Part One: In My Time
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The thunderstorm raged somewhere to the east of them. Stray winds rose more than 15,000 meters into the air, their convective fingers sometimes reaching out and clawing at the plane, causing it to leap and buck like a greenhorn on a bronco.
The BA AirBus A350 flew not over the tempest but around it, the pilot waiting until the storm moved off and it was safe to stop the plane's restless circling and descend into Toronto's Pearson International Airport.
"Just a bit of turbulence, ladies and gentlemen. Please be sure your seatbelts are securely fastened. There are some lightning strikes on the runway, and we're waiting for those to die down before we begin our descent." The plane continued to roar its determined engine noise, to fly in great circles that felt, deceptively, like forward progress, and to occasionally lurch, jump and suddenly drop as it rode the storm's reaching winds.
Some passengers were muttering nervously. Most were silent, determinedly reading their books as if there was no cause for alarm. A few children cried, and a few young people let out whoops of bravado with each lurch and leap.
In seat 45C, an aisle seat, Wolfe Corbyn was quiet, praying fervently to the god in whom he utterly disbelieved, that the plane would crash. It was a bit selfish, really, because if the plane crashed, a lot of people would die. But that was Wolfe, he never had given much of a toss about anybody. Or so he told himself. He did not want to go to Toronto and work at a mid-level accounting position in BNO Capital Markets, Inc. on Queen Street. If his father had to get rid of him, why couldn't he have exiled him to the branch in Shanghai, or Rio de Janeiro? Somewhere exotic, with beautiful, dark-haired girls? Just because he had moved money around a bit, here and there, working at the London branch that his father managed. He hadn't taken any money; he'd done it for the fun, not for the money. To show he could outsmart them. His father had never credited Wolfe's great intelligence. Wolfe did get caught in the end, but some part of him thought that maybe he had slipped up on purpose, so he could get out of the life of banking for which he had been programmed and destined. Or to get his father's attention, in the likely words of one of the several therapists they had sent him to over the years. Wolfe didn’t buy that psychobabble, and he did not want his father's attention. He wanted his father to leave him alone. His father had threatened to turn him in to the coppers. The thought of prison did not particularly appeal, but maybe in prison he could do his art, get three meals a day and be left alone? Though it could be a bit rougher than that, he supposed. Preferable, perhaps, to avoid it.
His father had agreed. Better Toronto than prison, he had said as he pulled a few strings, did a quiet and thorough coverup, and then practically strongarmed his son onto the plane. Toronto better than prison? Maybe not, Wolfe had replied. A boring, uptight Canadian city with boring, uptight girls, girls only a few generations removed from British, anyway, and Wolfe knew how bloodless London girls were. London girls had certainly never properly appreciated Wolfe. Let the plane crash. Then his father would be sorry, and he, Wolfe, would not have to live out this merciless exile, and a life in banking. The place bucked and lurched, and he continued to pray.
The middle-aged woman beside him, in seat 35B, began vomiting quietly into the appropriate bag. Wolfe took a break from praying and glanced again at the young woman in the window seat, 35A. She had a look about her. Sort of unkempt, but maybe that was a sign of wildness. She had long blonde hair and a face somewhere between pretty and plain. British? Canadian? Wolfe hadn't heard her utter a word. He would help her get her bag down when they landed (no, wait, they were supposed to crash) and maybe he could chat her up a bit, get her address. He took advantage of the hunched over posture of the vomiting woman in the middle seat, leaning over her to tap the blonde on the shoulder. He wanted to hear her say something. But she was staring out the window, apparently oblivious.
In seat 35A, Alison Budge did not feel the tap on her shoulder, nor did she notice the condition of the woman beside her. Alison looked out the window at the cold, dark sky and felt strangely serene. She had waited so long for her life to change, and she was ready for whatever the change would bring. For years she had cleaned the Scottish hostel owned by her parents, day after day. She had served drinks in a pub, sold drugs on the mean streets of Glasgow under her Uncle Duncan's protective eye, saving her money and waiting for her life to begin. When she had boarded the plane in London all her fear and self-doubt had seemed to fall away. Now she circled her new country, and soon, storm or no storm, her feet would touch its soil. She would be a new person, with a new life. This plane would land safely and her new life, her life, really, would begin.
