The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1)

by Everett Maroon

  “Surprise,” shouted the group gathered around the kitchen table. My parents—Mom looking better than usual—Jeannine, Kiernan, and Sanjay, stood next to each other, each singing their own version of “Happy Birthday.” On the table sat a cake with my name on it.

  Oh right, my birthday.

  For the next couple of hours, I was distracted from all the crap about time travel and Jacqueline. We stuffed ourselves on take-out Italian food and a chocolate cake from A&P. I thought back to my wish as I’d blown out the candles: Please save them. All of them. I didn’t really know where my wish was going, though, or who gave a shit about it.

  “You’re blushing,” said Jay, taking a bright paper plate with a square of cake from my mother.

  “What of it?” I asked, making an attempt to be coy, “don’t you ever blush?”

  “Nope, Kashmiris don’t blush, silly.” He fake batted his eyes at me.

  We cleaned the kitchen and moved to the family room. I took stock of my presents—a boom box with a dual cassette rack, a pair of jeans, a gift certificate to Sam Goody, and a HAM radio, assembled by my father, who had noticed I’d been reading up on amateur radio.

  “I’m going to say goodnight to Jeannine,” I told Jay, who looked nowhere near ready to leave. He grunted at me and thumbed through a copy of Rolling Stone.

  In the foyer, Jeannine gave me a peck on the cheek. She smelled like birthday cake and icing, and I wished it was Lucas’s hands around my waist.

  “Happy Birthday, Jackson,” she said softly.

  “Thank you, Jeannine. That was fun.”

  “Were you really surprised?”

  “I was really surprised.”

  She nodded a little, agreeing with I don’t know, the truth of my statement or something.

  “Onto bigger and better things,” she said. I raised an eyebrow.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we have to figure out how to help those people in Marion. Tomorrow is a new day.”

  “It is,” I said, but I was relieved. Any help I could get, anything. I leaned in to give her a thank you hug, and she pushed me away.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I know you’re not into me. You haven’t been since you came back. It’s okay. But we have to stay friends forever.”

  “Oh, Jeanne, you are amazing.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said, and her smile faded fast. And then she was bounding down the front stoop steps, across the street to her house. I watched the door shut behind her, and then closed my front door, sighing. I shuffled off to the family room to find Jay still reading about U2 and Bono.

  “I suppose you think you’ve changed,” he said.

  I considered his statement. “I think I have. It kind of happened without me noticing.”

  Jay kicked his feet up on the coffee table in front of the couch. “Jeannine told me quite a wild story this afternoon.”

  “I know, you think I’m crazy.”

  “It’s impossible.” He paused, watching with disinterest a hockey game on the TV. “But if it could be true, it’s amazing.”

  “I spent a long time telling myself it was all in my head, Jay, but I know it’s real.” He laughed.

  “What’s so freaking funny?” Was he mocking me?

  “It’s just—that’s what I said to myself about being gay.”

  I gave him a soft punch in his shoulder. “See, we still have so much in common.”

  “Watch the fine wool, buddy.”

  “Oh, excuse me.”

  We relaxed, partly because we needed to in the midst of our stress, and partly because we didn’t know how to begin talking about my bizarre story. Eventually I told him about going to see Dr. Dorfman, and later, Cindy, and what dead ends I’d reached. But I still felt a little vindicated that any other person believed what was happening to me, much less two.

  “I wish we could get him out of there,” I said.

  “Well, we can,” said Jay.

  I stared at him.

  He came up with a wild but weirdly sensible plan. At least, the plan for getting the doctor out of the hospital made sense. It was after we freed the doctor that we didn’t have much of a blueprint, so we put our heads together and figured it out. We reckoned that once we got him off his medication, he would be able to talk to us. And once he could talk, Dr. Dorfman would put the missing pieces together for us. Jay and I agreed to talk to Jeannine about it in the morning and see if she had any ideas.

  But maybe a rescue of Dorfpoodle could work.

