by Joe Mahoney
She shifted her gaze from Humphrey to me and back again. She shook her head and opened her mouth but nothing came out. She raised her hands in the air, allowed them to drop and dangle limply at her sides, then brought them back up again. “What… what?” she said.
At her side, Ridley was holding onto her helmet looking more amused than anything else. In fact, he looked genuinely happy. Everything else about the situation notwithstanding, that was good to see.
“Hello, Katerina. Ridley.” Humphrey’s professional manner contrasted starkly with his appearance: unshaven, his suit in tatters.
Katerina ignored Humphrey utterly. She had never been one for social niceties. “Barnabus, what do you think you’re doing?”
I assumed the offensive. “Katerina, you know how I feel about motorcycles, yet you continue to ride them willy-nilly. And you with a boy to raise. What if….” I couldn’t go on. There was more emotion in my voice, in my gut, than I had reckoned with. What I was saying was true—truer than I could possibly convey to my sister.
Katerina either didn’t register the emotion in my voice or didn’t care. “So you’re stealing it? Barnabus, I could have you arrested!”
“You would arrest your own brother?” Humphrey asked.
“Look. I need to be someplace and I have an errand to run first.”
“Oh? What a shame,” Humphrey said. “And here we’ve just come for a visit.”
I regarded Katerina suspiciously. She was dressed rather more elegantly than usual—a clean pair of blue jeans, her spiffiest black leather jacket, and black ankle-high boots polished to a high sheen.
“You can’t just show up on people’s doorsteps, steal their motorcycles, and expect to be invited in,” she said.
“Mom’s got a date,” Ridley announced.
Katerina turned and punched him in the arm, not gently. “That isn’t anyone’s business.”
“A date.” This information had never come out in the two years since she’d died. Ridley had certainly never mentioned it. I’d always assumed she’d been on her way to a party with some friends, or a night out with her employees from the music store she owned.
Katerina placed one arm on a hip. “Do you have a problem with that?”
It was no business of mine, of course. Just the same, her husband Jerry had been a friend of mine. Yes, he had his share of problems: he could be reckless, his jokes weren’t particularly funny, and he’d been missing for over two years, but I could see no reason to hold any of that against him. “What about–”
“Jerry’s gone,” Katerina said. “And he’s not coming back.”
“That’s fine—” I began, but Katerina cut in, building up steam as she went.
“You can’t come here and steal my motorcycle and then lecture me on how to live my life. You of all people! Living all alone out there in the middle of nowhere, barely able to look after yourself. Look at you. You haven’t shaved in days, your clothes are filthy; when’s the last time you even combed your hair?”
“I—”
“You probably don’t even own a comb.” Katerina looked smug. She knew she was right.
Ridley was doing his best not to laugh. Humphrey had busied himself cleaning a spot on the seat of Katerina’s bike. He spat on a pudgy thumb and—
“Don’t you dare touch that!” Katerina snapped.
“Now, Katerina—” Humphrey began.
“Shut up,” she said. “I need to go. I’m late.”
“For a very important date,” Ridley added playfully.
Yet again I marvelled at the difference in the lad. If he knew that in less than an hour he would effectively be orphaned, he would not be joking. “Katerina, look. You can’t go out tonight.”
“I bloody well can–”
I drew myself up to my full six foot two, something my sister, although an imposing creature herself, could not hope to match. “You can’t. Well, you can. But you can’t take your motorcycle with you.”
“Barney—”
“Why isn’t this date of yours picking you up, anyway?”
“He doesn’t own a car. Again, not that it’s any of your business.”
“You could take a cab.”
“I’ll do no such thing. I wish I could say it’s been nice to see you, but it hasn’t. At all.” Katerina strode forward and grasped the bike firmly.
But Doctor Humphrey had hold of it too and refused to let go.
Katerina tried to wrest it from him. “Peter. Give—me—my—bike!”
Humphrey was no match for a female Wildebear. One good wrench of the handlebars sent him flying unceremoniously onto his backside. Humphrey picked himself up like a cat pretending that falling down was something it had meant to do all along.
“I don’t know what’s got into the two of you,” Katerina said. “Why are you even here?”
The motorcycle bounced slightly as she straddled it. She turned the ignition. The vehicle that would soon kill her stone cold dead ignited with a devil’s roar.
I had never expected to see my sister alive again. Suddenly here she was before me—and absolutely furious with me. Our reunion left much to be desired. But I loved Katerina for her anger and her vitality and the mere fact that she was alive.
The moment was upon me though. If I let her go, this would be the last time I would ever see her fully alive. Everything would unfold as it had before. Possibly we had already altered events sufficiently to save her, but I couldn’t take that chance. So I didn’t even hesitate to do what I did next. As Katerina was busy strapping her helmet on, I stepped in, grabbed the keys, and turned the bike off.
“Barnabus,” Katerina said, and then, “Barnabus!” as I pitched the keys as hard as I could into the neighbour’s backyard, hoping they would get lost in the jungle somebody called landscaping.
“All right, Barney, that’s the last straw.” Katrina was rolling up her sleeves as she came off the bike as if she meant to go twelve rounds with me.
