by Dan Alatorre
But try as I might, I couldn’t distract myself enough times to erase the memories of the people who had become my friends. The ones who trusted me, who had taken me into their hearts.
I would miss them all. My heart hurt as I bathed in my loneliness, my self-inflicted exile. No amount of deep breaths and busying myself with linen receipts or repacking my suitcase could stop the sadness.
There was a knock. I picked up the forms from the small desk and walked over to open the door.
Of all the people in the world, she was the one I expected least.
I almost couldn’t speak.
“Melissa.”
It came out as a whisper.
She stood in the hallway staring at me, neither smiling nor looking angry. She seemed to be sizing me up in the dim light, debating about how she wanted to act towards me.
I stepped back, opening the door further. “I’m surprised to see you.” I swallowed. “And happy, I think.”
She took a few paces into my tiny room, stopping with her back to me.
I couldn’t hold back. “Melissa, I’m so sorry.” I searched the ceiling for words. “I’m sorry about everything.” I tried to get past the lump in my throat and hold my emotions in. “You were all my friends, and I-”
“Stop.” She put a hand out, lowering her head. “You sound like you’re going to cry.” She turned to face me, her eyes full of tears. “And if you start crying, then I’ll start crying.” A tear rolled down her face, followed by another. “And I don’t want to cry for you, Peeky. I hate you right now. So don’t you say anything else to me.” She folded her arms, sniffling a few times. “I had a friend I could talk to when I felt this way, and that friend is gone now.” She turned away, placing her hands on the desk.
I cleared my throat. “Okay.”
She wiped her eyes. “I didn’t come here to make a scene.” When she turned around, her eyes were puffy and red. “I had it all planned out and it didn’t include any crying.”
I stood silent, ready for whatever admonishments she wanted to throw at me.
She wiped her eyes again, taking a slow, deep breath. “I thought a lot about not coming, but Dad always says people deserve a second chance. I’m not so sure.” She sighed, glancing around the room, looking at anything but me. Her eyes brimmed again with tears. “You… you were my friend for a long time, before you weren't. You helped me through some tough times. So even though you lied to me like a piece of shit snake, I’d like to believe that some of that good guy still exists. I’d like to believe I wasn’t a complete fool.”
“Melissa, I didn’t know what to do. I had an ugly, deceptive plan that was born a long time ago for a lot of reasons that seemed good at the time. After I met you guys, you were all so nice to me—I wanted to come clean, but…” I stared down. “I just couldn't think of a way to do it without turning you all against me.”
“And yet you managed to do that anyway.” The tears rolled down her face again.
I nodded. “That's right. So here I am. I’d do anything to regain your friendship.”
She stared at me, seeming to size me up, to see which person was the real one. After a long while, she came to her conclusion.
“If you’re really still my friend, prove it.”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Everyone else from our original group is either in the hospital or in jail. Things have gotten pretty damned far out of control.” She looked me in the eye. “But I picked up the machine from the hotel. It’s in Mandy’s truck outside. She and I were able to get it out of the room and loaded into the truck bed. I’m supposed to turn it in to the University tomorrow morning.
“Instead, I want to ditch it.” She glanced over her shoulder at me, her eyes full of pain. “Tonight. Let's drop the fucking thing in a swamp or back into the mine where we found it. I want to get rid of it.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Why?”
She shook her head. “That thing is evil. Not devil-evil, but evil in its own way, like bad luck. It’s bad news. Nothing good happens to anyone who comes near it.” She walked back to me. “Think about it. Riff nearly got killed just unburying it. Roger almost died testing it. Barry was almost killed on his trip.”
“To throw away such a valuable-”
“Valuable? What value?” She threw her hands in the air. “It’s a tool of destruction. Its mere presence has caused every rational person who gets a whiff if it to drop any moral framework they ever had. The Dean, the police…” She glanced back out the window. “Us. Maybe its creators had noble intentions but that isn’t how it worked out. For God’s sake, look at what happened to your own family.”
Melissa turned to me, drying her eyes. “I’ve studied enough broken pottery to see that a lot of ancient people thought they had things figured out, and suddenly their whole civilizations vanished. We are not meant to travel through time. We can’t handle it.” She folded her arms, walking across the little room. “It’s like the kid who took the family station wagon for a drive when she was ten years old. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, and just . . . a matter of how bad it will be.”
She moved back to the desk, arms folded, and sat on the edge. “The original creators probably figured that out and threw the thing in an old well or a deep freshwater spring hoping nobody’d ever find it again. And then by pure accident, the machine was rediscovered—and disaster followed. We’re no different.” She looked up at me. “We need to get rid of that thing, but I can’t do it by myself. Can you help me? Can you be a friend and do that?”
I sighed, nodding. “I can do that.”
* * * * *
The drive to Florida Mining and Minerals site number 32 was a long one. And of course it had to rain.
Melissa drove while I sat there watching the borrowed truck’s GPS tell me how many minutes remained until I threw my dream into a hole. I was only a few feet from the machine I’d sacrificed so much for, over so many years, separated only by the truck’s small rear window.