Several rows back, in seat 47A, Maggie Dunn watched the same black sky, her feelings distinctly different than those of the other passengers. She wished that the plane would neither crash nor land safely in Toronto. She wished, rather, for a miracle, or magic, that would turn the plane around and fly it back across the ocean, in order to undo this decision, her decision to come home. Let me just turn time back eight hours, she thought. I will see Alison off in London and then disappear again, perhaps into a small English village this time. I will start a new, anonymous life. Again.
Time had already been turned back for Maggie, at least in a way. A year and a half ago she had become thirty years younger, her body somehow exploiting a chemical-genetic interaction and defying all known science. An explosion at a chemical plant and a cloud of poisonous gas had killed others, but awakened in her a unique genetic anomaly that, over the course of several months, had scrolled her body back from that of a woman in her mid-sixties to a woman in her mid-thirties. Since then she had been on the run, desperate to escape those who wished to study her. She was a freak, a scientific miracle, her body a potential laboratory in which to study the elusive, ever-sought dream of getting younger. Untold riches, fame and glory awaited those who unraveled the secrets hidden in her body. She was not willing to be that laboratory.
But the Isle of Skye had not been far enough. She had become embroiled in the investigation into a violent death, and the detective in charge had seen easily through her paper-thin identity. The name of a long-dead child, a false passport, a woman in her sixties in the body of a woman in her thirties (he didn't know that part, of course); a person with no past, no credit rating, no family. She didn't know why Detective Inspector Jack Wallace had not exposed her, but she was grateful that he had not.
Still, after that, she couldn't stay. It could all fall apart so easily. She had seen that she could not keep reestablishing her life, finding new work she could do for cash, always staying under the radar, always wondering if she was frozen forever in her mid-thirties, or if she would, gradually or suddenly, start getting older. Or younger still. Wondering whether her body could withstand any of those possibilities, and whether her soul could withstand the unspeakable loneliness of hiding most of herself, all of the time. She needed medical advice, friends she could trust, and a place to call her own. All of these things she had told herself after the investigation into Michael McConaughey's death, after she had seen that she could not stay.
When Maggie had first arrived in Skye, Alison's mother Dorothy had given her a temporary home and a job, and it seemed that all would be well until Michael had died and her secrets came so close to being revealed. Now, since Alison was moving to Toronto, it seemed right that she and Maggie should come together. She could help shepherd Alison into her new life as she figured out how to build a new, real life for herself. Maggie had no specific plan, just a sense that the trajectory of her strange life was moving this way, back to where it had all begun. The only way to stop running was to confront the past.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
But that was then. Right now, as the plane went around the storm over Toronto and around it again, she wanted to change her mind. She willed the pilot's circling to create a vortex that would swing the plane and its passengers back across the ocean.
Time did not go backwards, though, not in the way she wanted it to. She could not rewind the movie of the plane's journey west and send it hurtling back to London. And so here she was, coming home to face and somehow defeat the forces aligned against her. To claim her life and stop running.
"That's it, folks, the storm is moving further east and we have been cleared to land," announced the pilot cheerily. "Thank you for your patience." As if they had had a choice. The flight attendants rose from their seats, confined like everyone else during the turbulence, and began going up and down the aisles, collecting stray garbage, including the bag passed over by the woman in 35B, reminding people to put their seats into the upright position and close their tabletops.
The plane began its descent. They passed through layers of clouds, bright black sky appearing briefly before it was obscured again by thick clouds, gray, white, gray. Stray sparks of lightning flashed briefly, the dying echoes of the storm.
The plane's landing gear came down. The lights of small towns began to wink sparsely out of the darkness below, then the black expanse of Lake Ontario swallowed the landscape. The expanse was dotted here and there with the lights of ships, and then, finally, the lake met the vast, spreading blanket of lights that was Toronto.