  That night I tossed and turned in my bed. I couldn’t settle down. What if people said I was becoming delusional or commit me like they’d done to Dr. Dorfman? At some point I nodded off, but like had become my habit, I woke up in a panic, the smell of smoke and charred wood burning my sinuses. I remembered something, but what was it? The picture, the picture from the newspaper.

  I fumbled for the light on my nightstand, and shielded my eyes with one hand as I groped on my desk for the microfiche I’d snagged. I’d created a whole filing system for this information. I dug through my folders labeled “Marion history,” “HAM radios,” and the like and yanked out a file. I stared at the microfiche, but I couldn’t read the tiny inverted print on my own, so I picked up a magnifying glass from the back of my desk, a leftover part of my “detective kit” I played with when I was little. Yanking open the top drawer of my desk, I found a flashlight. I stuck the microfiche in the wax of a half-burned candle, and aimed the flashlight through the magnifying glass. The image glowed on my wall.

  There, in the background of the Temperance Union meeting photo, was Jacob Van Doren.

  It was right there in the article. Lucas’s father was a traitor.

  I clapped a hand over my heart and turned off the flashlight.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SANJAY LOOKED MUCH OLDER IN SCRUBS.

  “Green’s a good color on you,” I said, sitting in my car. I kept the engine running so the heater could warm us up a little.

  “Oh shut up.” He clipped his brother’s hospital badge on his shirt and said, “Wish me luck.”

  “You know, this is your brother’s badge, and he doesn’t really look like you,” I said, holding it out and examining it.

  “Please, Jack. Ain’t no hospital doctor gonna be looking at my badge to see if I’m different from the other brown men in the building. I’ll be fine.” He seemed sure about this.

  The plan was for Sanjay to say Dr. Dorfman needed to go to respiratory therapy, and he was the orderly to remove him. With all the smoking the doctor did, we hoped it wouldn’t look suspicious. According to Jay’s brother Prabal, lots of patients on the mental wellness ward smoked a lot and it was common for them to get checkups from the respiratory therapy staff when they inevitably had problems breathing. Class A medical service.

  “Well,” I said, “just be convincing.”

  “Nobody looks closely at us Indians,” he said, and he walked off, giving me the finger behind his back as he walked into the hospital. I smiled because there was nothing like getting the bird from him to show that we really were back on good terms.

  Now I had to wait. I continued to think about Mr. Van Doren, wondering why and how he could turn on his friends that way. It wasn’t like Dr. Traver was nice to him, destroying his business and forcing him out of his home. I was pissed that Van Doren would put Mother’s life in danger like that, not to mention his own son’s. How could you kill your own son?

  I didn’t believe for a second that Lucas could also be a turncoat, because he could have just waited for the thugs to come into Mr. Rushman’s farmhouse, and take me away. He’d protected me, smuggled me past them, helped me and the others plan. I supposed it was possible that all of that was done to build my confidence, but Lucas didn’t strike me as that kind of a long-game person.

  The passenger door opened, and Sanjay told me to help him. Dr. Dorfman looked as out of it as he had two weeks ago when I’d gone to see him.

 
“Hoo, it’s time traveling boy Jack,” he said in a loud voice.

  “Won’t you sit down, doctor?” I asked him. We needed to hurry but we also needed him to be cooperative.

  “Don’t stop on sixty cents!” Fucking Price is Right, I hate you.

  “Okay, let’s go to the show, doctor,” I said, leaning over the seat so I could help pull him into the car. He snatched his arm away from me.

  “Don’t make me catch it,” he said. Sanjay put the doctor’s feet in the car and shut the door. At the hospital entrance, I saw the security guards assembling, the tall orderly from the ward pointing at Jay and the now-empty wheelchair.

  “We have to go,” I said. Jay jumped into the car.

  “I know! So go!”

  I sped off. When we were sure we’d made it away alone, I changed direction to our destination.

