael and Denton and Jesus deJesus hovering above her like a trio of Kansas farmhands, telling her that she hit her head and dreamed the whole thing.

  All right, then. She just needs to concentrate. Really concentrate.

  There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like—

  “Clara?”

  She opens her eyes and there’s Jed Landry again, back on this side of the soda fountain, blue eyes laced with concern.

  “I’m sorry…” She swallows a lump in her throat. “I just want to go home.”

  “Maybe I can drive you, if I can borrow a car and—”

  “You can’t,” she says desolately. “I have to take the train.”

  “Well, if you’ll wait until I can drive—”

  “I can’t wait and I can’t drive home.… I have to take the train.”

  “I don’t think you should. Not alone. Not when you’re so…”

  He trails off, too polite to say mentally unbalanced or whatever it is that he’s thinking about her.

  “What about your folks, then? Can’t they come up from the city and get you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure if they knew—”

  “They’re not even in the city. My father lives in New Jersey and he’s probably away on a business trip anyway, and my mother lives in Florida.”

  “They don’t live together?” he asks in obvious dismay.

  “No, they’re divorced.”

  “That’s a shame. I’m so sorry.”

  Judging by his sympathetic tone and expression, divorced parents are uncommon in 1941. She hesitates, wondering if she should assure Jed that it’s really okay.

  But she opts not to…

  Because she realizes that it isn’t okay.

  Divorce might be the norm, but it’s never okay. Coming from a broken home is painful no matter what decade you live in—no matter how old you are.

  “What about your mom and dad?” she asks Jed, supposing they’re madly in love. As far as she’s been able to tell, Glenhaven Park in 1941 is small-town Americana at its vintage best: an insular, idyllic place despite the horrific events unfolding in the rest of the world.

  But Jed winces as soon as the question has left her lips, and she realizes that his parents’ marriage might be as painful a subject for him as her parents’ marriage is for her.

  “We, uh, I lost my father. Two years ago today, actually.”

  I’m sorry seems such a trite response, but what else is there?

  So she says it softly, inadequately.

  Then, needing to comfort him further, she allows herself to lay a hand on his sleeve. Her fingertips encounter woolen fabric as rough as her own suit, and she fantasizes, just for a moment, about the warm skin and defined biceps that lie beneath.

  Jed looks down at her hand, then up at her, clearly startled.

  Maybe women didn’t touch strange men back in his time. But she doesn’t move her hand away. She can’t. Not having seen the tears that rim his blue eyes.

  He clears his throat a few times.

  Then he says, “I should be over it by now.”

  “Over it? I don’t think you ever get over it, really, Jed.” Funny how strange his name sounds. It isn’t the first occasion it’s crossed her lips, by far.

  Running lines with Michael, she’s said it many times. Said it in anger, in passion, in delight—whatever emotion the script demands.

  But she’s never said it to him. The real Jed Landry.

  Who is either a figment of your imagination or a ghost.

  Looking very much alive, he says, “I guess I never really expected him to die. Not even while he was doing it and I was watching. I figured he’d pull through somehow. He always managed to. That was how he was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My dad’s nickname was Lucky when he was a kid. Which I think he might have come up with himself, since he really, really hated his real name.”

  “What was it?”

  “Abner. But Lucky Landry suited him better—back then, anyway. He was known around town for surviving a lot of close calls. He had smallpox when he was a baby. Then, when he was about seven, he was hit by a milk wagon and broke both his legs and a couple of ribs. And when he became a doughboy, my grandmother was convinced he’d never come home alive.”

  Clara finds herself picturing the fat white Pillsbury Doughboy from the commercials, and hides a quick smile.

  Somehow, she’s pretty sure that’s not what he means.

  “Your father worked in a bakery?” she asks, pleased at having quickly made the danger connection. Maybe Jed’s grandmother feared her son would get burned in a raging brick-oven inferno.

  “A bakery?” Jed is looking blank.

  “You said he was a doughboy.…”

  “In the Great War.”

  “He was a baker in the Great War?” she asks, vaguely embarrassed but not quite sure why.

  “He was a soldier in the Great War.”

  “Oh.” She nods as though she understands what baking has to do with fighting in the Great War.

  At least she’s aware that he’s talking about World War I, which was called the Great War back before there was a World War II.

  Suddenly, she is struck by just how much Jed Landry doesn’t know.

  America isn’t even officially in the war yet. Pearl Harbor hasn’t been attacked, but it will be… less than a week from today, she realizes, after a quick calculation.