Now I was helping take it to be dumped into a pond, in the middle of a mine, in the middle of nowhere. The workers of the next shift would unknowingly bury it, and it would be lost forever.
I didn’t speak much on the ride. Melissa had been emotional in the dorm room, but a two hour drive will cool most heads.
I kept thinking there might be a chance to persuade her to do something else with the machine.
It was already dark when we arrived, and the incessant downpour caused the watchman to barely stick his head out of the guard shack to check Melissa’s credentials. He didn’t seem to care that we weren’t in a university truck. He just waved us on through and went back to his newspaper.
We bounced along the dirt road for a few minutes, making our way to the center of the massive, muddy work site.
She stopped the truck and leaned forward over the steering wheel. “This looks like it.”
I peered out my window. There were no street lights, no work lights, just the high beams of the truck shining up onto a small hill through the rain.
Beyond it was the pond. The pretty blue waters that she and Roger had gone swimming in a few days ago. It had appeared so inviting then. It seemed so foreboding in the dark.
Melissa turned off the engine and pointed at the hill. “We’re going to pull the time machine off the truck bed, drag it up that hill to the far edge, and drop it off the cliff. It’s straight down into the deep water from there.” She looked over at me. “When the miners start working this area again, they’ll backfill this whole thing with a few million cubic yards of dirt. The machine will be buried for good.”
My heart sank. Her words echoed in my brain but I couldn’t let myself believe them. Surely she’d listen to reason. But time was running out.
She opened her door. “Come on.”
The rain finally stopped, allowing the constant humidity to create little clouds of mist around the pond’s cooler surface. Between the two of us, we were able to get th
e time machine off the truck and up the muddy hill.
From there, even in the darkness, we could see the water below. The dump mounds were notoriously unstable, especially in the rain, but this one seemed sturdy enough for our work. Grass had started to grow on it, so it had been around a while. At the top of the peak, the time machine rested, visible from the lights of the truck. I walked around behind it, taking it all in one last time and waiting for an opportunity to talk Melissa out of this madness.
She stood on the edge, hand on her hips, staring into the dark water below. Behind me, the noise of the truck’s intermittent windshield wipers was the only sound.
I knew there was no talking her out of it. No way to get her to see things my way. I could imagine the determination on her face.
There were only a few moments before that machine disappeared forever. Only she stood between me and my dreams.
She, who stood on the edge of a cliff right now, in the middle of nowhere.
“Peeky?” She turned to look at me. “You have a strange expression on your face.” She smiled. “Having second thoughts?”
I went over to her, my heart pounding. “How far down do you think it is?”
She peered over the edge. “I don’t know. Forty feet. Maybe more.”
“Four stories of a building.” I nodded. “That’s pretty high.” I could feel my heart thumping in my chest.
“It doesn’t really matter how high we are, it matters how deep the water is.”
I swallowed. “There’s stuff in that water sometimes. Old equipment. Big rocks. Something could land on it and get all smashed up. Maybe not sink at all.”
She looked at me. A concerned expression came over her face. “What’s with you?”
“I worked too hard, Melissa. I sacrificed too much.”
“To what? To give up the machine? Haven’t you been paying attention? It has ruined the lives of everyone who’s come in contact with it. You, of all people, should know that. It ruined your whole family.”
“I have a chance to change that.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I know that now.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know that. We hardly know anything about the machine.”
“I know enough. What are you thinking? You still want to chase after your fortune? Is that it? And I’m standing in your way?” She glanced around, holding her hands out. “Well, here’s your chance. Nobody else is here. We’re all alone, Peeky!”
I swallowed hard, staring at her.
It would be easy. A quick push… The machine would be mine. I could remove the shame of my family…
By doing the unthinkable?
The reality of it hit me like a blow to the gut. I felt my knees weaken.
What am I becoming?
I looked over at Melissa, suddenly sick to my stomach at the things I’d allowed myself to think.
Maybe she was right about the machine.
Pain and humiliation swept through me. “Why did you make me come here?”
“I needed help getting rid of this thing.”
“You could have gotten somebody else. Why me? Why did I have to be present for its destruction?”
“So you’d know. So you wouldn’t chase around the rest of your life looking for it.”
I found myself panting hard, like I had been holding my breath for a long time. “It doesn’t have to be evil.”
“What?”
“The machine. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We were too ambitious. We should have taken smaller steps. Or tried to change something bad that happened.” I glanced at her. “We should have done something noble.”
She stood there, shaking her head.
“I want us to use what we found before we throw it away forever. It’s the chance of a lifetime. Maybe we could change things.”
“We might be able to do something but that doesn’t mean we should. Fate might not be very forgiving if we do.”
“Fate? You mean God. And why would we be given the intelligence to find this thing and not use it?”
“We can kill a person with a gun that somebody was intelligent enough to build. That doesn’t mean we should do it.”
