by Paula Guran
Something was wrong. She shouldn’t be able to see herself. Not here. Not in the now. She should be in herself, experiencing the moment from the inside.
Perhaps that was a moment from her past. Perhaps that was what she had looked like before she had gone to the memory. Perhaps she hadn’t come all the way back.
She looked down at the controls, but they were still hidden by that incredibly bright light. She couldn’t feel her left hand.
Tyler would have known what to do. Tyler always test-ran the equipment, while she stayed back and monitored the progress from the Now-station. Only no one was monitoring for her. No one could see if the small red malfunction light was blinking.
It would be so easy, she had said to herself after having too much rum and eggnog alone in that big empty house. Just a little trip back, set for only ten minutes: routine. No one would argue with routine.
No one would even notice. No one was scheduled to return to the lab until the day after New Year’s, and that was Mark and Christy, the junior team, who would test all the equipment to see if everything was running properly for the week’s experiments. Mark and Christy were grad students who had only been on the Project since Tyler died. Even if they saw the malfunction button blinking, they wouldn’t know what to do about it.
Not that it mattered. No one had survived in the time stream this long. Tyler had thought it impossible to last more than a day. The government forensic experts who had autopsied him had thought some temporal distortion had killed him. They had warned her to pick the next traveler carefully—someone young with a lot of stamina and no family history of severe medical problems. Having anyone else travel would jeopardize the government funding and the Defense Department approval.
Amelia didn’t know how long she had been in the stream. Tyler had never mentioned a white light.
She closed her eyes and reached for her left hand. Her fingers encountered fabric. She followed it until she felt her left wrist bone—with her right hand, as if it were someone else’s wrist—then slid her fingers around to the controls. The plastic was cold. She couldn’t feel any of the indented keys. She fumbled, reached, and heard an explosion loud as a clap of thunder.
The sun warmed her face. Her back was wet. An odd tingling ran up her left side. Her left arm had gone to sleep. She opened her eyes and found herself staring at a sky so blue it looked like it had been painted by a child who loved bright colors.
Water lapped around her, pushing at her clothes, raising her off the ground and then retreating. A hesitant lover, uncertain of his touch. She smiled and reached for Tyler as she had every morning since she was twenty-five.
He was gone.
She sat up, memory returning. Her left arm dragged in the sand, the control fused to her hand as if she too were made of some sort of synthetic. The sand was white, the air humid. The branches on the palm trees swayed with the gentle breeze. To her left the ocean stretched as far as she could see. To her right, the beach ended in a rise that led to a modified Spanish adobe.
Amelia had never been here before.
She stood. Her arm swung heavy and useless beside her. Water dripped off her hair, and down her clothes. Her tennis shoes were soaked. That sensation bothered her most of all. She slipped off one shoe, then the other, picked them up and walked barefoot across the hot sand.
Halfway to the adobe, her feet encountered stone. The stone path led through a hedge of oversized ferns. She walked through it and stood on a rise overlooking a shaded verandah. Small groups of white wicker furniture surrounded a small swimming pool. Two large glass doors were propped open. Thin white curtains blew inside the house, revealing more white furniture and a white carpet. A serving tray bearing a glass filled with brown liquid floated by itself through the double doors. It stopped near one of the furniture groupings.
“ . . . can’t.” A woman’s voice floated up toward Amelia. Amelia walked down the rise beside the pool, looking for the source of the voice.
A young woman sat in one of the wicker lounge chairs, slim legs crossed at the ankles. She wore a sheer white wrap with bikini bottoms underneath. Her feet were bare. Her right hand rested on a glass table, the beverage beside her. The serving unit floated back toward the house.
“I know this isn’t the most festive place to spend Christmas. But—” her voice broke “—Grandmama’s funeral is tomorrow, and all the relatives will already be here.”
Amelia couldn’t see the phone at all, but she knew it had to be there. The young woman was speaking into the air. Amelia wondered how the young woman heard the voice on the other end. She walked closer, remaining half-hidden, uncertain if the young woman could see her.