They landed on a runway slick with rain and moved slowly to the gate. Finally they docked, the seatbelt light went off and the whirring engines were stilled. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Toronto."
People in the aisle seats began retrieving their bags from the overhead bins and standing in the aisles. Some helped those confined in middle and window seats to get their bags. Wolfe was quick to offer help to the woman in the middle seat (so he could show the blonde that he was a gentleman), then he called across to the blonde.
"Is this your bag, Miss, the red one?" He pulled it down in manly fashion and waved it at her. She nodded. Blast, she still hadn't said a word. Canadian or British? He couldn't stand another British girl. Maybe Canadians were a degree or two warmer. He handed it to her. The passengers stood or half-stood in uncomfortable clumps, waiting for a sign of movement at the head of the line. Finally the doors opened and people began their slow, eager, impatient shuffle down the aisles and out to freedom.
In the covered walkway that led to the terminal, the air was cool and fresh, perfumed with just a hint of jet fuel. Wolfe noticed that the blonde kept looking behind her. He managed to stand beside her as they approached the terminal.
"Waiting for someone? Got a friend on the plane?" he asked her in what he hoped was a friendly, non-threatening way. Damn, maybe she had come with a boyfriend and they had not been able to get seats together.
Finally, she opened her mouth. She was Scottish! He had not expected that. He had never been with a Scottish girl, but he imagined that they were feistier than the Brits. They had, after all, had to fight off the British for hundreds of years.
"Aye, I've come with a friend. She's Canadian, actually, so I'm glad to be starting out with her." They had reached the terminal. "Maggie! Here I am! What do we do now? Where should we go?"
Wolfe saw that Maggie was a trim, short-haired brunette somewhere in her thirties. At twenty-six, he preferred girls his age or younger, though maybe an older, experienced woman would be more interesting? Or more interested? He was happy to attach himself to Maggie and the as-yet unnamed blonde, to follow them through the terminal and jump through the various hoops with them. Because, if truth be told, Wolfe Corbyn, well-bred, well-educated and well-dressed, with an impeccable London haircut and expensive shoes, felt like a little boy sent to a new country all alone. Though he would never admit it, he was plenty nervous to be on his own for the first time.
They walked together down the long corridors, hopping on and off the moving walkways, glancing through the glass at the passengers in the waiting areas down below, those whose journeys were just beginning.
At passport control Maggie, as a Canadian, could scan her passport and declaration card at an ABC kiosk, while non-Canadians had to stand in a long line to present their documents to a border services officer. Wolfe managed to stay in the line with the blonde, and as they moved slowly forward, he decided the time had come to introduce himself. "Hello, I'm Wolfe Corbyn," he said to her, thrusting out his free hand. She looked at it as if she didn't understand what to do with it, and did not offer her own. Wolfe kept looking at her pointedly.
Finally, she said, "Oh, I'm Alison. Alison Budge." Then she turned forward again. It appeared the conversation was over. Damn, did these Scottish girls have no social skills at all?
"I'm here on a work permit," offered Wolfe. "Come to take up a position at a bank. Same bank I worked at in London." There was no reply, so he added, "and you?" And suddenly the floodgates opened and Alison Budge began to talk, in her lovely Scottish accent. He had always liked the Scottish accent.
"Well, I researched it a lot before I came. I want to apply for landed immigrant status eventually, but I need a job to do that. Well, you can apply if you're a refugee, but I'm not exactly that, am I?" The line moved forward. "Although my mum and da were a bit hard to live with, so maybe I am a refugee. That was a joke. They're quite nice, actually. My parents. So I found out that the best way to get a work permit if you don't have a job waiting for you” – line moves forward – "is to go for the International Experience Canada program. If you're fairly young. So I applied for that. I'm here on that program for now."
"How old are you?" asked Wolfe rudely.
"Twenty-five." She glared at him for interrupting. Line moves forward. "You can call it a working holiday, and then once you have a job, the employer can help you apply for a real work permit. That's the route I'll go." They had reached the front of the line.
"Are you together?" asked the uniformed officer who was directing people to one of five open booths.
