Grandma Sue, the woman my grandfather married a few years after his first wife disappeared, is the only grandmother I’ve ever known. She’s always doted on me to such an extent that it was a shock when I learned we aren’t actually related. She flutters around me from the moment I walk in the door. “Why didn’t you tell us you had a meeting down here?” she asks. “My friends will be so upset they missed your visit.”
“Sorry. It was just kind of last-minute.” It feels a little disloyal that I’m here to ask about her predecessor. My grandfather has been a good husband, I’m certain, but there’s apparently never been any doubt where his heart lies. Sue deserved better than second place.
We eat dinner while Sue grills me, asking in every roundabout way possible when I’m going to settle down. “We need babies running around the house again,” she says. “How much longer are you going to make us wait?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. I think of Quinn pregnant; I think of us raising a child together. That it will probably never happen makes my chest tighten. We’d have been good parents. “I’m not sure that’s in the cards for me.”
I call Quinn after dinner but only get her voicemail. I know she’s out with Caroline, but I call it again, just to hear the sound of her voice, that tiny rasp when she says her name, the sweetness of it. I just saw her a few hours ago and I already miss her. What’s it going to be like if she leaves me for good?
* * *
The next morning, my grandfather and I head out on his boat, just as the morning sky morphs from black to lavender. Fishing has always been more his thing than mine, but the traditions involved—waking up at dawn, the thermos full of coffee, and a small cooler with the breakfast my grandmother prepared for us—brings back memories.
“Don’t imagine you do a lot of this in D.C.,” my grandfather comments as we cast our lines.
“I don’t think I’d want to eat anything that came out of the Potomac.”
He nods. “So why don’t you tell me why you’re really here,” he says. “Because no one travels to a medical conference with nothing but a gym bag. Did your dad send you to check up on me?”
I laugh to myself. My grandfather never did miss much. “No.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “I did want to ask you some questions, though. About your first wife.”
A shadow crosses his face, a kind of sinking, deep-seated grief I suspect is always present, just hidden.
“What do you want to know?” he asks, his voice slow, gravelly with caution.
I lean forward, my elbows pressed to my knees, and turn my head toward him. “Do you really think she drowned?”
There’s a flash of something in his eyes, knowledge, gone nearly as soon as it appears. “No one knows for sure,” he replies. “Why do you ask?”
I hesitate. There is a ninety percent chance he’s going to decide I’m nuts by the time we get off this boat. “The woman I’m seeing, Quinn, may have a genetic mutation, one I think I may have as well. And I’m trying to figure out where I got it.”
He grows still. “What kind of mutation?”
I adjust my line, as if his question or my response are casual. “The kind that might be responsible for someone’s disappearance. Something not a lot of people seem to know about.”
My grandfather is silent, staring hard at the water. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Quinn has a brain tumor,” I reply quietly. “Unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Growing with no sign of blood flow to the site. We’ve been told she can do things other people can’t.”
“What sort of things?” my grandfather asks.
I’d hoped to get him to talk without being forced to admit what I’m getting at. If I’m wrong he’s going to think I’m crazy. “Time travel.”
He’s quiet. He’s quiet for so long I grow certain he’s looking for a diplomatic way to end our fishing trip entirely before he goes home to tell my parents I need medication. “And you’re wondering if your grandmother did it too,” he says. “Because she disappeared.”
I run a hand through my hair, realizing how insane it sounds when stated outright. I jumped on a plane and flew down here like a fucking lunatic because a woman who lived next to the water disappeared over fifty years ago. “I know it sounds crazy,” I tell him. “We’re just a little desperate.”
He doesn’t look at me but stares straight at the water. “It doesn’t sound all that crazy to me,” he says quietly.
My head jerks toward him. “Are you saying she did it?”
He sighs. “She did.”
I grip the fishing rod, stunned into silence. I came here because I thought it was possible, but learning it’s true still shocks me. It also means Quinn’s theory may be right—I carry at least one mutated gene and she carries two. Which means there’s a 75 percent chance any daughter we have would be able to time travel.
“It’s funny,” my grandfather muses, “how you can convince yourself of anything until you learn otherwise. Once I knew the truth about your grandmother, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t wondered. She had these eyes like nothing I’d ever seen before, and she was so beautiful we couldn’t walk down the street without getting stares. But I never questioned it.”
I didn’t either. I noticed the same things about Quinn—the way people stare as she passes, the color of her eyes—and it never occurred to me that she was anything more than genetically blessed. I guess it’s human nature to explain away the unusual. Quinn denies all these strange incidents in her childhood meant anything, my mother and I both have these bizarre dreams we rationalize away. We’ve spent our lives insisting unusual things were normal. Maybe it’s time we stopped.
“So when she disappeared,” I ask, “did you know what happened? Do you know where she went?”