Then she stopped. The young woman had long black hair, a narrow face, and wide dark eyes.
She looked like Tyler.
She looked exactly like Tyler.
Amelia sat on one of the wicker chairs near the pool. Her left hand bumped the edge of the chair, sending a dull ache to her shoulder. The unit squealed and light eased out of its sides. The fingers on her right hand tingled.
A lump rose in her throat. She and Tyler had never had children. On purpose. So what had brought her here, to this woman, near Christmas? It was somewhere beyond Now, somewhere in the future, judging by the devices. Had Tyler had a child he hadn’t told her about? He had had so many relationships before they met.
“No, look. I’m sorry,” the young woman said. “I can’t talk any more.” She moved her right hand slightly and sighed. The connection had been severed somehow. Then she sat forward and squinted in Amelia’s direction.
“Grandmama?”
The young woman reached for Amelia.
“Grandmama?” she repeated.
The light grew brighter. Amelia reached back. Their fingers met, but did not touch. Instead, the light engulfed her, and she could no longer see.
The gifts were open. Brightly colored wrapping paper lay in shreds on the floor. Paul and Tyler sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor, playing with Matchbox trucks. Jeanne and Amelia’s younger self leaned on the back of the couch, arms crossed, and made snide comments about boys always being boys.
Amelia stood next to Paul. His red truck skid across the floor and went through her feet. Her entire left side tingled, and the tingle had grown in her right fingers. She wanted to kneel next to Tyler and ask him what was happening. She wanted him to reassure her that everything was all right.
But everything was not all right. She was wasting away. Tyler had had the same symptoms, spread over a longer period.
She crouched, her left hand scraping the smooth wood floor. Paul started, then slid back, grabbing Tyler’s arm as he moved. “There she is,” Paul said.
“Where?” Amelia’s younger self stepped forward. Jeanne followed.
Tyler looked up. “I don’t see anything.”
“Jesus,” Paul said. “It looks like your mother, Amelia.”
“Mother was never in this house,” Amelia’s younger self said.
Amelia remained still. She met Paul’s gaze steadily.
“Where?” Tyler asked.
“Right next to me,” Paul said.
Suddenly Tyler saw her. She recognized the light in his eyes. “My God,” he said. He got up and walked around her. She stifled the urge to move with him. Then he tried to put his hand on her shoulder. She leaned into the touch, but his hand went right through her.
“My God,” he repeated. “This isn’t your mother, Amelia. This is you.”
Amelia nodded. Tyler jumped back.
“This isn’t possible,” Amelia’s younger self said. “I’m right here. I’m alive.”
“And so is she.” Tyler crouched in front of Amelia. His cheeks were flushed. “You can hear me, can’t you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes,” he whispered. “But I can’t hear you.” He tried to touch her again, and frowned as his hand went through her. “It’s some kind of distortion field. You’re not a ghost at all.”
“I’m alive,” Amelia said. She had to repeat it twice before Tyler understood.
“It is a distortion field. Time experiments?”
The older Tyler would have yelled at her for giving his younger self that much information, but she didn’t know what it would hurt now. He had already seen her.
She nodded.
“My God,” he said. “They work.”
She shook her head and touched her arm. “Help me,” she said. “Please. Help me.”
“She’s asking for help,” Paul said. “Tyler—”
But Paul’s voice was fading. The light had returned: brighter this time. It burned into her left hand, along her side. She cried out in pain—and then the light engulfed her.
Colors flashed behind her closed eyelids. She was on a cold, hard floor. Her head ached. She sat up and rubbed her forehead with her good hand before opening her eyes.
The lab again. Her Now-self still huddled over the controls like they were her last link to sanity. She stared at her Now-self for a moment. Had she really looked that lost before stepping into the time stream? She used to pity women who looked like that after they had lost their man. Tyler had been dead six months. She still had the experiments, their house, their friends.
But they all felt so empty without him. An ache grew in her chest.
It’s a dream, Tyler had said. We’re living a dream.
