“I got old, you mean,” Robbie says.
Francesca picks up his left hand. “And this?” The gold ring on his finger looks well worn.
“I figured you would catch that pretty quick,” Robbie says.
“Wow, man. This is crazy,” I say. I give Robbie a hug.
He’s spread out a little in the middle.
“What happened?” Francesca says, covering her mouth with her hands. “I mean, look at you. You’re so grown up!”
Robbie leans around us and addresses Mr. Cameron. “Hey, Grandpa. I’m going to take them downstairs and tell them the story.”
Mr. Cameron nods and extends his arms toward Francesca. “Only if I get a hug first.”
Francesca gives him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He extends a hand to me as well and I hold it for a moment.
“It’s really great to have you back under my roof again.” Mr. Cameron smiles.
“It’s good to be back,” I say.
Robbie leads the way downstairs and we find chairs in the sewing room. Francesca takes the couch.
He looks like a different person, but that’s really my friend.
“You took the slow road to get here, I guess.” I say as I sit down.
“That’s one way to put it,” Robbie replies. “It’s had its perks though.”
“What is your perk’s name?” Francesca smiles.
“Her name is Amy. We have a couple of little perks, too.” He pulls out his wallet and hands a plastic sleeve of photographs to Francesca. “The youngest is Micah, the older one there is Dominic. They’re older than this now.”
“Oh wow. They are precious,” Francesca says. “And is this Amy?” She holds up a photo of a blonde woman with a Rays baseball cap on.
“Yep. That’s her. Guess it shows there’s someone for everyone. Even I found somebody.”
“She’s really pretty, Robbie,” Francesca says. “You did good. I can’t believe this. You’re so grown up!”
“It seems like you have a pretty great life,” I add.
“I really do. I couldn’t be much happier,” Robbie says. “And Grandpa has been hanging in pretty well. My kids love him.”
“Wow. Is that awkward with the rest of your family?” Francesca says. “What about the younger version of you? He’s grown up now, too.”
“Yeah. That is a little weird. I wasn’t really sure how that was going to go. I mean, he’s me, so I’ve tried to have a pretty hands-off approach to being around him.” Robbie scratches his head. “But . . . he’s not me. The thing is, I don’t know how bad this is, but I know some stuff got changed. He’s had some experiences I don’t remember ever having.” He looks from me to Francesca. “He even had a girlfriend that I obviously know I never dated. I didn’t know what to do. I made sure he still was on the softball team, but that didn’t work out either. I was by there tonight. None of us time traveled. The game got rained out, but everybody just went home. I was freaking out for a bit. I kept thinking any second I was going to get erased or disappear or something.
“When nothing happened, I waited a while to see if you guys would show up, but when you didn’t, I headed back here. I knew I needed to tell you quick that you’re all still here.”
“I know. We saw the other Blake,” I say. “Have you seen Carson? Where is he?”
Robbie furrows his eyebrows. He exhales slowly and looks me in the eyes. “Carson is dead.”
Francesca inhales sharply. Her hands go to her mouth.
His words are slow to register. My chest feels like someone is crushing it.
I must have heard him wrong. We just left Carson. He was smiling in the backyard. He can’t be dead.
“How?” I choke out. “What happened to him?”
“It was about ten years ago,” Robbie begins. “Initially we’d planned to follow you guys like we discussed. Grandpa was a little slow to recover though, so I kept putting it off. Plus, not having had all the training you guys had, I was pretty unsure of myself. Carson was sure he could get me through it, but I wasn’t as confident. We had the planning all laid out, but I procrastinated. I found more and more excuses for not leaving. Carson wasn’t really in a hurry either. He met a girl, started getting some regular music gigs.”
Carson playing the guitar. That part is true. I can see him. Not dead though. Dead people don’t play guitars.
Robbie stands and begins pacing the room as he talks.
Not Robbie. Some old man. Who does this guy think he is? Why am I listening to this?
“One day a guy came into the bar where Carson was playing. He’d found himself some bandmates by then. This guy offered them a recording deal. Carson, and I think her name was Jeanna, they decided to move out to L.A. and pursue the recording offer.”
This guy gestures funny when he talks. Robbie doesn’t gesture like that when he gets agitated. Robbie doesn’t get agitated. He’s always calm. The calm little center of our group.
“After a while, Carson actually made it pretty big. He didn’t record that much himself but he started writing and producing. He’d compiled a huge portfolio of songs. Some of them were actually his. A lot were covers of stuff we all knew growing up, he just always came out with it a couple of years before the original artists did.”
Carson did want to do that.
I scoot forward to the edge of my seat. “That idea worked?” My voice is not my voice.
Why can’t I breathe? I need to remember to breathe.
“Yeah, some of the stuff was great, maybe even an improvement in some cases. Some things weren’t too good though. He got into screenwriting too. He totally screwed up Independence Day. I don’t think it even had Will Smith in it this time. Or maybe he left out Jeff Goldblum. In any case, it wasn’t very good.” Robbie sits back down and pauses. “Problem was, I wasn’t the only one who noticed the changes.”
“Another time traveler?” Francesca asks.
