“Maybe.” Freya smooths her lips together. “I don’t even know what to hope for. If this is the U.N.A.’s doing, they have their reasons, but it seems wrong to wish for anyone’s death.”
Freya and I have been having versions of this conversation for over a year, questioning how much wrong a person, organization, or country can commit in the name of a greater good and still consider itself on the side of right. I don’t know how to quantify the answer, but every time I think of the U.N.A. lurking in the shadows something inside me revolts. The fate of the entire world is at stake and the U.N.A.’s influence is great, but that doesn’t make them the voice of reason. They’ve been wrong about so many things.
And still, that doesn’t mean I want them to fail either. If global warming could be stopped in time there’d be no eco-refugees, no Pakistan-India nuclear exchange. The world would have a chance.
Freya and I hover in front of the TV for over an hour before the newscaster announces, “President Reagan has succumbed to the grievous injury he sustained while addressing the crowd gathered at Arlington National Cemetery. We have also learned the shooter is thirty-six-year-old Stephen Hewko, a motorcycle mechanic from Delaware.” The newscaster is the picture of solemnity as he adds that a statement about Vice President Nelson taking the oath of office is expected shortly.
First, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster four months ago, and now this. The Americans will be in a tailspin.
Freya looks dazed as she gets up from the couch and drifts towards the kitchen to open a can of Coke. “They’re really doing it,” she says. “They’re changing things.”
My brain begins to race and then, just as abruptly, crashes to a halt. This is too much to process. Everything changed for us when we were sent back and now it’s time for the change to hit everyone else, only they can’t see the ripples the U.N.A. have set in motion. Aside from the directors and their teams, Freya and I are the only ones to realize what they’ve done.
Damn, I need a cigarette. What did I do with my jean jacket last night? I pad into the bedroom and throw my shirt on, scouring the bed and floor for any sign of my jacket. “I hung it in the hall closet,” Freya shouts in after me. “If you’re quitting, how come there’s a package of cigarettes stuffed into your pocket?”
“Last pack,” I swear. “When I finish them, it’s over.”
I trek back into the living room and along the hall, where I reach into the closet and tug my cigarettes and lighter from my jacket pocket. Then I bound back across the room and pull the sliding door open. The brown-and-grey bird has flown off somewhere, leaving the balcony to me. Out there with my feet bare and my shirt hanging open I feel like someone who desperately needs to quit smoking. As the first cigarette of the day fills my lungs, my shoulders unknot and my brain begins to relax.
“Hi, Robbie,” a voice greets. It’s my neighbour’s kid, Dawn, out on the next door balcony, and I stare at my wrist to check the watch I’m not wearing. Shouldn’t she be at school now?
“Hey, Dawn,” I say. “What time is it?”
Dawn shrugs, her straw-coloured hair rippling in the breeze as she leans over the railing. She’s about thirteen years old and wearing the same purple corduroy overalls that I see her in roughly every third day. Sometimes Freya and I hear Dawn’s mother shouting through the wall, her words thick like someone trying to speak with their mouth full, and a couple of times when I passed her in the hallway I would’ve sworn I’d smelled alcohol on her breath. But mostly when I see Dawn, her mom’s either out somewhere or asleep.
“Around eight-thirty,” Dawn adds, chewing on her hair. “Time to do up your shirt, maybe.” Her sarcasm makes me laugh and I jab the cigarette between my lips so I can get down to buttoning. Dawn has more tolerance for Freya, who let her hang out at our apartment and fed her mint ice cream with chocolate sauce the time she got locked out, than she does for me. I think Dawn just accepts me as part of the package deal.
“Better?” I ask, turning to give Dawn a look at my buttoned shirt.
“If you could line the buttons up properly,” she says dryly.
I glance down at my wrinkled shirt and hear her snicker. The buttons are perfect; Dawn’s just entertaining herself.
“You’re way too easy,” she says, pulling away from the railing to reach for the sliding door behind her. A second before she disappears into her apartment, she cranes her neck back and adds, “See ya, Robbie.”