She made herself get up. She swayed a bit, unused to moving without the help of her left arm. She walked around the benches to her Now-Self. Her Now-self was fiddling with the controls. Amelia remembered that moment: she only had time to return to one memory. She had to make it a good one.
Odd that she hadn’t picked one with her and Tyler alone.
But she had been thinking Christmas, since it was the loneliness of the holidays that had driven her to the lab in the first place. And the best Christmas had been that first one in the country house, with Paul and Jeanne. She and Paul and Tyler had always compared the others to that one, thinking that nothing could measure up.
But it didn’t really seem that special now. Perhaps it had been special because it had been the first.
Her Now-self looked up and gasped. Amelia sat on the bench across from her. Her Now-self reached out just as the air exploded around them.
She couldn’t get air. Her mouth was filled with water. Her right arm flailed. She opened her eyes to a blue distorted world. Under water. She was under water. She had to reach the surface or she would drown.
She kicked up, three good strong kicks that pushed her to the air. She spit the water out of her mouth and took deep, thankful breaths. Water rippled around her. Her presence had disturbed it. She was in a pool. The pool she had seen near the adobe house. She kicked her way to the ladder on the pool’s deep end, and grabbed onto the metal railing with her right hand. The tingling had progressed into her wrist. She could barely move the hand at all.
She was running out of time.
She climbed out and sat on the side, breathing heavily. The young woman was asleep in her lounge chair, left arm covering her beautiful face. Amelia knew better than to try and touch her. The people were not real but the places were, as if they were a revolving set for a cosmic play.
Amelia grabbed a towel off the stack and wiped the water from her face. The humid air almost felt cool. She wrapped the towel around her neck, and wandered inside the house.
The main room was white with white furniture: obviously for entertaining. The back rooms had beds in them with clothes scattered about. The young woman did not live alone. A cat slept in the middle of one of the beds, and gave Amelia the evil eye as she passed.
She stopped in the only bedroom that looked as if it hadn’t been used recently. The bed was an oversized four-poster like the one she and Tyler had had, with pale pink sheets under a pink and brown patterned spread. But that wasn’t what drew her. What drew her were the pictures on the walls.
Some looked familiar: an early date with Tyler at a seafood place; a prize-winning photo of their first lab. But others were dream photos: her in a white wedding gown, Tyler in a black tux smiling down at her; both of them smiling in professional photography fashion at the tiny baby she held in her arms. Then baby pictures and school pictures of a young girl surrounded by family groupings with Tyler aging as he had and the temporal distortion wasting him away. He wore another tux for the young girl’s wedding, looking proud and fatherly, and after that, he appeared in no more pictures even though they continued to chronicle the girl, and then her daughter—the young woman Amelia had seen outside.
She sighed and leaned on the bed. Her body was shaking. A life that she hadn’t lived, complete with photographs. This had probably been her room until she died.
The shaking turned into a shudder. A life she hadn’t lived. A life she could never live, even if she had married Tyler and had a child. She would die in this time stream—in this loop—and no one would know. They would just think she had disappeared.
She stared at the photos, and watched as they vanished in a blur of light.
She awoke to the sound of voices. Tyler was hunched over her, a frown on his too-young face. “She’s back,” he said.
Amelia couldn’t move either arm. She wanted to sit up, but knew she didn’t dare, not in front of this young Tyler, not with the chance of losing her balance.
“What’s happening to you?” he asked.
She wished he could hear her. She would tell him and maybe he would find a solution. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to try. “I’m trapped,” she said. “I’m stuck in a loop.”
He understood the part about being trapped. She had to repeat herself three times before he said: “Loop? Like in the movies?”
Not exactly, because she did move forward in each time period. She just kept visiting the same three settings. But she nodded anyway.
“Loop,” he said reflectively. The tree lights winked behind him.
“I still think she’s a ghost,” Paul said, from somewhere behind them. “I don’t care about the scar on the chin. She looks like Amelia’s mother.”
