Kyle took the blunt from his pocket and tossed it into the toilet. “Then maybe we don’t need to have this in here right now.”
“Dick,” Joe said.
There was a knock at the bathroom door.
“Who’s there?” Kyle answered, his heart thumping as hard as it ever had.
“I’m going to get you out of there,” a female voice said, “but you need to listen to me carefully.”
Kyle exchanged a look with Joe, who finally looked as freaked out as Kyle felt. “Who’s there?” Kyle asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” the voice said. “Everything’s fine. You just need to go to school and have a normal day. If you do that, everything’s going to be fine.”
“Are you the police?” Kyle asked.
“Yes,” she said. “We had a report of an intrusion, and it’s been taken care of. I need you to get to school now so I don’t have to cite you for truancy.”
“No!” a man’s voice shouted. “It’s not what she says. Don’t—” The voice stopped suddenly as Kyle heard a loud pop. He’d never heard one before, but Kyle thought it might be a gun shot.
Now, he was in a full-on panic, his stomach fluttering with fear. Joe crouched down in the bathtub, and Kyle squeezed himself between the toilet and the sink, trying to use the porcelain of the toilet to block him from anything—like a bullet—that might come through the door.
“I’m going to unlock this door. What I need you to do,” the female voice continued, “is to stay in there for a few minutes. I want you to count to two hundred before you come out. Count slowly, okay? And loud enough so I can hear you.”
Kyle nodded, as if she could see him. “One . . . Two . . . Three . . . ”
With the gun pressed against the back of his head, Sillow had no choice but to climb into the trunk as she instructed. As he climbed inside, he noticed the tire jack he’d bought for the Sentra almost twenty years ago was still in there.
“I hear one kick, one scream, one anything, then you can be sure the next shot I take won’t miss,” the blond woman said.
Sillow laid down to get his head out of the way, and watched the trunk of the Sentra slam shut over him.
From the moment Kyle opened the bathroom door, the boys sprinted until they were through the house and out to the driveway. Kyle looked all around him for some evidence of what had just happened. Outside at least, there was nothing out of place.
“Can we get the fuck out of here?” Joe asked.
“We should call the police,” Kyle said.
Joe wrinkled his brow. “Are you fucking crazy?” he asked. “We’re fucking hammered.”
“I’m not hammered,” Kyle said. Joe had definitely hit more of the tequila than he had. “Then let’s go to school, at least.”
Kyle started toward his car, but noticed the flats immediately. “Look,” he said, pointing the tires out to Joe. “Shit.”
“Let’s go to my house” Joe said, starting down the driveway toward the street.
Kyle looked at his watch. He’d forgotten about Meltzner’s math quiz while they were locked in the bathroom, and now there was no chance he’d make it before nine. Maybe his excuse would be good enough to satisfy his teacher. “Let’s take your car to school,” Kyle said.
Joe started walking out of the driveway, toward his house. “I’m too fucked up to drive,” he said. “Let’s go chill at my house for a bit, and then we’ll go to school later.”
“Do me a favor, Joe? Today’s been fucked up enough. If you don’t want to call the police, can we please just go to school? We know we’ll be safe there. I’ll drive your car if you want. Please?” Kyle asked.
Joe looked at Kyle and rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he said. “Fine.”
Scarlett felt guilty for laughing at the stupid trick with the gum that the eighth graders on the bus did to Marlon. Maybe if they hadn’t had such an audience, they wouldn’t have gone through with it. She might cry too if she woke up to someone else’s gum in her mouth.
She faced forward and handed her seatmate Patty an earbud. “Wanna listen together?” she asked. “It’s the new Taylor Swift album.” Scarlett had had enough of the Cheese Bus for today.
The bus pulled up to the last house on their morning route, which was just across Banditt Bridge from the school.
Paul Hacker’s mom walked out to the bus with him, wearing the same Lululemon yoga pants that every mom in Flemming wore.
