by Edward Aubry
“Okay,” was all I said, and for that instant, she accepted it as good news. But it was her comment about no one to share my weight that still rang in my ears. At some point, she was going to have to learn about Athena.
elen didn’t stay. With the rest of the day ahead of me to sort out my thoughts as well as I could, I fell back on tinkering with the wrist modules. They worked now, thanks to Athena, but no better than they had before I showed up. My charge was to perfect them, whatever that meant. Maybe they held some potential that was so far unexplored.
Maybe there was some way they could be used to stabilize the timeline.
A new excitement drove my work. This was absolutely a guess, and a pretty obviously desperate one at that, but there was a very appealing plausibility to the idea that my secret assignment had been that angle all along. If Future Me experienced the same unhappenings, it would explain not only why he wanted me to work on this project alone, but also why he was such a broken shell of a man to begin with. He had fifty-two years on me. The prospect of fifty-two more years of these random revisions did not bode well, and it was easy enough to believe how badly it would eventually wear me down.
The new premise behind my work was more than enough to propel me through the day, although predictably, I had no encouraging results. Still, I found myself with an enthusiasm that was a welcome change. The fact that Helen had confronted me had also bled away some of my tension. There was a tricky road ahead of us, but having everything on the table was at long last a relief.
At the end of the day, I returned to an apartment with completely different furniture than any I had ever owned. Some of it was nicer, others not so much. The next morning I found my license plate on a completely different car. My key card and thumbprint still started it.
Neither of these transformations caused me any particular trouble. I went to work fairly certain that I would see Helen afterward for coffee, and that none of our experiences would be lost. This was based on intuition more than evidence. Apart from our divergent memories surrounding the cat, I knew of no examples of a revised timeline that included a loss of history for the two of us. I was now convinced that my curse had been trying to hit Helen for months, but that it missed the target every single time.
s I half-expected, Helen met me at the entrance to my building at the end of that day. Her smile was obviously nervous. We had agreed to find some new equilibrium, but neither of us had any idea what that would be, or how it would work.
“Coffee?” she said in as timid a voice as I had ever heard from her.
“Please,” I said in a voice that sounded no more courageous in my head.
She got a piece of cake that day. Atypical for her, and my first instinct was to read too much into it. Not to be outdone, I ordered a blueberry scone, for which I immediately realized I had no appetite.
“I thought you didn’t like scones,” Helen pointed out.
“Maybe now I do,” I said. It was the weakest of jokes, and she left it alone. “On that topic, what’s with the cake?”
“It’s a cake kind of day,” she said around a mouthful of it. Fair enough.
“I have a theory,” I said, not exactly intending to.
She swallowed. “About cake?”
“About my curse.”
“Oh,” she said, putting her fork down. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
I hesitated. “This is going to be super awkward, no matter how I say it, right?”
“Probably,” she admitted. “Why don’t we just stipulate to that, and then not worry about it? I’ll have a fair number of awkward things to add, I’m sure. No score keeping, okay?”
Despite everything, I laughed.
“Agreed. If you want to go first…” I held out my hands in a gesture of deference.
“Not on your life,” she said, pointing at me with her fork.
“Quick check: how long have we known each other?”
Her worry was immediately evident. “Did something unhappen?”
“No. I mean, yes. New furniture, different car. Nothing of consequence, but I think you just answered my question. Things continue to unhappen to me, but the one constant is you. I’ve thought about this a lot, and over the last year, the only example I can name of the two of us having different memories is finding Mary Sue. Still working on why that is, and I hope I can determine it without having to dissect her.” I paused for laughter. Got none. “Joke,” I said.
“Good.”
“Anyway,” I continued with mild embarrassment, “you are the only person in my life for whom that has ever been true. Everyone else close to me has diverged at some point from my experiences with them. The other thing is that every time I felt like you and I have gotten closer over the last year, a lot of minor things unhappened immediately afterward. But not you. It’s like whatever force does this is trying to pull us apart, but it can’t figure out how. Like it keeps trying to get to you, but it hits everything around you instead.”
She frowned. “I’m not sure I understand what that means.”
I took the leap. “I think it means you have some kind of immunity. I think you can’t unhappen to me. I have no idea why, but I think you are the only person who can’t be affected by my curse.”
She stared at me for a few seconds after that, and finally whispered, “Wow.” Her expression was unreadable.
“Please know I’m not saying this from any ulterior motives. I know where we stand, and I’m not trying to maneuver for something else. It just seemed important to me, and real, and I thought you would want to know.”
“I hope it’s true,” she said. “Because I think…” She shook her head. “No. Strike that. I’m sure. I love you.” She looked over her head, presumably waiting for comedically timed lightning. Seeing none, she declared, “Still here!”
My internal reactions to this were too copious to describe. On top of it all, I blurted, “So far!”
“Listen to you, mister glass-half-empty.”
