Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  Once when Anna was seven, old enough to see and hear everything, she watched in horror at the suddenly changed face of her father as he sat with his pre-dinner beer, waiting for Anna’s mother to get home from the high school where she taught math. Anna looked at the clock. It was ten minutes after four. This was her mother’s day to stay late for the math club, so she wouldn’t be home until 4:45. That was too much time. She heard her father take three big gulps of his Heineken, an acceptable beer for the vice principal of the junior high school in the next town. The empty bottle tinged on the glass coaster.

  “I asked you a question. What are you smiling at?”

  Patrick was thirteen, skinny and hard. He had just walked into the house, only to be met full throttle by his father. To Anna, Patrick normally looked huge, towering over her when the two of them were home alone, arguing over the TV or who should get the last of the pizza. But in relation to her father, he looked like a stick, a milkweed that could be snapped in half.

  Patrick tried to stand his ground, tried not to move his body in a way that would reveal anything. He clenched his backpack.

  “I was thinking about school, about how Mr. Patterson said he liked my history project. That’s all.” He was in eighth grade and the very worst of things had not yet happened. Patrick took a tentative step toward the hallway to their bedrooms.

  Anna looked at the clock. 4:20. Time had slowed to a tortuous crawl. She heard the living room clock ticking in a slow, watery drip. Patrick shifted his backpack minutely.

  “I told you yesterday to clean your room. I don’t suppose you remember that. I decided to give you a hand. Why don’t you go take a look?” said their father.

  Anna knew this was a trick; it had all the sounds of a trick, of a coyote making encouraging pup sounds to a housecat before it snapped its neck.

  Patrick backed away from the living room and only turned when he was in the hallway. His footsteps quickened as he neared his bedroom. Anna followed him. At first she couldn’t see into his room because Patrick’s body blocked her sight. Then she ducked under his arm and saw.

  All of Patrick’s posters had been ripped off the walls and torn up. His soccer trophies from middle school had been ripped from their bases; everything, everything was piled high in the middle of his room, as if it had been a toxic dumpsite. Patrick’s alarm clock was somewhere under the heap of his life. Anna could no longer see the time.

  “I’ll help you. I can help you fix it,” Anna said as she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the room. She had to keep him in the room until their mother got home. Patrick’s face reddened; the ruby tint started on his neck and traveled to his cheeks.

  What else could Anna do? She could ordinarily distract Patrick or her father, but this was different, this was the first time that something had gone too far. She heard the creak of her father’s chair and his crisp steps down the hall. Patrick and Anna stood on either side of the wrecked pile of her brother’s possessions, the shreds of paper, the punctured soccer ball, the sheets balled up with a jumble of running shoes. Their father stopped in the doorway and leaned one hip into the doorframe. He crossed his arms and he smiled. Anna worried that she’d freeze, as she did in her dreams when alligators chomped at her heels.

  “So how do you like it? Next time I tell you to do something, do it. Don’t make me go to all this trouble.”

  Patrick vibrated with rage. “I would have cleaned it. What did you want me to do? Make my bed? Pick up the clothes off the floor? I’ve seen you drop clothes on the floor.”

  And that was all their father had been waiting for—the opening, the excuse.

  “Don’t tell me about my clothes, my bedroom. Because this is my house and if I tell you to clean your room, you’re going to clean your goddamn room.”

  “I’m not cleaning this,” said Patrick.

  “What did you say to me? What did you say?” Their father stepped into the room and grabbed Patrick by the front of his shirt. The backpack hissed to the floor.

  “Daddy!” said Anna. “I’ll clean his room.”

  But neither of them heard her. Their father lifted Patrick up against the wall until the tips of his running shoes dangled within inches of the floor.

  “What did you say to me?” His face was unrecognizable, screwed up into a jumble of popping veins, red flesh and lip spittle.

  Anna sprang on her father, pulling at his arm and with one powerful toss, Anna landed on the floor and slid into the baseboard. Thrown away, that’s what it had felt like, tossed away.

  Anna heard the front door open. A gust of air broke the vacuum seal in the bedroom. She pushed up and wiped tears off her face, a bit of snot from her lip.

  “Where is everyone?” their mother yelled in her best teacher voice, trained to project to the farthest reaches.

  “Mommy, we’re here. We’re in Patrick’s room,” said Anna, jutting her chin out at her father.

  Their father released his grip on Patrick and turned toward his wife’s clear voice. The presence of their mother had always been the determining factor, had always brought the father back from his train wreck of rage with Patrick. But the power of her presence was diluting with each new eruption.

  In the year that Patrick entered high school, he grew four inches over the summer and into the fall. He grew so steadily and so quickly that Anna was sure she could hear him grow at night. She was sure his new size would crush the house with his height, with his size twelve feet, and the lower register of his voice. She no longer smelled the boy smell in his bedroom that was like the boys in her fourth-grade class. She felt the snake of fear travel across her neck with her brother’s new scent. She had watched enough National Geographic specials to know what happened when a male came of age in a pack. The old bull, the elk, the alpha male, drove off the young buck. Their father needed no more excuse to drive Patrick out than to catch a scent of this new creature that had replaced the boy.