“I apologize,” Bruno called out to her, as he opened the door.
“They’re not supposed to be late,” Paul’s mom said, as she nudged her son onto the bus.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he answered in his thick Italian accent, smiling for her.
“Don’t let this happen again, please,” she said. “I’m on the school board, you know?”
Scarlett felt bad for Bruno. It was the first time she could remember ever being late for school because of the bus, and it was only eleven minutes after nine. They were going to be fifteen minutes late at most. The school would probably give them all late passes for first period too.
Bruno shut the door and started toward school. He revved his engine and climbed the hill on Nairn Boulevard faster than usual.
The bus came down Nairn now, also more rapidly than normal. Scarlett liked to close her eyes on the downhill and imagine she was on the Double Dragon coaster at Six Flags and then open them just as she felt the bus slide onto Banditt Drawbridge.
She felt the bus skid a bit to the left on the slick ground and from her seat right behind him, saw Bruno pull the wheel back to the right, and then to the left again to correct himself. He even veered into the other lane for a second. Just as she saw a look of concern on Bruno’s face, she noticed a black car coming in the other direction.
She grabbed onto the divider between the stairs and her seat and held on as everything spun around. She barely felt any impact, but all of a sudden, she was upside down. She held on as the bus spun in mid-air, but lost her grip quickly. Scarlett had a feeling of weightlessness, then, until her whole body hit the roof of the bus. It felt like a real roller coaster now. They were falling.
Oh no, she thought. Oh my God.
CHAPTER 18
February 3 & 4, 2016
* * *
Two years later
Kyle made the long, downhill journey through the tunnel between the rung labeled 1998 and the one labeled 2016, and then slid the silk blot into its slot. He pushed his head through and looked around eagerly. He hoped he was coming back to a world in which the people he killed were still alive . . . A world in which he would have to explain why a free man was inside a cell in Stevenson Youth Correctional in the first place.
Immediately, though, standing in his empty cell, his brain felt incredibly fuzzy. That can’t be right. Was I dreaming? Am I dreaming? His entire memory of the bus crash felt unclear.
He saw the same picture of him with his mom at the beach on the wall over his bunk. Shit! If this was still his cell, it would mean his father had failed to stop the bus crash. Wait! Stop the bus crash? Was he dreaming? Kyle stood for a moment trying to figure out what was reality and what he might have dreamt. He also saw his list on the wall—the thirteen names from the bus.
Kyle laid down in bed, and stared at the other side of the cell. He noticed that Ochoa’s training regimen was missing from the spot where it had been taped on the wall since Kyle arrived at the prison. And Ochoa’s toiletries were gone. Maybe everything was different! Maybe it hadn’t been a dream. But that would mean Ochoa was dead. And if Kyle’s stuff was still there, that Sillow hadn’t stopped the crash.
Kyle felt exhausted. He had no sense of what time it was, but he stretched his legs out, and extended his toes as far as he could. The whole thing must have been a dream.
He opened his eyes for just a second and saw his folder, with all of his newspaper clippings from the day of the accident, sitting on his foot locker. There was no doubt now that he was back in his cell at Stevenson Youth
Correctional. Seconds later, he passed out.
Kyle opened his eyes when he felt something poking him in the belly. He saw a few sets of legs right in front of his face. All of them wore the navy blue pants of the Stevenson prison guards.
“Hey, Cash!” a voice called out, as he felt another poke in his ribs. “Get your ass up.”
He was too exhausted to listen. He closed his eyes again.
Later, he was startled awake when he opened his eyes and saw four guards holding him down, while Mrs. Wilson, the Stevenson nurse, stuck a needle into his arm. Kyle wondered why they were holding him when he had no strength to resist them. She was drawing blood from him. He looked around and realized that he was in the prison’s infirmary.
When she was done drawing blood, the guards all took a step back. The five of them stood and looked at Kyle. He was still confused about what had just happened to him, but felt refreshed and awake now. His memories of the day of the crash still felt off. Not incomplete, but too complete. Like several memories overlapping each other.
