Traveler from 1970. Caroline Sears. Needs DL, SS#, insurance, CC attached to Temporal Solutions, and cash. Phone and iBook. Will send pic. Myra.
“What’s a ‘CC’?” I asked.
“Credit card,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t need one of those.” I’d never had a credit card. “Hunter gave me a thousand dollars, and I’d feel guilty taking any more money that’s not mine.”
“Get over it,” Myra said. “A thousand dollars won’t go very far in 2001. We’ll call your trip an experiment and that will justify using Temporal Solutions funds for you. Use them for living expenses and clothing. Medical costs. A hotel in New York. Whatever.”
“Is … does Temporal Solutions do anything except time travel?” I asked.
“People think it’s a time-management consulting firm, which cracks me up.” Myra chuckled to herself. “They’re right of course, but not the way they think.”
“Wouldn’t the military be interested in what you do?” I asked. “It seems like they could put it to good use.”
“Oh, they’d be interested, all right,” she said. “But I’m not interested in them. They’d abuse it, I have no doubt, so I keep everything highly secretive. If anyone gets too close, we have a code word we use to put everyone on alert. We instantly change our phone numbers and email addresses as well as our office location. We’ve done it three times in the fourteen years we’ve been in existence.” She typed as she spoke. “Twice the FBI got a whiff of what we were up to,” she said. “The third time, it was a private organization sniffing around. We fly under the radar.” She stopped typing. Looked over at me. “So it would make my people very nervous if they knew about you,” she said. “I’m going to keep you my little secret. I’ll trust you because Hunter trusted you, but that’s it.”
I nodded. “I understand,” I said.
“That accent of yours,” she said. “You’re going to stand out here, so expect people to ask.” She went back to her typing. “I’ll get you a North Carolina license rather than New Jersey,” she said, “so you’ll have to make up why you’re up here. You have family here, or a friend. Whatever. Make it up.”
She stood up abruptly, setting the computer on the coffee table. “Come with me,” she said. “We need to snap your picture for the driver’s license. Need a blank wall, and since I’ve already packed all our art, that’s easy.”
She led me to a bare wall in the dining room and had me stand against it. I was certain this would be the worst picture of my life. Straggly hair. An exhausted face full of confusion and uncertainty. She picked up a small camera from the otherwise bare buffet and held it to her eyes.
“Don’t smile,” she said. “Nobody smiles in a driver’s license picture. They’re too fed up after waiting in line at the DMV.” She pressed a button. “Okay, good,” she said, popping something I couldn’t see out of the camera. “I’ll email that to my partner.”
“I don’t understand how email works at all.”
Myra snickered. “Your head’s going to explode by the end of today,” she said. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll learn all you need.”
Back in the living room, we took our seats on the sofa again. She stuck something in the side of the computer and hit a few keys. “Okay,” she said. “We’re all set for the documentation.” She closed the computer, then her gaze lit on my belly. “You’ll be returning to 1970 with an infant,” she said, and I could tell she was thinking out loud.
“I really hope so,” I said. “Hunter said I’d need some way to carry her attached to me.”
She nodded. “We’ll research the best way. Some sort of sling, probably. How has Hunter arranged your return to 1970?”
“He figured out a number of portals for me to use.” I reached into the pocket of the backpack and handed her the list of portals Hunter had given me. “They’re all from a bridge over a pond in Central Park, because I can only step off over water.”
“Why?” She made a face as though she couldn’t possibly understand. “You’re not going to hit the ground as long as the calculations were done correctly.”
“It’s just … too scary,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. Then she very nearly smiled as she looked at the paper. “I recognize Hunter’s handwriting,” she said. “Let me go over these a little later and verify his calculations.” I thought I saw a bit of pride in her face that her son had followed in her footsteps, but she was a hard person to read and I wasn’t sure.
She got to her feet and I took it as a signal that we’d come to an end of our conversation. I felt suddenly nervous. I remembered Hunter saying that I could stay with Myra, but I couldn’t imagine coming right out and asking.
“Is there a hotel nearby?” I asked.
“You’ll stay here with us until we figure out your next move,” she said, lighting another cigarette.
“Us?” I asked. I didn’t think she was married. I remembered Hunter saying he didn’t know his father.
“Hunter and me,” she said, and my eyes widened.
“Hunter lives here?”
“Well, of course,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke over her shoulder. “He’s only fifteen. He’s at school right now and you are not, under any circumstances, to let him know why you’re here or that you’re time-traveling. Hunter doesn’t know what I do and I don’t plan to tell him until he’s in college. We’ll say you’re the wife of someone I work with and that I’m helping you find a … what did you call it? Fetal surgeon? I’m helping you find a fetal surgeon and letting you stay here while we make those arrangements. We often have scientists staying with us. He won’t think it’s strange.”
Well, I certainly thought it was strange. “Okay,” I said. The thought of actually seeing a teenaged Hunter shook my nerves. This was so bizarre.
