it another searching look. When she glanced back at me, her smile had become thin indeed. “I suppose there’s some humor in finding a book by a writer who shares my son’s name, but I also feel a little like you’re making fun. Maybe I asked for it, getting emotional over Sherlock Holmes. Still. Not a nice thing to do, mister.” She dropped the book and turned to leave.
“Ma’am,” I said quietly. “I’m not making fun. Don’t go yet. Wait a moment.”
She hesitated with her hand on the latch. She was very pale.
“Your son is going to make it home and write a whole pile of novels. That’s the first of them. If you try and look at it now, your eyes will go funny, because Die Laughing! hasn’t been published yet. I’m not sure when it came out—1970, maybe? Go ahead. Look at it.”
She lowered her chin and stared at the book on the floor, a slick trade paperback with Tom Hanks’s stern, grieving face on the cover and Zachary Quinto in the background, on his knees, laughing convulsively with blood all over his hands.
“Oooh,” she said, and put a hand to her left temple and swayed and shut her eyes. “It makes me motion sick.” When she looked at me again, her lips were colorless and she was beginning to tremble. “What are you doing to me? Did you . . . I don’t know, give me dope? I’ve heard you can put LSD right against someone’s skin and make them ill.”
“No, ma’am.” I picked up the book and handed it to her. When she looked at it again, it was the Freas cover once more. She exhaled slowly. “When you’re not holding it, it slides out of your time and back toward mine. That’s why it makes you motion sick to look at it. But as long as you’re holding it, it’ll stay frozen in your time, and then it’s safe to read.” I flashed to a sudden memory of reading the book myself in eighth grade and said, “I think he dedicated it to you. I’m not sure. Look.”
She folded back the cover, and there it was:
To Lynn Dolan, without whom this book wouldn’t have been possible
But I had forgotten what was below the dedication:
(1926–1966)
Now it was my turn to feel motion sick. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. I forgot—I haven’t read it since I was in junior high school—”
When she lifted her chin, though, she no longer looked afraid but instead stricken with wonder. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, with her fine delicate features and great dark eyes. I could’ve just about fallen in love with her, if she weren’t more than fifty years dead.
“It’s real,” she whispered. “It’s not a bad joke. My son writes this in a few years, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. Mrs. Dolan . . . I’m so sorry . . . I shouldn’t have . . .”
“But you should have, and you did, and this is how I know you aren’t being cruel. I’m quite aware this is the last year of my life,” she said, and her lips moved in the slightest smile. “I’ve known for a few weeks. That’s what I can’t stand. Not hearing from him, and knowing I might never find out if he makes it back. How do you—” She pursed her lips.
“When I left this morning,” I said, “to do my rounds in the Bookmobile, it was December 2019. But sometimes this happens. People from the past show up to borrow books. I met a guy named Fred Mueller—”
“Fred Mueller!” she cried. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. From West Fever. Poor man.”
“Yes. He turned up in my Bookmobile a few weeks ago, and I gave him a book that won’t be out for a while. I hope he liked it. I’m pretty sure it was his kind of thing.”
“A few weeks ago?” she said. “He died ten months back. I was going to write Brad and tell him, then thought better. I only send him good news from home. Every day over there could be his last, I don’t want him to have a head full of rotten . . .” But then she fell silent and looked down at the paperback in her hands again. She peeked inside and flinched. “I can’t read the . The numbers jump out of sight when I try to focus on them.” She leafed through some of the other pages. “But I can read the rest.” Then