Rewinder (21 page)

“What?”

“Well, um…”

“There isn’t a room, is there?”

She shoots me a worried glance that tells me everything I need to know.

“Dammit,” I mutter and push myself to my feet.

She jumps up and puts a hand on my arm. “There was one, I swear. Marilyn rented it out to a couple of guys this morning. They’ve been moving their stuff in all day.”

I start walking toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“To find a place to stay.”

“You can stay here. I’ll sleep downstairs on the couch. I’ve done it before.”

I shake my head. “I’m not kicking you out of your room.”

“Please don’t go. Not yet at least. Just…” She rubs a hand across her eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

I stop and turn to her. “I told you, you’re not crazy.”

“Then what’s going on?” she says, looking as if she’s on the verge of a breakdown. “Why do I know where you’re going to be? Why do I know you’re in trouble? Why do I
feel
you?”

My training demands that I say nothing, but in reality, what will it hurt? Once the twelve-second gap is eliminated and Richard Cahill is allowed to report Washington’s position, Iffy will either be entirely erased or live a life under empire rule in which she never meets me. As I think this, other thoughts begin stirring in my mind, the ones I was having at the library earlier today. I shove them away before I have time to acknowledge them.

I walk back to her. “I know why.”

“Tell me, then. Please!” Whatever she’s been using to hold herself together crumbles and she begins to cry. “I want to understand.”

I shouldn’t do it. I shouldn’t even be thinking about doing it. I should be turning around and walking out. I should already be on the stairs.

I pull her into my arms. I can’t think about what I
should
be doing, I can only think about what a bastard I’ve been. All this time I’ve been focused on how our connection affects
me
, not what it’s doing to her.

When her body begins to relax, I lower us to the mattress again. She sniffles a few times, and then looks at me through watery eyes, waiting.

“You’re not going to believe me,” I tell her.

“I will.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ll believe anything you say.”

She’s probably telling the truth but I need to ease her into it. I need to ease
myself
into talking about it. “Tell me about your name first.”

“My name?”

“Are there a lot of others named Iffy?”

That gets a laugh out of her. “I got it in high school, from someone who used to be a friend.”

“Not your parents?”

“My given name is Pamela.”

“That’s pretty.”

“For a soccer mom, maybe.”

I’m not sure what a soccer mom is but I get the larger point. “So, why Iffy?”

She thinks for a moment. “My friend and I had been in school together since third or fourth grade. One day she blew up at me, said she’d had enough of my waffling.”

“Waffling?”

“Yeah, said she was sick of me not being able to make a decision, that I was iffy on everything. She started calling me that, and it wasn’t long before others did the same. It used to make me so mad. I couldn’t wait to go to college where no one knew me and I could be Pamela or Pam or anything else.”

She pauses. “The thing is, the bitch was right. I was horrible at making decisions. By the time I left home after high school, I was so used to hearing the name that I kept it. Decided to use it to help me be better.”

“And has it?”

“Still a work in progress, but getting there.” She tilts her head and looks at me. “The old me would have never come looking for you. She would’ve hidden in her room, hoping the feeling would go away. Your turn. Why is this happening? Why you?”

__________

H
OW DO YOU
tell someone you’re a time traveler? Not from the future, but from the now? Only the now you’re from is real and the one the other person knows is an imposter.

I start at the beginning, with my selection to join the Upjohn Institute, and lay it all out from there.

Iffy is so quiet that I think, contrary to what she said earlier, she doesn’t believe a word. Why should she? If someone had come up to me before I joined the institute and said the same, I would’ve thought the person was insane.

After a while, she begins asking questions, having me fill in gaps in my story. When I come to my encounter with Cahill, I carefully explain what should have happened and then what did. She falls silent again, and I take this to mean she’s having a hard time following, so I start explaining it again.

“I got it,” she says, stopping me. “You created a delay that resulted in him being killed and Washington being allowed to live. That’s when everything changed.”

“Yes.”

I tell her of my mostly unconscious time in New York, and my escape to what I thought would be New Cardiff.

“I didn’t want to believe at first that I’d caused the change, so that’s why I went to the library, hoping to find it was something else.”

“You must have figured it out fairly quickly, though,” she says.

I nod.

“Then why didn’t you go back and fix it at that point? I mean, all you have to do is keep yourself from entering the tavern, right?”

I nod. She’s understood it all perfectly.

“Then why haven’t you gone yet?”

“I…I guess I want to know more about this world first. It’s so different than where I’m from. I want to know it better.” I take a moment, and then say, “Do you believe me?”

“You still haven’t told me why we’re connected,” she says.

I hesitate, then pull my satchel over. From inside, I remove my Chaser. “This is what you’re really connected to.”

“What is it?”

“A Chaser. It’s what allows us to travel through time.”

As if fearing it’d shock her, she carefully touches it before taking it from me. She turns it every which way until she’s inspected the whole thing. “Why would I be connected to this?”

I tell her about how the Chasers work, about companions, the sharing of the pain of travel, and the subtle mental connection between the machine and both of the users. “When my original companion disappeared, it chose you for some reason.”

“But why?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I’m not a scientist or an engineer, so I don’t really know the details on how all of this works, but I do know the link between machine and companion is made, from the human side, on a cellular level. You call it DNA here, I think. You know what that is?”

“Sure. Everyone does.”

“My theory is that you and Palmer Benson share, um, I guess common relatives.”

“You mean like we’re cousins?”

“In an odd way, I guess. If I’m right, then the device linked with you because you were the closest match to what it knew. How it figured it out…” I shrug. We’re already way beyond my areas of expertise and into pure speculation. I let her live with this for a minute before I say, “You haven’t answered my question.”

She looks at me, eyebrow raised.

“Do you believe me?”