  Denton’s dramatic proclamation comes back to her. The world I came into that day was a far different world than it had been the day before. I was born the day America’s innocence died.

  Maybe she should warn someone. Jed, or better yet, warn the presid
ent. Maybe she can somehow get to FDR and—

  What? Heroically change history? Save the world? Preserve America’s innocence?

  You’re dreaming all this anyway, Clara, remember?

  “So my father made it through the war, and that horrible flu that killed all those people,” Jed is saying, “and he survived the Depression. Then he was hit with the one thing he couldn’t survive.”

  “What was it?”

  “Lung cancer.”

  There it is again, rearing its ugly head to invade her dream like the murderous Mouse King invaded the Clara character’s in Tchaikovsky’s ballet.

  Cancer.

  The one word that never really leaves her consciousness… not even when she’s asleep.

  “They couldn’t treat it?” she manages to ask Jed, who shakes his head bleakly.

  “It was cancer,” he repeats, as if that explains everything.

  And it does.

  In this day and age, a diagnosis like yours isn’t the automatic death sentence it used to be.

  Haunted anew by Dr. Svensen’s words, Clara comprehends that for Jed’s father, just as for her own grandmother, there were no effective treatments. They were trapped in a world without options.…

  And now… am I trapped there, too?

  Alarmed as the chilling notion hits her, Clara withdraws her hand from Jed’s sleeve. Age-old instinct sends her restless fingers straight to her head, where she encounters her hair confined by the velvet hat and stiff spray.

  It seems like a lifetime ago that she donned her retro costume and boarded the train to shoot her scene.…

  Dear God, if I’m not dreaming this, then it really was a different lifetime.

  If I’m not dreaming this, and I’m really stuck in 1941, then…

  I’m going to die.

  Just like Grandma, and Jed Landry’s father.

  And Jed.

  Jed is going to die.

  Unlike his father, he won’t come home from the foreign battlefield. He’ll be killed on a beach in France on a June day.

  A wave of foreboding rises within her to collide with one of sheer panic.

  Overcome, she bolts from the stool.

  “What happened?” Jed asks, startled.

  She doesn’t reply, just takes off running, running as fast as she can despite liquid knees and ridiculous high-heeled platform dress shoes.

  “Clara! Where are you going?” Jed calls, scrambling after her.

  “Home,” she hurls over her shoulder, then jerks the door open with a jangle of bells and bursts out into the street.

  A wall of cold air and swirling snow hits her head-on.

  She flinches momentarily but resumes the race.

  There are more people out on the street now, despite the blustery weather. She weaves her way through the scattered pedestrians, vaguely aware that they’re turning toward her in bewilderment as she flies by.

  Midway down the next block, her path is obstructed by a slow-moving quartet of chatting young women pulling children along on wooden sleds.

  Clara darts between two oversized automobiles parked at the curb and steps into the street. Her foot promptly sinks into gray slush so deep that it rises above the thick soles of her shoes to soak her stockings.

  Ignoring the icy chill that shoots up her leg, she waits for an antiquated pickup truck to pass, then scurries across the wide avenue and on toward the train station.

  Her head hurts and her cold, wet feet are killing her. The air is bitter, snow falling on a diagonal wind from the gray sky.

  Several times she nearly loses her balance on the slick sidewalk, yet she rushes on, determined to catch the southbound train.

  Finally, she trips on an uneven slab of concrete and goes down hard for the second time this morning.

  Assorted male pedestrians, all in overcoats and fedoras, most of them smoking cigarettes, rush over to help her up.

  “Are you okay, doll?” one of them asks.

  Another gallantly brushes a few snowflakes from her sleeves, politely ignoring her more provocative body parts that are now presumably covered in white.

  Clara wriggles away from them, murmuring that she’s fine.

  “Wait, honey, is something wrong? Why are you running?”

  In the distance, she hears a train whistle from the north.

  “I—I have to catch the train,” she blurts, and takes off toward the depot again. Behind her, she can hear the men calling out to be careful.

  Then she hears something else. Someone is shouting her name.

  For a moment, she wonders if it’s Michael or Denton—if somehow, she’s awakened from the nightmare at last.

  She turns her head.

  No, she’s still dreaming… or still in 1941.…

  Because the voice belongs to Jed. He’s striding down the street on the opposite side, toting a large piece of luggage and her purse.

  She forgot all about them.

  But it doesn’t matter. She can’t go back now. If she misses the train—

  Helplessly, she ignores Jed and hurries on. She’ll have to leave everything behind.

  The suitcase, the clothes it contains, her iPod—and Jed Landry.

