If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  Roger squinted at me. “You mean…”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean. Lisa is my mom.”

  “No.” Roger shook his head. “Lisa is your pain-in-the-ass kid sister. I’ve known her since she was born.”

  “Right. Lisa is the kid sister of the Daniel you know. But I’m telling you, in 2016, Lisa is my mom.”

  Roger stands there, looking uncomfortable. “So how did you get here? I don’t get it.” I could tell that he was just humoring me, but I had to take the opening.

  “I have no idea. I woke up. I was here. This is my bedroom in 2016, but it’s a different color, with newer carpet, and that chick, what’s her name—”

  “Christie Brinkley.”

  “Right. Her. She’s not on my wall.”

  “That sucks. She should be on your wall. But why would you wake up in the same place, with the same people, and have no idea why you’ve skipped back thirty years?”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know. But there’s one other thing.”

  Roger waited, eyebrows raised.

  “Andy is supposed to die this year, and I think I might be able to save him.”

  Roger shook his head. “Dude. I’m at a loss here.”

  “I know.” I fully understood his reaction.

  “And when you woke up, you had that phone with you?” Roger crossed his arms and put his hands under his armpits. It looked like he was trying to protect himself from me. I was a little offended.

  “It was here, yeah.”

  “Does this story involve aliens?”

  I couldn’t help myself; I laughed out loud. He wasn’t wrong to ask—this whole evening probably felt like a totally surreal experience to him, and I had to hand it to old Roger, because he was taking it pretty well.

  “No aliens. Just me and my iPhone.”

  “This is a lot, dude.” Roger looked away from me.

  “I know it is, but I need you—you’re the only person I trust here.”

  He sighed and shifted his weight from foot to foot, but he didn’t try to leave.

  “Will you keep this to yourself? For me? I just need to figure some things out.”

  “I don’t really understand it all, but yeah, you can trust me.” Roger looked at me and I could see the hint of a smile on his face. “But I have a really serious question I need to ask you.”

  I took a deep breath and prepared for a question that would force me to unravel the mysteries of the future for Roger. Maybe he’d want to know more about technology or foreign affairs or something. I was ready for whatever he threw my way. I owed him that.

  Roger reached out a hand and put it on my shoulder as he stared into my eyes. “Can I have the rest of the Chips Ahoy?”

  14

  December 18, 2016

  In My Life

  The ICU floor was quiet the week before Christmas. Patients slept peacefully in rooms that lined the corridors, and doctors and nurses moved around on thick-soled shoes, checking vital signs and charts as they hummed Christmas songs to themselves. The elevator slid to a stop on the third floor and the doors opened. A tall, redheaded man in a navy blue sweater stepped out and looked both ways.

  The man approached the nurses’ station, ducking under a bough of tinsel as he tried to get the nurse’s attention.

  “Excuse me,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was wondering where I could find Daniel Girch’s room.”

  “Family?” the nurse asked, glancing up at him from the keyboard she’d been typing on.

  “Friend of the family,” he said, considering for a moment that he should just lie and say that he was Daniel’s uncle or something.

  The nurse glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. “Visiting hours are over, and technically they’re only for family in the ICU.”

  “But I really need to see him,” the man said, placing his open palms on the counter as if this would make her see the urgency in his situation.

  She slid a clipboard across the counter at him and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Name and phone number on this line,” she said, tapping a blank line on the sheet. She handed the man a ballpoint pen and went back to her typing.

  He picked up the pen and stared at the paper.

  Roger Napoleon, he wrote and added his phone number after it.

  Coming here was weird—or at least had the potential to be weird. Before writing his name, Roger had taken a moment to think through the potential repercussions of showing up in Daniel’s hospital room thirty years after they’d initially met. Would Lisa think it was odd seeing the guy she only knew as a childhood next door neighbor after all these years? Would it even make sense for him to show up at Daniel’s bedside to offer his support as a family friend?

