“Wakey, wakey,” the border guard says in a tone midway between comical and someone who enjoys the power that comes with his job a little too much. “So where are you folks going?”
“Sacramento.” Elizabeth replies. “My sister—her mother—is getting married.”
“And you?” He wags a finger at me in the backseat.
I tilt my head to indicate Freya/Amy. “I’m her boyfriend.” That much is the truth and the words slide easily off my tongue. “Her wedding date.”
“How long will the three of you be staying in the United States?”
“Five days,” Freya blurts out in a dry voice.
The border guard chuckles at Freya’s enthusiastic joining of the conversation. “Well, don’t eat any bad fish.” He hands Elizabeth our licenses and adds, “Have a good day.”
My shoulders unknot as we leave the custom station in our wake. Elizabeth pulled it off but she shouldn’t have rushed Freya. We can’t afford to make mistakes, and I can’t trust her judgement.
My fingers squeeze Freya’s arm before I lean back in my chair and snap my seatbelt on. “Good job.”
“Thank you,” she says meekly.
Within minutes she’s out again and my eyelids are heavy too. I need to stay awake, to make sure Elizabeth doesn’t screw us over somehow or make a wrong move, and for a while longer I do. My throat’s dry and I gulp down some of the juice I salvaged from the groceries in the trunk. Then I lay into Elizabeth, in barbed whispers, for defying her own advice about not waking Freya and being patient with her.
While Elizabeth’s defending herself I drift away, her voice fading into the hum of the car chugging along the highway. Last night left me exhausted, and between glances out the window I dream snatches of dreams—visions of my mothers dancing together in a future life, of Freya and me paddling in Elaho, of the two of us having lunch on a roof terrace in Ronda, and of art classes with Seneval that end in her death.
Nothing’s really over. Everything stays with you. The past. The future. Your dreams. Your fears. The people you’ve lost and the ones you’re afraid to lose. Nothing is ever finished.
That’s how it feels each time I wake up, that I’ll be looping through my life forever. Until the last instance, when I catch Freya staring into the backseat, watching me like I’m an exotic zoo animal. Her eyes clear my mind of everything but her. “You’re awake,” I observe.
“Am I?” Her lashes blink with a rapidness anyone from the U.N.A. would recognize. It’s what people of the future did at the moment of exiting gushi and returning to real life. An automatic reaction to clear gushi visions and adjust their eyes to reality. Only gushi hasn’t been invented yet.
“Of course you are,” I say gently but firmly. “You’re wide awake.”
The view from outside the window catches my eye, diverting my attention: tall buildings, long city blocks, and a monorail zooming almost directly over our heads. We made it to Seattle.
“We just arrived,” Elizabeth tells me. “I don’t know the city. Where do you think we should go?”
I don’t know Seattle either. It was abandoned before I was born.
So we drive like the tourists we are, Elizabeth and I craning our necks as we cruise around in circles. We pass the Space Needle, the Pike Place Market, and an area that appears to be a business district. Then we swing around and head north again, crossing over the bay. On a nondescript street a few blocks from the University of Washington, we stumble across a motel. It looks like the kind of place we can afford and I instruct Elizabeth to give the person at the front desk a sob story about her credit cards and baggage being stolen. The same story worked for me once, but with her middle-aged office clerk persona, Elizabeth will be believed more readily than I would.
Left alone in the parking lot I finally return my gaze to Freya, who has stopped her rapid blinking but whose profoundly confused eyes worry me. “Everything’s under control,” I assure her. “Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine. The hard part is over with—we got across.”
Freya grinds her lips together and glances down at her chipped purple nails. “I don’t…I don’t understand,” she stammers. “What is this? How come I can’t stop it?”
This is exactly what I was afraid of when I saw her eyelashes flutter in that telltale way. She thinks everything she’s seeing and hearing is gushi, that she’s somehow stuck. There hasn’t been a case of gushi cementing since 2039 but I might suspect the same thing in her place.
