t-shirt, boots; it was his James Dean phase, even if he was thirty-two. What stunned her most wasn’t his apparel or the way he gaped at Laurel. What shocked Andrea was that he looked as though not a day had passed. He should be decrepit, or dead like Carl. Instead he shook with fear, similar to her last moment with him, as if no time had elapsed at all.
But five decades had moved through her world, the proof in young voices trying to project older. Justin shook his fist. “Get the fuck outta here before I call the goddamn cops! She’s my sister, not, not…”
“Juss, step back. You all just step back and leave him alone.”
Five pairs of eyes stared at Andrea, and Laurel’s were the biggest. Justin’s were a close second, and Andrea waved them off like pesky insects. “Go in the house now, give me a moment with this gentleman.”
“Grandma, he thinks Laurel’s…”
She smiled at Thom, who blinked. Then she looked at her oldest grandchild. “Juss, it’s all right honey. Go inside.”
Andrea reached for his face. Then she glanced to a relic from the past as youthful as her grandson. “Go on now Justin. Do what I say.”
“Honey, come on,” Cat called. “All of you, do as Grandma says.”
Trudging steps were taken as Andrea stared at the frightened man trembling on the grass. “Thom, my lord. Is that really you?”
He nodded, then took small strides her way. “Oh Jesus Andy, is that, are you really…”
Her arms opened. “Oh Thom yes, my God. What’n the hell?”
Before he could answer, he was wrapped against her, weeping into her shoulder.
They sat alone, a plate of spaghetti remnants between them. He had eaten two helpings, what Laurel was going to take home. Instead it went into this man; Thom’s gray eyes were ringed with dark circles, brown hair was unkempt, yet everything else was the same, from the mole on his right cheek to the cowlick that never laid flat over his left eyebrow. He had told her that cowlick was hereditary, from his great-grandfather. In all truth, he could be a great-grandfather; he was eighty-two years old. But he looked fifty years younger than that. He also looked weary, as if a week’s sleep wouldn’t be enough. He looked… Andrea sighed, then gently took his hands. His were tanned, hers were ancient.
“Where have you been?” she asked. Then she smiled. “Thom, oh Thom.”
He glanced around the kitchen, which wasn’t modern by normal standards, but to what he was accustomed, it looked positively new. Andrea had a dishwasher, but she rarely used it. The coffeemaker and toaster oven were her favorite appliances, but nothing remained of the early 1960s, when she had last seen him.
He found her eyes, then he gazed to the light fixture, wall switches, and toaster oven. Andrea preferred it over the microwave; reheated pizza came out crispy, breadsticks too. She would nuke pasta, but loved that little oven, last year’s Christmas present from her grandchildren.
Her eldest grandson was in theory just six years this man’s junior. Andrea didn’t wonder why Thom was here and so young, how time had stopped for him and not her. Instead she studied his eyes, gray and so fearful. Then she gripped his hands, and he responded with strength.
“How, I mean, I don’t know where I am, I mean…”
“It’s 2012 Thom. It’s been fifty years.”
“Oh no, no, I mean, oh Christ no…”
His head went to their clasped hands. His tears were plentiful, her heart feeling each one. He had disappeared after a silly argument, over what she couldn’t even remember, and no one knew where he had gone. At thirty-two years old, he had fled her life just as he had drifted into it, like some dream. Five decades later here he was again, but now he wept. She had never seen him weep before.
“Thom, can you tell me what happened?”
He nodded, then looked up. “You were so pissed at me, so I got drunk. I can’t remember where I laid down, but I musta passed out, Jesus Christ.” He gazed at her face. “I dreamed about you, like this. I swear to God Andy, I was dreaming of you the whole…”
He stroked her bobbed hair, then caressed her cheek. His hand remained, like touching reality. “Andy, my God, your eyes, they’re just the same.”
She smiled. “Thom, you’re just as big a liar…”
“No, I mean it, I…” Then he shivered, as if authenticity was a slap along his face. “Oh Christ, what the hell’s happened to me?”
She scooted closer, wishing for some answer. She didn’t disbelieve any of it, for she knew this man, he had not changed. She had, and everything else too, but within her heart and mind, the time with Thom Sugerman was as fresh as yesterday. She glanced at the vases, flowers so lively, just like who she sat next to. He leaned into her. “Andy, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know honey, I have no idea.”
