Jacob Wonderbar and the Interstellar Time Warp

by Nathan Bransford

  He had known something seemed off about his mother. He had seen his parents having hushed conversations in the kitchen several different times. They would break off mid-sentence whenever he entered the room, giving him strange, pitying looks. But he had simply thought they were having money problems or were upset about his continued inability to avoid getting into trouble with Jacob Wonderbar. He had no idea it could have been something as serious as an illness.

  Just then he saw his dad at the end of the hallway, and Dexter grabbed Sarah and Chloe and ducked around the corner. He hated to run away from his own father, but if his dad saw him, Dexter knew he would have to go into the hospital room and see his mom, and he wasn’t sure if he could bear it.

  They heard the door to the hospital room shut and edged closer so they could hear what was happening.

  Dexter heard his mom say, “Have they found him?”

  He almost felt like he could see her as she said it, her hair disheveled and staring up at the ceiling, worried . . . and then it hit him.

  He had seen it, when he was on Planet Archimedes on his first space voyage, staring into the Looking Glass. When he had returned from space that time, he had expected to go home and find his mother sick, only she was fine.

  But she wasn’t fine after all. He realized that the scientists had shown him the future on Planet Archimedes.

  “Sarah . . .” Dexter started to say.

  Sarah nodded. “The Looking Glass. I just realized too.” She hugged him and he squeezed out a tear when he clenched his eyes shut.

  “What do you want to do?” Chloe asked.

  Dexter thought about taking the time machine and zooming forward to the future to see what would happen. Maybe the illness was nothing and she would be fine and he wouldn’t have to worry.

  But he shuddered to think of the alternative. What if it were really bad? Then he would know and would have to go back and talk to his mom and say his good-byes knowing full well what was going to happen. He couldn’t do it.

  It didn’t feel real. His mom was a powerful individual, not someone who could be felled by something as small as a virus . . . or cancer.

  But he remembered the time machine in Sarah’s pocket. It didn’t have to be real.

  “Let’s go into the past,” Dexter whispered to Chloe and Sarah. “Let’s fix this.”

  Sarah and Chloe glanced at each other. “But Dexy . . .” Chloe said.

  “No,” Dexter said, the strength in his voice surprising all three of them. “We have to. We have to make this better.”

  Sarah nodded slowly and took out the time machine. “Okay. We’ll do it, Dex. Whatever you need. But what do you want to do?”

  Dexter pointed at the key. “We’ll go back in time and make her live a healthier lifestyle.”

  Jacob watched the younger version of himself across the clearing. He was struck by how much smaller he was, just a kid who had no idea he would someday travel through space and time.

  It was hard to watch his younger self plop down on a log, too numb to even cry. Younger Jacob looked so incredibly sad.

  Jacob knew which day he was seeing. His dad had only moved away from home a few days before and young Jacob was having trouble believing it was really happening. He felt like he had woken up in someone else’s life. He knew about things like divorce and kids who grew up with only one parent, and one of his classmates had no parents at all, but those were things that happened to other kids and on television shows, not something that he had ever once thought could possibly happen to him. His life had completely changed overnight and there was nothing at all he could do about it.

  His younger self slumped on the log, clutching a stick, too sad and bewildered to even hit anything with it. He just stared at the leaves and sat there.

  Jacob recalled feeling like his whole body was on fire. He had been unable to pay attention to anything at school, he constantly tried to decide if he should tell people or not, and he wondered every day if things would ever feel normal again.

  He had to completely change the way he thought about his life and the future. No more asking his dad first if he could spend the night at Dexter’s because he’d be more likely to say yes than his mom. No more pancakes on Saturday mornings cut into strange shapes. No more surprise birthdays.

  He was gone. And Jacob remembered this day in particular because it was the one where he started believing his dad really wasn’t coming back.

  “So . . .” Mick whispered.

  Jacob shot him a look that made Mick back off. He wasn’t leaving yet.

  His younger self reached into his pocket and took out something small and green. Jacob remembered exactly what it was. Earlier that day, Sarah Daisy had rung the doorbell and pressed a flattened four-leaf clover into his hands with a sympathetic look. It was one of her most prized possessions and he took it wordlessly, knowing that he didn’t have to say to her how much it meant to him.

  The only reason he was able to get through the pain he felt when his dad left was because he had his friends and he had his mom, who cared about him and were patient with him when he wanted to talk and when he didn’t want to talk, and who didn’t take it personally when he was mean to them for no reason other than that he was just angry. And he got through it, one slow, hard day at a time.

  His younger self took out his cell phone and stood up to leave. Jacob remembered that his mom had texted him that dinner was ready. Little Jacob stomped away, and Jacob felt bad and happy for himself at the same time, knowing he had a long, hard road to go but that there was also so much happiness to look forward to.

  Jacob glanced at Mick, who was twirling his finger, waiting for Jacob to say something.

  And then it hit Jacob.

  Mick had sent Jacob’s dad back to this precise moment. He had tried to arrange a reunion.