“Hey! Sleeping beauty! Ready to wake your ass up!” a stern voice shouted. Kyle opened his eyes again. A man in a suit stepped between two officers. Kyle had never spoken to Warden Aguilar before.
The warden leaned his head down close to Kyle’s face. “Where’s Trevor Ochoa?”
Kyle looked the warden in the eyes. “Huh?” was all Kyle managed to get out.
“Your cellmate is missing and I need answers. You guys are friends, so tell me, where is Trevor Ochoa?”
Kyle used his whole upper body to shake his head ‘no.’ All of a sudden, the memory came to him so sharply he knew his trip to the past had been real. He cringed as he thought about Ochoa bringing his hands up to his ears in pain, and then, his head exploding off of his shoulders.
“No?” Warden Aguilar said indignantly. “No? What does ‘no’ mean?”
Kyle took a deep breath and tried to form the words. “I don’t know.”
“And I bet you don’t know what you drank or smoked—or snorted—to make yourself completely incapacitated for the last four hours, is that right?” the warden asked. “But we will, as soon as this blood test comes back. And you’re gonna want me to be thinking of you kindly when I have proof of whatever fucking contraband you ingested.”
Kyle remembered Myrna Rachnowitz telling him he could go back in time to stop the crash. It was all real. Nothing had been a dream.
Kyle quickly sat himself up. He needed to figure out what to tell them. He just looked at the warden, and the guards behind him and didn’t say anything.
Mrs. Wilson stepped in between two of the guards. “Rapid screen is clear for drugs and alcohol,” she said.
“I don’t get it,” the warden said, walking to the window of the room. “I don’t fucking get it . . . ” He turned to Kyle again. “You have no clue where your cellmate went? He just fucking vanished?”
After a full night of sleep, things were even clearer to Kyle. His trip through time felt a bit more like a distant memory than a recent one, but he knew for sure that it had all been real: Ochoa’s head blowing up all over the pavement in Washington Heights, Allaire tantalizing him and almost making him give up on coming back at all, and his father pressing his forearm against Kyle’s throat in the white Sentra which Kyle would own many years later.
What he couldn’t figure out was what had gone wrong. Had Sillow just blown it off, and not shown up? That was his best guess at the moment.
Kyle looked through his folder with all of the clippings from the accident. He knew all of them word for word. All of the obituaries. Even the names of the surviving loved ones. Lucilla Pasquale . . . Jennifer Hacker . . . Alberto Costello . . .
He read through the front page article from the Times-Gazette from the day after the crash looking for something. Some clue as to what had gone wrong. He knew the first paragraph of the article almost by heart:
Flemming, NY (AP)—A traffic accident occurred yesterday morning when an automobile collided with a school bus in Flemming, NY, killing fourteen people in total. The bus flipped over the barricade of a bridge above Banditt River and fell forty feet into the water. The only survivor of the crash, which occurred shortly after nine o’clock, was the driver of the Black Audi A4 which struck the bus. Authorities have declined to comment as to whether the driver may have been impaired at the time of the accident.
It was on his third reading of the article in a row that Kyle noticed it. He needed to consider every word, looking for any slight change. There had to be at least one thing that changed as a result of the trip through time, Kyle thought to himself . . . And, that’s what it turned out to be. One thing: a single word.
The only survivor of the crash which occurred just after nine o’clock.
There it was! The original accident took place at 8:59. Kyle knew it because he’d gotten to see the autopsy reports for each student during his trial. His lawyer had resisted showing them to Kyle at first, but he was obliged to do what his client asked. Eight of the thirteen people on the bus had been given a time of death of 8:59 AM, just as the collision happened. Five others had been found to survive the initial crash, only to drown in Banditt River below.
Quickly, though, Kyle’s excitement faded. So what? he thought, the more he considered it. So, it had been a few minutes later, but the accident had still happened. The clippings and the obituaries were all still there. Everyone was still dead. He’d been given the chance to change everything and he’d failed.