He took her face in his hands, searching for what, she wondered, truth, lies, anything that might explain lost years. He had slept off one hell of a drunk, far longer than Rip Van Winkle, Andrea considered, as he moved toward her face.
What did he see? Her voice was croaky, her skin baggy, her teeth… She giggled, those were still her own, but everything else was another woman. “Thom, what’re you doing?”
“What, huh?” He backed away, but still held her face. “Andy, I, I…”
She smiled, as if no time had slipped from their grasp. He was still amorous, she was edgy. But instead of it being due to her youth, now it was because she was older than him.
“Thom, you need some…” Had he actually been unconscious for the last fifty years, and if so, where? “Honey, where again did you wake up?”
“About a mile from here, in some barn, but it was like this place, new. Christ Andy, is this really 2012?”
The numbers were slow coming off his tongue, and she nodded. “Yeah, 2012. Been easier to say it since 2010, don’t have to say two thousand whatever anymore.”
“Two thousand, two thousand…”
She patted his hand. She had turned seventy-two that day, and what kind of present was this? “Thom, are you tired?”
“What, oh yeah. God, I’m beat.”
She nodded. “All right, let me make up the sofa. No beds upstairs, grandkids don’t spend the night anymore.”
She stood, but he took her hand. His eyes were huge, and hopeful. “Andy, you really gonna make me sleep on the sofa?”
“My God Thom, are you serious?”
“Do you still, I mean…”
“What?” she said, hands on hips. “Do I still what?”
“Love me?”
She closed her eyes, wanting to fall into the floor. She gripped the chair, took a breath. “Oh for God’s sake Thom, you don’t expect…”
“Don’t make me sleep alone, please. Oh Andy, Christ, sit down!”
Instead he held her close, his warm strong arms like those of her grandchildren, but with a different need. What did he see, who did he think she was? “Thom, my God, oh Thom.”
He had started crying again, this time releasing a flood. She struggled to reach the living room, where they plopped onto the couch, his weeping deep and anguished. Andrea cradled him, shedding a few tears of her own.
He fell asleep on the sofa, an old tattered afghan over him. His boots were on the floor, and once he was out, Andrea inspected them, her heart skipping; she had bought these shoes for his thirty-first birthday. She had been twenty-one, and he had needed new boots. The ten years between them seemed erroneous; she was responsible, he was reckless.
Yet, he had taught her how to love a man, lessons not difficult. Her mother hadn’t approved, and until Andrea was twenty, they met on the sly, slipping away from church, which he only attended to get on her mother’s good side. He always left before communion, and once Andrea had taken the bread and wine, she exited the building instead of rejoining her family. Her father never spoke of it, but her mom…
They had been so relieved when he never returned, and when Carl began knocking on the door, they couldn’t get Andrea married off fast enough. That had be
en two years later, and nine months after that Samantha arrived. In the mid-1960s children right after marriage wasn’t an issue. And by then Andrea was almost twenty-five years old.
She knew why Thom mistook Laurel for her, and no one had called her Andy since he left, since that argument, the point of which she still couldn’t remember. Thom hadn’t mentioned the topic either. He had assumed Laurel was his lover, an honest mistake, if this night was to be believed. Andrea half-expected to come down in the morning to an empty sofa. If nothing else, seventy-two had started with a bang.
But he was real, her daughters and grandchildren had seen him. Justin looked ready to slug him, but Juss might have been in for a surprise; Thom had a mean left hook, although he was wobbly, probably would have gone right down. But he wouldn’t have forgotten it, and at their next encounter, Juss would have seen stars. Their next encounter; Andrea clucked softly, then stepped away from the couch. Just how long was Thom going to be around?
She stood still, trying to reason his presence. Was it magic, some act of God? Had time really stopped for this man, would the authorities haul him away and she would never see him again? Her heart stopped; then as she took a large breath, he flopped over onto his back. She eyed him from head to those bare feet, his socks stuck in the boots. He wasn’t overly smelly, like he had slept off a binge. She walked around the coffee table, and picked up one shoe, sniffing inside; she had bought real leather boots for him. She still knew the scent of his feet, of all of him. She