  Anna had learned to bake cookies, and she had permission from her mother to bake them by herself. She was, after all, old enough to do such things. She would quickly throw together a batch of chocolate chip cookies, confident that the smell would drug her father and all of them into a sense of confused comfort. She would run to the basement and dig out the summer fan, plug it into the outlet near the kitchen door so that the sense of love and chocolate would be dense and powerful in every corner of the house.

  She had to camouflage her brother, douse the house to cover the dangerous man smells that would eviscerate the last bit of safety that remained for Patrick. Then Anna noticed something strange; her mother began to cook also, stuffing her family with aromatic roast meats, bluefish, and French cheeses until even Anna could not force herself to take another bite. The mother and daughter worked in wordless tandem. Each night at dinner, the father would glare suspiciously at his son, his nostrils flaring to catch wind of something, then he would fall into the delirious pleasures of his food.

  Patrick had stopped speaking at dinner and was in between sports so that he had no excuse but to be home. Fall soccer was over and wrestling season wouldn’t start for two weeks. As they finished a calming bread pudding, dusted heavily with cinnamon, the phone rang. Teachers and principals took calls at all times; it could be for her mother, in which case it would be a parent of a student who was presently sobbing over her math homework. If it was for her father, it was a parent who wanted to negotiate about a child’s suspension. Their mother picked up the beige wall phone and the family watched to determine which educational calamity was at stake.

  “Alice? What’s wrong? Oh, dear God. Yes, of course I’ll come.” Alice was their mother’s best friend, another teacher at the high school. The family waited for the specifics of the bad news.

  “That was Alice. Her husband has been in some sort of accident, she didn’t say what exactly, something about the loading dock at the paper mill.” She looked at her family, looked one second longer at her daughter. “Is everyone OK here? I’ve got to go. Alice
is all alone at the hospital.” She put on her coat. Anna felt a prickle of fear starting in her knees. “Take Patrick with you, Mommy. He could drive. You look too upset,” said Anna. And from the look on her mother’s face, the pause, the dark cloud that ran across her eyes, Anna understood for the first time that her mother knew everything that happened when she left the house. That she was willingly leaving her daughter to be a waifish referee.

  Her father clattered his knife to his plate. “He’s only got a learner’s permit, for Christ sake. Mary Louise, it’s better for you to drive yourself. The kids have their homework. You don’t know how long this will take.” Who could argue with this?

  Their mother had her coat on, car keys in hand, on her way to her best friend’s urgent need, and Anna knew they couldn’t stop her; she couldn’t refuse to go. Her mother paused at the door.

  “Charles, I’ll call you from the hospital. I’ll let you know how things are.”

  This was code for letting them all know that she was going to check on them. But it was not enough, not nearly enough.

  Chapter 16

  She wondered if they had been reported missing back in Massachusetts and what calamity had resulted from their disappearance. Who would miss her? Not Steve, her ex-husband. Her mother would, deeply and inconsolably. But not her brother, the coma patient; of all of them, he now had the simplest problem—he simply had to sleep. Even his breath was assisted by a respirator. Her friend Harper, her travel buddy, confidante, and late-night margarita drinker, might miss her, but she had gone directly from their Celtic trip to Peru. There was not a chance that Harper would give two thoughts to any calamity with Anna. Her other buddy from law school, Jasper, lived in L.A., specializing in entertainment law. So if he did miss her, there would be messages on her phone machine, curious at first, teasing, then petulant, then hurt. He would eventually take it personally and wonder if he’d done something wrong. Her friends knew that she had been traveling; they’d eventually think she had extended her trip. So it would only be her mother and Alice who knew that she and Joseph had fallen off the grid.

  Anna was on her own to figure out something that appeared incomprehensible. She didn’t know the rules of time travel. Is six weeks in the past equivalent to six weeks in her time? Could she get back to her time without anyone noticing because only five seconds had elapsed? Did time bend and whoosh round like a piece of seaweed pulled by the tides? She was beginning to think that what she had always understood to be true was only partly true or not true at all. She’d seen a five-year-old Joseph struggle with time concepts of today, yesterday, and tomorrow: she remembered him saying, “We’re going to the park yesterday” and “Remember when I fell off my bike tomorrow?” She had been fascinated by the unnatural net that had had to be fit over the boy’s brain to force him to grasp the generally accepted notion of time—that there is a past, a present, and a future, and they form one straight line. Everyone knows that. The past of twenty-four hours ago is yesterday. The future of twenty-four hours hence is tomorrow. The moment that we are inhaling a breath is now. Talking about a week in the past is preceded by last, as in last week. If it is one week in the future, it is preceded by next, as in next week. Once Anna broke it down for Joseph, she saw how hard it might be for a kid to understand. But she had never imagined that she would be the one who was completely wrong.

  Stay on issue. Find the rule. Analyze. Then make a conclusion. This had worked so well in law school and later at the firm. But here, she found it hard to get past the issue. So time is somehow fluid, enough so that she and Joseph had tripped a switch and landed in the past, exactly 164 years prior to the time formerly and erroneously known as the present. She squawked at the lack of veracity. The how of it was the big question. And if this happened to Anna and Joseph, had it happened to anyone else? What had flipped the switch? And why Anna and Joseph, of all the unlikely combinations? Was the issue time, or was it Anna and Joseph?