“I’ll explain everything when we get inside.” I don’t want her to go into shock and cause a scene before we can get her safely into the motel room. “It’ll just be a few minutes now. But trust me, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“The way you repeated that is making me nervous,” Freya admits. “We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
“Not nearly as much as before.” I don’t know how much she remembers about being taken but Elizabeth’s advice to save the complicated questions for later echoes in my mind. Regardless, I can’t resist asking the one that’s been looping through my head since Freya first opened her eyes. “Do you remember me?”
Freya nods soberly. It’s the answer I was hoping for, yet it still feels wrong. “Do you remember me?” she asks.
“I remember everything about you.” My hand reaches for hers, closing tenderly around her cool fingers.
Freya peers down at our linked hands. Silence envelopes us. It feels strangely like the first time we touched. Like this is brand new again and together we’re something not yet decided.
We’re still holding hands when Elizabeth opens the car door and interrupts the quiet minutes later. “We’re hours early for their regular check-in time but we’re in luck,” Elizabeth chirps proudly. “They had a room for us. I had to pay them a deposit because of the credit card situation but they’ll refund it when we check out.” Her chin slopes down as she takes in the image of our hands. “I told them you were siblings so you shouldn’t do that anywhere motel staff could see.”
Freya snatches her fingers back, two splotches of red forming on her cheeks. I feel the sensation of her fingers against mine even when they’re gone. I grab Freya’s charity box clothes from the trunk and Freya and I trail Elizabeth through the lobby and up to our room. Surveying its matching queen-size beds, I realize I should’ve stolen a change of clothes for myself too. My head fills up with things that still need to be done as I pile Freya’s clothes on the bureau behind me. The fake passports. Money for plane tickets. Flying someplace new where they’ll never find us and creating different lives for ourselves while hoping the threat of Minnow’s virus has been neutralized by the very people who could be searching for us right now.
If Elizabeth thinks she can depend on me to scratch the first thing off our list, she’s wrong. I’m not leaving Freya alone again.
“Stretch out and lie down, Freya,” Elizabeth advises, motioning to the beds. Freya lowers herself tentatively onto the nearest mattress, her feet still solidly on the floor. She tugs restlessly at her miniskirt, trying to make it cover more of her thighs than it was designed to.
“You said you’d explain,” Freya reminds me.
“I will.” But first I turn to Elizabeth. “You need to go get us passports. I’ll give you some money for ours.”
Elizabeth’s face pales. “You’d be better at that than I would. I have no idea how to find someone who could make us convincing forgeries.”
“Or sell us doctored stolen passports,” I add, gazing protectively at Freya on the bed. “You’ll do fine. I can’t leave her here.”
“You can leave her with me,” Elizabeth insists. “I’ll watch out for her.”
“Forgive me if I don’t want to leave her in the hands of one of the people who were ready to do a hatchet job on…” I don’t want Freya to overhear so I stop short, throwing my good hand into the air in a gesture of defiance. “She stays with me. It’s not up for discussion.”
Elizabeth points her gaze in Freya�
�s direction and sighs soundlessly.
“Look, you got us through customs and you got us this room,” I continue. “Dealing with the kind of people who can get us passports will be easy. They’ll want your business. You just need to find them.” My left palm itches under my cast. The cast itself feels heavy and looser than it should. 1986 medical technology is lousy and I haven’t treated my wrist or the cast that surrounds it with the tenderness it requires. “When you get outside ask someone what the worst part of town is. When you reach it zero in on anyone who looks shady, like they could be dealing.”
This is probably a tall order for someone like Elizabeth, who has likely never dealt with any ‘bad guys’ unless you want to include U.N.A. personnel in the category. Once she leaves the motel with a chunk of my cash in her pocket there’s always the chance Elizabeth will skip town without us. But I have to risk something here and it won’t be Freya.
Crestfallen, Elizabeth points out, “They’ll need photos.”
“They can leave that part for last. We’ll stop into a photo booth later and then bring the photos in when we go pick the passports up. Freya needs to rest first.”
Freya bristles at my suggestion from the bed. “Freya needs to know what’s going on,” she insists, her cheeks pinkening like they did when we held hands in the car.