“I just… don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t at least try.”
“Oh, you just want your money! I thought we were past that.”
“You’re past it!” I pointed at her. “You’re not getting deported tomorrow morning. You don’t have a life of shame and humiliation waiting for you the way I do.” I gasped. “You have money and a respected family name. What if you didn’t? I’m not making excuses. I did some bad things and I deserve what’s coming to me.”
I stared at the ground. “But do I deserve my whole life to be ruined forever? Yours won’t be. Barry’s won’t be.” I sighed, looking up at her. “Friends help each other, don’t they?”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “Everything we tried caused something bad to happen, Peeky.”
“So we adjust. We don’t throw it all away. We’re scientists. We make mistakes, but we learn from them. Early doctors had way more failures than they did successes. Leeches and bleeding people—but they built on those failures and created a world where they’ve saved millions of lives.”
I lowered my voice, looking into her eyes. “We have that opportunity. We just start small. Safe.” I turned to the machine, putting my hands on the rail frame. “There’s enough fuel for a trip like that. Two short trips, maybe.” I glanced over my shoulder at her. “One for you, then one for me. We could achieve something great. We could right a wrong.”
She folded her arms like she was hugging herself, shaking her head but staring at the machine. “We’d be playing God, changing things that have already happened.”
“Or would we be thwarting His will by not fixing something that was within our grasp?” Now was my chance. “Isn’t there something you’d like to change about the past?”
Melissa glared at me, her eyes filled with fear. “You don’t speak for God.”
“Neither of us does. What if this was put here for us to use to fix things? To change a terrible situation that had happened to one of us?” I held my breath, assessing her reaction. “What if you could change things—and save her?”
Melissa recoiled in horror. “Don’t do that! Don’t put me in a position to save my mother’s life and not do it!” She fell to her knees. “It’s wrong somehow. Haven’t the trips showed us that?” She eyed the time machine. “It has brought nothing but bad things into our lives, and you want me to go back and use it on my family?” Tears ran down her face.
“But what if-”
Her words were choked with emotion. “But what if it didn’t? What if the drunk driver kills both of them next time? They always jogged together, but Dad stayed behind to take a business call. He would have been with her.” She looked up at me. “I could have lost both of them.”
Melissa shook her head as tears spilled down her cheeks. “We were all chopping up vegetables, the three of us. To make chili for some big football game. It was our first home cooked meal in the remodeled kitchen.” Her voice drifted off. “It had to cook for a long time, like three hours. So they decided to go out for a jog, but the phone rang.” She swallowed. “Dad took the call and mom went out jogging by herself. I… never saw her again.”
I knelt down next to her. “Let me help you see your mother. Then we can talk about maybe helping me. What do you say?” I leaned into her line of sight, making her look at me. “Aren’t you curious? Haven’t you wanted to try? When we were in Barry’s apartment and we were all sitting around talking about time travel, didn’t it cross your mind?”
“What if God punishes me for doing something I shouldn’t do?”
I sat back. “I think you’ve been punished enough by losing your mother when you were just a child. Maybe this is a way of getting a second chance. Everybody deserves one.”
She burst into tears again. “I’m afraid.”
“I know you are.”
She stayed there, staring at the mud, unsure of what to do.
“Maybe we could pick someplace safe instead. Just-”
She snorted through her tears. “Safe? Like what? A police station? A meadow full of flowers?”
I smiled. “A place where you don’t get beaten up by the Roman guard.”
“Or eaten by a T-Rex.”
I was relieved at her comment. I was happy to see the raw emotions had passed. My opportunity might present itself yet.
Melissa spoke quietly. “The safest I ever felt in my life was at the beach that day, making sand castles.”
“Let’s do that. Go there. It’s safe.” My opportunity was suddenly within reach again. “Give me the location and date. I’ll set the coordinates on the time machine by using the truck’s GPS.”
She shook her head, turning away. “I- I can’t. I’d be afraid to… ruin it.”
I nodded. “Then don’t go to the beach. Go to the other place.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Two papers.
Two destinations.
I sat in the truck looking at what I’d written on pages from a dusty, yellowed notepad. One held the coordinates for Melissa’s safe trip, the family outing at the beach.
The other was for the accident that killed her mother.
The happiest and saddest days of her life were separated by two weeks and about twenty miles.
I dropped the pen back into the glove compartment and slammed it shut. As I walked back up the muddy hill, I stuffed the two notes into my pocket—next to a third one, for me. The one I’d written out years ago, for the stock exchange and New York City.
Life is full of difficult choices.
* * * * *
“How about a cold one?”
Carter Garrett glanced up at the clock on the wall. Nearly six o’clock. It would be getting dark soon.
Damned daylight savings time.
“Thanks, I’ll pass.”
His brother looked over at him. “You ruined my joke. You’re supposed to say ‘yes,’ and then I’m supposed to say ‘grab me one while you’re up.’” Bobby craned his neck to see Carter’s empty hands. “What, are you not drinking today?”
