In Times Like These (43 page)

I step onto the back porch and move to the screen door. Blake is sitting on the porch steps
, staring off 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 m
e. 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.”

“What kind of things?”

“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 a moment 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 ab
out ‘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 though? Why help us, but then leav
e 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 you think I might still find Mallory? My Mallory?”

“It’s the only thing that makes any sense to me,” 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 could 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 I see Dee at the far side of the room, reading in an armchair by the light of a single overhead lamp. She looks up for a moment 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.

“Hey,” I whisper.

Another sniff.

“It’s going to be okay.”

“I was mean.” Her voice is slightly muffled by the pillow.

“What?”

“The last thing I said to him. I don’t really remember what it was, but I think it was mean.”

“Oh. I don’t remember you being mean. And I’m sure Carson would have known you were joking anyway.”

She turns her head
toward me. “I was always mad at him.”

“Well, sometimes he deserved it.” I smile and rub her shoulder.

“I should have been nicer. I can’t believe he’s dead. It seems like a bad dream.”

“I know. I feel that way too.”

She sniffs again. “I’ve known Carson since second grade. How will we ever explain this to his mom? What are we going to do?”

“I was talking to Blake about that. He’s downstairs. We want to try to fix it.”

“Fix it?”

“Yeah. Somewhere out there is the world we came from. The one where we got struck by a power line at softball and left our lives behind. We came from there, so it has to exist. We just somehow got to the wrong 2009.”

“We can find the right one?”

“There has to be a way. These other time
travelers zip around and change stuff all the time. We just need to figure out what we did wrong.”

“And Carson? What about him?”

“We save Carson.”

“How?”

“We need to stop Stenger. If we stop him, we can keep Carson from dying.”

“Stenger. I really hate that guy. I’ve never even met him.”

“You don’t want to.”

“I do now,” she says. “I want him to meet my boots with his teeth.”

“I think that’s a fantastic idea.”

Francesca’s tears have stopped. She sits up, but still hangs onto the pillow. There is a rap on the door and Blake pokes his head in.
“You guys okay?”

“Yeah. Come in,” I say.

“You can turn the light on,” Francesca says.

Blake flips the switch. The room hasn’t changed much. The little cat statue still guards the closet door. Francesca has
tearstains down her face.

I probably look terrible too.

Blake takes a seat in the armchair. Robbie appears at the door as well. “Hey.”

“Hey, man.”

“How are you guys holding up?” Robbie asks.

“It’s been kind of a rough night so far,” I say.

“Yeah. Rough,” Blake echoes.

“
I know Grandpa would be happy to let you stay here as long as you need to. I have to get home, but I want to make sure you’re going to be okay . . . I don’t know what happens now.”

I straighten up and look him in the eyes.
“We’ve actually been talking about that. I don’t think we’re going to stay long.”

Robbie drops his eyes a moment, but then nods and looks back to me. “What are you going to do?”

“We have to try to fix this,” I say.

“How do you mean?” Robbie says.

“Carson,” I say. “We want to stop Stenger, find Carson and get home. Our real home.”

Robbie shifts his feet and considers this. “You’re going back? Back to 1986?”

I nod.

“How?”

“We haven’t figured that part out yet,” I say.

“
I have.” Francesca reaches into her pocket and removes the crystal fan fob. She dangles it from her fingers. “He said he’s coming back. I vote we hitch another ride.”

I explain our adventures with Cowboy Bob and the Fridays in Boston and h
ow their machines can make long-distance jumps.

“
I wish I would have known that,” Robbie replies. “It wouldn’t have been as many jumps as I thought.”

“You can come back with us,” Francesca says.

“Hmm. I appreciate the offer, but I think a few people here might miss me. I never planned it this way. I always thought that eventually I would get back to my old life, but as the months, and then years went by, I realized it stopped being realistic. I remember one conversation I had with Carson on one of our meet-ups after he went to Hollywood. We were in our mid-thirties then, and we joked about what it would be like to go back and try to pretend we were twenty-six again.” Robbie runs a hand over his balding head. “I think we both knew at that point that it wasn’t going to happen. We’d missed our window of opportunity.”

“Do you miss it?” Francesca asks.

“Sometimes,” Robbie muses. “There are times when I think about friends I missed out on seeing, and of course my family. But I had my family here in a different way. It wasn’t exactly the same, but I never felt alone. And Grandpa. He’s been amazing. He was the only one I could really talk to about all this stuff after Carson was gone. I eventually told Amy too. Some days I still wonder if she really believes me.”

“How did she handle finding out?” I say.

“She didn’t walk straight out the door, so I guess that was a good sign. Grandpa helped there too. I had at least one person to back me up.”