Time After Time Read online

  Time After Time is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Grunwald Adler

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Time After Time,” words by Sammy Cahn, music by Jule Styne, copyright © 1947 (renewed) Sands Music Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Grunwald, Lisa, author.

  Title: Time after time : a novel / Lisa Grunwald.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018054342 | ISBN 9780812993431 (hardback) |

  ISBN 9780679645481 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Romance / Time Travel. |

  GSAFD: Love stories. | Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.R837 T56 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018054342

  Ebook ISBN 9780679645481

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page image: © iStockphoto.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Lynn Buckley

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1: I Know Where I Want to Go

  Chapter 2: As If the Sun Were Rolling By

  Chapter 3: It Is You!

  Chapter 4: Here We Go

  Chapter 5: Got Something Good?

  Chapter 6: Swifter, Higher, Stronger

  Chapter 7: I Met This Girl

  Chapter 8: No More Strange Women

  Chapter 9: Where Were the Real Stars?

  Part Two

  Chapter 1: The World of Tomorrow

  Chapter 2: Unfinished Business

  Chapter 3: Bits of Memory

  Chapter 4: You Read Me Peter Rabbit

  Chapter 5: Is That Play Money?

  Chapter 6: Life

  Chapter 7: I Can’t Believe You’re Here!

  Chapter 8: Lost and Found

  Chapter 9: Time

  Chapter 10: M42

  Chapter 11: Waiting for the Sun to Set

  Part Three

  Chapter 1: Ever Heard of Stonehenge?

  Chapter 2: No One’s Winning

  Chapter 3: Essential Personnel

  Chapter 4: Oh, Buddy

  Chapter 5: I Was Thinking It Looked Like Fun

  Chapter 6: What a Wife Did

  Chapter 7: From That Moment On

  Chapter 8: Real Stars

  Chapter 9: The Cascades

  Part Four

  Chapter 1: 700 Feet

  Chapter 2: Presents in the Morning

  Chapter 3: Did Santa Bring Me Coffee?

  Chapter 4: Voilà

  Chapter 5: Lexington Avenue and Forty-first

  Chapter 6: You Can’t Measure Worry

  Chapter 7: Manhattanhenge Sunset

  Chapter 8: Brat Day

  Chapter 9: Gesso

  Chapter 10: Longing

  Part Five

  Chapter 1: Surrender

  Chapter 2: One Night

  Chapter 3: Up in the Air

  Chapter 4: Empty as a Kettle

  Chapter 5: Some Welcome Home

  Chapter 6: The Dream Apartment

  Chapter 7: So Lucky to Be Loving You

  Chapter 8: If He’d Moved Away

  Chapter 9: Somewhere Else

  Chapter 10: Your Heart’s Beating So Fast

  Chapter 11: The 20th Century

  Chapter 12: All Aboard

  Chapter 13: Someone Special?

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Source Notes

  Books by Lisa Grunwald

  About the Author

  Time after time

  I tell myself that I’m

  So lucky to be loving you

  So lucky to be

  The one you run to see

  In the evening, when the day is through

  I only know what I know

  The passing years will show

  You’ve kept my love so young, so new

  And time after time

  You’ll hear me say that I’m

  So lucky to be loving you.

  —Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, 1947

  If you’re lost you can look

  And you will find me,

  Time after time.

  —Cyndi Lauper and Rob Hyman, 1983

  PART ONE

  1

  I KNOW WHERE

  I WANT TO GO

  1937

  She wasn’t carrying a suitcase, and she wasn’t wearing a coat. Those were the things that struck him when he saw her for the first time. It was just a bit after sunrise on a Sunday in early December. Joe was heading across the Main Concourse for Track 13, but there she was—no bag, no coat—standing by the west side of the great gold clock, peering into a window of the information booth. If she was traveling, then she was traveling light. If she was working at the terminal, then she was drunk, or she should have known better. No woman who worked at Grand Central would ever go near the guys in the booth at this hour, not at the end of a long night, when their shifts were finally over, and they were probably handing a bottle around.

  Then one of them must have made a pass, because she stepped back quickly, and he could hear them barking and laughing as she turned to walk away. Joe saw how young she was, and how completely out of place she looked. Why was she here at dawn, and what was she doing without an escort? Still, she didn’t seem scared by the guys as much as frustrated, even angry. Her eyes were enormous and bright green, and her lips were the same kind of hard-candy red as the stoplight on a signal lamp.

