by Ryan Schow
When Susan learned I had an eye for talent and was multi-lingual, she made me her private assistant. My salary increased significantly, but that didn’t matter because money was never an issue. I just wanted something to do that didn’t involve saving the world.
Susan and I had an amazing friendship I never let extend beyond the borders of the publishing house. Then, one day when she found the picture of me from 1945 (I like to call it my “Killing Hitler Photo-Op”) she approached me, distraught. I’d been eating lunch, reviewing the work of an up-and-coming thriller writer, when she held the book in my face and said, “You look exactly like the girl who killed Hitler.”
“No shit,” I said, still chewing my food, not looking away from what I was reading but to give her a cursory glance of acknowledgment.
“Why is that?” she asked. She dropped the book on the table beside me, startling me, not that I showed it. I shrugged my shoulders. Kept eating, kept reading. “It’s honestly down to the tiniest detail, Lizzy.”
And it was. Because it was me in the photo.
I didn’t pick up my last check, and I changed my phone number. Some days I miss Susan so much it hurts. But I’d been struck with literary fever. Naturally, I continued my work.
Understanding the role the internet was about to take in terms of independent publishing—specifically Amazon’s massive KDP platform—I knew I had a strategic advantage I could use to help others. So from my humble abode in Manhattan, and with a tremendous amount of pride, I started The Vanderbilt Literary Group.
I hand selected ten aspiring authors, drew up contacts that favored them in every way, then worked with them to hone their talents and bring their fiction to the emerging eBook market.
That was 2011.
Two years later, seven of them were multi-millionaires despite all the screaming naysayers in the traditional publishing houses. The year after that, the entire group of ten was worth seven figures each, and two were worth eight. That’s when I decided to try my hand at writing.
I was Elizabeth Vanderbilt in name with a social security card, a bank account, amazing credit and a home, so why shouldn’t I take the title of self-published author, too? As a child, I would have been overjoyed to pen the next Twilight novel, or maybe the next Hunger Games; but as an eighty-plus year old woman in a hot AF young woman’s body, I was consumed with all those things I was lacking in my life: romance, love and steamy, steamy sex.
Without hesitation or apology, I wrote an erotica series of novellas that became my pride and joy, the perfect cherry on the top of the amazing cake that was my New York lifestyle.
Did I tell you I miss New York? OMG, I do!
Back when I first immersed myself in future Raven’s world, I couldn’t stand what I’d become. For so long I defined myself by something I didn’t do. Not yet. I thought of myself as Raven the Destroyer of Worlds, Raven the Homicidal, Supernatural Mass Murderer, but with an entire lifetime behind me now, I’ve come to see myself as Elizabeth Vanderbilt: humanitarian, time traveler, entrepreneur, writer.
Like I said, the storied life of a New Yorker.
Now I’m back in California, opening the circle of my old life again, sending my younger self back to kill Hitler, taking her place in a different kind of world, one where hopefully I can find balance between the two coasts of the United States.
Why I needed to kill Hitler is still beyond me. Maybe I had to do it. Maybe I wanted to do it. All I know is when the note came, along with the satchel of time travel devices I think of as organic marbles, I went. This sort of scared me because I knew I wasn’t Raven, but maybe I still was. When I took Hitler’s head, when I beat the African warlord to death, I knew that changing the body wasn’t necessarily stopping a pattern of behavior, it was just changing the window dressing.
This is me. I’m a justice junkie.
This junkie, however, is really, really wanting a man right now. I’ve had plenty of opportunities throughout my life, and I seized upon them a few times, but they’ve always been by choice. To date, the longest relationship I held was with a man in Italy. That lasted seven years. Six and a half of them were great, but now he’s dead and that’s a sad story for another time.
For anyone, this lifetime of mine would be more than enough, but as I near my ninetieth birthday, I honestly feel like I’m just getting started. And making the phone call I told my much younger self I was going to make, well…me finally getting laid after this monumental dry spell is just me finishing a fantasy I started more than seventy years ago.
God, I don’t even trust my memories of his good looks anymore. What I do trust, however, is the way I remember feeling with him. That’s what I want. What I need.
His cell phone number sat buried in my mind. For seven decades it resided there at the bottom of the beginning of my life until I finally dredged it up. I promised past me I was going to get us laid, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Taking a deep breath, I pick up the phone and make the call. He answers and my heart literally stills.
“Hello?”
“It’s me, Raven,” I say. “Can you talk?”
“I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you again.”
“I want to see you.”
Yeah, older me, she doesn’t mince words.
“I’ve been wanting to see you, too. But after that last call, it sort of had me worried. You said you’re in high school, that I basically…well, that I had sex with a minor.”
Ah, the conversation is a bit hazy, but I remember now. I remember telling Sebastian when he sent his girlfriend packing that he should call me. And he did. He dumped Corrine and then he called me. I was in the middle of a near psychotic emotional crisis where I gave up the goods on myself and basically acted like a rancorous bitch.
Whatever. That was forever ago.
“If that was true back then, it isn’t now. To be honest, Sebastian, you caught me at a vulnerable moment. A moment of weakness.”
