by Edward Aubry
“2092.”
Again, she took a moment to process this. “2092? You’re from the past?” I nodded. And then she made a leap I never would have predicted. “Nigel-Graham. You really are both of them.”
“Wow,” I said with no small degree of relief. “That saved me some time.”
“I want to meet him,” she said, continuing to surprise.
“You can’t. Even I’m not allowed to talk to him directly.”
She squeezed my hand again, more assertively.
“Thank you for letting me in,” she said.
I nodded, unable to tell her that if everything went to plan, I would be inviting her much further in, very soon.
thena visited again. Given the tone of our last two encounters, I was starting to wonder how long it would be before she showed up, if at all. But she did. I found her waiting for me outside my apartment. Before I had a chance to speak, she hugged me. This was unusual, but not the first time from my frame of reference, or hers.
“Hey,” I said. She didn’t let go. “Are you all right?”
She pulled back and nodded. “I want things to be better between us, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too. Sorry about last time.”
She shook her head. “Don’t. It’s okay. I just…” She looked away. “I need someone to talk to. Can we table the other stuff? For now? I do want to answer your questions. But today I just need you to be here for me.”
“Of course.”
She took my hands. “Ready?”
“Sure.”
The world blinked. We were back at the park. There was no evident reaction to our arrival. Even knowing the cause for that effect, noticing it was a bit creepy.
“This is your safe place,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
She ignored the question. “Do you remember the last time I brought you here?”
“Yes,” I said. “You wanted me to kill a dog.” As I said that, I spied the gray whippet from before. Its person was wearing the same thing I had seen her in the last time. “Wait, that dog. Is this the same day?”
She ignored that question as well. “Would you?” she asked.
“Would I?”
“Kill the dog. If you knew what it meant.” She stared at the animal, a blank look on her face.
“Like, right now?” I considered the possibility. Even as a thought experiment, it made me incredibly uncomfortable. “I don’t think so. Maybe if I had time to think about it.” I shook my head. “No, that wouldn’t help. I’m sorry, I can’t kill the dog.” I took a moment to consider what its day must be like right now. Beautiful weather, a person to please. He seemed like a reasonably happy dog, or at least a dog with reasons to be happy. I was going to remark on that to Athena, but when I looked at her, I saw that she had given up on the whippet.
She was looking at the stroller.
So many things went through my head at that moment. Our last conversation had started with her asking me about killing baby Hitler. This one started with her asking me if I was willing to kill a dog on a moment’s notice.
“Who is the baby?” I asked, as calmly as I knew how.
She shook her head slowly, never taking her eyes off the stroller. On a bench next to it sat a young couple, doubtless oblivious to us.
“No more questions today, okay?” With that, she took my hand, and held it tight. “Just be here for me. Be my rock. Just for a little bit.” We stood there in silence for perhaps half a minute.
The world blinked.
“Thank you,” she said, and handed me two small clear yellow rods, about the size of paper clips.
“What are these?” I asked.
“The missing components of the wrist modules. They’ll work now.”
I turned them over in my hand.
“Why?” was all I could think to say.
She took my face in her hands and made me look at her. “Because I am trusting you to give her the choice. And I am trusting her to say no. And because if I don’t give you these, you are going to do something even more stupid in your quest to have her.”
She hugged me again.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said, and blipped out.
I stood outside my home, too paralyzed to go inside. Too many possibilities argued in my head, some demanding immediate action on my part, others doing their best to calm me down. Over all that din, the only item that meant a damn to me at that moment was that if that was the same day I had already visited twice, it was sometime in 2115. The baby had to be at least four years too old to be Helen.
Nothing else mattered.
t took me four days to get the wrist modules up and running, and another two to test them. After that, it was just a matter of working up the courage. That took a week, at the end of which Helen decided to visit her mother. Four more days of profoundly impatient waiting later, I was ready.
I found her at her desk. It was the middle of the afternoon, well past my lunch hour. She did not expect to see me. I was greeted with the usual happy face.
“Hey! What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you,” I said.
“Well, that’s new.”
I sat in the chair next to her desk, and put an envelope in front of her. She made a surprised face.
“What’s this?”
“You could open it and find out.”
She steepled her fingers in front of her. “I suppose I could do that. Or perhaps I could take this, and leave it, forever sealed, perhaps framed. It could be the mystery of a lifetime. Just guessing what it might be could sustain me for years.”
“Or you could open it.”
“Or,” she said, taking it, “I could open it.”
What lay inside were tickets and hotel reservations. One week in Hawaii. Neither of us had been on a proper vacation the entire time we had known each other. I imagined the setting to be the perfect venue for my offer of time travel. She had already expressed interest, so I did not expect resistance. I just wanted it to be as perfect as it could be.
She pulled out the tickets, and read them without reaction. Setting them aside, she removed the reservation details. Five star hotel, right on the beach. We had an entire suite. She read this in silence.
