TWENTY-FIVE

      Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

      And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

      And yet … today I am granted such a chance.

      Livy Marston does not call as she promised she would. She shows up at our front door at nine a.m. wearing faded Levi’s and a white blouse tied at the waist, sapphire earrings a shade darker than her eyes, and a silk scarf in her hair. On the street behind her, a midnight blue Fiat Spyder convertible idles like a resting cat.

      “I’m kidnapping you,” she says. “If it’s all right with Annie.”

      It takes a moment to center myself in the present. “Kidnapping me to where?”

      She smiles. “It’s a surprise. If you thought about it, you’d know. But don’t think. Today is a right-brain day.”

      Five minutes after I clear it with Mom and Annie, I’m clinging to the passenger door of the Spyder as Livy races up the highway, cutting in and out of traffic like a Grand Prix driver. She borrowed the car from a friend of her mother’s, and we both know why. Our senior year in high school, after she received some honor or other, Livy was given a Fiat convertible much like this one by her father. The night they brought it back from the dealership in New Orleans, she and I drove across half the state with the top down, drinking beer and reveling in the promise of futures unbound by visible limits. We spent many of our best moments in that car, and she has apparently decided to relive some of them. I’ve fantasized about scenes like this more than once, but there is something eerie about tearing up the sun-drenched highway toward the edge of town twenty years after we did it the first time, and in the same car.

      As the Spyder crosses the westbound bridge into Louisiana, Maude Marston’s words echo in my mind: You ruined my daughter’s life, you bastard. I want to ask Livy outright what her mother was referring to, but Livy always had a way of being elliptical where serious matters were concerned.

      “What did you mean, today is a right-brain day?” I ask.

      She laughs. “I mean today everything is off limits.” Her voice has deepened slightly over the years. “Everything except experience.”

      “Livy, I have some questions.”

      “You mean like why are my husband and I separated? Why did you and I really split up in college? Why did my father try to destroy yours?”

      “Yes. Little things like that.”

      “We’ll get to all that. I have questions too. But first we give ourselves a little of the past. A little innocence.” She grants me a brilliant smile. “We owe ourselves that.”

      At the foot of the bridge she pulls into the parking lot of the liquor store we patronized during high school. Joking that it’s finally legal for us to shop here, she goes inside and returns with two chilled bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé. Handing them to me, she takes a small ice chest from the trunk and sets it on the backseat. Inside, I see French bread, cheese, grapes, peeled shrimp, and chocolate chip cookies.

      She crosses the four-lane and whips the Spyder onto Deer Park Road, the same route I drove yesterday with Frank Jones. Only Livy takes the gently curving blacktop at ninety miles per hour. She was always an excellent driver, aggressive but in control. When the road jumps onto the levee, she has to slow to seventy, but the wind still whips through our hair, keeping the sun from frying us. I serve her wine in a styrofoam cup, and when she drinks, the wine clings to the same fine golden down that dusted her upper lip when she was seventeen. But she is not seventeen now. And the questions hanging between us cannot be ignored.

      She pulls a pair of Ray-Bans down from the visor and slips them on, snapping me straight back to Sarah’s funeral. I didn’t notice Livy at the church service, but later, at the graveside, I saw her standing at the edge of the crowd, a hauntingly beautiful apparition in a black dress and sunglasses, unmistakable even after twenty years.

      “It meant a lot that you came to the funeral,” I say above the whine of the engine. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more than say hello.”

      She shakes her head and touches my arm. “I had to come. And I didn’t expect any more than that.”

      At the end of the levee she stops, and we switch seats for the return leg. Somewhere in the middle of the empty cotton fields, she intertwines the fingers of her left hand in my right. I don’t look at her, but I feel a sudden tingling, as though I’ve put my hand through a portal in time and felt a charge of energy pour through. On some level, acceding to this intimacy seems a betrayal of myself, but it also presages a deeper connection,