“So are you over eighteen or not?” Sebastian asks, hopeful, hesitantly detached.
“Of course I am,” I say. It’s more like eighteen plus seventy-one.
What I don’t tell him, what I can’t tell him, is he’ll never get me the way he wants. He had sex with a minor when we were last together, and now—if we’re together again, and that’s the plan—he’ll be banging a senior citizen.
I stop myself from snickering, but barely. The irony is just too delicious.
The big white elephant in my room, though, is the fact that Raven is gone. She’s fleshy amber sludge flushed down a New York city drain long, long ago.
How I’m going to overcome this little detail when I see him, I’m not sure.
I’ll have to improvise.
“So…are you coming to see me, or do you want me to come see you?” he asks, his tone less guarded, more optimistic. That he even offers to come to me makes me appreciate his chivalry, something that has waned incrementally over the passing decades.
“I want to come see you,” I tell him.
“When?”
“Sometime in the next few weeks. Are you still working at the surf shop?”
“It’s just me and the owner. The rest of the staff is seasonal.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Pretty much all of us pick up part time work at restaurants. One of the guys, he’s got a Christmas tree business, and another hangs Christmas lights, so when either of them need help they hire a few of us locals on. Honestly, I’m less about the restaurant scene than the Christmas tree scene. The smell of pine trees rivals the smell of grease and half eaten food all day long.”
We chat like old friends for another half an hour or so, then I tell him after Christmas I’ll come down and see him. He makes me promise, and with a kind of easy laughter I tell him I pinkie swear, and all that gooey shit.
2
It’s two days until Christmas, I’ve done my shopping, and now it’s just me watching TV, exercising, not talking to Jacob Brantley, who’s come over twice
with his weird haircut and his ever expanding muscles (okay…) wanting to talk to either Rebecca or me.
Did I tell you I’m over him? Yeah. That ship sailed with the Titanic.
When I was young—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—Jacob was dreamy, so cute I practically hated him; now, me closing in on a hundred, guys like him, guys with no life experience, with that below-the-surface insecurity, guys who couldn’t pay for a crappy apartment in Oakland because the words “self-sufficient” weren’t even in their vocabulary, they’re not exactly my cup of tea, thank you very much. Unless they’re decent guys, of course.
Still…
Jacob knocked on the door a few days ago and he was like, “Is Rebecca here?”
I told him no, then just looked at him to the point where he was peeing his pants he was so in love with the way I looked.
“Are you…?”
“Rebecca’s sister?” I asked. He nodded. “Kind of. I’m Orianna’s daughter.”
“This place is like a halfway house for super hot chicks,” he mumbled under his breath, not knowing I’ve been all those “super hot chicks.” Well…except for Rebecca, who’s every bit as beautiful as me and all my former selves.
“That’s an interesting observation,” I’d mused.
“Every time I come over,” he said, finally holding my eyes, but with something like disdain, or resolution, “there’s someone new and beautiful and they’re always making me pay for me…being me.”
After not seeing Jacob for so long, I was less attracted to him than I was amused. But I never remember him being so glum.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what he meant.
“Never mind,” he replied, not even trying to meet me, “can you just tell Rebecca that Jacob from next door stopped by?”
I told him I would, then waited, just looking at him. When he turned to leave I cleared my throat and said, “Where are your manners?”
He turned around, slowly, almost like a scolded kid. He met my eyes and I saw it in there. The sadness. He extended a hand and half-heartedly said, “Jacob Brantley,” to which I took his hand and said, “Savannah Crawford-Swann.” His pupils dilated just the slightest little bit at the mention of my name. Specifically Savannah.
I said, “You’re the kid with the micro-wiener, right?” Okay, in my defense, it just came out. Can’t say I was proud.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he mumbled before I could apologize. “Super tiny dick. Smaller than a baby’s and just as useless.” Then, without a trace of humor, totally deadpan, he said, “If you’ll just tell Rebecca the guy with the smallest dick on planet earth stopped by, that would be amazing.”
I wanted to laugh, but I knew broken when I saw it, and he was broken. The way he cracked ding-dong jokes at his own expense, he said it like he was drugged. Like his life was so far down in the shit that when he looked up all he saw was the damp bottom of every turd ever left to rot on the hot, wet lawns of the world.
“Jacob, what’s wrong? What happened?”
“I’m sort of not having a very good day,” he said. “My grandmother just died.”
Something in my chest broke open that afternoon. I was old AF and mature enough to admit my judgment was sometimes still for crap. Maybe I should have crawled his mind. I could’ve been a lot nicer knowing this was why he seemed so glum.
“Oh my God, Jacob,” I said, stepping onto the porch and hugging him deep. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve known.”
“You couldn’t have known,” he said, resting his head on my shoulder.
That was such a sad interaction. I had to work to shield myself from the grief emanating from the deepest most vulnerable parts of him. When he let go of me, he refused to meet my eyes. I knew he was about to start crying, and maybe because of this, I felt like planet earth’s biggest butthole.
“How are your parents doing?” I asked.
“Not good.”
“First grandparent?” He nodded, turning away from me, wanting to leave before I saw him break into tears. “Yeah, I can’t imagine.”