Tyler shook his head just a little. He smiled at her with the love she had missed. He knew her, just as she would have known him. It didn’t matter that she had a younger self watching somewhere in the background.
The light was back, eating Tyler, making him disappear. The loops were shorter now. “Tyler,” she said, wishing she could reach for him. She didn’t want to lose him again—
—but when she came to herself she was back in the lab, propped against the large black lab table near the front of the room. The numbness had started in her feet. She looked at her arms. They seemed to be hers, except for her left hand, with the control fused to her skin.
She had jumped back too far. She had known there would be that risk. Tyler had said that when he went on trips longer than ten years he always felt depleted. But she had thought she could deal with depleted.
Her Now-self left the bench and walked over to Amelia. Her Now-self wore a ring on the third finger of her left hand. Had Amelia altered something by appearing? Or had she slipped into another life, another time? Had that trapped her?
Her Now-self’s hands were shaking. They passed over Amelia’s useless left hand, and her Now-self swallowed, hard. “Your control is broken,” her Now-self said.
“I know,” Amelia said.
But her Now-self was looking down and didn’t seem to hear. Even in this place, she couldn’t speak to herself.
Her Now-self set the control down. “Here,” she said. “If I don’t touch it, you can. Take mine.”
Amelia shook her head. She couldn’t move her arms. She smiled a little sadly. She would die here.
“You’re the woman we saw all those years ago, aren’t you?” Her Now-self asked.
Amelia nodded. She was getting too tired to speak.
“You went to see him, didn’t you?” Her Now-self asked. “Just like I was going to.”
Amelia smiled a little. She had
seen him, one last time. And he had smiled at her. He loved her, no matter who or when she was.
“And it was wrong. It trapped you.” Her Now-self stood. “When he—when he was alive, he made me promise to never come here by myself. He knew, didn’t he?”
“He guessed,” Amelia said, even though her Now-self couldn’t hear.
“And all the precautions,” her Now-self said quietly. “He was trying to protect me. He said, before he died, that he would always love me. And I didn’t believe him. I had to see—”
Amelia nodded. The tingle filled her entire body. The light was returning, and the sound was fading. She had done this. She had made the changes, by appearing in her own past. As a ghost.
She wanted to tell her Now-self not to go, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move at all.
The light faded one final time. Amelia knew something supported her, but she couldn’t feel it beneath the tingle in her body. As the red and green dots dissipated, she found herself on the four-poster bed in the adobe house, staring at the pictures on the wall.
They hadn’t changed: she and Tyler gazing happily at each other, the baby between them; Tyler, giving away the bride. It took a moment before she understood what the photographs meant. They meant that her Now-self had heard, had understood. Her alternate self, the one who had married Tyler, born a child, and worked on the project, had set the controls aside, faced the dark and lonely house, and conquered it.
A breeze moved the curtains. The air had a fresh, salty smell here that she could have grown to love. A movement caught the corner of her eye. She tried to turn her head, but couldn’t. The floorboards creaked, and the young woman in the white shift appeared at the edge of Amelia’s vision.
“Grandmama,” the woman said, kneeling beside the bed, “Grandmama, I miss you so.”
Amelia smiled her last smile at the woman she and Tyler had helped make in a world she would never remember. “I missed you too, honey,” she said as the light took her. “I missed you too.”
La Befana, mentioned near the end of this haunting tale, is an Italian Christmas tradition. The ragged old lady rides a broomstick—or carries it over her shoulder supporting a bag—and delivers gifts to children on Epiphany Eve. (Epiphany marks the Twelfth Day of Christmas and the day the Magi made their visit to the infant Jesus.) M. Rickert relates one version of the Befana legend. Another variation casts her as a mother who had lost her own child. Insane with grief, not accepting the death, she bundles the infant’s belongings up and goes in search of him. She finds the Christ child instead, and gives the bundle to him. The woman—who has suffered so much she appears to be an old crone—is granted the gift of being the mother of all children for one night each year: mostly rewarding her offspring, but occasionally letting some know they must improve their ways.