"No," said Alison, at the same time as Wolfe said yes. They moved forward together.
Their documents approved, they were welcomed to Canada and directed onward. Maggie was waiting for them after passport control. She looked at Wolfe, and then, with a gesture, asked a silent question of Alison.
"Oh, this is Wolfe. What was your last name again?"
"Corbyn. Wolfe Corbyn." He reached out his hand and Maggie, unlike Alison before her, took the hand and shook it. She was always cautious, but this clean-shaven young man with neat brown hair and earnest brown eyes did not seem like a threat.
"Maggie Dunn."
They were following the signs and the people to the baggage retrieval area. Down a long escalator, along another long corridor, arriving finally at the large, open area with luggage carousels and screens that displayed the numbers of the carousels that would receive luggage from various flights. An Emirates plane had arrived from Dubai, an El Al flight from Tel Aviv, two different flights from New York, an Air France flight from Paris. The screen directed them to carousel twelve for the British Air flight from London. They had become a threesome, physically at least, trudging every step together as Wolfe chatted, feeling that his words were the glue that would keep them together. He did not want to go out that big exit door and into this new world alone.
Several bags were going round and round carousel twelve, riding wearily, apparently forgotten from a previous flight.
"How on earth can someone forget their luggage?" Wolfe asked Alison and Maggie. There was no reply. The bags from the London flight had still not begun to arrive, though the machine at the top of the chute made occasional, encouraging noises as if it might be about to start. Wolfe tried again.
"So, where will you be going now? Family meeting you?"
Alison was absorbed in her own dreams again, so Maggie replied. Lost as she was in her own anxiety, she was still able to feel a bit of compassion for Wolfe, who seemed like a scared young man.
"No, no family. We're going to a small hotel on Avenue Road, till we get our bearings. You?"
Wolfe's heart leapt. Avenue Road? Wasn't that where his hotel was? And what kind of name was that for a street, anyway? Might as well call it Road Avenue. He fumbled in his bag for his hotel reservation sheet. "I'm going to the Niagara Grand. It's on Avenue Road, too! Is that where you're going?"
The bags had started to tumble down, and Alison moved forward, jostling for space in the waiting crowd. Maggie knew the Niagara Grand, though only from the outside. It was indeed grand, and it was situated directly across the street from the hotel she and Alison were booked at, the Downtown Boutique, an ancient hotel saved from seediness only by its location and the largely unsuccessful sprucing-up attempts that had been made over the years. But it was cheap, probably a third of the price of the Niagara Grand.
"No, we're at a small hotel right across the street from the Niagara." At this, Wolfe's heart leapt again.
"Maggie, isn't this your bag?" Alison grabbed it from the carousel and deposited it at Maggie's feet.
"Yes. Thanks, Alison. That was pretty fast. Now if only your bag comes down soon."
Wolfe's bag came around and he hoisted it off the carousel, but he did not, as most casual traveling acquaintances would have done, wave good-bye and hurry off. He took a luggage trolley from a row of trolleys, put his bag on it and then came back to stand beside the two women, apparently waiting with them for Alison's bag to appear.
"Maggie, where is my bag?" Alison was starting to worry, as the bags came thundering down the chute and more and more passengers pounced on their own luggage and went off towards the exit. The crowd was thinning. "Why didn't our bags come together? They were checked in at the same time. It doesn't make sense. What if my bag is still in London? What if they forgot it, or put it on the wrong plane? What will I do? Oh, there it is! Is that it? Yes!"
Wolfe jumped forward and grabbed the bag at which Alison was pointing, placing it on the luggage trolley with his. He picked up Maggie's bag and added it to the trolley. "Do you want to put your carry-ons, too?"
Maggie thought it was time to break up this threesome, created by pure happenstance. An instinctive distrust of people was revving up now that she back was in Canada. Why was this man so interested in them, anyway? Didn't he have a life, a job, a plan of some sort that he needed to get on with? "Thanks," she told him, "but we'll get another trolley."