“See you,” I tell her.
Alone on the balcony I finish my cigarette before stubbing it out against the railing. When I move back inside Freya hands me a bowl of Count Chocula mixed with Wheaties, my cereal combo of choice. We settle back onto the couch together, a worry line between Freya’s eyes as she methodically chews her Cheerios. “I’m going to be thinking about this all day,” she says, “wondering what they’re planning next.”
“Me too. They must’ve already made a lot of changes that weren’t high-profile enough for us to pick up on.” The talking heads on the TV are long-faced and craven, and I squeeze Freya’s knee reassuringly. “They’ve probably given up on us. They have bigger things to worry about.”
I don’t entirely believe that, but maybe it’s true. They were relentless in their pursuit last year. If Freya hadn’t seen them coming, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. But with the future’s fate resting on their shoulders, how much could two young people like us matter to U.N.A. forces anymore?
Our hands wind together as Freya and I watch Reagan take a bullet to the neck again. People will be seeing that image repeated all day long. The entire nation must be in a state of shock.
One of the newscasters says Mitchell Nelson is scheduled to take the oath of office in approximately an hour. Freya reluctantly stands, leaving her cereal bowl orphaned on the couch. “Let me know if anything else happens,” she says. “I have to hop into the shower.” I’d forgotten that Freya has to be over at Expo soon and automatically frown. I wish there were more time before she had to leave, that we could spend the day together adjusting to the implications of the shooting.
Freya’s lips smack against mine just before she disappears, and when she pads into the room minutes later she’s wearing one towel and has swept her hair up in a second. I tell her she didn’t miss a thing, and Freya unwraps her hair and begins towel-drying it. Her legs are perfectly smooth under the bath towel. I can’t resist reaching out to wrap my hand around the back of her knee and running it up her thigh a little.
Freya’s fingers play with my hair. I lean my head against her belly and listen to her say, “Hey, did I mention Dennis and Scott invited us to a barbecue they’re having on June fourteenth?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll try to book the day off.” Dennis and Scott, a gay couple who helped us get this apartment, are two of Freya’s best customers at Il Baccaro. Dennis and Scott know the super because they used to live in a larger unit here, before Scott inherited a pile of money from an old aunt and bought them a house over in Kitsilano, just a few blocks up from the beach.
Freya’s really fond of them both and has referred to Scott and Dennis as the uncles she never had. In 2063 no one would bat an eyelash at their relationship, but in 1986 there are people who hate them on sight. Those people would hate my mothers too. I think about Rosine over in Toronto all the time and wonder how she’s getting by. They stole her memories of Bening when they wiped and covered her and sent her back into the past with me, but other than that, she’s still the same person.
In some ways, the 1980s is the time before people ruined the planet, and in other ways, it’s a nearly barbaric era. So much hate and judgment based on race, gender, and sexual orientation, things we paid little attention to in 2063.
“Okay,” Freya says lightly as she pulls away to continue getting ready. “Have fun watching the new future unfold.”
I smirk at the phrase ‘the new future.’ There was a fork in the road we weren’t sure was coming, but now it has, and after Freya leaves for work I watch Mitch
ell Nelson officially become the forty-first president of the United States. He’s about six feet tall, pale, clean-shaven, and unremarkable looking, except for his eyes, which appear steely yet sincere. I keep staring at him, looking for signs of U.N.A. allegiance in his face.
Finally I have to cycle over to Expo to put in a four-hour shift. A pall hangs over the crowd as I load people on and off the skyride gondolas that give you a bird’s-eye view of the fair. Snatches of conversation about Reagan and Nelson flit by my ears as I take people’s arms to help them. Only the kids seem unaffected by the news. The children are usually the ones who get most excited about the gondola, but normally it seems as if most people who pass through the fair’s entrance gates are ready to believe the future is full of promise. Today, when that might be closer to true than it’s been in a long time, people probably believe it less.
