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Author: Orson Scott Card
Title: Missed
Original copyright year: 1998
Genre: Short Story
Comments:
Source:
Date of e-text:
Prepared by:
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Missed
Missed
By Orson Scott Card
Tim Bushey was no athlete, and if at thirty-one middle age wasn't
there yet, it was coming, he could feel its fingers on his spine. So
when he did his hour of exercise a day, he didn't push himself,
didn't pound his way through the miles, didn't stress his knees.
Often he relaxed into a brisk walk so he could look around and see
the neighborhoods he was passing through.
In winter he walked in mid-afternoon, the warmest time of the day.
In summer he was up before dawn, walking before the air got as hot
and wet as a crock pot. In winter he saw the school buses deliver
children to the street corners. In summer, he saw the papers getting
delivered.
So it was five-thirty on a hot summer morning when he saw the
paperboy on a bicycle, pedaling over the railroad tracks and up
Yanceyville Road toward Glenside. Most of the people delivering
papers worked out of cars, pitching the papers out the far window.
But there were a few kids on bikes here and there. So what was so
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odd about him that Tim couldn't keep his eyes off the kid?
He noticed a couple of things as the kid chugged up the hill. First,
he wasn't on a mountain bike or a street racer. It wasn't even one
of those banana-seat bikes that were still popular when Tim was a
kid. He was riding one of those stodgy old one-speed bikes that were
the cycling equivalent of a '55 Buick, rounded and lumpy and heavy
as a burden of sin. Yet the bike looked brand-new.
And the boy himself was strange, wearing blue jeans with the cuffs
rolled up and a short-sleeved shirt in a print that looked like ...
no, it absolutely was. The kid was wearing clothes straight out of
"Leave It to Beaver." And his hair had that tapered buzzcut that
left just one little wave to be combed up off the forehead in front.
It was like watching one of those out-of-date educational films in
grade school. This kid was clearly caught in a time warp.
Still, it wouldn't have turned Tim out of his planned route -- the
circuit of Elm, Pisgah Church, Yanceyville, and Cone -- if it hadn't
been for the bag of papers saddled over the rack on the back of the
bike. Printed on the canvas it said, "The Greensboro Daily News."
Now, if there was one thing Tim was sure of, it was the fact that
Greensboro was a one-newspaper town, unless you counted the weekly
"Rhinoceros Times," and sure, maybe somebody had clung to an old
canvas paper delivery bag with the "Daily News" logo -- but that bag
looked new.
It's not as if Tim had any schedule to keep, any urgent
appointments. So he turned around and jogged after the kid, and when
the brand-new ancient bicycle turned right on Glenside, Tim was not
all that far behind him. He lost sight of him after Glenside made
its sweeping left turn to the north, but Tim was still close enough
to hear, in the still morning air, the faint sound of a rolled-up
newspaper hitting the gravel of a country driveway.
He found the driveway on the inside of a leftward curve. The
streetlight showed the paper lying there, but Tim couldn't see the
masthead or even the headline without jogging onto the gravel, his
shoes making such a racket that he half-expected to see lights go on
inside the house.
He bent over and looked. The rubber band had broken and the paper
had unrolled itself, so now it lay flat in the driveway. Dominating
the front page was a familiar picture. The headline under it said:
Babe Ruth, Baseball's
Home Run King, Dies
Cancer of Throat Claims Life
Of Noted Major League Star
I thought he died years ago, Tim thought.
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Then he noticed another headline:
Inflation Curb Signed By Truman
President Says Bill Inadequate
Truman? Tim looked at the masthead. It wasn't the "News and Record,"
it was the "Greensboro Daily News." And under the masthead it said:
Tuesday Morning, August 17, 1948 ... price: five cents.
What kind of joke was this, and who was it being played on? Not Tim
-- nobody could have known he'd come down Yanceyville Road today, or
that he'd follow the paperboy to this driveway.
A footstep on gravel. Tim looked up. An old woman stood at the head
of the driveway, gazing at him. Tim stood, blushing, caught. She
said nothing.
"Sorry," said Tim. "I didn't open it, the rubber band must have
broken when it hit the gravel, I --"
He looked down, meant to reach down, pick up the paper, carry it to
her. But there was no paper there. Nothing. Right at his feet, where
he had just seen the face of George Herman "Babe" Ruth, there was
only gravel and moist dirt and dewy grass.
He looked at the woman again. Still she said nothing.
"I ..." Tim couldn't think of a thing to say. Good morning, ma'am.
I've been hallucinating on your driveway. Have a nice day. "Look,
I'm sorry."
She smiled faintly. "That's OK. I never get it into the house
anymore these days."
Then she walked back onto the porch and into the house, leaving him
alone on the driveway.
It was stupid, but Tim couldn't help looking around for a moment
just to see where the paper might have gone. It had seemed so real.
But real things don't just disappear.