Stunned, I asked, “Where did this come from?” Despite everything I had just explained to her, and despite my delirious joy at hearing those words, my concern for her safety rushed to the surface of all my thinking.
She smiled softly. “It was always there. I’m just done kidding myself about it.” I stared, dumbfounded. She stared back. “So…,” she prompted, rolling her hand.
“Oh! Right!” I cleared my throat. “In the event that it has not been self evident for some time… I love you, Helen.”
She closed her eyes. A visible load of tension drained out of her body. “Thank you. Hearing that really does make this easier. You still worried about how awkward you sound?”
“In no way,” I said.
“Good,” she said, taking another bite of cake. Then pointing her fork at me again, added, “Although we definitely need to work on your delivery. ‘In the event that it has not been self evident’? What the hell was that?”
“Ha! Sorry. Scientist. Don’t get out much.”
“Hmm,” she said with a little laugh. “Fair enough.”
And then, apparently, we ran out of things to say. I broke the silence.
“What do we do now?”
“Now,” she said carefully, “we put our last two secrets on the table. You’re going to hear all about Carlton.”
“His name is Carlton?” I said quietly, mostly to myself.
“His name is Carlton,” she confirmed. “And after that, you’re going to tell me the one thing you’re still holding back.” She meant Athena, although it was unclear whether she understood it that specifically.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because that’s what we do,” she said. “We hide things from each other. Except not anymore. Drop the other shoe, Nigel.”
“Okay,” I said. “There’s another time traveler. Her name is Athena. I see her once or twice a month. We are just friends,” I hastened to add.
Helen’s eyes opened wider, and that childlike grin of discovery I had come
to adore spread across her face.
“Oh my,” she said. “That is so much better than I expected.”
hat conversation lasted two hours. I learned a great deal more about Carlton than I have the heart to reproduce here, but the most salient points went as follows:
Helen and Carlton met while she was still an undergrad, studying abroad. He was an expatriate American living in France, and heir to one of the most wealthy and powerful families in the world.
“Yes, but can he travel through time?” I inquired.
“Quiet, you,” she clarified.
This alone would have been more than enough to intimidate me beyond measure. Unfortunately, at one point in her description of him she somehow felt compelled to show me a photo of him on her tablet. As I feared, he was basically a god. Chiseled features, lithe build, lush blond hair to his shoulders. Their children would be characters straight out of Norse mythology.
This was all essentially my worst nightmare, and I couldn’t help but think my curse had simply found new and creative ways to deprive me of happiness.
It turned out there were two reasons why she had never told me about him. The first was that their relationship, for the entirety of its three year run so far, was a secret to everyone, not just me. The elaborate web of power to which his family constituted several strands made marriage—and anything that could potentially lead to marriage—a topic enmeshed in politics far more than romance. His parents were well aware of Helen’s presence in his life, but were unaware of the extent to which she held his heart. This revelation made me extremely uncomfortable and resentful. How dare he hide her like some shameful and scandalous affair? I managed to withhold saying that out loud right up to the moment she told me he had asked her to marry him.
“What did you say?” I asked, not really want to hear the answer.
“I’m not supposed to say,” she said. When I buried my face in my hands, she explained, “No, I mean I’m not supposed to say to him. He asked me not to give him an answer right away. He wanted to spend some time warming his family up to the idea. Failing that, he wanted time to create a fallback plan, so that we could have a life away from that yoke. He’s in Paris right now, and has been since he proposed. We see each other about once every two months, whenever he can get away.”
“Oh,” I said, mentally filling in a gap in her story. “You weren’t really visiting your mother.”
She shook her head sadly. “No. Sorry.”
“How much time have you given him?”
She poked her half eaten cake with her fork, avoiding my eyes.
“He asked me to marry him only a few days before I met you. We never set a time limit for how long to drag this out, but I think we are both getting to a place where we need to make a decision.”
“Do you know what you’re going to do?”
Still not looking at me, she shook her head.
Carefully, I asked, “He has no idea I exist, does he?”
This time she looked up. “No.”
“What’s the second reason you never told me?’
She sighed. “I didn’t tell you because I was afraid if you knew, I would lose you. Which almost happened, I might add.” She then crumpled up a napkin and threw it at my forehead. “Jerk.”
Taking all this in was not easy. Part of me wanted to consider it a solution to the ongoing concern about her safety in my presence. A very, very tiny part.
“Helen, I am not going to try to nudge you one way or the other on this. You know what a life with me might mean for you, and I’m not even sure I want you to risk it. You mean too much to me. If I’m going to lose you, I would much rather it be to a life with someone else than to oblivion.”
She absorbed that in silence. What could she say, really? Finally, she said, “I want to meet her.”
Her talent for non sequitur was nearly unsurpassed.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Desperately,” she confirmed.
I nodded. “That’s fair. You mean Athena, I assume?”