"No, no! I mean, we're going to exactly the same place. What a coincidence that our hotels are across the street from each other. We'll share a taxi. It'll save us all money."
Well, there was certainly something to that. Although if the man was staying at the Niagara Grand, he probably wasn't too worried about money. Maggie looked at Alison, who shrugged. Men with British accents seemed intrinsically trustworthy to Maggie (though not to Alison, who had a profoundly Scottish distrust of the British). It was decided by default as they moved together towards the exit and out towards the taxi stands.
They waited a few minutes while the passengers ahead of them were directed to taxis by the man organizing the taxi line-up, and then he waved them towards the next free car. The driver was a tall Sikh with a full black beard and a blue turban. He hoisted their luggage into the car's trunk. Maggie and Alison climbed into the back seat, in order, by their mutual, silent consent, to forestall any funny stuff by Wolfe Corbyn.
Wolfe turned almost completely around from his position beside the driver, so that he could talk to them the whole way. And talk he did. Alison was craning her neck from side to side to see the city, exclaiming every now and then and paying Wolfe no attention, so Maggie politely took it on herself to engage in some sort of conversation with the young man.
Alison was ecstatic. "Look, Maggie! Over there, that must be the real downtown. The buildings are so tall! Is that the CN tower, close to the lake? And Maggie, we're driving on the wrong side! Everybody is! It feels so weird, like we're about to crash, all the time!"
Maggie was distinctly uninformative as she fielded Wolfe's questions about their backgrounds, and instead asked about his. He had come, at his father's command, apparently, to be some sort of junior accountant at BNO Capital Markets, Inc.'s Toronto branch. Maggie wondered why a junior accountant would be transferred to a branch in another country. She assumed this was a family conflict, something Wolfe wanted to get away from. Not her business to ask. He told them he had been granted four paid nights at the Niagara Grande, courtesy of his father, at the end of which he was to have found an apartment, started his job and begun to "act like a man." He sounded quite bitter, and more than a little scared.
For that reason, her motherly urge having been awakened, Maggie agreed, when they were dropped off first at their hotel, that they could all meet for breakfast at eight the next morning in the restaurant of the Niagara Grand. Wolfe had offered, so why not? She knew for a fact that there was no breakfast available at the Downtown Boutique. Maggie hoped Wolfe would pay for breakfast, because he had invited them and they definitely could not afford it.
As the taxi driver pulled their suitcases out of the trunk, Alison and Maggie both got out their wallets, both silently wondering whether they should pay half or two thirds of the taxi fare.
"No, no, no," said Wolfe. "This is paid for by my father, too, as is breakfast tomorrow. I've got four days on his credit card until I have to become a man. Hah, hah. Until then I will keep on being the rascally scoundrel I have always been." He winked at them and wriggled his eyebrows in a Monty Pythonesque way. The taxi driver sped into an illegal U-turn in the middle of Avenue Road and deposited Wolfe across the street at his grand, temporary abode. Wolfe waved at Maggie and Alison, calling something to them before he went through the sliding glass doors of the Niagara Grand. It sounded like, "We're neighbors."
Maggie and Alison picked up their bags, opened the non-sliding door of the Downtown Boutique and went into the dark, dingy lobby of the hotel. As they waited for the man at reception to finish with another check-in, Maggie flashed back, unaccountably, to a children's CBC television show that she had watched as a very young child on her family's small, black and white TV set. She had been Jane then, Jane Emily Brown. The show was called 'Maggie Muggins' and it portrayed the happy days of a red-haired, pig-tailed, freckle-faced girl in a gingham dress who interacted with various animal puppets and humans, especially her neighbor, Mr. McGarrity, who seemed to work all day long in his garden. The part that popped now into Maggie's mind was the ending of every episode. At the end of each show Maggie Muggins would skip home and say in a singsong voice, "I don't know what will happen tomorrow!"
Their turn came, and Maggie and Alison moved forward. Alison was practically hopping up and down in excitement, her mood in no way dampened by their meagre lodgings. Their first night in Toronto. And Maggie thought: I don't know what will happen tomorrow.