Elizabeth clutches her abdomen. “I can’t do this all on my own. Even if I can find someone to sell us passports, what are we going to do about the flights? We’ll need at least fifteen hundred dollars to get us to Europe.”
If that’s even where we want to go. Having seen inside Freya’s head, if the U.N.A. decides to widen their net beyond North America, Spain would be the first place they’d look for us. Better to avoid Europe entirely and head for South America.
But I don’t plan to tell Elizabeth where we’re going. Once we get to the airport our trio will have to divide into two parts. It’ll be safer for everyone.
Unfortunately, more risks will need to be taken first. There’s no safe, legal way for us to get our hands on anywhere near as much cash as Elizabeth mentioned. She and I both know that. We’ll have to steal it. Hopefully from someone who doesn’t need it as badly as we do. And when it happens, it will be one more thing I can’t allow myself to feel bad about.
In the meantime I frown and nod. “I’ll figure something out while you’re gone. But it could be dangerous.”
“We can’t be caught.” Elizabeth’s frown is at least as deep as my own.
“I don’t plan on it. But I’ll probably need your help.” I feel Freya’s stare on my cheeks, the warmth spreading to my forehead and down along my neck. She’s like a sponge, absorbing every word Elizabeth and I say but giving no indication of how she feels about any of it. “We’ll talk about it when you get back, okay?” Before I can start worrying about coming up with clever robbery plans and the price to be paid if the police catch me in the act, I need to be alone with Freya. My arms are dying to hold her, and we have to talk. One night apart from her felt like forever.
“Okay,” Elizabeth agrees reluctantly. “Give me the windbreaker at least. I’m still wearing the same clothes they last saw me in.”
“They who?” Freya demands.
Elizabeth floats me a wary look as I hand her the windbreaker and a pair of hundred-dollar bills. She presses the extra room key into my hand before turning on her heel and exiting the suite.
With the door closed behind us, Freya’s head wilts on her shoulders. “My head hurts and I’m so thirsty, so tired. What happened to me? Where are we and what kind of trouble are we in?”
Freya’s skin is waxy and pale and she hasn’t had any fluids since before I unhooked her from the wires back in British Columbia. “Let me get you some water,” I say, zipping into the bathroom for glasses.
I upend one for each of us, turn on the faucet and fill two glasses of water. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds but when I return to the bedroom Freya’s asleep on top of the bedspread, her feet still hanging off the mattress. Elizabeth said coming out of the wipe process could be gradual and it looks like she was right. Freya’s worn out.
I set her water on the nightstand next to her and gulp mine down. Then I gather up Freya’s feet, sandals and all, and lift them slowly onto the bed. I fold the bedspread over her and lie down next to her, watching her sleep, so happy her higher reasoning capabilities seem intact that it feels like something close to what Kinnari was looking for in meditation and numerology. We didn’t really have words to describe the feeling in the U.N.A. but I know what many people here and now would call it.
A state of grace.
Seventeen: 1986
Outside, a woman’s whistling “The Greatest Love of All.” Still half asleep, I roll over onto my left arm. It’s the feel of the cast around my wrist that makes me open my eyes. In the first moments of wakefulness you can forget anything. Freya was never taken. I didn’t break my wrist or shoot Isaac Monroe. My sister never died of Toxo. There’s only this unseen phantom woman whistling cheerfully from some undefined place. One of the motel maids, maybe, I realize as I float closer towards consciousness.
The bedspread has been folded over me the way I folded it over Freya earlier and there’s a space where her body should be. I gaze sleepily at the closed bathroom door. “Freya?”
In the corridor, the sound of Whitney Houston’s biggest hit begins to fade. Since the future I knew is in the process of being rewritten, Whitney Houston has another chance along with everyone else. Maybe this time she’ll live to be ninety-seven.
“Freya?” I repeat, my gaze flicking over to the empty glass on the nightstand at her side of the bed. “Are you all right?”
I jump to my feet, take three long strides to the bathroom door, and pull it open. Empty.