“Kat, I’m trying to save your life.”
“Good thing you brought a doctor with you. Someone’s gonna need to save yours.”
“Kat, if you get on that motorcycle you’re going to die—I know it!”
“You don’t know that.”
“In point of fact he does,” Doctor Humphrey said, evidently reconsidering his stance on upsetting my sister.
“If it’s my date you’re worried about—”
“We don’t care about your date,” I said. “We care about you.”
Humphrey pulled out his wallet. “I have something I think you should see.”
Reluctantly, she followed us to a streetlight. Humphrey showed her the date on his driver’s license, issued one year in the future.
“You would not believe what we’ve been through,” I told her.
“I don’t know, boys. This is an awfully elaborate joke. And not particularly funny.”
“It’s no joke, Katerina,” I told her.
She searched my face, and then burst out laughing at what must have been an uncharacteristically solemn expression. And with that all her anger seemed to dissipate. “All right, I’m touched by your concern. We’ll go inside. I’ll call my date and tell him I’ll be late.”
I let my breath out, relieved. “We’ll call a cab.”
“Ridley, show the boys in. Pour them something to drink.”
“What do they want?”
“Ask them! Tell them what’s in the fridge.” Katerina kicked the kickstand out from under the Victor or the Vincent or whatever it was called and started wheeling it back to her driveway. “But you’re going to have to help me find my keys later.”
“I make no promises,” I told her, following Ridley up the driveway, past the cedar bush to the front door. Ridley held the door open as I entered.
Behind us the motorcycle r
oared to life.
“Wildebear!” Humphrey cried out.
I rushed back down the steps as fast as I could only to see Katerina roaring off down the street on her bike. Ridley joined me at the bottom of the steps. I was horrified to see him holding onto his mother’s helmet.
“She wears a spare key around her neck,” he told me, smiling smugly.
XIII
A Matter of Life and Death
Humphrey and I paced the driveway waiting for a cab that was taking way too damned long. Ridley stood with his hands in his pockets regarding us quizzically from beneath his long bangs. One of Katerina’s two cats rubbed up against my feet, seeking affection I was too upset to offer. I glanced at Sebastian. It was past nine o’clock. The accident had occurred at a quarter past nine. We had little more than ten minutes to get Katerina off that bike.
Ridley shook his hair out of his eyes and said, “She’s never had an accident, you know.”
“Didn’t she drive into the garage once?” Humphrey asked. “I distinctly remember hearing about a sprained wrist. And what about the time she skidded on the wet pavement?”
“Well, aside from that,” Ridley conceded.
“And the time she was just sitting on it and went to get off and forgot to put the kickstand down,” I said. “Banged herself up pretty good that time.”
“Don’t forget the time she burnt herself on the exhaust,” Doctor Humphrey said. “I seem to remember giving her advice on how to treat a bad burn.”
“Okay, yes, well aside from all that she’s never had an accident,” Ridley insisted. “I don’t know why you’re all so worried.”
I thought about just levelling with the boy. He was a smart kid. Clearly he took after the Wildebear side of the family. But he already thought of me as eccentric. To insist that I had somehow travelled back in time to save his mother’s life—and perhaps his own—would only upgrade his impression of me from eccentric to mentally ill.
“The important thing is we’re trying to help your mother,” I told him. “Do you really think we’d come all this way just for some silly practical joke?” I regretted the words the instant they were out of my mouth.
“Oh, you mean like the time you paid a mechanic to take the bike apart and then you hid the pieces all over the house? You know how long it took my mother to put it back together again? She’s still missing a few parts, you know. If you really wanted to help mom you’d find the missing bits. A wheel could come off any time.”
Damn it—Ridley knew me too well.
A cab turned onto High Street and meandered its way infuriatingly slowly up the road toward Katerina’s house. Humphrey and I met it half way up the street.
“Good luck,” Ridley shouted after us.
We invaded the cab before it could come to a full stop. “Samuel’s Coffee House on Water Street,” I barked at the cabbie. “As fast as you possibly can. It’s literally a matter of life and death.”
The cabbie—Jack Poirier, according to the license strapped to the back of the passenger street—regarded me placidly in the rear view mirror. Even in my distress I could not help but marvel at the thick black unibrow that loomed over his eyes like a well-fed caterpillar.
“Life and death,” he repeated in a pleasant baritone. “Got it.”
He placed his Nissan Rouge into drive, and began puttering his way down the street as though driving a hearse in a funeral procession.
I stared at him in disbelief. “Can’t you go any faster? I’m telling you—there’s a life at stake here!”
“Speed trap at the bottom of the street.” He fumbled around for something in the pocket of his plaid fleece jacket. It turned out to be a yellow lollipop. He ripped the plastic wrapper off the lollipop with his teeth, spit it out onto the seat beside him, and plopped the lollipop in his mouth.
Sure enough, seconds later we passed a police cruiser partially concealed in a church parking lot. It ignored us. Safely past, Jack turned onto Victoria and stepped on the gas. I clutched Katerina’s helmet tightly in my lap feeling like I could barely breathe as the abrupt acceleration forced me back into my seat. Worse, the air freshener in the cab was more dreadful than the lingering traces of vomit it failed to conceal. Not only that, but I was coming down with a cold. And of course there was the matter at hand.