  I read Jeannine’s directions and drove out to a house at the edge of a country club. This was her friend Aimée’s parents’ house, and they were away for the holidays, skiing somewhere in Europe. Most of our classmates lived in the suburbs, like us, but there were a few who came from money, like Aimée. I’d have thought she’d attend an expensive prep school, but getting a Catholic education where her father had attended was more important to her dad. Plus hey, it came in handy for sudden subterfuge.

  I pulled into a long driveway that ended in a courtyard, long rows of pruned shrubs lining the gravel road. The house was almost as big as a block of homes in my neighborhood, with thick columns holding up an extension of the roof that sheltered the massive front doors. We got out of the car and propped up Dr. Dorfman, who kept talking about the television he watched and time travel.

  Jeannine met us at the bottom of the white front steps, surrounded by expensive architecture. She helped us get him out of the car, grunting as she pulled at him.

  It had occurred to us that technically, we were kidnapping him. We hoped that Dr. Dorfman wouldn’t press charges once he was off his medication.

  “Okay, you get back home,” Jeannine told Sanjay, who had to return his brother’s badge before Prabel noticed it was missing. I watched him drive off in Jeannine’s car, and then I took in the grand entry of this house. I should have been paying attention to Dr. Dorfman, but the house distracted me.

  Marble floors and life-sized portraits in gold-gilded frames set up the edges of the room, and at the far end a double stairway curled up high to the next floor. In the entry, all of the furniture was oversized, as if they were made for giants. At the middle of the round room stood a stone table with three thick, swooping legs. I imagined that when the occupants were here it held some fresh flower arrangement, but today it was bare and lonely. I’d known that there were rich people in the world; I just hadn’t dreamed they lived in houses of this size. The rooms could have doubled as basketball courts. They were echo chambers; acoustics came in handy when Jeannine called out to me to help her with the doctor.

  “Where did you go?” I asked the foyer/ampitheater.

  “Come through the living room,” she said.

  I picked which room could possibly be the living room, and saw a doorway at the other end, after a long line of bookshelves. Down a few steps, I saw her and Dr. Dorfman, sitting on a plush couch in front of a projection television.

  “Behind the couch is the Betamax,” she said, pointing. “I taped the show earlier.”

  I walked up to the machine, pressed the power button and then play, hoping I wouldn’t have to do anything else to get the video on the TV. In seconds Bob Barker was introducing the people in Contestant’s Row.

  “The Price is Right,” said Dr. Dorfman, clapping his hands.

  “How long is it going to take him to come out of this?” I asked. Jeannine had read up on anti-psychotics, or so she’d said.

  “It could be anywhere from a few days to a week.”

  “A week? What are we supposed to do with him for a week? We can’t baby sit him around the clock. And the hospital will be looking for him!”

  “Relax,” she said. “It could be sooner than that. We just have to take it one day at a time. We have two weeks off before we have to go back to school. Aimeé’s parents won’t be back until the third week of January.”

  Dr. Dorfman was engrossed in the show.

  “You sure do find that interesting,” I said.

  “The show is easier,” he said.

  “How do you mean?” I grasped at whatever else the man would say.

  “Life, so precarious, dangerous. Showcase Showdown is safer.” He let out a big sigh and slumped into the plush couch.

  “Maybe he really is crazy,” said Jeannine to me, whispering.

  “Actually, now I’m convinced he isn’t crazy.”

  On the couch, Dr. Dorfman rolled his eyes at us. “I wish I had my notebook.”

  ***

  Around dinner time, Sanjay showed up in his car.

  “The hospital is going nuts,” he said. “When my brother showed up everyone was checking badges. It’s like Checkpoint Charlie, and there are police all over the place.”

  “Maybe this was a bad idea,” I said.

  “Nonsense, it’s fine,” said Jeannine. “Nobody’s hurting Dr. Dorfman, and when he gets off these anti-psychotics, he’ll be happy we rescued him. He didn’t commit himself, after all.”

  We looked at the doctor, who was sleeping, still on the couch. He hadn’t been cared for very well at the hospital, judging from the smell of him.