  She stepped away from the stir she’d caused but stopped walking after just a few yards. A tramp standing on the marble staircase cupped a cigarette in his hand, flicked off the ash, and gave her the eye.

  “Hey, princess,” he said. “Can you spare a grand?”

  Joe hadn’t had his coffee yet, but he moved to her side in just a few steps. Her earrings might have been real pearls, and they dangled from glittering, flame-shaped tops. But “princess”? Joe didn’t think so. Her pale-blue dress was smudged and worn, and her s
hoes seemed old and scuffed.

  “You look kind of lost,” he said to her.

  Behind her, the tramp gave Joe the finger. Another guy whistled from inside the booth.

  “I’m not lost,” the girl said. “It’s just that—”

  “What?”

  “Those men.”

  “Did you need directions?” Joe asked.

  “No,” she said. “No, I’ve been here before.”

  “Well, what did you need those guys for, then?”

  “I was only asking them what happened to the bank on the lower level. One of them said there’d been a little fire, and they all started laughing and saying things like ‘Fire down below.’ ”

  She looked at the ground, then back at Joe. “Do you think they could be drunk?”

  “Oh, they could definitely be drunk,” Joe said.

  “How rude.”

  “Want me to go chew them out?”

  She smiled. “You’d do that?” she asked.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and lifted her chin just slightly. Joe realized she wasn’t just beautiful. There was something else about her, something vivid and exciting. She made him think of the cats in the tunnels far beneath the concourse: coiled up and waiting, all energy, no telling what they were going to do.

  By now, the tramp had moved away, and the guys in the booth were leaving too—disappearing one by one down the booth’s hidden corkscrew staircase.

  “So, you know where you’re going?” Joe asked the girl.

  “I know where I want to go,” she said.

  “And where’s that?”

  “Turtle Bay Gardens.”

  That was the neighborhood near the East River, just blocks from the YMCA where Joe lived but miles beyond him in all other ways. Turtle Bay was a high-class place with pale, private houses and rich, private people. That meant the pearls were real, Joe thought. But still this young woman seemed happy, even eager, to be talking to him.

  Standing this close, he could smell her perfume: a blend of talcum and flowers and something sharper, like wood or whiskey. She was two or three inches shorter than he was. Her hair was a jumble of soft copper wires, and it fell at her neck in a cloud of curls. Her cheeks were smooth and pink, the same shade as the terminal’s Tennessee marble floors.

  “So why do you need a bank at this hour?” Joe asked. “I thought they’d caught Ma Barker.”

  She didn’t laugh at his joke. She reached into her dress pocket and pulled out a cushion of paper money. The bills weren’t green; they looked foreign. “This is all I’ve got,” she said. “I need to get it changed for American dollars.”

  “There’s a branch a few blocks away,” Joe said. “But I don’t think it opens till nine. Where are you coming from, that you don’t have cash?”

  “I do have cash. It’s just French cash.”

  “Last I heard, they hadn’t laid any tracks under the Atlantic,” Joe said. “What train were you on, anyway? And why aren’t you wearing a coat?”

  This time she laughed—a wonderful, confident laugh, deeper than he would have thought possible for someone who looked so young. But she ignored all his questions.

  “Anything else you’d like to know, mister?”

  “Didn’t mean to be rude,” he said.

  “You’re not!” she exclaimed. “You’re being so kind.”

  He told her his name, and he asked for hers.

  “Nora Lansing,” she said, extending her hand, as if he’d asked her to dance.

  Joe shook it, but hastily let it go. “Your hand’s really hot. Do you feel all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Carefully, he took her hand back, cupping it now in both of his, as if it were a butterfly. Its warmth seemed to spread from her hand into his, then traveled the length of his spine, like a current along the railroad tracks.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Lansing.”

  “Nora.”

  Nora. It was an old-fashioned name, and she did seem a little old-fashioned. Her pale-blue dress had a black collar, black cuffs, and swirly flat black buttons that looked like rolled-up licorice wheels. What Joe knew about women’s clothing could fit inside an olive, but he knew the dress looked wrong somehow.

  She leaned in closer to him.

  “So, Joe, let me ask you this,” she said. “Is there any chance you could walk me home?”

  “To Turtle Bay Gardens? What about the bank?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t need to go there, see, if you could walk me home.”

  Joe looked up at the gold clock and then back at Nora. “I wish I could,” he said. “Honestly. But I work here, and I’m late for a meeting, and right after that, I start my shift.”