  Anna was having a hard time remembering what had happened immediately before the big time portal express. While studying liability in auto accidents, she had heard about retrograde amnesia: people often lost their memory of events leading up to an accident, often as much as hours prior to the accident. It was as if the brain short-circuited due to the trauma and erased memory banks right before an accident. Knowing what the memory gap was called was not particularly helpful to Anna, but it did ease her sense of knowing so little.

  When she wasn’t thinking about her life back in Massachusetts, her life in the future, her mother, her brother in the hospital, or the fate of her nephew, she was thinking about food. Anna was hungry; she had never been this hungry in her entire thirty-four years. She ate two potatoes in the morning, some kind of porridge midday that was potatoes mixed with oats, and when night fell on Tom and Glenis’s cottage, they ate roasted potatoes. She had been here for more than two months and her gums had started to bleed when she’d scraped at her teeth with a sharpened stick in an effort to clean them. Her famously strong nails had begun to crack. And mostly, Anna craved protein. She fantasized about a filet mignon cooked rare, with a side of broccoli dripping with butter. An entire peach pie with lattice crust waited in the culinary wings. Without protein, a switch had turned deep in her belly, and she was howling for meat. One night she dreamed of meat cooking on a black, domed grill, sizzling, sending up curls of grease-scented smoke so delicious that it made her weep.

  She had to get better nutrition. She wished that her life expertise had been more than political science, followed by law school. If her college friend Emily had been sucked back in time, she would have known how to search out herbs and plants to supplement her diet. What did Anna know about plants? Who’d had time to learn about anything else when they’d been on the fast track through law school, then to a coveted spot in a major law firm?

  Think, think, she had to figure this out. She needed to stay healthy, she could not get sick in the past, where aspirin and antibiotics were still unimagined, where the idea of germs was unconsidered. What if she caught tuberculosis or the plague and died in the past? Wouldn’t that erase the future, or at least her part of it? Would her death in the past cause a tear in the time space continuum and rip open the universe? What would happen if she was never born? What about those times that she had diverted her father’s rage and Patrick had been spared a beating? What would have happened? Would Patrick have become even more damaged, less loved? Would her nephew have been born at all, would Joseph have braved a childhood with his fitful father without Anna latching onto him when he was a toddler, dragging him here and there, baking cookies with him, sending him books and paints and all that? What if he was never born?

  This is exactly why time travel is a terrible idea, she thought as she walked the high fields around the cottage. Mistakes could be made anywhere, disturbing the order of the universe. What about the kids that she was teaching? She knew nothing about the history of math. What if she taught something that wasn’t acknowledged or known in 1844? She felt sluggish and sad. She needed food.

  Anna thought hard. I need protein, and I need some goddamned green vegetables. What did Emily used to drink? Rose hips tea, yes that was it, vitamin C, wild rose hips. The English hadn’t made a law against rose hips yet. She could find those. And fish, and seaweed, whatever came out of the ocean was now going to be up for grabs. She was not going to die here.

  Anna no longer used the walking stick, the shillalah. She trotted down the hill, testing her leg as she went. As she neared the house, she saw Glenis with Nuala on her hip.

  “Glenis, can you show me where the wild roses grow? And you said you’re ready to bring a load of seaweed up from Kinsale for fertilizer. I want to go with you,” said Anna. “I’m going to make some seaweed soup.”

  Glenis squeezed her face up. “My Grannie made me eat seaweed soup. You’re on your own with that.” She wiped Nuala’s runny nose with the tip of her apron. “Tom could use an extra pair of hands with the load of seaweed. He just said th
at it’s time to dress the garden beds for the winter. And there are old rose bushes on the road into Kinsale, near the old monastery. What would you be wanting with those?”

  “I want the rose hips to make a tea,” said Anna, taking the young girl into her own arms so that Glenis could hang clothes.

  The child looked fondly at Anna and placed a tiny hand on her cheek. “You are a lovely lady,” said Nuala.

  “Aye. Lovely and odd,” said Glenis.

  Anna’s head ached from trying to understand the Irish language that people spoke to each other. No one seemed to expect her to understand the language. It sounded like nothing she had ever heard before plus German, which she didn’t understand either. But she wasn’t sure about the German part; perhaps it was a Slavic language. She was learning a few nouns. She liked the word for book—leahbar, rhyming with tower. And she liked something else about the language that dropped her deeper into the land, into the music of the place. Glenis, Tom, and the children helped her learns bits and pieces.

  The structure of the language pulled her into a direct relationship with anyone she spoke with. If someone asked her, “Are you walking to the blacksmith?” she learned to answer by falling in step with the question and responding, “I am not walking there.” As a lawyer, she was used to asking questions for which the answer was absolutely yes or no. Glenis told her, “You say yes or no like the English do, as if all the world fits only one way or the other. We don’t think that way. You see, the hope can’t be scratched out of us. There is always a place where a thing is mostly not, or tis, but only for a wee bit. We Irish are much more specific about what is and what is not.”