In Your Atmosphere (Paul McCartney/Beatles Fanfiction)

Chapter 16 - Tomorrow Never Knows

Marisol had a lot of time to think during the following week. Angela was busy with exams, and Nick had flown Margo and the twins to Portugal for a quick holiday. Grandma Bellamy had come down with a head cold and had taken to bed. Marisol spent her days running errands, walking the dogs, making tea and chicken soup, and straightening an already immaculate house, and her nights wondering about Paul. Was he thinking about her too? Was he safe and happy? Did he miss her at all, or had he given up on the two of them and moved on?

The telephone was silent. It drove her mad. There was no way for her to reach him. She didn't know where he was. She couldn't even write to him—her letters would get lost among the thousands of pieces of mail from other girls vying for his attention.

It was a ridiculous situation. She'd come to England to stop crying over Dan, and now she was leaving England heartsick over someone else. It had been foolish to think she could be intimate with someone like Paul and casually say goodbye when it was time to leave. They'd breathed each other's breath, slept in each other's arms, seen and touched every inch of each other, shared their bodies and their secrets. Leaving him was going to hurt, no doubt about it.

But when she thought back over every moment with Paul, from the time she first laid eyes on him standing in the sun in Mrs. A's front garden until she watched him on stage singing his heart out for American television cameras, she wouldn't have wanted to miss a thing.

His joie de vivre, his merry smile, his obvious delight when he sang and played music in front of an audience, the way he looked at her when they were alone, the way he listened to her with his full attention--he was irresistible. She knew it like thousands of other girls knew it. And he was everywhere.

In every newspaper, on the wireless, on show bills in the train station and shop windows, even on television. He was everywhere but with her. She had to let him go. Evidently he'd already let her go because the phone didn't ring.

Then finally it did. On Friday night, just before dinner, an odd time for Paul to call. Marisol was sitting beside the phone, flipping through a copy of House Beautiful, bored and homesick, waiting for her grandmother to wake from a nap to see what she might want for dinner. She picked up the phone on the second ring, expecting to hear one of her grandmother's friends.

"Mari, have you been listening to the news?"

It was Paul, at last. She breathed a sigh of relief. "Paul! Where are you? You sound--"

"Have you been listening to the news?" he repeated. His voice was more grave than she'd ever heard it.

Her mind reeled with possibilities, all of them bad. "No...what's going on? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, love. You should turn on the BBC."

"Is it another plane crash?"

"No, no... it's your President Kennedy. He's been shot. In Dallas."

She was rooted to the spot with the phone receiver dangling from her hand when her grandmother walked into the room and froze at the look on Marisol's face. "I heard the phone. What is it, love?"

"Paul says the president has been shot."

"What? Your president? That lovely young Irish man with the beautiful young children?"

Marisol only nodded, too stunned to say more.

"God Almighty." Grandma took the phone from her hand, replaced it, and picked it up again, trying to reach an international operator to connect to Marisol's mother in California.

All the while they flipped between BBC and ITV news reports, they tried unsuccessfully to place a transatlantic call. The ITV network interrupted the show Take Your Pick with updates on the President's condition, and his death was confirmed at 7:30 pm UK time followed by a two-minute silence.