The U.N.A. can’t have taken her—they would’ve grabbed me too—and I curse as I fly into the hall. Where would she go? I rampage through the motel with my face burning—the coffee shop, the pool area, and every damn hallway in the motel—I scour them all looking for her.
The extra room key is snugly in my back pocket, and I stand in the lobby counting what’s left of the cash Isaac returned to me. Minus the two hundred dollars I gave Elizabeth, it’s all still there. Freya’s fled with only the clothes on her back.
I don’t know why she’d do it and I don’t know who I’m angrier with, myself or her. But I have to find her. Jogging into the street, I’m breathless with worry. I circle the streets surrounding the motel, expanding my perimeter as I see no sign of Freya’s red hair or pink miniskirt.
I run with a violence that leaves me gasping on the corner of Northeast Forty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue, my body bent and my palms on my lower thighs to steady myself. If I didn’t know better I’d think I was in some not-quite-trendy urban Vancouver neighbourhood—the low-rise apartment buildings and modest houses look and feel West Coast familiar.
A wave of dizziness knocks me to my knees. After everything that happened last night—the drugs, the shootings, the shock—my body can’t take much more. I need a minute. My knees ache from the fall and I stretch them out in front of me as I fill my lungs with oxygen. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Freya said she remembered me but clearly she didn’t remember the U.N.A. snatching her. There were holes in her memory that caused her to run off. Where would I go if I had gaps in my memory? Where would I look for answers? Is it possible she’s wandered back to the motel and is waiting for me there?
I force myself up and half sprint, half walk to the University Motor Inn, fighting the sensation that I’m about to pass out. Inside the motel I race to the room and find it just as I left it. I knock back two glasses of water, hoping that will be enough to keep me upright, and head straight back into the street where I snare the first cab I see.
It smells like smoke and my lungs greedily suck in the bad air. “Where to?” the driver asks.
I have no clue. I’m out of my mind with worry. Can barely string together the words that will g
et the cab moving.
“Got an address for me?” the driver prompts, an edge creeping into his tone. He must’ve faced down a dozen varieties of weirdoes while doing his job. I’m just the latest.
“No address,” I mumble. “I need to find someone.” I tell him about Freya’s pink skirt and red hair, say we had a terrible fight and she ran off.
The driver pushes at one of his sleeves. “Look, I’m no private eye. Your girlfriend will come back when she’s cooled down. You’re better to sit and wait it out.”
“I can’t do that. I need to find her now.” Maybe he’s worried I won’t pay him. I pull a hundred dollar bill from my pocket, waving it frenziedly. “Take it. You can give me the change later.”
The driver stares at the offered bill. “No American cash?”
I’d forgotten I’d have to change currency. Last I heard the Canadian dollar was worth a lousy seventy-one cents. “Sorry, I just got here.”
The driver pinches the inferior Canadian bill between two of his fingers and gives me a tired look, like he’s doing me a favour. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”
Because I have no idea where Freya could be, we begin by making a wider circle around the motel. Then we cross the bay and the driver takes me to the heart of the shopping district. I do a double take every time I see a girl with red hair or one poured into a pink miniskirt. The driver points out likely candidates. None of them are Freya and we continue to whirl around the city for close to an hour before the driver suggests I try the Space Needle.
“Everybody who comes to Seattle for the first time wants to go up the Space Needle,” he says. “I bet that’s where she went.”
He could be right and I ask him to take me there. Relief lights up his face when we reach the Space Needle. He hands me American greenbacks in change, happy to be rid of me.
The disc section at the top of the needle reminds me of the one perched atop Vancouver’s Harbour Centre. I can only hope Freya feels the same way and that it drew her here. I pay $3.50 to ride the elevator up to the observation platform. The sunny morning has become a sunny day and the view from the platform is striking—blue water and blue mountains in nearly every direction, ferries, cargo lines, cruise ships, and buzzing city streets framed with skyscrapers. There’s even a float plane coming in for a landing on the lake below while I roam the deck looking for Freya. I check the revolving restaurant too, and when I’m one-hundred-percent sure she’s not here, I stagger into the street.
Tomorrow Page 19