  Roger thought back to the last time he’d seen Lisa; it had been a good fifteen years. His mother had just died and his father was selling the family house next door to the Girch’s. He’d gone over to help his dad pack up one Sunday, not sure what to expect as he’d rolled into the driveway.

  In the Girch’s front yard was a tricycle and a small boy in shorts and no shirt. The boy had waved at the car and gone back to playing with his toys. Daniel, he’d thought, eyeballing the toddler and trying to wrap his head around the fact that he was seeing his best friend as a three-year-old in the yard of the house he’d lived in as an eighteen-year-old in 1986. He stared at Daniel for another minute before Lisa had come out of the house, calling her little boy’s name.

  The nurse pulled the clipboard back across the desk and read his name. “Room 314.”

  Roger tapped the desk twice and walked away. The tinsel floated on the air as he brushed past it and made his way down the empty hall.

  At the door to room 314 he paused, wondering whether he’d catch Daniel alone. Roger put his hand on the doorknob and exhaled deeply. This was going to be unsettling. Seeing his best friend as an eighteen-year-old again, only this time in a hospital bed in 2016, seemed surreal. What had happened between then and now? What tricks could time play that would make Roger even comprehend the possibility that the eighteen-year-old Daniel he’d known in 1986 (at that time alive and in love with Jenny) and this eighteen-year-old Daniel were the same person? The boy in the hospital room was merely a shell, hovering on the brink of death and floating somewhere in the universe, but the Daniel he’d known had been alive and well.

  As quietly as possible, Roger opened the door. The room was empty except for Daniel’s unmoving figure in the hospital bed. As it had been when Lisa had first set foot in the room, the only sounds were the beeping and humming of the machines. The only light was the one above Daniel’s bed, illuminating his figure like the proverbial white light that supposedly beckoned people to their final destinations.

  There was no sign of Lisa or any other visitor, so Roger closed the door softly and walked across the room to stand next to his friend’s bed. Daniel’s face was placid and still, his dark hair stark against the white pillow beneath his head.

  “Hey,” Roger said, looking down at Daniel. The words caught in his throat as he realized the full impact of seeing his old friend recovering from a bullet wound to the head. He looked at the bandages on Daniel’s skull, imagining the trauma of being shot and undergoing brain surgery. For a moment, he felt eighteen and helpless there, wanting to do anything he could to save his best friend.

  Roger cleared his throat and tried again. “Hi, Daniel. It’s Roger,” he started, reaching out a hand to tentatively feel the steady rise and fall of Daniel’s chest, aided by a life support machine. “It’s 2016, man,” he said, finding that a laugh was ready to escape him at the absurdity of it all. “Last time we saw each other, things were…” He wasn’t sure if he should go on. How much of what had happened that weekend in 1986 was worth repeating to a comatose Daniel who might have no idea what he was even talking about?

  Daniel’s unblinking eyes and still mouth were pointed at the ceiling as Roger took a deep breath and watched him. So much had happened in the years they’
d been friends, and he had no idea what to say to Daniel now that he was standing here at his bedside in a trench coat, his face lined from years of raising children, hair grayed by the loss of a business and both parents. The eighteen-year-old in Roger wanted to grab Daniel and shake him, to tell him anything and everything he could. But the grown man in him knew that Daniel wasn’t really there. And that this Daniel wouldn’t even know what he was talking about.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” Roger said to his old friend. “You told me your secrets and asked for my help when you didn’t have to.” He ran a hand over his unshaven face, the sound of whiskers against his palm like sandpaper on rough wood. “I don’t know if we made a difference or not, but we had some good times, didn’t we?”

  Daniel said nothing, of course. The silence in the room prompted Roger to continue.

  “I’ve thought about you over the years, man. I wanted to see you, but…if you could just open your eyes and see me, you’d know why I couldn’t just drop by and say hello.” Roger imagined the horror on Daniel’s face if he’d opened his eyes at that moment and seen a man of almost fifty standing next to him. “And I wasn’t sure how this worked, like, would you remember coming back to 1986? Do you remember Jenny?”