“Yeah. The worst one who could have noticed,” Robbie says.
“Stenger?” I ask.
“No one ever caught him after those murders here. I tried finding Malcolm and Quickly to see if they knew anything about him early on, but I never could locate them again. The cops never found any sign of him either. But Stenger found Carson. He showed up in L.A. after one of the albums Carson produced went platinum. I don’t know what he wanted. He never said apparently. He traumatized Carson’s girlfriend at the time pretty bad. She’s still screwed up. He kidnapped her, and when Carson came to save her, he killed him.”
“I can’t believe it,” Francesca says.
“Yeah, it was really messed up. She said he kept ranting about how he was going to be the only one. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but I think he may have meant time travelers. I think maybe he didn’t want any others to find out about him. He knew Carson was a time traveler from meeting him at the lab. I think that was part of why he went looking for him.”
“No. No no no.” I put my hands on my head.
Carson dead. Two Blakes. Stenger loose. This is just a nightmare. We must not really be here. I’m dreaming. When did I go to sleep? The ranch house after the stars. Why does that seem so long ago? I just need to wake up.
“What did you do?” Francesca says. Her eyes are tearing up.
“What could I do, really?” Robbie says. “It was three thousand miles away. I flew out there, but there wasn’t a lot to do. Carson made a lot of friends, but no one knew his family. The young Carson was still here, growing up, oblivious to it all. I saw him tonight. Still plays shortstop.”
Our Carson is dead.
“Stenger is still out there?” I say.
I should have shot that monster when I had the chance. This is my fault.
“I don’t know. The cops found very little evidence except the surveillance video showing Stenger entering Carson’s building the night he died. The police showed me the video. That’s how I know it was him. I couldn’t very well tell them anything about the time traveling though. Not i
f I wanted them to believe anything I said. I told them the same guy killed a bunch of people here in St. Petersburg in the eighties. They did follow up on that. Problem was, they matched those prints to the younger Stenger. The one who never time traveled. He had a pretty good rap sheet by that point anyway. They convicted him of Carson’s murder, along with some other things. He went to prison, but it wasn’t the right guy.”
“They caught the younger Stenger?” Francesca says.
“Yeah. It was no good for me to tell them they had the wrong one. The guy that killed Carson is still out there. And there’s one more thing.”
He stops altogether for a second and looks at the floor. When he looks back up his jaw clenches. “He has Carson’s chronometer.”
Chapter 19
“Many erroneously believe that time travel is a way to fix their past mistakes. You can’t undo what’s been done. Revisiting past pain only lets you relive it, not prevent it. One’s time is better served crafting the future. It’s a commodity too valuable to be squandered on repetition.”
-Excerpt from the journal of Harold Quickly, 1980
My mind is on fire. Nothing is connecting anymore. The house, the man who claims to be Robbie, even Francesca. Their mouths are moving but I don’t hear the words. Francesca is in tears. She shouldn’t cry. None of this is real.
I stand up and move out of the room into the hallway. I pass through the library with its empty birdcage, empty chairs, empty existence. Mr. Cameron’s house should be alive. There should be something alive in here. Why is there no Spartacus? No. He wouldn’t belong here now. Not in this dying place.
I veer through the dining area and fumble with the knob on the back door. I finally get my hands to do what I want and wrench the door open. The blackness of the backyard yawns out to reach me through the porch. No. There’s nothing out there for me either. Why bother? There’s nowhere to go. I lean my head against the doorpost and stare with one eye out into the dark.
Carson was great at everything. Great at living. How could he be the one to die?
The images in my mind shift and churn till I see Stenger on the floor. Carson holding him down, and the gun in my hand. This is my fault. I could have stopped him. I could have ended him right then. I ran. My vision is blurry from tears but I see movement beyond the screen door. Who’s out there? Malcolm?
I step onto the back porch and move to the screen door. Blake is sitting on the porch steps, staring into the night. I wipe the tears away from my eyes and open the screen door. I owe him an apology. This is all my fault.
I let the screen door slam behind me and slump down next to Blake on the steps.
“I know what I have to do,” Blake says. “You aren’t going to like it, but I’m going to need your help.” His voice is somber but his eyes still look wild. He doesn’t look at me. He just keeps staring into the darkness. “I’m going to have to kill him.”
Who is he talking about? Does he know about Stenger?
“There can only be one of us. I know I can’t live my life without her. She won’t have to know.”
“What . . . what are you talking about?” I mumble.
“We’re going to get rid of him. She won’t have to know. It’s not murder. It’s okay. They’ll never be able to say he’s even missing.”
“You want to kill . . . yourself?” What is wrong with this place?
“I don’t think it even counts as killing. I’ll still be alive. There will just be one of me. It’s more like suicide, only not self-inflicted. Well, another self . . .”
I try to wrap my brain around what he’s saying. “Blake. I saw him. I talked to him. He’s you. We can’t kill you.”
“That thing is not me,” Blake says. His voice is cold. “He’s just living my life.”
“Dude. He’s you. And it’s not just you,” I say. “I’m here, too.”
Blake is quiet for a moment. “We’ll just have to get rid of him, too.”
