He had carved on Earth
but always as a form of timekeeping, counting, notching moons and suns, the earliest math in the world.
What Dor carved now was different. First he made three circles to remember his children. He gave each of them a name. Then he carved a quarter moon to remind him of the night he told Alli, “She is my wife.” He carved a box shape to remind him of their first home together—his father’s mud-brick house—and a smaller box to symbolize the reed hut they shared.
He drew an eye shape to remind him of Alli’s lifted gaze, the look that made him feel tipped over. He drew wavy lines to suggest her long dark hair and the serenity he felt when he buried his face inside it.
With each new carving, he spoke out loud.
He was doing what man does when left with nothing.
He was telling himself his own life story.
27
Lorraine knew there was a boy involved.
Why else would her daughter have worn heels last night? She only hoped Sarah hadn’t picked a jerk like her father.
Grace knew Victor was frustrated.
He hated to lose. And it saddened her that this last fight, against a terminal illness, was destined to be a defeat.
Lorraine heard the front door open, and Sarah, without a word, whisked upstairs to her room.
It was how life worked between them now. They lived together but apart.
Things were different even a few years ago. When Sarah was in eighth grade, a girl in gym class stuffed a volleyball under her shirt and, unaware Sarah was within earshot, cooed to a group of boys, “Hey, guys, I’m Sarah Lemon, can I have your French fries?” Sarah raced home crying and buried herself in her mother’s lap. Lorraine stroked her hair and said, “They should all be expelled, every one of them.”
She missed being of comfort like that. She missed the way they once leaned on each other. She heard Sarah moving about upstairs and wanted to speak with her. But the door was always closed.
Grace heard Victor return from his outing.
“Ruth, he’s home,” she said into the phone, “let me call you back.”
She came to the door and took his coat.
“Where were you?”
“The office.”
“You had to go on Saturday?”
“Yes.”
He hobbled down the hallway, still using his cane. She didn’t ask about the manila folder under his arm. Instead she said, “Do you want some tea?”
“I’m all right.”
“Something to eat?”
“No.”
She remembered a time when he’d kiss her at the door, lift her a few inches off the ground and spoil her with questions like “Where do you want to go this weekend? London? Paris?” Once, on the balcony of a seaside villa, she said she wished she’d met him earlier in life, and he said, “We’re gonna make up for that. We’re gonna live a long time together.”
She reminded herself there were moments like that once, and that she had to be patient now, more compassionate; she could not know what he was feeling inside—the dwindling days, the impending death. However cranky or distant he got, she was determined to make the little time they had left more like the start of their life together, and less like the vast, joyless middle.
She did not know, as Victor disappeared into his study, that he was thinking about another life altogether.
28
Mankind is connected in ways it does not understand—even in dreams.
Just as Dor could hear voices from souls he could not see, so, too, on occasion, could a sleeping man or woman see his image from beyond.
In the seventeenth century, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth featured a skeleton looking over one shoulder, and an old, bearded man looking over the other. The skeleton was meant to represent death, but the mysterious bearded figure was, the artist claimed, a symbol of time that had come to him in a dream.
A nineteenth-century etching depicted another bearded man, this one holding an infant, symbolizing the New Year. No one knows why the artist chose this image. He also told colleagues he had seen it in a dream.
In 1898, a bronze sculpture showed a more robust man, still bearded but bare-skinned and fit, holding a scythe and an hourglass and positioned over a giant clock in a rotunda. The model for this bearded man remains a mystery.
But he was referred to as “Father Time.”
And Father Time sits alone in a cave.
He holds his chin in his hands.
This is where our story began. From three children running up a hillside to this lonely space, a bearded man, a pool of voices, the stalactite now within a millimeter of the stalagmite.
Sarah is in her room. Victor is in his study.
It is this time. Right now.
Our time on Earth.
And Dor’s time to be free.
FALLING
29
“What do you know about time?”
Dor looked up.
The old man had returned.
On our calendar, it had been six thousand years. Dor gaped in disbelief. When he tried to speak, no sound came forth; his mind had forgotten the pathway to his voice.
The old man stepped quietly about the cave, examining the walls with great interest. On them he saw every symbol imaginable—circle, square, oval, box, line, cloud, eye, lips—emblems for each moment Dor recalled from his life. This is when Alli threw the stone … This is when we walked to the great river … This is the birth of our son …
The final symbol, in the bottom corner, was the shape of a teardrop, to forever remind Dor of the moment Alli lay dying on the blanket.
The end of his story.
At least to him.
The old man bent down and stretched out his hand.
He touched that carved teardrop, and it became an actual drop of water on his finger.
He moved to where the stalactite and stalagmite had grown to within a razor’s edge of each other. He placed the teardrop between them and watched it turn to stone, connecting the two formations. They were one column now.
Heaven meets Earth.
Just as he had promised.
Instantly, Dor felt himself rise from the floor, as if being pulled by strings.
All his carved symbols lifted off the wall, moving across the cave like migrating birds, then shrinking into a tiny ring around the narrow throat that joined the rocky shapes together.
With that, the stalactite and stalagmite crystallized into smooth, transparent surfaces—forming an upper bulb and a lower bulb—the shape of a giant hourglass.
Inside was the whitest sand Dor had ever seen, extremely fine, almost liquid-like. It spilled through from top to bottom, yet the sand in each bulb neither grew nor diminished.
“Herein lies every moment of the universe,” the old man said. “You sought to control time. For your penance, the wish is granted.”
He tapped his staff on the hourglass and it formed a golden top and bottom with two braided posts. Then it shrank into the crook of Dor’s arm.
He was holding time in his hands.
“Go now,” the old man said. “Return to the world. Your journey is not yet complete.”
Dor stared blankly.
His shoulders slumped. Once, the very suggestion would have sent him running. But his heart was hollow. He wanted none of this anymore. Alli was gone, she would always be gone, a teardrop on a cave wall. What purpose could life—or an hourglass—serve him now?