His face sags. He stares ahead at the water, but his mind is somewhere else. “I was trying to save money for medical school and she kept saying she could go back a few years. Make an investment for us. I always said no. I didn’t want her to do it, not until your father was grown, because it was a dangerous business, time travel. Never know what you’re going to find or where you’re going to get stuck. And I think she mostly didn’t do it, but the temptation was just too strong I guess. A few months after she disappeared I got a financial statement from a broker. We somehow had 400,000 dollars in stock, which was a fortune back then. I researched it, of course. It looked like the original investment was made in 1921. I kept hoping she’d come back—” He flinches. After all this time, the memory still hurts. “Obviously, it didn’t work out that way.”
I can already feel it, the sick turning of the gut I’d have in his place. That could be Quinn. She could go back and I’d have no fucking way to find her. “How would she have gotten stuck there? Couldn’t she just time travel right back out?”
He pulls off his hat and straightens it. “She once told me if you go back a ways, it sometimes takes all you’ve got. You’re so exhausted you have to recover before you can jump back. And if you stay someplace too long you weaken until you can’t get back. But I don’t think that’s what happened to her.”
“No?”
He shakes his head. “She was only 25 when it happened. If she somehow just got stuck in 1921, she’d have still been alive when she got to 1962. Even if she didn’t want to come back to us, she’d have let me know somehow that she was okay.”
I’d pictured it as something simple, like a jump over a yardstick. It’s not simple at all. It’s deadly, and here I’ve been pushing Quinn to try. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
He looks over at me for the first time since the conversation began. “I’ve had almost sixty years to get used to it. Sounds like you’re the one in need of sympathy. This girl of yours—there’s no other way to cure the tumor? Radiation? Chemo?”
I grit my teeth as I realize I’m going to lose her whether she time travels or not. “No,” I reply. “And maybe I’m fooling myself, thinking that if we can just talk to the right person, someone who kno
ws what’s going on, we can solve it. But I have to try.”
“I wish I could help,” he says. “But your grandmother was the only person I ever knew who could do it.”
“She never mentioned anyone? A friend? A family member?”
He shakes his head. “There are rules,” he says. “I don’t understand them, but there are rules about who you tell. She never even told me until she was pregnant—said we had to share a blood relative.”
I think about Rose and her initial refusal to help. “What would have happened if she’d told you before?”
He shakes his head. “I never knew a lot about it. Didn’t want to know. But she implied if you got caught it was bad for everyone involved.”
I try to ignore the twist of guilt in my stomach. If any teenager was duplicitous enough to get away with breaking some time traveling code of ethics, it was Rose.
We sit in silence for a while longer. Nothing is biting, so eventually we turn toward home. It’s only as we’re climbing off the boat that my grandfather’s hand lands on my shoulder. “I hope you know what you’re doing. It’s a hard life.”
“Time traveling?”
He shakes his head, staring at the rope in his weathered hands. “No,” he says. “Being the one who has to stay behind.”
12
QUINN
It feels like days since I’ve seen Nick and it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. Caroline and Trevor took me out last night, but even they couldn’t cheer me up. He’ll be back tomorrow. It’s pathetic how badly I want to beg him to come home tonight instead.
It will be an unpleasant day on so many fronts, I think, as I pull into the driveway of the house I shared with Jeff. It’s probably the last time I’ll ever come here, but what makes me unhappy right now is the fact that I wound up here in the first place. I never wanted this house. I never wanted the furniture we bought. I never wanted to live in the suburbs. The thrilling part of being in D.C., after my years on the farm, was how lively it was. I loved that I could walk to restaurants, that I never had to drive anywhere if I didn’t want to. It was Jeff who wanted what we had, and I gave up everything again and again, without a fight. It’s almost as if I was scared to ever want anything of my own too much.
I walk back into my former home, uncertain where to start. It would be frugal for me to take some of the furniture, but I really don’t want it. I go through the kitchen and find that I don’t really care about anything there either, even though I purchased most of it myself. They were supposed to’s. Because you’re supposed to have a fancy cappuccino machine, even though I rarely drink cappuccinos. You’re supposed to have the panini press, the salad swiveler. They were things I chose in an attempt to fill the hole in my life, but it was like pouring water into a pit made of sand…far too soon the space it took up siphoned into nothing and left me empty again.
I move to the closet instead, carefully folding the clothes I wore to work, the T-shirts I bought on sale at the J Crew outlet or Ann Taylor Loft. After about ten minutes I dump them out of my suitcase and put them in a bag of donations.
I’m not taking anything into my new life with Nick that I don’t absolutely love.
The suits go, as do the blouses, the heels I spent too much on but never wore because they killed my feet. I throw in the pantyhose, the slips, the worn, old bras I held onto for no reason other than frugality. Caroline was right when she said I’d spent my life cowering. From my career choices to my boyfriend to the clothes I wore, my whole life has been about shrinking myself, trying to become less than what I was because it felt like the safest course. With Nick it no longer seems necessary.