He couldn't linger in the driveway any longer. An elderly woman
might easily get frightened at having a stranger on her property in
the wee hours and call the police. Tim walked back to the road and
headed back the way he had come. Only he couldn't walk, he had to
break into a jog and then into a run, until it was a headlong gallop
down the hill and around the curve toward Yanceyville Road.
Why was he so afraid? The only explanation was that he had
hallucinated it, and it wasn't as if you could run away from
hallucinations. You carried those around in your own head. And they
were nothing new to him. He'd been living on the edge of madness
every since the accident. That's why he didn't go to work, didn't
even have a job anymore -- the compassionate leave had long since
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expired, replaced by a vague promise of "come back anytime, you know
there's always a job here for you."
But he couldn't go back to work, could only leave the house to go
jogging or to the grocery store or an occasional visit to Atticus to
get something to read, and even then in the back of his mind he
didn't really care about his errand, he was only leaving because
when he came back, he'd see things.
One of Diana's toys would be in a different place. Not just inches
from where it had been, but in a different room. As if she'd picked
up her stuffed Elmo in the family room and carried it into the
kitchen and dropped it right there on the floor because Selena had
picked her up and put her in the high chair for lunch and yes, there
were the child-size spoon, the Tupperware glass, the Sesame Street
plate, freshly rinsed and set beside the sink and still wet.
Only it wasn't really a hallucination, was it? Because the toy was
real enough, and the dishes. He would pick up the toy and put it
away. He would slip the dishes into the dishwasher, put in the soap,
close the door. He would be very, very certain that he had not set
the delay timer on the dishwasher. All he did was close the door,
that's all.
And then later in the day he'd go to the bathroom or walk out to get
the mail and when he came back in the kitchen the dishwasher would
be running. He could open the door and the dishes would be clean,
the steam would fog his glasses, the heat would wash over him, and
he knew that couldn't be a hallucination. Could it?
Somehow when he loaded the dishwasher he must have turned on the
timer even though he thought he was careful not to. Somehow before
his walk or his errand he must have picked up Diana's Elmo and
dropped it in the kitchen and taken out the toddler dishes and
rinsed them and set them by the sink. Only he hallucinated not doing
any such thing.
Tim was no psychologist, but he didn't need to pay a shrink to tell
him what was happening. It was his grief at losing both his wife and
daughter on the same terrible day, that ordinary drive to the store
that put them in the path of the high school kids racing each other
in the Weaver 500, two cars jockeying for position, swerving out of
their lanes, one of them losing control, Selena trying to dodge,
spinning, both of them hitting her, tearing the car apart between
them, ripping the life out of mother and daughter in a few terrible
seconds. Tim at the office, not even knowing, thinking they'd be
there when he came home from work, not guessing his life was over.
And yet he went on living, tricking himself into seeing evidence
that they still lived with him. Selena and Baby Di, the Queen Dee,
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the little D-beast, depending on what mood the two-year-old was in.
They'd just stepped out of the room. They were upstairs, they were
in the back yard, if he took just a few steps he'd see them.
When he thought about it, of course, he knew it wasn't true, they
were dead, gone, their life together was over before it was half
begun. But for that moment when he first walked into the room and
saw the evidence with his own eyes, he had that deep contentment of
knowing that he had missed them by only a moment.
Now the madness had finally lurched outside of the house, outside of
his lost and broken family, and shown him a newspaper from before he
was born, delivered by a boy from another time, on the driveway of a
stranger's house. It wasn't just grief anymore. He was bonkers.
He went home and stood outside the front door for maybe five
minutes, afraid to go in. What was he going to see? Now that he
could conjure newspapers and paperboys out of nothing, what would
his grief-broken mind show him when he opened the door?
And a worse question was: What if it showed him what he most wanted
to see? Selena standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone,
smiling to him over the mouthpiece as she cut the crusts off the
bread so that Queen Dee would eat her sandwiches. Diana coming to
him, reaching up, grabbing his fingers, saying, "Hand, hand!" and
dragging him to play with her in the family room.
If madness was so perfect and beautiful as that, could he ever bear
to leave it behind and return to the endless ache of sanity? If he
opened the door, would he leave the world of the living behind, and
dwell forever in the land of the beloved dead?
When at last he went inside there was no one in the house and
nothing had moved. He was still a little bit sane and he was still
alone, trapped in the world he and Selena had so carefully designed:
Insurance enough to pay off the mortgage. Insurance enough that if
either parent died, the other could afford to stay home with Diana
until she was old enough for school, so she didn't have to be raised
by strangers in daycare. Insurance that provided for every
possibility except one: That Diana would die right along with one of
her parents, leaving the other parent with a mortgage-free house,
money enough to live for years and years without a job. Without a
life.
Twice he had gone through the house, picking up all of Diana's toys
and boxing them, taking Selena's clothes out of the closet to give
away to Goodwill. Twice the boxes had sat there, the piles of
clothes, for days and days. As one by one the toys reappeared in
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