“I got us a suite,” I pointed out redundantly. “We each have our own room.”
This reassurance accomplished nothing. My heart pounded, probably attempting to throw itself on the floor. How could I have miscalculated her response this badly? I considered the possibility she was pulling my leg, but then the moment stretched past any reasonable point of humor. Her eyes had gone wide, and she looked down and away.
“Please say something,” I said.
She said something. “I’m seeing someone.”
We allowed that idea to hang in the air between us, like a poisonous vapor. All my plans, all my hopes, had been crushed the very moment I finally let my guard down. Well played, curse. All I could bring myself to say was, “Of course you are.”
Of course she was.
fled. The pain of losing Helen right on the cusp of being able to have a life with her was more than I could manage, so I abandoned my work in search of solitude. My plan of becoming a time nomad started to look like a real possibility, but I hadn’t worked up the nerve for that yet. So I left town. No fixed destination, just travel. I’d like to say I saw spectacular things, and visited places I had always dreamed of. But I didn’t. I moved from random hotel to random hotel. My only objective was to keep moving, and hope the constant change of scenery would provide me with sufficient distraction.
It didn’t work.
I would also love to say this was the start of a new phase in my life, that it gave me a freedom I had never known, and that I never looked back. The truth is, I left Mary Sue with about a week’s worth of food, and no intention of abandoning her. So, after six days, I returned to my cat and my life. No wiser, no less hurt.
During that span, Helen sent me five messages. I deleted all of them w
ithout listening to them. Not out of anger, of course. Helen had not wronged me in any way. With my entire relationship with her now having unhappened, I didn’t even know what kind of friendship we might still have. Or ever have had. Clearly we had some kind of social connection, as she had greeted me in a very friendly manner the day I humiliated myself in front of her. This wasn’t like my previously unhappened relationships, in which my girlfriends wound up not knowing me, at best, or vanished forever at worst. She still knew me, and she still demonstrated some fondness for me. But all that did was make the whole retroactive collapse of what we had even more painful.
In the wake of my day with Wendy, followed by the restoration of what I had with Helen, having it immediately yanked away from me so definitively made it impossible for me not to see this as personal. I wanted to believe that my reversals of fortune had always been some inescapable consequence of time travel. But this last misery was so repugnant, and so surgical, I could no longer pretend it was anything other than a direct attack.
Even with that perspective, slowly resolving itself into a certainty, there was still no recourse. I would never win Helen back, any more than I could resurrect Carrie Wolfe. The safest thing for my peace of mind was to push her away, as far and as permanently as possible. And so, naturally, that was exactly what she refused to let me do.
hree days after I got back from my feeble exile, Helen figured out not only that I had returned to work, but also that I was coming in two hours early every day. It seemed like the easiest way to preempt any chance of her catching me in the morning. She was continuing to leave me messages I wouldn’t listen to, and it seemed reasonable to expect her to strike in person next. What I failed to take into account was her level of perseverance. When I found her waiting for me by the elevator, it was still dark out. There was no telling how long she had been camped out in the corridor.
I considered ignoring her, but the reality was that I held no resentment, and I had no desire to be hurtful. I chose curtness instead.
“Hi,” I said.
“Wow. ‘Hi’? Way to sabotage all my rehearsed responses. You were supposed to say something bitter, or pathetic. Now I’ve got nothing.”
“Go home,” I said. “Is that bitter enough?”
“It’s a start. That’s not going to happen, but at least we’re getting somewhere now.”
I took a deep breath. At that moment, all I truly wanted was for this conversation to last as long as possible, no matter how awful it was. But I also knew that every moment we dragged this out would add one more layer of misery.
“Helen, I misread the situation. I am very sorry, and very embarrassed, and I just want to be left alone.”
She shook her head. “We both know there’s more to this.”
“There really isn’t.”
She stepped closer to me, and said quietly, “Yes there is, but we should probably sort that out somewhere more private. Wouldn’t you agree, Nigel?”
Not Nigel-Graham. This was a red flag.
“What are you talking about?”
She pointed to the elevator.
“In,” she said. We stepped inside, and allowed the doors to close. I assumed she just wanted privacy, until she said, “Fourth floor.”
“That won’t—” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence as the elevator ascended.
“You already authorized me,” she said.
None of this made any sense. My friendship with Helen had unhappened, maybe not entirely, but significantly. If she had already been to my lab, on my authority, she must know almost as much as she did before the timeline changed. Without a credible reason to deny her what she had already been granted before, I let her in through the airlock to my lab.
“You think what we had unhappened,” she began bluntly. “Don’t you?”
Yet again, she caught me off guard.
“You know about that?”
She nodded.
“Ask me.”
It took a second for me to grasp what she meant. Then I thought back on the last time I thought we had unhappened.