  She couldn’t care less about the bag—it’s a meaningless prop.

  Yet, desperate as she is to get back to New York, the present, familiar territory—she can’t help feeling…

  Wistful.

  It’s ridiculous.

  Absolutely ridiculous, because even if he really does—did?—exist…

  There’s no place for Jed Landry in Clara’s world.

  And she has no intention of staying in his if she can help it.

  “Wait, Clara!” he calls again breathlessly.

  She glances over her shoulder to see him stepping recklessly into the road to get to her.

  “Jed, no!”

  A car swerves to miss him. Its horn emits an old-fashioned ah-ooga in unison with another high-pitched whistle from the train, sounding much closer this time.

  Oh, Jed, be careful.

  She turns away, knowing there’s nothing she can do… knowing, too, that his life isn’t in danger.

  He’ll be okay.…

  Today.

  Swept by helplessness, she forces herself to cover the last stretch of sidewalk to the depot.

  The whistle sounds again, loudly, drowning out Jed’s urgent shouts.

  She mounts the steps to the platform two at a time as the big antique locomotive pulls into the station. She’s vaguely aware of curious stares from the cluster of people waiting there: a few businessmen dressed in overcoats and hats, and several uniformed soldiers who shoot curious—and appreciative—stares in her direction.

  She can again hear Jed calling her name.

  Don’t look back. Whatever you do, Clara, don’t look back. Just get on the train.

  It slows to a stop.

  “Clara, just wait one second!”

  His voice is so plaintive. She starts to look over her shoulder for him. Maybe, if he’s close enough, she can grab the suitcase and tell him good-bye.…

  “Need a hand?” One of the soldiers, a red headed guy with a freckled face and a friendly grin, materializes at her elbow, obstructing her view of Jed.

  “I’m fine,” she protests, but he ushers her onto the high step.

  There’s nothing to do but move from there into the smoky, crowded car with the other boarding passengers.

  The train begins to move again, and she leans toward the nearest window, hoping for a last glimpse of Jed.

  Why, she has no idea. She just wants to see him one more time before he disappears forever.

  For a moment, the deserted platform is all that’s visible in the sliver of glass between the large hats of two women seated by the window.

  Then, through a thickening curtain of falling snow, she spots him.

  He’s poised on the depot steps, still holding her bag, searching the train windows as though he’s looking for her.

  She wav
es, a futile gesture, and feels ridiculous when she catches the red headed soldier looking at her.

  “Good-byes are tough, aren’t they?” he comments.

  She merely nods, closes her eyes, and inhales the smoky air deeply, trying to steady her nerves as the train chugs away from Glenhaven Park…

  And Jed Landry.

  And, please God, 1941.

  If she opens her eyes, will she wake up at last, back in her own century?

  “Miss?” Somebody touches her arm. “Take my seat.”

  I’m definitely still dreaming.

  She knows it even before she opens her eyes to see a young uniformed soldier standing and gesturing at the mohair cushion he just vacated.

  On a modern-day commuter train, the seats are cushioned in stiff vinyl, and nobody offers one to a woman unless she’s enormously pregnant, or elderly.

  She slides into it gratefully, thanking him. He tips his cap and steps away, down the aisle, past the red-haired soldier who helped her up the steps.

  In the process of lighting a cigarette, he catches her eye and offers the pack.

  She shakes her head.

  He comes over anyway. “Are you Jed Landry’s girl? I saw him chasing after you back there at the station.”

  Jed Landry’s girl.

  Why does the quaint phrase immediately send a ripple of pleasure through her? And why can’t she quite bring herself to tell him that, no, she isn’t Jed Landry’s girl?

  She hears herself asking instead, “You know Jed?”

  “Sure. I went to grammar school with his brother, Gilbert. Jed was a coupl’a years ahead of us. He’s a good egg.”

  She smiles faintly at the quaint phrasing. “He is a good egg.”

  The soldier sticks out his gloved hand. “I’m Walter O’Mara.”

  “Clara McCallum.” She shakes his hand politely, wondering why his name sounds so familiar.

  Walter O’Mara…

  “You can’t be from Glenhaven Park,” he said, “or I’d know you. It’s too small a town.”

  “No, I’m from the city.”

  “Going back home?”

  God, I hope so. She merely nods.

  “I wish I were.” He exhales a stream of smoke.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Fort Eastkill. My National Guard company was mobilized into the army.”

  Fort Eastkill.

  He’s one of them, Clara realizes, staring into the friendly, freckled face of a soldier who is little more than a boy.