In the end it only takes two suitcases and a few boxes to hold every single thing I actually love: my favorite jeans, my softest sweaters, the dresses and shoes I can’t live without. A few books, a few photos. It’s astonishing, and depressing, that in a two-bedroom home crammed with stuff, I loved and wanted so little. All of it fits tidily in the trunk of my car. I think I had more stuff in the college dorm room I shared with Caroline than I have right now.
I arrange for the bags of clothes I’m giving away to be picked up, and I’m in the process of dragging the last one outside when Jeff turns into the driveway. I freeze, rooted to the spot as if I’ve been caught breaking in. I wasn’t really scared of him before, not the way Nick thought I should be. Now I realize how foolish that was. There’s no reason for him to be home today at all—and certainly not at this hour—unless he somehow knew I was here.
He climbs from the car, stalking toward me with narrowed eyes. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Inside, I quake, but I refuse to let him see it. “Why aren’t you in Harrisonburg?” I counter.
“What’s the point?” he asks. “I was only at that job because of you. And you didn’t give a shit.”
The guilt trip he’s given me over the jobs he’s held here is getting a little old. It’s not like I pushed him, and in fact with his current job I lobbied against it because it was such a bad fit. “I never asked you to take that job.”
“Don’t try to act like it had nothing to do with you. You could have told me no at any point and you never did.”
I swallow and stare at the ground. He’s being an asshole, but he’s also right. I should have shut him down when he first came to D.C., but I was so desperate to keep the peace, to do what my father wanted and to feel safe, that I wound up doing something so much worse: I stayed with someone I was never meant to be with. “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “And I know an apology makes up for nothing and can’t give you those years back, but I’m truly sorry I put you through this.”
He steps closer. I fight the urge to back away. “Tell me something. How much of this bullshit is about your tumor, and how much of it is about Nick fucking Reilly?” His arms cross over his chest, his legs spread wide as if he will actually block me from heading to my car. “I knew he was after you from the first fucking moment he looked at you. You weren’t even conscious, and I knew. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
My heart beats faster. I’m shit at lying, and he’s right. If I’d never met Nick, I probably would have continued with my blinders on, marrying a man I didn’t deeply love, going through the motions of a life I never wanted. But the truth won’t work here, not with him as angry as he is. “No. It’s not.” Liars look up and to the left, as I recall, which is probably why my gaze desperately wants to veer away from his. “I just want this year, if it’s going to be my last, to be perfect.”
“Bullshit,” Jeff hisses. “You’re covering for him because you know how much trouble he could get into for this. You’re his patient. I’ll bet he’s not even allowed to date you, is he?”
My hands start to tremble, and I shove them into my pockets in case he notices. “Is it really so hard to accept that I don’t think you and I are meant to be together? We don’t like the same things; we don’t want the same things from our future. You’ve been unhappy with every decision I’ve made for months. Don’t start trying to make this about someone else.”
His nostrils flare. “You know why I know it’s about someone else? Because you’re too goddamn weak to have ever left on your own. You’d never have been willing to hurt me and my family and your mother unless there was someone else. And the second I get proof I’m going to make that asshole pay. He’s taking advantage of a dying girl. You’re probably not the first one he’s done it to, but you’ll definitely be the last because when I’m done with him, he’ll be out of a job.”
My stomach starts to spin, whipping fast and faster until the knots are tied so tight I’m not sure they’ll ever come loose. “You sound insane,” I reply, doing my best to sound flippant when it feels like I’m about to vomit on his shoes. “And you’re just convincing me I made the right decision.”
I walk away, swallowing my pain and my terror until I’m behind the wheel of my car. And then I drive exactly one block away, press my face to the steering wheel, and cry, wonder
ing exactly how much of Nick’s life I’ll have ruined before this is through.
13
NICK
My grandfather and I enter the house after what could only be considered an unsuccessful trip—no fish, no information that can save Quinn. Just a new kind of anxiety eating at my gut when I imagine losing her the way my grandfather lost his wife.
It’s barely been twenty-four hours since I saw her, but it’s already been too long. I miss the curve of her lips, the way her lashes lower when she’s thinking something she shouldn’t. The raspy note at the base of her laugh, the velvet skin on the underside of her wrist. I want to hear about her day and tell her about mine. In an ideal world I’d do a whole lot more than all of that.
Just after lunch I call her. My relief when she answers fades the moment I hear the choked sob in her voice. “What’s wrong?” I push the bedroom door closed behind me. “What happened?”
She takes a deep inhale, trying to pull herself together. “I went to go get my stuff from Jeff’s. He showed up as I was leaving and…”
I’m going to break every bone in his goddamn body if he laid a finger on her. “I thought he was out of town.”
“I did too.” Her swallow is audible. “But he’s convinced I broke up with him over you. He didn’t seem to have any actual proof, but he said he could get some and that he’d ruin you.”
The news tires me more than anything else. Neither of us has time for this bullshit right now. I sink onto the bed. “I knew the risks when I started this with you.”
“Nick,” she whispers, “I can’t be the reason you lose your job.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. God, I wish we weren’t having this conversation over the phone. “You won’t be. Let’s just cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 10