According to Ridley, Katerina had gone to the liquor store in the Waterfront Mall to fetch a bottle of Beaujolais before her date. There wasn’t enough time to intercept her there. Humphrey and I had no choice but to head straight to the accident site. Our plan was simple: prevent the pedestrian responsible for Katerina’s death from stepping in front of her motorcycle by whatever means necessary. Afterward, I would wave her down and force her to wear her helmet if I had to strap it on her head myself.
Rain drops splattered against the windshield. Jack turned on the wipers.
“Sebastian, how we doing for time?” I asked.
“Katerina’s accident will occur in three minutes and thirty-seven seconds,” Sebastian told me.
“Dammit,” I said. “Not enough time.”
“We’ll make it,” Humphrey assured me.
I stared out the window at the rain. “Doctor, if we do manage to save my sister—”
“When we save her.”
“When we save her it’s going to change things. I worry that—I mean, it would be unthinkable not to try to save her, but what about…” I trailed off, not sure I wanted to pursue the thought.
“You’re worried about changing the future for the worse,” Humphrey said. “It’s true, there’s a lot we don’t know. But we do know this. That when we save her, Ridley won’t go to live with you, he won’t find the book, and he won’t go through the gate.”
“And neither you nor I will go through the gate after him,” I said.
“Exactly. Katerina will be alive and Ridley will be safe—all good. But I might still find the book at a used bookstore and give it to Joyce for Christmas. Joyce might bring it with her when we visit you in February. She could still leave it in your guest bedroom, where someone else might find it. Iugurtha could well get her clutches on someone else. You maybe.”
I dismissed the notion with a wave of my hand. “So long as she leaves Ridley alone. But…”
“But what?”
I was thinking about Sweep, and Half Ear, and the rest of the T’Klee. Iugurtha had taken Ridley to help save Sweep’s people from the Necronians.
“Forget it,” I said. My responsibilities extended to Ridley and my sister and that was all.
Jack was staring at us in the rear-view mirror, his unibrow deeply furrowed. We were approaching a set of traffic lights. They were red, and Jack wasn’t slowing down.
“Watch out!” I cried.
Jack slammed on the brakes. Tires screeched beneath us. We lurched forward as far as our seatbelts would allow. A mini-van shot through the intersection precisely where we would have been had we not stopped in time.
“A little too close for comfort,” Humphrey remarked.
Jack looked left, right, put the Nissan in gear, and turned left on Granville through the red lights.
“Hey!” I cried.
Jack opened his window a crack, threw his lollipop out, and rolled the window back up. “I get it,” he said. “You’re time travellers. On a mission to save someone. Good thing you found me.”
The speed limit on Granville is forty. Jack was soon doing one hundred.
“I’ve been driving in this town a long time,” he said. “That’s how I know it takes five minutes to get to Samuel’s from High Street. According to your watch, you need to be there in less than four. Lucky for you I can get you there in three.”
He caught up to a red Sienna, slowed briefly, then stepped on the gas and passed it. Next up was a Jeep. Granville Road only has two lanes, and there is no shoulder on the right hand side.
Oncoming traffic prevented him from passing on the left. To my astonishment, Jack passed the Jeep on the right. This meant driving on lawns.
“You’re nuts,” I observed, my fingers claws in the upholstery beside me.
Jack chuckled. “This from a man claiming to be from the future.”
He deked around a telephone pole before manoeuvring bumpily back onto asphalt.
“We do need to get there alive,” Humphrey pointed out.
“Without killing anyone in the process,” I added emphatically.
“Shut up,” Jack said, “and hang on.”
I shut up and hung on as he negotiated what should have been an impossible right turn onto Green Street without slowing down. I braced myself for an unpleasant collision with the YMCA; we missed it by that much. Turning left onto Central, at least two wheels left the ground. The light was with us at Notre Dame, allowing us to roar down Central at something resembling the speed of sound. The old post office was a blur on the left, Linkletter’s restaurant a flash on the right, and then we arrived at our destination in what I couldn’t deny had to be record time.
Jack placed the Nissan in park and turned to face us. “That’ll be ten dollars if you please. Except you don’t have any money, do you?”
He was right—I hadn’t taken any with me to C’Mell. Humphrey shrugged, indicating he was in the same predicament.
“How did you know?” I asked.
Jack shook his head sadly. “Time travellers never do.”
Paying Jack was the least of our concerns. Humphrey and I reached for the door handles simultaneously but Jack was too fast for us. Every lock in the car clicked shut, trapping us in the Nissan.
“Fifty-seven seconds until Katerina arrives,” Sebastian said.
“I don’t have time for games,” I told Jack. “You said it yourself: we’re on a mission.”
I stared at him intently, willing him to open the doors. Instead, his eyes seemed to merge into one beneath his single brow. I gasped and drew back.
Jack’s eyes returned to normal. He smiled. “Tell you what. Give me that talking watch of yours and we’ll call it even.”