“Yes.”
I thought about that. The first thing she said to me when she discovered I was the younger analog of an old man currently alive was she wanted to meet him. I refused her that, on reasonable grounds. It was unclear to me whether those grounds applied to Athena.
“I’ll ask her.”
“Thanks,” she said, and scarfed down the rest of her cake. Unlike her revelations that day, I offered nothing else. Because I knew Helen, I was sure she wanted to hear nothing about Athena in words. She wanted to experience Athena for herself.
It remained to be seen if Athena would want to share that experience.
s had now become predictable, shortly after Helen told me all about Carlton and asked to meet Athena, my life was peppered with unhappenings of a noticeable but inconsequential nature. The most interesting of these was a construction project to expand the lab building, which had apparently been underway for several months before it appeared one day. It meant meeting Helen at a different entrance for our afternoon coffee dates. Her memories were of meeting me there this whole time, but none of her memories of the meetings themselves had changed.
Helen and I established a code phrase for testing the theory that unhappenings weren’t affecting her, relative to me. If I had cause for concern, I would ask her how long we had known each other, and she would simply respond, “Stingrays.” The code word was her choice. She wanted to evoke a happy memory whenever this came up. If she ever gave me any other answer, I would need to ask her questions beyond that. So far, it had been unnecessary.
We tabled any discussion of Carlton, or the decision ahead of her. The lone exception was a three day period in which he was going to be in the country. On previous such occasions, she had simply avoided me, sometimes with a plausible excuse for needing to have a few days to herself. This time she was forthright about it. Curiously, I felt no jealousy over losing my time with her to him. Perhaps it was simply honoring the fact that I was not truly entitled to be jealous. Perhaps it was something else.
Nor during that time did we explore taking our relationship any further than friendship. We had made our confessions and had chosen for the time being to live with the knowledge of our feelings without acting on them. It was enough.
For now.
nevitably, the moment came when we had to stop talking around our situation.
We had both taken a day away from work, at her request. I assumed it was another hooky day, like our aquarium outing, just to give us both a break from ongoing stress. It was mid-February, and we sought warmth and pleasant pastime in the Museum of Natural History. The dioramas and skeletons were not bringing that light of discovery to her eyes. We took a moment to rest on a bench in the mineral room, among a multitude of brightly colored stones in glass cases. I chose that moment to ask her if she was all right.
“He wants an answer,” was all she said.
The dread I felt at pursuing this idea was exceeded only by the dread of not knowing.
“Do you have one?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. I had a fraction of a second to bask in the reprieve before she continued. “But he deserves one. His parents know now. They have for a while, but he kept that from me. They are good people. Truly. But they are also trapped in a set of expectations that is very difficult for them to shake off. Apparently it’s been a bit of a battle.”
I waited for a follow-up, or a question, but she stopped there.
“I don’t know what to say.”
She looked at me with steel eyes.
“Good. I don’t want you to say anything. This can’t be about you.”
“I know,” I said. “Whatever you had before you met me, you still have. I don’t even know if I can stay in this time. I certainly can’t offer you anything compared to the life he can give you. Whatever you decide, I will understand.”
She stared at me blankly.
“What part of ‘I don’t want you to say any
thing’ got past you?”
“Ha. Sorry.” I let the silence hang between us for a bit. Then I said something stupid. “He loves you, you know.”
She gave me a look I read as equal parts bewildered and impatient.
“How do you know that?”
“How can he not?” was all I said.
The impatience drained from her face, and the bewilderment swelled. Then she took my face in her hands, and kissed me. As surprised as I was by the fact of it, the sensation surprised me more. It was not hungry, or passionate, or awkward, or confused. In her frame of mind, any of those would have made sense. Instead, it was tender. A simple, soft statement of fact. She looked down as she pulled away.
“Helen…”
“Don’t,” she said flatly. “I need time.”
With that, she stood and left me sitting alone in a room full of wondrously beautiful rock, a handful of gawking schoolchildren, and my doubts.
e had come to the museum in Helen’s car. I waited half an hour for her to return to the mineral room, and then I went to the coat check to see if her jacket was still there. It was not. As I stood there trying to decide whether to find my way home or just stay there, a voice behind me asked, “Is this a bad time?”
I turned to find Athena, who had doubtless just materialized in a crowded room to no one’s observation. For the first time in a while, I noticed she was getting older. When she first started visiting me in this time frame, she was a few years younger than I. By this point, she looked like she might have caught up to me.
“For you?” I said. “Never. Bad in general? Probably.”
“Girl problems?”
I growled. “Please don’t make fun.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m not. I actually came here to talk about that. In a supportive way, if that’s okay.”
“Quite okay,” I said. “At this point I’ll take whatever support I can get.”
“Come on,” she said, leading me away from the coat check. We meandered through the museum, with no particular destination. “What did she say?”
