Free Written in Time by Jerry Ahern Page A

Take a deep breath.”  
    “It’s not going to happen. Time travel isn’t real. Period,” David said, his voice emotionless, flat, almost leaden.  
    Clarence walked out of the room, sounding like he was starting to cry as well.  
    “Well, it looks like dinner has been a really big hit, Jack. Shit,” Ellen said, going over to the wall and slowly, rhythmically hitting it with her fists.  
    Jack Naile’s hands shook with rage or fear or exhaustion— maybe all three. He shook his head, lit a cigarette.  
    “That’s your answer to everything? I don’t think so, Jack! You’re just giving yourself lung cancer or something. Fine, we all go get time-transferred or zapped or whatever, and you die! What happens to the rest of us?!”  
    Ellen stormed out of the room, sounding as if she was starting to cry; and, after a second, Jack heard her running up the stairs, heading for the bedroom to cry or the bathroom to throw up.  
    Elizabeth cried even harder.  
    David just stared.  
    “Fucking wonderful,” Jack said under his breath. He turned on the kitchen faucet and put his cigarette under the spigot.  
    The thunderstorms were upon them. Ellen holding his hand, Jack Naile stared at the lightning. “I’ll try and cut down.”  
    “That’s the only good thing if this time-travel thing really happens. You would have had to roll your own in those days, right?”  
    “I guess.”  
    “And you’re too clumsy.”  
    “Right.”  
    “You going to fly out to Nevada?”  
    “Before Clarence went to bed, he told me he’d fly out there with me, at his own expense even. This is really shaking him up.”  
    “I think David’s going to start to plan for this, as a defense mechanism so he can keep himself from thinking about what happens if it really happens,” Ellen almost whispered.  
    It was nearly midnight, the rain lashing at the front porch from the northwest. Jack started walking toward the part of the porch that was getting soaked, Ellen beside him.  
    “You didn’t help things with that bit about maybe you were dead and that’s why you weren’t—”  
    “David had been thinking that, and I figured that everybody else was. Sometimes the best way to deal with something is to get it said, get it out in the open.” Ellen took her hand from his and wrapped both her arms around his left arm instead. “I bet I know what’s at the back of your mind, aside from being able to play cowboy.”  
    They could read each other, sometimes, it seemed. Jack Naile laughed a little. “My Dad?”  
    “Um-hmm. If that one photo was taken in 1903 and we didn’t look too much older than we do now—you looked like you had a little more gray—but, you could go back to Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1908 and somehow see your father.”  
    Jack Naile’s father had died at age sixty-three, before either of his grandchildren had been born. “Yeah. I’d like to do that, but it’d be neat to meet him when he was old enough to talk to and talk back. Maybe that time when he flipped the fence and broke his elbow when he was maybe twelve or whatever.”  
    “If we went back tomorrow to 1903, and—help me with the math here,” Ellen said. “How old are you? I can never remember how old I am.”  
    “This month you’ll be forty-four, and five days later I’ll be forty-six.”  
    “So, if you were forty-six in 1903, you’d be fifty-one when your Dad was born. When he was twelve, you’d only be—” And Ellen stopped talking.  
    “The same age he was when he died from his first and last heart attack.” Jack Naile’s initial impulse was to light a cigarette, but he decided against it.  
    Jack had refigured the dates as they related to his father, remembering that Arthur Beach had found out the Naile family had first arrived in Nevada in 1896. If Jack Naile waited for his father to reach age twelve, he’d be seventy years old when he met his dad. If Jack Naile died at sixty-three, as his father had, he