The image of me facing another version of myself takes me aback. Could I do that? Could I fight myself? I couldn’t even shoot that monster who deserved it. How could I kill myself, or Blake or . . . Francesca? The image of Francesca screaming on the softball bench fills my mind.”
“Francesca,” I say out loud. “I would never hurt Francesca.”
Blake finally takes his gaze away from the darkness of the yard and looks me in the eyes. His eyes are red. He looks lost in there.
“No.” He lowers his eyes. “Not Francesca.”
A breeze moves through the yard and makes the palms rattle. More killing won’t solve this problem. This isn’t home.
“Carson is dead.”
Blake lifts his head back up and looks me in the eyes again. “When?”
I breathe the night air deep into my lungs and then let it out. “He never made it here. He never came home. Stenger found him.”
Saying it out loud makes it real.
Blake looks into the porch toward the back door. “And Robbie?”
“Robbie is here,” I say. “Robbie never left. He’s old now. He’s okay though. Mr. Cameron is still here too.”
Blake holds the back of his head with both hands and stares at his feet for a few moments, then turns to look at me. “What are we going to do, Ben? How are we going to live like this?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t want to live here. Not in this place. Even if there weren’t two of me.
“How’d everything get so screwed up?” Blake asks.
“I think it might have been Stenger, but I don’t really know. Robbie says things in his life have changed too. Well, the other him’s life.”
“Like what?”
“Life experiences. Girlfriends. That sort of thing.”
“So we screwed stuff up when we went back,” Blake says. “We screwed something up so bad that we never time traveled.” He pauses before he continues. “But then how are we here? If we never went back, how can any of this have ever happened?”
We broke something. How do you break time? Can something so bad happen that you fracture the world? I stare into the dark yard and think about the mess my life has suddenly become. It certainly feels broken. I picture myself in a mirror with a million little cracks spreading through the glass till the whole mirror crumbles apart. The image lingers in my mind. Nothing but cracks.
“Hey, do you remember the screen that Lawrence had up on his computer? The one with all the diverging lines?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“He said something about ‘the fractal universe.’ He said he would explain it in the morning, but of course he never did. It seemed like something to do with time being a bunch of different threads. He seemed surprised that we didn’t know about it.”
“I feel like there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about,” Blake grumbles.
“I do, too. It’s almost like we were deliberately left in the dark on certain things.”
“Why would Quickly do that? Why help us, but then leave out information that was important?” Blake says.
“I don’t know. Maybe he was going to tell us, but never got the chance. Maybe he planned to but couldn’t after that night when the lab burned. I sure want to know now.”
“You think our lives are still out there somewhere? The right time? You think we can fix this?”
“I’m sure willing to try.”
“So we might still find Mallory? My Mallory?”
“It’s the only thing that makes any sense,” I say. “We came from somewhere. There has to be a way back.” And there has to be a way to save Carson. Please let there be a way to fix this.
“I guess we’re time travelers. I suppose if anybody can do it . . .” Blake straightens up. His eyes look a little clearer. He stands. “If she’s still out there, waiting, I owe it to her to get home.” He extends his hand and grabs my arm, pulling me to my feet.
“I’m sorry I got us into this mess,” I say.
“How was it your fault?”
“Stenger. I cou
ld have shot him. I had the opportunity. If he’s the reason things got screwed up, we could’ve been home by now. And Carson would still be alive.”
“Stenger being a psychopath is not your fault. I don’t know what caused him, but I am sure it wasn’t you. I’m the one who should apologize. I was pushing us so much to get back and to not worry about him . . . I could have listened . . . and I shouldn’t have said what I did earlier about—”
“It’s okay.”
He nods and reaches an arm out and we give each other a brief hug.
“I’m glad you came back,” I say.
“Me too.”
I open the screen door and head back inside. Blake follows.
When I make it to the sewing room, Robbie is still sitting on the armchair where I left him, but Francesca is gone. Robbie stands when Blake enters behind me.
“Hey, Blake.”
“Hey, Robbie.” Blake gives Robbie a hug. “Glad you’re okay, man.”
“You too.”
“This is surreal,” Blake says, taking in Robbie’s appearance.
“It’s pretty crazy for me too,” Robbie replies.
“Where’s Francesca?” I ask.
“She went upstairs. She’s pretty upset.”
I make my way upstairs while Blake stays to catch up with Robbie. The hallway is dark except for a gleam of light coming from the first bedroom doorway. It’s opened a crack and Dee is at the far side of the room, reading in an armchair by the light of a single overhead lamp. She looks up and our eyes meet, but then she goes back to her reading.
Moving to the door of the farther bedroom, I hear muffled sobs. I give the door a couple of raps with my knuckles and wait. The sobs grow silent, but I hear no response. I try the knob slowly and peer around the door into the darkness.
“Francesca?”
I hear a sniff in reply. Francesca is a darker lump in the corner of the dark bed, shaking slightly. I move to the bed slowly so I don’t collide with anything in the darkness, and sit down on the edge. Reaching my hand out, I find what I think is her thigh. After a few moments, my eyes adjust enough to make out the rest of her curled in a fetal position around a pillow.
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 32