For his sake, I said that. The truth was, I knew exactly what he was feeling, and perhaps this is why I opened myself up to him.
As a witness to future Raven’s life, I suffered the deaths of my parents, my friends and my four great loves. As a traveler into the past, I lost a man I adored for seven long years. I didn’t tell Jacob, but me and heartache were intimate companions. I understood loss.
Grief spread like disease through every weeping cell in my body for years. Decades. Entire millennia. Standing on the front porch that day as a silent observer to Jacob’s suffering, I felt the stamp death had seared upon my soul. Over the years, sorrow had slowly, methodically eaten holes in me. It’s left me in ruin before. It’ll do so again, I’m sure.
Even then, as I studied Jacob’s downcast eyes, as I recognized the oceans of pain, I couldn’t help thinking there was something about me that still felt both ragged and incomplete.
Death changes people. It’s a tugging, pulling force of darkness.
If I let myself pitch forward into Raven’s future—what could very well be my future—I could sink so deep in that mire of depression I might never come out alive. This was exactly where Jacob was and I truly felt for him. But he had a chance. Kids’ grandparents die all the time. Every day in fact. It’s the parents, the siblings and the lovers’ deaths that hit the hardest.
He’ll be okay.
“Do you want to come over for dinner tonight?” I had asked him, thinking this small act of kindness on my part might go a little ways toward pushing back the grief.
“I should really eat with my parents,” he replied. “But thank you.”
For every rotten thing I’ve ever done to him, and I did my fair share (not that he didn’t deserve it), I found myself wanting to undo them. That’s not possible, I know, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t offer an olive branch.
“I’m sorry about calling your penis a micro-wiener,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” I said. “But just so you know, Abby said it was a pretty good one. Not small at all.”
He looked up at me, his expression changed, his face showing small signs of life again. He wiped his eyes discretely, then said, “She really said that?”
I nod, give him an empathetic smile. “If you change your mind, dinner’s at six and we can always set another plate.”
When he left, I felt better about myself for not being cruel, or even hostile, but there was still that lingering part of me that felt bad that he was in pain. It’s like that sometimes, how one person’s grief leaves behind a residue that takes so much time to shake loose you almost wonder if it’s become yours as well.
Looking back on this encounter, I feel the chances are pretty good that one day I’ll end up being a decent human being. And that maybe Jacob will do the same. Hopefully in time to make Rebecca happy.
In fact, as I’m telling you this, I’m remembering something…a conversation I had forever ago with one of my mother’s many come-and-go therapists. She was a gorgeous woman named Tiffany Oaken, the only therapist to really get me. The only therapist I was fully transparent with. Sitting in her plush Bloomingdale’s couch in her lavish Palo Alto office, I admitted the pain Jacob caused me by teasing me in high school. Now I can’t help but smile.
She said it wouldn’t surprise her if later in life Jacob took a different kind of interest in me. And he has. He’s taken an interest in me—all the versions of me—and now in my brand new sister, Rebecca, as well.
Jesus in heaven, I might even approve.
3
Christmas with my family feels like an incredible blessing I’m still not sure is real. Rebecca and I watch Christmas shows (classics she hasn’t seen before that I saw first run), and we listen to Christmas music (classics she hasn’t heard before but I saw performed live), and I try not to think about all the life she missed being stuck in a tank as Dr. Heim
’s genetic slave.
Part of me is thrilled to be doing this with her. But part of me wonders, does she miss the childhood she never had? At this point, with her being in such a festive mood, I don’t dare ruin the moment with such a loaded question.
Anyway, with Christmas Eve upon us, I settle into a nice bourbon while Rebecca nurses a virgin egg nog, and then when we’re both bored enough of being at home, we cruise the neighborhoods admiring the lights and festivities. I think about Rebecca, about the daughter she doesn’t yet know she has.
Skye.
Holland has her; Quentin has her.
Skye. Jake Teller’s future wife. The girl he came to save, the miracle girl Heim gave her. One of three. The only one to survive.
Rebecca has that thing missing inside her. The emptiness she can’t quite pinpoint. She thinks it’s that she doesn’t have her real family, that she’s trying to fill it with mine. With us. But it’s not just that. She dreams. It’s just pictures and feelings, every so often a muffled cry.
I want to pull these things from her mind. Any left over bits of memories of Skye. But I can’t. I won’t. She has to know about her baby. Just not now. Not during Christmas. But eventually I’ll have to tell her. Eventually we’ll have to confront Holland.
That creep.
“You should see Christmas in New York,” I tell her, pushing my thoughts back, trying to just be with her and not all the old memories in my head. Memories that have been peeking their little faces through the darkness and into my awareness. “The lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree is something you need to experience at least once in your lifetime.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s like everything tight in you lets go and breathes at once. When I first got to New York in the early nineties, I wasn’t really scared, but I was alone. Alone in a city of millions,” I tell her with a laugh. “This wasn’t the first Christmas I’d spent alone, though. I spent the sixties in hibernation. Completely by myself. When I saw the tree first lit, as I stood breathless in wonder, it became my way of coping with solitude. That tree literally saved me.”