“How long have we known each other?”
“Almost a year.”
“How did we meet?” I asked.
“I Shanghaied you into running a mock interview for the library job.”
None of this made sense. Events from one year ago and a few days ago were consistent with my memories of them. There should have been some divergence at one extreme or the other. “Ferris wheel?”
“I made you ride The Zipper first.” No hesitation.
“Aquarium?” I asked.
“Stingrays.”
It seemed that her intent was to clear matters up, but the further we went, the more confused I became.
“Mary Sue?”
“Your cat,” she said. “We found her about four months ago, but your first memory of her was only one month ago. Because your life is one long string of inconsistencies. Things happen and then they unhappen, over and over again. Because you’re a time traveler, here from 2092 to help the version of you who lives now with God only knows what. And no one knows but you.” She paused. “And me.”
I sat down, struggling to accept this, against some extremely strong internal resistance.
“I don’t understand. How can all of that still be true?”
She came over to my seat and crouched to meet my eyes. “Because it all happened. And none of what we have has been lost. Nothing important about me has changed.”
I shook my head. “I have no memory of you seeing someone else.”
“You don’t remember it,” she said, “because you never knew.”
I took a moment to reflect on that possibility.
“How long?”
“The whole time,” she said. “And two years before that.”
I started to feel slightly faint. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
She stood, and looked away.
“It’s complicated.”
Despite myself, I laughed.
“Don’t even get me started on complicated.” She flinched at this, and I immediately regretted it. The silence began to stretch. “The part about me being embarrassed is still true,” I said to fill it. “That stands.”
She laughed softly.
“That’s my fault. I honestly thought we were going to have this conversation much sooner. Like a few weeks after we met. You weren’t exactly subtle, you know.”
I groaned. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I just thought you were going to force the issue without realizing it. To be honest, I hoped you would. I thought it would be easier for both of us to put it on the table. But then…” She shrugged. “You never did anything. You never said anything. And I figured you had your reasons for wanting to keep things platonic. As long as that was true, I assumed we would be fine.”
“But why keep it a secret at all?”
“I can’t…” She shook her head. “Let’s just leave it at complicated, okay?” She walked to a window and gazed out. I had no idea what to make of her words. Something about this was a weight around her neck, but it was impossible to know what. I considered the possibilities that she was covering for an abusive boyfriend, or that the person she was seeing was in fact another woman, but neither of those conjectures rang true for the Helen I knew. “Why didn’t you?” she asked suddenly.
“Why didn’t I?”
“Do something. Say something. Force the issue. Lord knows I gave you plenty of opportunities. I like to think I’m a decent hint-dropper, but you never took the bait.” She turned to face me. “Why did you wait a year? You’re outgoing, you’re a risk taker, you don’t strike me as someone who fears rejection, and we were hitting it off. Why didn’t you make a move?”
I considered the truth for a fraction of a second, then bailed.
“I’m only like that when I’m around you,” I tried.
“Okay, sure,” she said. “Even if I buy that—which, by the way, I do not—you were around me. Pr
etty much every time we were together. The question stands.”
I grappled with the truth one more time, and conceded.
“Come, sit,” I said. She gave me a bewildered look. “You’re going to want to be sitting for this.”
She moved toward the chair with obvious apprehension. My best guess is that she had been expecting to hear something extremely personal, like a phobia, or severe shyness. If so, she was about to be surprised, and looked none too excited about that. She sat.
“You’re sure you want to know?” I said. One last chance for us both to walk away. She passed.
“Yes.”
After a moment to collect my thoughts, I took a deep breath and dove in.
“When I was fourteen years old, I had my first kiss. The next day, that girl was gone, and no one had ever heard of her. I had three girlfriends in high school. The first one suddenly stopped knowing me one day. The second one was suddenly dating my best friend. The third one…” I hesitated. “The third one died. When she was twelve. Five years before we started dating.”
And there it was. The last piece of the mystery that was Nigel-Graham Walden. Helen had gone pale by this point.
“Oh my God,” she said softly. “Nigel, I’m so sorry.”
“So, you understand what I’m telling you?” Hesitantly, she nodded. “Yes, I have feelings for you that go far beyond friendship, and yes, that has been true for a very long time. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid you would be receptive, and that being with me would end up destroying you.”
“You can’t possibly believe you caused that girl’s death.” Her tone was pleading. She wiped away a tear.
“How can I possibly dare believe anything else?”
We sat there mute, both looking at the floor, for what must have been several minutes.
Finally, still not looking at me, she said, “Please don’t push me away, Nigel. We can fix this. You are my best friend. The best friend I have ever had.” Then she did look up. “And I can’t bear how much weight you have to carry with no one to share it. Please, let’s fix this.”
I looked up, her words suddenly reminding me that there was still one piece of my story I had yet to reveal.