“It doesn’t matter if I believe you. You can just prove it to me.” She hands me back the Chaser. “If I give you a date and time and place, you can go there?”

I smile at the thought of performing the same demonstration Marie used on me. “I can.”

“All right. February 13, 2012, 7:00 p.m.” She gives me an address in a city called San Diego. “That’s my mom’s house. I was still in high school. Oh, probably not a good idea to just appear in the living room.”

Despite the fact that the trip will use up precious power, I owe her this. “All right,” I tell her. “But you should know that as companion, even though the trip isn’t far, it’ll be painful for you.”

“Yeah, I’ve experienced a bit of that already.”

My short trips around the city. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s all right. Now get going.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Take a slow walk along the other side of the street from my house, right at seven. You’ll know.”

“Fine. But I need a map to figure out the location. The Chaser doesn’t understand your addresses.”

“No problem. I’ll bring it up on Google.”

__________

I
F THERE IS
a difference between 2012 and 2015, I’m not tuned into the culture enough to perceive it. To me, it looks like I could have hopped a couple minutes into the past to another part of Los Angeles.

I arrive early in the morning of February 14. Since the computer map Iffy showed me uses satellite images of the neighborhood, I’m able to coordinate this with my Chaser and pinpoint my arrival to a narrow space behind several retail shops a few blocks away from Iffy’s mom’s house. Since the space hasn’t been paved over, I can check for footprints in the sand. There are shallow depressions that look at least several days old, but nothing indicating anyone has walked between the buildings since then.

Confident my arrival will go unnoticed, I set the Chaser for 6:30 p.m. the previous day and jump back.

The evening is cool but not unpleasant. I note the addresses and keep track of time as I walk casually through Iffy’s neighborhood. Her house comes into view a minute before 7:00 p.m.

A car has just pulled up in front of her house. A baby-faced teenager straightens his hair and runs a hand down his nice shirt before heading up to the front door. I’m still not directly in front of the house when the door opens, but I’m able to see the large man standing inside. A conversation ensues. The only thing I can understand is when the man yells into the house, “Pamela!”

When Iffy appears at the door, I slow. She looks young enough to pass for a pre-teen. While her skin is pale as ever, her hair has yet to be reduced to her current boyish style and is pulled into a long ponytail. She’s wearing roomy pink pants and a matching bulky top.

The look on her face when she sees the boy is one of surprise, and judging by his demeanor—though I can’t see his face at the moment—he’s surprised, too.

Words float across the street…

“Ready” and “dance” and “I thought” and “way.”

The large man says something to Iffy. She looks reluctant, but he continues talking until she steps outside with the boy. The man closes the door, and the two kids walk slowly toward the boy’s vehicle.

I cross the street, angling my path so that I’ll reach the sidewalk at the far edge of Iffy’s property. It crosses my mind that this could interfere with their conversation, but it soon becomes apparent that they’re so wrapped up in each other, they don’t even notice me.

“…talk about it,” the boy is saying when I’m finally able to hear them.

“That was two months ago. I thought you were kidding. You should have checked with me again.”

“I didn’t…I thought…”

“Ryan, you’re a nice guy and all. I’m just not a dance kind of person, okay?”

“But you said yes.”

“Because I thought you were
joking
.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry, all right? I’m so sorry.”

She turns back to the house. When I reach the sidewalk, I continue past a couple houses before looking back. The boy is still standing by his car, staring at Iffy’s house. I turn away, feeling like I’m adding to his embarrassment.

__________

I
FFY GASPS AS
I reappear in her room. She’s lying on her bed, her hands pressing against her temples.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

She blinks multiple times as she breathes deeply. When the tension finally leaves her face, I know the worst of the pain is over.

“How do the companions stand it?” she asks, propping herself up on an elbow.

“They’re sedated and don’t feel much, I think.”

“They’d have to be if they do this all the time.”

I help her sit all the way up.

“So…what did you see?” she asks.

“The fact that I vanished from your room and your nerve endings caught on fire isn’t enough to sway you?”

“Could be that’s just a teleportation device. Which, I admit, would be
very
cool. But it’s not time travel.”

“You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” I know I shouldn’t let this happen, but I’m enjoying our banter.

“Tough enough to survive a bout of crippling pain.” A pause. “Well?”

I tell her about the boy.

Her eyes are wide as I describe him. When I finish, she nods and whispers, “Ryan Smith. We’d known each other for years.”

“And the man who answered the door? Was he your father?”

“Stepfather.” Her voice is stronger now. “He made me go out and talk to Ryan.”

“The boy asked you to go with him somewhere but you didn’t want to, right?”

“To the high school Valentine’s Day dance. He asked me, like, months before. I didn’t think he was serious, especially since he never mentioned it again.”

“He must’ve been afraid you’d back out.”

“Yeah. I figured that out eventually.”

“Why did you pick that for me to see?”

She looks down at her hands. “In May, before school ended that year, Ryan and his mother were killed in an accident. A truck driver dozed off and crossed the center line, right into their sedan.” She looks at me. “Same car you saw. I’m positive I’m the only girl he ever asked out, ever
would
ask out, and I turned him down in the worst possible way. So that night’s kind of stuck with me. Talk about selfish. What would it have hurt to give him one night?”

I could say it wasn’t her fault he never asked out anyone else, but I know it won’t do any good.

“I believe you,” she says, and then leans against me, her head on my shoulder. “I believe you.”

I don’t realize how much tension I’ve been holding until it breaks at that moment. My secret is now a shared one.

Without any forethought, I slip my arms around her. Our faces turn toward each other and our lips meet in a kiss initiated by both of us. It’s my first, and it’s impossible to believe there will ever be a better one.

We lie back on her bed at some point, and I tell her the part of my story I left out earlier—the part that triggered my coming to find her.