  The brightness in her eyes dimmed a bit. Joe realized, with some amazement, that he suddenly felt it was his obligation to bring the brightness back.

  “What if I find a cop to walk you?” he asked.

  “Oh, you’re so nice,” Nora said. “But I can do that myself. I should have done it in the first place.”

  By now the Main Concourse was starting to bubble and steam with the morning rush: workers and travelers in seemingly random motion, except for the subtle dance steps that kept them from bumping into each other. No one stopped, unless it was at the clock, the ticket windows, or the blackboard where Bill Keogh stood on a ladder and wrote out the times and track numbers in lemon-yellow chalk.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Joe asked Nora.

  “I’m sure.”

  She circled her left wrist with her right hand. For just a moment, she looked confused, and he hesitated, reluctant to leave her. Then she said, resolutely: “Go ahead, Joe. You don’t want to be late.”

  They walked off in opposite directions, and Joe checked the time as he hurried across the concourse. When he stopped to look back, he was half embarrassed, half thrilled, to see that Nora had done the same thing. Their eyes met the way their hands had: filled with heat and surprise. Finally, Joe turned to leave and, noting the time once more, he started to run.

  2

  AS IF THE SUN WERE

  ROLLING BY

  1937

  The meeting Joe was heading for had nothing to do with Grand Central, even though everyone who attended it had a job somewhere in the terminal. This was a prayer meeting run by a porter named Ralston Crosbie Young, also known as the Red Cap Preacher. Like virtually all the Red Caps, Ralston was abidingly polite. He had been carrying passengers’ bags and giving directions since the terminal’s opening in 1913. But for years now, at least three days a week, he had also been leading prayer meetings in an empty train car on Track 13. Joe had been born and raised a Catholic, and he attended church now only when he went with his family in Queens. Ralston’s meetings were more his style. “Listen, man,” Ralston frequently said. “God has a plan for your life.”

  There were several dozen regulars, like Joan, who gave manicures at DeLevie’s and always had an eye out for Joe. There were Wallace and Delroy, Red Caps like Ralston who looked incomplete when they took off their hats. There was Doug from the Oyster Bar kitchen, whose shoes scraped the floor with the bits of shells that were caught in his soles; Tommy, the kid who swept the barbershop; and Mr. Walters, who wore a suit and tie, so no one ever quite got around to asking him what he did.

  Joe wasn’t a regular, but the group always seemed to welcome him. He was thirty-two now, but he’d been seventeen when he’d gotten his first job at the terminal, and even people who hadn’t known him for years usually felt they had. In some ways, he still looked like a kid. His mouth, slightly crooked, always seemed to be smiling, no matter what his mood. His ears were mismatched: one straight, the other tipped like an elf’s. And though his thick black hair was parted along the tidiest line, some C-shaped locks were always flopping down on his forehead. Despite hi
s youthfulness, though, Joe seemed sturdy in every way. His face was broad and Irish; more friendly than handsome, but steadfast, like his body.

  Ralston had already started the meeting when Joe arrived, but he stopped, pointed a slender brown finger at him, and said, “Hoped I’d see you this morning.”

  Joe pointed back at him, smiling. “Hoped I’d see you too.”

  Ralston moved some newspapers from the seat beside him.

  “Here’s your place,” he said quietly, and Joe sat.

  Joe liked going to Ralston’s meetings now and then, but he’d rarely missed the ones that were held on December 5 and January 6. These were special meetings because they took place on special mornings. Clear weather permitting, these were the two mornings in the year when you could stand on certain side streets and, looking west to east, see the rising sun line up exactly with the street grid of Manhattan. The same thing happened on two summer evenings, looking west at sunset. During these sunrises and sunsets, the skyscrapers of Manhattan framed the sun exactly the way Joe had heard the towering rocks at Stonehenge in England did.

  Not many people knew about these special days, but those who did waited for them. They were sometimes called the Manhattan Solstices because—due to the particular angle of the New York streets—they occurred several weeks before and after the true winter and summer solstices. In the terminal, they had always been called Manhattanhenge, and a Manhattanhenge sunrise was one of the few things that could bring even old-timers to work at dawn. If you were game to stand out in the cold and dark, you would first see the sky start to lighten, then a small halo on the horizon that slowly grew taller, as if an angel were rising from the edge of the world. Finally, the sun would appear, and the light would come coursing down the street.