  Dexter, Sarah, and Chloe stood outside a brick building covered in thick green ivy and waited for Dexter’s mom to emerge. The year was 1986, and questionable fashion choices were everywhere.

  There were men who had only one side of their head shaved and wore a single thin earring. There were women who apparently would not consider wearing any article of clothing if it was not torn in some manner. Men wore blazers over just a T-shirt. Someone had decided that thick wool leggings around the ankles were an appropriate accessory. And there was a terrific race afoot to make one’s hair as large and as poufy as humanly possible.

  Dexter noticed a particularly galling assemblage of clothing. One woman wore a giant gray sweatshirt that was ripped at the neck, exposing one shoulder, with jeans studded with rhinestones, purple leg warmers, and purple gloves with the fingers cut off. Then he realized he was staring at his mom.

  “Whoa,” Dexter said.

  His jaw fell open and he pointed. Sarah and Chloe smiled and nodded, and they started trailing behind her a safe distance away.

  Dexter struggled to take it all in. Her hair wasn’t in a bun, it was all poofed out, a contender for the largest hairdo award. She didn’t walk with purpose and efficiency, she . . . bounced. Happily. She wasn’t someone who looked like she was overly concerned about beds being made and good grades achieved and a successful future secured; she looked like she did not have a thing to worry about in the universe.

  Dexter looked at Sarah and Chloe. “I think my mom was cool,” he whispered, hardly believing that those words were emerging from his mouth. His mom was fearsome, intensely caring, a force of nature, the smartest person he knew. But she most definitely was not cool.

  “Ah!” Sarah shouted. She covered her mouth and pointed.

  Dexter saw his mom saunter up to a tall blond woman next to a tree. They started chatting casually.

  “Ah!” he shouted, finally realizing who the blond woman was.

  It was a younger Mrs. Daisy. Unlike Dexter’s mom, Mrs. Daisy was d
ressed in a simple black sweater, jeans, and black boots, and she had forfeited the large hair competition. She was wearing librarian glasses and at age twenty or so, she looked eerily like a taller Sarah Daisy.

  “Our moms were friends?” Sarah whispered.

  “How is that possible?” Dexter asked.

  And yet there was his mom, chatting with Mrs. Daisy, looking like the best of friends.

  Sarah turned to Dexter, her eyes wide. “What happened to our parents?”

  Dexter shook his head and looked at Chloe, who seemed oddly detached from everything they were seeing. But before he could attempt to formulate a coherent sentence to ask Chloe about why she didn’t seem surprised, he saw his mom pull a small package out of her back pocket, shake it, take something out of it, and hand it over to Sarah’s mom.

  They were about to smoke a cigarette.

  “No!” Dexter shouted.

  “Mom!” Sarah gasped.

  Their moms looked over at them, and it chilled Dexter to the bone when his mom’s eyes just sort of glanced past him, not recognizing him.

  Of course she didn’t, he remembered. He wasn’t born yet.

  Dexter summoned his courage. Smoking was wrong. It was time for him to be the parent. He could save his mom from herself and maybe stop her from getting sick in the future.

  He put his head down and charged over, and grabbed the cigarette out of his startled mom’s hand. He stomped it on the ground and gave her a fierce look.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” he said.

  He thought his mom was going to be furious at him like she was the few times he had ever dared talk back to her and defy her authority.

  Instead she laughed, sounding surprisingly girlish, and patted him on his head. “Whatever,” she said.

  Sarah’s mom tore her cigarette in half and Dexter’s mom laughed at her.

  “Shoo,” Dexter’s mom said, nudging him away.

  Dexter slumped back to Sarah and Chloe.

  “Okay, you did it, let’s get back,” Chloe said.

  Dexter raised his head. “I’m not satisfied,” he said in a low voice.

  He spun around and followed his mom and Mrs. Daisy as they walked beside a boggy pond with large lily pads and croaking frogs. In an island at the center there was a rough sign with a painting of Phil the therapist’s face that said: “Trust in Phil. Because your feelings are greater than gold.”

  They followed Dexter’s mom to a hot dog stand, where she ordered a heaping chilidog covered in a strange yellow liquid cheese. Dexter shuddered. He had never seen his mom eat anything that wasn’t made out of the healthiest and freshest ingredients. Who knows what consuming such a strange concoction could have done to her health. He started running.

  “Go, Dex!” Sarah cheered.

  Dexter ran up to his mom, smacked the chili cheese dog out of her hands, and yelled, “You should eat healthier food too!”

  He kept running. The food splattered on the ground. Dexter looked over his shoulder expecting to see his mom exploding with rage.

  She was laughing.

  What are you trying to do?” Jacob said, his voice strained.

  Mick held up his hands, signaling for either time or calm, Jacob wasn’t sure which. What Jacob did know was that he wasn’t feeling calm and wasn’t about to give Mick Cracken time to come up with a clever retort. Jacob balled his hands into fists and he wondered if he and Mick were going to have their first real fight.

  “This is my life you’re messing with,” Jacob said. “My life. Not yours. Mine.”