He spent the rest of Sunday afternoon in his bunk. Word would spread soon enough that Ochoa had escaped and Kyle wondered how he was going to protect himself against Stevenson’s many gangs without Ochoa having his back.
He heard the lock on his cell door turning and wished Ochoa would walk through.
Officer Radbourn walked in instead. “Cash Man, what the hell happened? Warden’s saying you got high and helped Ochoa escape. What the fuck?”
Kyle wished he could just tell Radbourn everything. He wanted to tell someone everything.
“None of it’s true,” Kyle said. “My tox screening came back clean. And, I have no clue about Ochoa. I’m just as surprised as you are.”
“Whatever,” Radbourn said. “Anyway, you’ve got a visitor.”
Kyle sat up. “Who?” he asked.
CHAPTER 19
February 4, 2016
* * *
Moments later
A few days ago, when Sillow visited, Kyle looked through him at first. He was no more familiar than a stranger.
Now, even with the receding hairline and a face that had every minute of the last eighteen years stamped across it, Kyle knew him immediately.
“Hey,” Sillow said as Kyle sat down.
He waited for Radbourn to back out of earshot, and then Kyle leaned his head in close. “I went back, didn’t I? Tell me I’m not crazy.”
Sillow nodded. “I came here yesterday. I tried to tell you not to. Whole thing was doomed from the start.”
“What do you mean, doomed?” Kyle asked.
“As that day got closer,” Sillow said. “Every little thing that could go wrong, did. My flight was delayed. Then, the landing gear got stuck and we had to land without it. After I gave a statement to police at the airport about the crash, the cab I took to my hotel broke down. And, that lady . . . ”
Kyle shifted in his seat. Everything had been real. There was no doubt that Ochoa was really dead. “What lady?”
“This lady showed up at your house that morning—”
“Blond? Black baseball cap?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah,” Sillow said. “I locked you in the bathroom, like you told me to. You and your friend didn’t even try to break out of there. I think you were too high—smelled like a fuckin’ reggae concert in that hallway.”
“So, what happened?” Kyle asked.
“The woman broke into the house right after I locked you guys in and stuck a knife in my face. She went up and unlocked the door. Forced
me into the trunk of your car for a few hours so I couldn’t do anything. Then, she put me in a taxi back to the airport and threatened to kill me if she saw me again. By the time I got down to JFK a few hours later, the bus crash was all over the news.”
When he thought back to the morning of the crash now, Kyle vaguely remembered being locked in the bathroom. It was fuzzy though, like his memories from traveling back in time. He remembered the woman’s voice talking to him through the door and asking him to count to 200.
“I’m sorry, Kyle. I’m sorry I let you down again,” Sillow said.
“Who is she?” Kyle asked. “Why would she want the accident to happen?”
“She told me it had to,” Sillow said.
“Dammit!” Kyle said, pounding the table.
“Hey!” a guard called over. “Knock it off!”
Why wouldn’t Myrna have warned him if there was going to be someone there trying to stand in the way of their plan? Kyle closed his eyes and tried to think clearly about his time in 1998. He remembered seeing the blond woman watching from a distance when Ochoa died, and then again in the parking garage of the hospital where Sillow worked, sprinting toward him, and then turning and running away just as quickly.
“I went up to New York so I could get past my guilt for being such a shitty father,” Sillow said. “But eventually, I started to get jealous that you got to go back and try to fix what you’ve done wrong,” Sillow continued. “I started to wish I got that chance.”
“We blew it though,” Kyle said, exasperated. “We had the chance to change everything, and all we managed to do was delay the crash about fifteen minutes.”
“We did somethin’ then, son,” Sillow said. “We changed somethin’ . . . ” Kyle was surprised that Sillow looked excited. What did it matter? And, he wasn’t sure how he felt about Sillow suddenly calling him ‘son.’
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