  Daniel’s eyes moved beneath his lids, but there was no other obvious response to Roger’s words.

  “Jenny was really something, wasn’t she?” Roger chuckled to himself, remembering his friend and the girl they’d spent New Year’s Day 1986 tracking all over town. “And you two were—”

  The door to the room opened and a doctor in a white coat stuck her head in.

  “Visiting hours are over, sir,” she said, stepping all the way into the room. “The patient needs to rest, but you can come back and see your son tomorrow.”

  Roger was about to correct her, to say that Daniel wasn’t his son. Couldn’t she see that just by looking at them? They were contemporaries, not—but wait…of course he looked like Daniel’s father. Why wouldn’t a man his age be there visiting his teenage son?

  He took one more look at Daniel and then stepped back from the bed. “Take care, buddy,” he said to Daniel. The machines beeped in response.

  Roger brushed by the doctor as she stood near the door. She gave him a close-lipped smile as he passed.

  “Have a good night,” she said.

  “Night.” Roger stepped back into the hallway and the door shut behind him. The tinsel in the hallway waved overhead as he walked towards the elevator.

  15

  January 10, 1986

  Just Like Heaven

  The movie started at seven-thirty. I got to Jenny’s apartment at seven.

  I’d changed my clothes about five times, paced up and down the hallway while trying to talk myself out of this movie date (“She’s too cool for you—she only said yes because she feels sorry for you, you loser,” I’d told myself), and begged Andy to let me borrow his ‘69 Camaro to pick Jenny up in. Andy had given me a slow, lazy smile and tossed me the keys from across the living room. “That car will get you some action,” he’d said with a knowing look before my grandma walked by and whacked him on the back of the head lightly.

  “Ow!” Andy had said, putting a hand to his scalp like he’d been mortally wounded.

  “Don’t talk to your brother like that,” my grandma said, resting her ever-present basket of laundry on one hip.

  “The little dude is a man now, Ma,” Andy had argued, winking at me behind her back.

  I looked at my face in the rearview mirror of the Camaro in front of Jenny’s place, trying to give myself some last words of mental encouragement. The girl I’d been chasing had finally agreed to go out with me, and the nerves were kicking in.

  I walked up to Building C to look for apartment 12 and found Jenny waiting on the top step in a pair of jeans and a giant gray and black striped sweater. She was looking at her watch.

  “You’re late,” she said. Her words sounded like a complaint, but the look in her eyes was playful. Teasing. She glanced away to keep herself from smiling. Her breath came out in a puff in the cold night air.

  I looked at my watch. “It’s only 7:03.”

  Jenny stood up and stomped her black boots like she was trying to warm up her feet. “I’m kidding. You’re totally fine.” She put both hands into the pockets of the jean jacket that barely covered her bulky sweater.

  I stared at her lips and thought about kissing her. Of course, we’d kissed before at the New Year’s Eve party, but I didn’t remember that. I had no idea whether the brick red lipstick she wore would come off on my own lips when we kissed. The way she bit down on her bottom lip in English class while Mrs. Henderson read aloud had nearly driven me insane. If I had more confidence in where things were going, I might have leaned in and put my lips to hers right then.

  Instead, I unlocked the door to Andy’s car and held it open for her.

  “Wow,” Jenny said, admiring the car. “I had no idea you were this cool.” She ran a hand along the smooth paint, somehow making the movement look suggestive. I would have given anything to be made of hydrocarbon polymers at that point so that she’d touch me that way.

  “It’s my…brother’s,” I said, catching myself before I called Andy my uncle.

  “And he trusted you to drive it?” Jenny took the hand that wasn’t in her pocket and ran it through her hair, letting the silky, straight strands fall over her sharp cheekbones as she stood in a pool of light under the streetlamp in the parking lot.

  I made a face. “Of course he did. I’m a very trustworthy kind of guy.”