The gap between the crowd’s sadness and anger and my own feelings of confusion and endless possibility makes me edgy. Because I have three hours between the end of my Expo shift and the seven o’clock start at Greasy Ryan’s, I head back to the apartment, hoping to catch up with Freya, who has the night off.
Despite the weird atmosphere at Expo, I’ve gotten through half the day on a single cigarette and I’m fighting the idea of smoking a second when the phone rings.
“Hello,” the female voice says. “Is this Robert Clark?” No one calls me Robert. To everyone aside from Freya I’m always ‘Rob’ or ‘Robbie,’ but I tell the voice yes. “Holly Allen’s suffered a concussion and we’re currently examining her at Vancouver General Hospital,” the voice explains in a perfunctory tone.
My brain stutters over the information. At first hearing some stranger say ‘Holly’ tricks me into thinking she must have called the wrong phone number and be talking about someone else.
But I’m Robert Clark, just like she said, and Freya’s Holly Allen. The Holly Allen who is lying injured in a hospital bed.
“A concussion?” I repeat breathlessly. “What happened? Is she okay?”
“She took a fall and lost consciousness briefly,” the woman explains. “But she’s awake now. I’m not yet sure whether they plan to release her tonight or keep her overnight for observation.”
“I’ll be right there,” I tell her.
Head pounding, I tear into the elevator with my bike, fly up Main Street, and shoot along West Twelfth Avenue. This is one of the times I wish we still had the money-pit car old Freya bought us—a thought that flings my mind back to the moment old Freya was murdered. It was both a miracle and a nightmare, and almost as incredible to me now as the day it happened. That older version of Freya coming to help us because I’d died. I would’ve done the same thing if I’d lost Freya that day, thrown myself back into the chute another seventy-eight years so I could try to rescue a newer Freya and Garren. But I didn’t have to. Freya was the one left to face another journey through time, and then decades of waiting for the right moment to save me, giving us both another chance.
The memory deepens my anxiety. Timelines tangle in my brain, fraying, unknotting, and snapping before slithering back together. Freya has to be okay.
It’s a primal, paranoid fear. Losing her. There’s every reason to think this Freya—my Freya—will be fine. Otherwise the woman at the hospital wouldn’t have said they’d release her tonight or tomorrow.
Within fifteen minutes I’m tearing into the E.R. and giving them Holly’s name. It’s another thirty-five minutes of staring anxiously at my hands and feeling sweat gather around my hairline until they call for me. A male nurse takes me in to see her, and Freya smiles tiredly up at me. “I’m okay,” she says. “Just stuck with a headache.”
I rub her arm, so relieved to see her in one piece that I exhale like someone blowing out a match. “What happened? My mind was running wild.”
“Didn’t they tell you I was all right?” Freya’s forehead crinkles in sympathy.
“They did.” I shrug, suddenly feeling ridiculous.
The nurse hands me an information packet. “Sorry to interrupt. She can explain when you get home, but there are some things I need you to look out for. We can’t release her unless there’s someone to watch over her for the next twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll do that,” I say quickly.
“Good,” he says. “You need to keep an eye on her. If her speech becomes slurred or if she gets confused or the headache worsens, or there are any other strange symptoms, bring her back right away. She should be woken up every two hours during the night so that you can check that her condition hasn’t changed. And her family doctor should check her out again in a day or two.”
“When can I go back to work?” Freya asks, her fingers bunching up in her lap.
“Not until you see your regular doctor and he tells you it’s okay. For the next few days we don’t want you doing anything except taking it easy, all right, honey?” Freya nods obediently and we both listen to the nurse explain that it could be a week or two before she’s back to her old self.
But at least she can come home with me now, and Freya and I slowly make our way out of the hospital together. I hail a passing cab, thinking that I’ll have to come back for my bike tomorrow night when it’s safe to let Freya out of my sight again. In the backseat of the taxi, she begins to tell me about the accident. “I was almost home when I saw an old man running after his dog on the sidewalk, shouting after it. I was closer than he was and I thought I could catch up with the dog. But the thing was so strong—it looked like some kind of Rottweiler mix, all muscle—that even when I’d hooked my fingers around its collar, I couldn’t make it stop. It kept yanking me along. We were coming up to the corner and I slammed right into a person who’d just rounded it from the opposite direction. I fell over and conked my head on the sidewalk.”