“We need to get you some clothes, too.” She glanced at my backpack. “Looks like you don’t have much with you.”
“Hunter said my clothes would stand out too much in 2001.”
“True,” she said. “Are you tired? The stepping off can exhaust you.”
“I really am,” I admitted.
“Come on,” she said, heading for the staircase that opened into the room.
She led me up the stairs, cigarette smoke blowing into my face. We reached a hallway and I followed her into a small bedroom. The bed was bigger than mine at home, and as with every other room I’d seen in the house, there was nothing on the walls. Boxes were piled beneath the window. She told me where the bathroom was, then left me alone, and as I crawled, exhausted, under the covers, I wondered if I would wake up to discover this had all been a dream.
* * *
My chronometer read two thirty when I finally opened my eyes in the unfamiliar little room. I felt remarkably refreshed and hungry. I got out of bed and used the bathroom, where I caught a good look at myself in the mirror. I looked no different than I had the day before. My hair needed washing and the skin around my eyes was darker than the rest of my complexion, but that was about it.
I walked downstairs and found Myra at the small square table in the kitchen, where she sat leaning over her laptop once again, cigarette in hand.
“Good, you’re up,” she said, without even looking at me. “I was hoping you’d be awake before I left.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I need to pick up your documents.”
“Already?” I sat down across from her. “I don’t understand how you get them,” I said. “A social security number and everything.”
“I have a trustworthy coworker who gets us documents for a price, shall we say,” she said, closing the top of the computer. “Now as for clothing and such”—she stood up—“I despise shopping. Can you order online and we’ll have things sent overnight?”
“Online?” I asked.
“On the computer.” She sighed and I heard impatience in the sound. “I’ll show you how to do it later.” She lifted her tan jacket from the back of the
chair and slipped it on. “In the meantime, help yourself to whatever you can find in the fridge.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Hunter said you would help, but I never expected all … everything you’re doing for me. I was so afraid to do this. To time-travel. But I would do anything for my baby.”
She stopped rushing for a moment, her hands still on the zipper of her jacket. “I understand,” she said. “I know I come across hard-edged. I can’t help it. I’m a scientist and my mind is always full of facts and figures. But when I was pregnant with Hunter, I nearly lost him. You would have seen a different side to me then. A maternal side came out of me that even I didn’t know existed. So I do understand, even if I seem all business, and I’ll help however I can. Once we get your insurance, I’ll do some research to find you the best fetal surgeon.”
I shut my eyes. “I’m so afraid he’ll say there’s nothing he can do.”
“One step at a time,” she said, “though I’m afraid your fear might be founded. I read up on fetal surgery while you slept. You said it’s the baby’s heart, right? Some condition leading to hypoplastic left heart syndrome?”
I nodded, frightened of what she would say.
“Fetal heart surgery for that condition seems to be experimental right now, but if the help you need exists, I’ll find a way to get it for you.”
I didn’t think Hunter would have put me through this if he didn’t think I could find the help I needed. “I can’t believe how kind you’re being,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Hunter might come home before I get here,” she said, heading toward the hallway. “I’ll text him that there’s a guest in the house so you don’t surprise him.”
I had no idea what “text him” meant, but I nodded. Maybe it was another way of saying “email.”
“What you should do while I’m gone is watch TV,” she said. “Watch CNN. That’s the news station. The TV’s already set to it. You should learn what’s going on in the world.”
“All right,” I said.
Once Myra left, I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and carried it into the living room. It took me a minute to realize that the large flat screen on top of the pile of boxes was the television. I’d never used a remote control for a TV before, but I figured out how to turn it on and was surprised that the huge picture was in color. I knew a few people who had color televisions but had never seen one before.
That CNN station apparently ran news all day long, which seemed crazy to me. I was used to getting my news in the early evening from Walter Cronkite. How could there possibly be enough news to fill a full day? Today the reporters or whatever they were talked mostly about some bombings in Israel, and they kept showing the same pictures over and over again. I supposed that was how they filled an entire day. In between that repetition, I learned that the president was a Republican named George Bush, and he seemed no more popular than Richard Nixon in 1970. A movie called Bridget Jones’s Diary was the most popular movie of the past weekend. I also learned that the price of gas was a dollar sixty-three. It was thirty-four cents at home. How did people afford to own a car in 2001? I wondered.
Then they were back to the bombings in Israel, so I used the remote to change the channel and discovered to my shock that As the World Turns was still on the air. I stared at the TV in openmouthed wonder. Not only was Patti’s and my favorite soap opera still running, but the same actors still played the characters Lisa and Bob and Nancy. They were older, of course—thirty-one years older than the last time I saw them—and watching them was the strangest experience. I felt comforted by them, as if I were seeing old friends.
I wished I could call Patti. I wanted to tell her I was all right. She had to be completely freaked out. I could call her if I could find a number for her. That thought sent a shudder through me. In 2001, Patti would be sixty years old. I could ask her if everything turned out okay with my baby. No tampering, Hunter had said. I wouldn’t dare call her. What if she’s dead? Hunter had said. He was right. I had to follow the rules.