  Jenny laughed. “I’m sure. But I sort of get the impression that you’re the kind of guy who might make out with a girl on New Year’s Eve and then never call her.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her, trying to gauge whether this was a real jab or a teasing one. “We already talked about this! I tried to find you!”

  “You could’ve called,” she said simply, shrugging her shoulders as she climbed into the car. “I wrote my number on the bottom of your shoe. Remember?”

  I waited until she was safely inside and closed the door. On the bottom of my shoe? Seriously? Of course I didn’t remember! I touched the wallet in my back pocket with one hand as I walked around the car and got in. Inside the wallet was my driver’s license. Actually, it was the other Daniel’s license, complete with a picture of him (me) in a polo shirt with a popped collar. The address was the same one I’d grown up with, naturally.

  I took a deep breath before I got into the car, praying that I wouldn’t make any huge mistakes or get pulled over. I knew how to drive—I mean, I knew enough to get by—but I’d never actually gotten my license. I’d wanted to once or twice, but something always came up. Sometimes it was that my mom spent her whole paycheck at the bar, or that she owed the water company the previous month’s bill—but it was always something. Plus there were too many options in 2016: someone was always willing to give me a ride, or I’d just stay home and FaceTime people or text them instead. Who needed the stress of getting a license and paying for car insurance? Which meant that, here I was in 1986, nervous as a hen in a fox den while I considered navigating the snowy winter streets in a car that Andy obviously valued more than his own life.

  “You ready?” I asked Jenny. I shut my door and buckled my seatbelt. The engine turned over and rumbled as it came to life. “What do you want to see?” I pulled out of the lot carefully, turning on the indicator and looking both ways before making a right onto Upper Saddle Lane. Not only was I completely freaked out about not having a license, but the thought of anything going wrong while I was behind the wheel of Andy’s car made me break out into a cold sweat.

  “I tried to call the theater,” Jenny said, turning the knob on the stereo, “but it was busy.” She frowned. “What are you listening to?”

  “Radio station,” I said simply. “And what do you mean you called?” I merged in with the traffic headed toward the downtown area.

  Jenny was staring at my
profile. I could feel her brown eyes on me, assessing my every move. “I mean,” she said slowly, talking to me like I was the kind of moron who couldn’t find his own pulse, “I tried calling, the line was busy, I hung up, I called again. Still busy.” She paused. “And my dad already threw out today’s paper, so…”

  “The paper,” I said, nodding. “As in the newspaper, right?”

  Jenny laughed indulgently. “Yeah, as in the newspaper.” She turned the dial on the radio again, searching for a better song than the Van Halen one that was coming from the speakers. “Forget it. Let’s just go. There’ll be something playing. It doesn’t matter.”

  The lot at the theater was packed with Friday night moviegoers. It was cold and dark, and I waited next to the passenger side as Jenny put her purse over her shoulder. It wasn’t like I was expecting her to hold my hand or put her arm through mine, but I was kind of surprised when she started walking across the lot with both hands in her pockets.

  She turned around, not breaking her stride as she walked backwards. “Are you coming, or what?” she shouted, her eyes shining as she teased me. “I didn’t know I agreed to go to the movies with my grandma.”

  “Wait up,” I yelled back, jogging a few steps to catch up to her. The wind blew her chin-length hair around as she walked backwards.

  “Time waits for no man.” Jenny turned around and walked forward as I reached her side.

  “Time is kind of a confusing concept,” I said under my breath as we reached the ticket booth.

  Jenny shivered next to me. We scanned the list of pictures and times, leaning in close while she looked up at the movie schedule. She bumped me with her shoulder.

  “How about Back to the Future?” She put her head close to mine. Her hair smelled like lavender. “Have you seen that?”

  Only about a million times. “Nope,” I said. “Never seen it.”

  We bought tickets and followed the herd into the theater.

  “Back row?” Jenny asked, walking up the stairs ahead of me. She glanced back over her shoulder. “That’ll make it easier for you to grope me in the dark. You know you want to.”