I wince. “That must’ve hurt like hell.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember my head hitting. Just the stuff that happened before. And when I woke up there were a bunch of people leaning over me and I heard the ambulance siren. One of the women told me I’d been knocked unconscious and said not to get up. It was weird; it felt more like a dream than real life. The doctor says I could be foggy for a little bit. Light-headed and dizzy, that kind of thing.” Freya squints like the sun glinting through the car window is burning her retinas. “Mostly it’s the headache that’s bugging me, though.”
I remember the nurse saying Freya could have a pain killer, and when we get back to the apartment and she’s settled herself on the couch, I bring her two aspirin. Then I call Greasy Ryan’s and talk to my boss about needing tonight and tomorrow off. He’s not happy about it but grudgingly says he’ll call around to find someone to pick up my shifts. Luckily Freya’s bosses at the restaurant are more understanding and tell her not to even think about coming back until Friday.
Freya and I spend the next twenty-four hours living in slow motion, me bringing her fluids and food and periodically quizzing her about how she feels. A couple of times, while she’s sleeping, I sneak out to the balcony for a smoke. The rest of the time we’re camped out in front of the TV watching a weird combination of music videos, American political news coverage, and soap operas. Freya isn’t used to being under the weather—in the future no one really gets sick anymore and injuries heal fast—and after the first night she starts pushing herself harder than she should, listening to the Spanish tapes and rearranging stuff in the hall closet.
When I lecture her about needing to rest, she says we’ve both been so busy for so long that she doesn’t know how to take it easy anymore. “I get that,” I tell her. “But your brain needs a break.”
“Like your lungs,” she counters. “So how about this? If you stop trying to ration that last pack to make it last forever and quit right now, I’ll go sit down again.”
I root my hands to my hips and resist the urge to roll my eyes. “What’s the point of that? I told you I was quitting anyway. Just this final pack and that’s it.”
“I know.” Fr
eya’s gaze is so level you could stack a set of encyclopaedias on it. “I just want to make sure.”
Sometimes a person wanting the best for you doesn’t feel the way it should. If I want to taper off cigarettes rather than quit cold turkey, I shouldn’t need anyone else’s approval to do it, even hers.
“I’m nineteen, you know. It’s not like I’m going to get hit with lung cancer next year, Freya.” So maybe the package on the coffee table won’t be my final one, so what? The thought feels like a stupid little rebellion even as it’s sprinting through my head.
“I don’t want to be having this conversation with you for the next twenty years,” she says. “You were supposed to quit months ago.”
It’s true. I started talking about quitting in February. But I’m not going to let Freya pressure me into doing it today just because I wish she’d go lie down. “And you’ve left this place a mess a thousand times,” I tell her. “So I don’t see you changing in a hurry either. On any other day your dirty dishes would probably be clogging up the sink right now, but as soon as you’re supposed to rest, you can’t leave the closet alone. You’re just using me as an excuse.”
It’s not the worst fight we’ve ever had, not even technically a fight, but not a conversation I want to continue either. “I have to go get my bike at the hospital,” I grumble. It’s been exactly twenty-five hours and five minutes since I met Freya there. She doesn’t need watching anymore and anyway, she won’t listen to me about taking it easy.
Freya’s nostrils flare as she looks away. I lurch towards the coffee table to scoop up my cigarettes and say, “Just try not to hit your head again, all right?”
She smiles like I’m being an idiot. “Don’t get lung cancer on the way to the hospital,” she quips, her eyes flashing with mischief.
I can’t help it; a tight grin cascades across my face and next thing you know we’re both chuckling at ourselves. Give us another couple of years and maybe we’ll be smart enough to skip the majority of our arguments and zip straight to seeing the funny side of things.
Tomorrow Page 5