  “At least you two are underage,” I said. I understood that he would be better off with us, or at least I hoped he would. But I wasn’t sure how he would reintegrate. Wouldn’t he just be committed again once he went back into the world?

  “It’s going to be fine,” Jeannine insisted, and she sounded final about it. “Did you bring any supper?” she asked Jay.

  “Yeah, it’s in the kitchen. I scarfed stuff out of the fridge. There’s lamb stew and some rice. This is a hell of a house. I bet there’s a swimming pool here somewhere.”

  “Why have a swimming pool when you can have a whole country club,” I said. “There’s a putting green out back.”

  “What? You’re kidding!” He rushed to the windows, which ran all the way to the twenty-foot ceiling. When he walked back to us he was shaking his head. What would Lucas think of this place? I wondered.

  “Holy crap, there’s a putting green out there. What the hell, rich people?”

  We went into the kitchen and heated up the food in the largest microwave I had ever seen. Sanjay’s mother was a great cook. Jeannine suggested between bites that we ought to be invited over for supper at his place much more often. I sat between them, relieved to be with friends, but full of thoughts about Lucas, Jacqueline, and her mother, worrying about how they’d been betrayed by Mr. Van Doren.

  Our heads turned together as we noticed a shuffling sound at the edge of the kitchen. Dr. Dorfman stood there, rubbing his hand over his scruffy face.

  “You must really want to talk to me.” His voice was scratchy, but didn’t have that frantic quality like when he was talking about the game show.

  Jeannine dropped her fork.

  It was Sanjay who stood up and helped walk him over to us. “Would you like some dinner?”

  “Yes. It smells great.”

  I leaned in to Jeannine.

  “This is not three days.”

  She nodded.

  “I stopped taking my pills a week ago,” Dr. Dorfman said, obviously overhearing us. “I knew I had to get off the meds after you came to see me, I just had to figure out how, since they check our mouths.”

  He’d palmed his pills, using sleight of hand to trick the orderlies. Dr. Dorfman explained that since he was such a model patient, they didn’t pay enough attention to him to notice that he’d gone off his medicine.

  We offered him what was left of Jay’s mom’s cooking and he scarfed it down.

  “This is the best food I’ve had in six months.”

  “Yeah, it’s great even
when you’re not comparing it to hospital food,” said Jeannine, and Dr. Dorfman laughed. After talking with him for a while, I was ready to ask my nagging question.

  “So are these hallucinations I’m having or am I really traveling through time?”

  “Jack, you’re really time traveling. Well, kind of. As far as I can figure, your consciousness is jumping. But I’m still a little fuzzy upstairs,” he said, poking with a fork at the remains of food on his plate. “I tried to draw things out in the other room.”

  He was much more cognizant than I would have been after months in his condition. It hadn’t occurred to him right away that my mutterings were anything other than disorientation, but my brainwaves were unlike anything he’d ever seen, with aftereffect trails that weren’t supposed to happen after an epileptic seizure. And then he saw it with two other people, during only the sessions in which he induced seizures in a certain area of their brains, near the visual cortex. They also returned talking of traveling back in time, but in their cases they’d visited some point earlier in the day or week, well away from where they were in real time, places they’d never visited. He started fact-checking people’s visions and decided they were really encountering these earlier times. He made a note in his lab work, meant only for himself, but a supervisor responsible for the study read it and called him in to a meeting.

  He’d been told to take the day off to rest. Instead he spent it confirming his hypothesis. When he came to work the next day, he learned his wife had agreed to admit him for observation. By the time we’d stolen him away, she’d sent his lawyer divorce papers.

  We went into the den to see what he’d drawn up. On the screen of the projection TV, he’d written a lot of squiggly lines.

  “Uh, what is this?” I asked, walking around the couch to get a better look. It looked vaguely familiar but I didn’t know what it depicted.

  “It’s how the EEG and the fourth dimension interact,” he said. “This part of Einstein’s theory of relativity, that time flows backwards as well as forwards, has never been proven. Everything else has been shown scientifically except that.