Strange Highways

small. Finding any particular volume would not have taken long. In fact, she took no time at all to search, because she knew what she wanted.
     They stopped in the fiction aisle, a narrow space with books shelved eight feet high on both sides. She directed the beam of light at the floor, and the colorful spines of the books seemed magically luminescent in the backwash.
     "Promise to believe," she said, and her beautiful eyes were huge and solemn.
     "Believe what?"
     "Promise."
     "All right."
     "Promise to believe.
     "I'll believe."
     She hesitated, took a deep breath, and began. "In the spring of '73, when you were graduating from County High, I was at the end of my sophomore year. I'd never had the nerve to approach you. I knew you'd never noticed me - and now you never would. You were going away to college, you'd probably find a girl there, and I'd never even see you again."
     The fine hairs on the nape of Joey's neck prickled, but he did not yet know why.
     She said, "I was depressed, feeling like the nerd of nerds, so I lost myself in books, which is what I always do when I have the blues. I was here in the library, in this very aisle, looking for a new novel ... when I found your book."
     "My book?"
     "I saw your name on the spine. Joseph Shannon."
     "What book?" Puzzled, he scanned the shelves.
     "I thought it was someone else, a writer with your name. But when I took it off the shelf and checked the back of the jacket, there was a picture of you."
     He met her eyes again. Those mysterious depths.
     She said, "It wasn't a picture of you as you are now, tonight - but as you will be in about fifteen years. Still ... it was recognizably you."
     "I don't understand," he said, but he was beginning to think that he did.
     "I looked at the copyright page, and the book was published in 1991."
     He blinked. "Sixteen years from now?"
     "This was in the spring of '73," she reminded him. "So at that time I was holding a book that wouldn't yet be published for eighteen years. On the jacket it said that you'd written eight previous novels and that six of them had been best-sellers."
     The not unpleasant prickling sensation on the nape of his neck increased.
     "I took the book to the checkout desk. When I passed it to the librarian with my card, when she took it into her hands ... it wasn't your book any more. Then it was a novel by someone else, one that I'd read before, published in '69."
     She raised the flashlight, directing the beam at the shelves behind him.
     "I don't know if it's too much to ask," she said, "but maybe it's here again tonight, here again for just one moment on this night of all nights."
     Overcome by a growing sense of wonder, Joey turned to look at the stacks where the flashlight focused. He followed the beam as it slipped along one of the shelves.
     A small gasp of delight escaped Celeste, and the beam came to a halt on a book with a red spine.
     Joey saw his name turned on edge, in silver-foil letters. Above his name was a title in more silver foil: Strange Highways.
     Trembling, Celeste slid the book out from between two other volumes. She showed him the cover, and his name was in big letters at the top, above the title. Then she turned the book over.
     He stared in awe at the photo of himself on the dust jacket. He was older in the photograph, in his middle thirties.
     He was familiar with his appearance at that age, for he had already lived five years past it in his other life. But he looked better in this photograph than he had really looked when he'd been thirty-five: not prematurely aged, not dissipated by booze, not dead in the eyes. He appeared to be prosperous too - and best of all, he looked like a happy man.
     His appearance in the photograph, however, was not a fraction as important as who was shown with him. It was a group portrait. Celeste was at his side, also fifteen years older than she was now - and two children, a beautiful girl of perhaps six and a handsome boy who might have been eight.
     Unexpectedly filled with tears that he could barely repress, heart hammering with a wild joy that he had never known before, Joey took the book from her.
     She pointed to the words under the photograph, and he had to blink furiously