  No one messed with Jacob Wonderbar. Not substitute teachers, not wannabe schoolyard bullies, not pretend space buccaneers who somehow got themselves elected president of the universe. And they certainly did not mess with his family. No matter how angry Jacob may have been with his father, he was his father, and Jacob would defend him until the end.

  But Mick just stared back at Jacob, the first inklings of a satisfied grin beginning to form around the edges of his mouth.

  Jacob felt a creeping thought in the back of his head and it slowed down his anger just a tad. He was still furious with Mick, but there was a small part of him that understood, maybe even appreciated, what Mick was trying to do. Jacob had spent endless afternoons wishing his dad would come home. He would go to bed dreaming of his dad being there in the morning making breakfast and destroying the kitchen in the process, or of showing up unannounced to one of his basketball games. And on that particular day when Jacob was ten years old and so sad sitting on the log, he would have given anything to see his father walk through the forest as a surprise visitor from the future.

  What if Jacob’s dad had shown up that day? What if his life had been different? What if Mick could have fixed Jacob’s life and made it unfold the way it should have the first time around, with his dad still around day in and day out and surprising him with exciting presents on his birthday?

  It almost seemed like Mick was trying to do the right thing for once, that the good side of Mick that seemed to hide just beneath his constant thievery and lying may finally have been emerging.

  But he was still Mick Cracken. There had to be another angle. And Jacob realized he could have had the situation completely wrong.

  Maybe Mick was dangling the idea of reuniting Jacob with his dad so he would follow Mick around for some other purpose. Maybe Mick was playing a bigger game and had no interest in helping Jacob find his dad at all. It could have all been one of Mick’s patented tricks. He would make Jacob think he knew where his dad was so Jacob would trail along.

  “What do you get out of this?” Jacob asked quietly.

  Mick rubbed his chin and raised his eyebrows. “Why, Jacob Wonderbar, I would never presume to—”

  “Spare me,” Jacob said. “Did you really strand my dad in the past? Why would you even do that in the first place?!”

  “Jacob,” Mick said mock-patiently. “You have to understand—”

  “All I understand is that you are a lying—”

  “Listen,” Mick said. He looked serious and sincere again.

  “No, you listen to me . . .” Jacob said.

  “Your dad is an Astral,” Mick continued. “You’re half Astral.”

  “I know that. So?”

  “So Astrals are in danger, which means you’re in danger. Think about it. There are life-changing things happening on your planet right now that could mean the end of all Astrals. Including you.”

  Jacob mulled over what Mick was saying, and ultimately found himself believing him. Jacob didn’t have proof, but he felt like there was something brewing between Earth and Astrals. It made sense that Mick would find himself in the middle of it. Those strange people in the Palais des Tuileries certainly seemed scary, and Jacob believed that all Astrals could be in grave danger.

  Mick’s cocky smile returned in full force. “And I’m the only one who can save us. I have a plan.”

  Dexter, Sarah, and Chloe stared at two male college students who wore fancy blazers over T-shirts instead of over collared shirts like normal people. They were chattering about achieving a high score on something called Pac-Man.

  “The eighties are weird,” Dexter said.

  Sarah put her hand on Dexter’s shoulder and shook him a little bit, and when she did, he realized that he had been stalling. As exciting as it was to stare at college students from twenty-five years ago and imagine them being his friends’ parents, he knew that at some point he had to go back to the present to see if his attempt to force his mother to make better lifestyle choices had succeeded. They had steered Dexter’s mom clear of a building that Dexter suspected had asbestos by blocking it off with yellow tape. They secretly signed her up for an aerobics class that advertised its willingness to pound on your door at five a.m., and whose instructor promised that she didn’t take no
for an answer. They snuck into her dorm room and placed blinders and earplugs on her bed to ensure that she would always get a proper night’s sleep.

  It was time to face the hospital and all of its assorted medical devices and see if their efforts had worked.

  And now that he had seen a new side of his mom, one that he had never even considered existed, it made him want to save her all the more desperately now that he understood there were other parts of her that he had never seen before.

  He nodded to Sarah and she handed the time machine over to him. It glinted in the sunlight and almost seemed aware of its own power.

  “I’m ready,” he said, staring at the key.

  Sarah grabbed him on one shoulder and Chloe touched his other.

  “I can do this,” he said.

  He paused for a little while longer before he finally said the words and the air rushed out of his lungs as they warped back to the hospital.

  Dexter kept his eyes closed for a moment but knew he was right back in the hall outside his mother’s room. He could smell that strange rubbery hospital smell.

  Sarah squeezed his shoulder in solidarity, and then Dexter lost nearly all brain functionality entirely when Chloe pulled him into a tight hug. He was not positive that his feet were still touching the ground, and he was pretty sure his brain had somehow flown straight out of his skull.

  “It will be okay,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Dexy.”

  Chloe broke the hug and Dexter said, “Thank you.”

  Chloe bit her lip and looked away. Dexter took a deep breath and readied himself to peek inside his mother’s hospital room. If they had succeeded, if his mom had stopped smoking and that had somehow cured her of her illness, it would be someone else inside the room.