When As the World Turns was over, I switched back to CNN again. I watched it for over an hour. The biggest difference between the news of 1970 and 2001, I thought, was no mention of Vietnam. Of course there wasn’t, and yet it felt strange and disorienting to hear nothing about the war that had absorbed all our time and attention for the past few years. Had Joe and all the others who died been completely forgotten?
I was watching another soap opera, one I’d never seen before, when I heard the back door slam. I held my breath, and in a moment, a tall blond boy walked into the living room, green backpack slung over one shoulder, an apple in his hand. He grinned at me.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m Hunter. Whatcha watchin’?”
12
HUNTER
May 1970
Nags Head
I walked in the back door after a long, emotionally agonizing run to find Patti pulling a pan of brownies from the oven.
“I need to check on Carly,” she said. “It’s not like her to sleep this late.”
I drew in a breath. I’d avoided Patti so far this morning, eating breakfast on my own only an hour after sending Carly to 2001. Then I’d walked around the house thinking through how I would tell Patti what I’d done. When I finally heard her stirring upstairs, I chickened out and went for the run. Now it was nearly 10 A.M. and I could avoid her no longer.
I glanced through the open kitchen doorway to the living room, where John Paul was playing contentedly—for the moment—in his playpen. “I need to talk to you,” I said.
Patti looked instantly worried. She set the pan on a trivet. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. Her gaze was riveted on me as she turned off the oven. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Are we all right?”
I couldn’t believe she’d asked that. We’d always been all right. I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to say that after today, though.
“It’s nothing about you and me, so don’t worry,” I said. “It’s about Carly.”
“What about Carly?”
“Come sit, okay?” I patted the back of one of the chairs at the kitchen table and she moved across the room and lowered herself to the chair, her eyes never leaving mine. I sat down, pulling my chair close to her. I wanted to be able to touch her.
“You look so serious,” she said. “Is something wrong with Carly?”
I’d practiced beginning this conversation a dozen different ways while I walked on the beach. In my imagination, none of those beginnings came to a good end.
“This is going to be really hard for you to believe, so I’m asking you to just bear with me, all right?” I asked.
She gave me an uncertain smile. “What are you talking about?”
“Carly’s not upstairs.”
“Yes she is.” She started to get to her feet, but I grabbed her hand and held it down on the table.
“Wait,” I said. “Let me explain, all right?” I licked my lips. “I happen to know that, in the future, there’s a type of surgery they can perform on unborn babies,” I said, speaking slowly. “And I knew how I could actually send Carly to that future … to 2001 … where she could get the surgery.”
Patti stared at me and I wondered what was going through her mind. Did she think I’d gone crazy? I could see the thrumming of the artery in the fair skin of her throat.
“Is this a joke?” she asked.
“No, not a joke.” I gripped her hand a bit tighter. “You always say I’m so brilliant. That I seem to know so much about so many different topics. But it’s not that I’m brilliant, Patti. I seem to know a lot because I actually lived from 1986 to 2018 before I ever came here. Before I came to 1965, when I met you.”
She jerked her hand out of mine and scraped her chair a few inches away from me. She thought I was losing my mind. I could see it in her frightened blue eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asked.
“I told you my mother was a scientist, remember? Well, she discover
ed a method of time travel,” I said. “She—”
Patti leaped to her feet. “I’m checking on Carly!” She flew out of the kitchen and I stayed at the table, my eyes closed as I waited. I could think of no way for this conversation to go well. A moment later, Patti was back, her face red and full of fear. Was she afraid of what was happening? Of me? Probably both. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, clutching the jamb, as far from me as she could get without being in the next room. “Where is she?” she demanded.
I looked up at her, not budging from my seat. I was afraid if I went to her, I’d scare her more than she already was. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, honey,” I said. “I know it sounds … insane. I know that, but I’m telling you the truth. Please sit down again.”
“No!”
“I came here from the future as part of an experiment,” I said. “I was never supposed to stay, but when I fell in love with you, I didn’t want to go back.” I hoped that would soften the anger and fear I saw in her face, but instead her eyes narrowed to stormy slits.
“Where … is … my … sister!” She bit off every word.
“I sent her to 2001,” I said again. “Once I explained everything to her, she wanted to go. She wanted to get help for her baby. She’s—”
“What have you done?” she asked in a near whisper. Tears ran down her cheeks and it was all I could do to stay in my seat. “Did you kill her?”
“Of course not!” I said, horrified she could even think that. “She’s with my mother right now, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2001,” I said. “She’s actually with me right now, only I’m just a kid. Fifteen. That’s why, when I met her in the rehab unit, I recognized her and got excited. I knew her from 2001 and I—” Before I knew what was happening, Patti crossed the room and slapped me hard across the face.
“Stop it!” she shouted.
I lifted my hand to my stinging cheek, stunned. In the living room, John Paul began to wail.
The Dream Daughter Page 9
