The Here and Now (19 page)

And the people whose house burned down? I could anonymously report a dangerous electrical situation and try to get a fire inspector sent over to the house. I could pose as a fire
inspector over the phone and get them to at least put fresh batteries in their smoke detectors.

I am suddenly the vigilante future girl, star of my own not-very-glorious superhero comic strip.

Naturally, I think of the fourth rule. It is among the most serious of them. It isn’t the rule the counselors talk about most, but somehow it still has more natural weight than the others.

I turn to the last page of the paper, with the obituaries in small print. Some of them have a few lines about the person’s life or death, and most not much more than dates and the names of the family members who survive them. Most of the dead are old people, probably sick people, whose deaths you could do nothing to prevent. But what about the other ones?

It’s an intoxicating power to think about, saving people from death, preventing tragedy, swooping in at some critical juncture to make sure a life goes in one direction instead of another.

What if there were other moments, less than death but still important, when you could tip the balance just a little in an instance of defeat or discouragement. I guess it would be hard to find those moments in the newspaper.

With my finger I move down the list of deaths to the youngest near the bottom.
January 2, 1996–May 17, 2014
. My eyes stick on that date. I feel a chill starting in the bottom of my abdomen. I move my finger across the column to the left.
Ethan Patrick Jarves, beloved son
. I tear my eyes from the newspaper, disoriented. I feel my vision, my excellent vision, go out of focus. This isn’t possible.

I look across the room at that very beloved son, beloved
friend, beloved beloved, sprawled over the bed we shared, as tanned and strong and healthy as a beloved could be.

That cannot be
. I look back down at the paper, actually expecting to see something different this time, but it’s the same.

Ethan Patrick Jarves, beloved son
. Survived by his parents and his sister.

My eyes feel like they are vibrating in their sockets. My heart is thrashing like a prisoner in my chest.

Ethan makes a sleeping noise and kicks his leg out from under the sheet.

I jump to my feet, holding the paper. I go to the bathroom as quietly as possible, pull on shorts and let myself out of the room. I walk toward the elevators. I still can’t see right.

Clutching the newspaper, I make my way out of the lobby and down the path to the beach. I walk to the little rise before the water. It is still early and the beach is mostly empty but for gulls picking at the overflowing garbage cans.

I fold the newspaper many times so it won’t blow around. I still think I could give it another chance, that when I open it again, it will say different things, and beloved Ethan Patrick Jarves will be nowhere in it.

It isn’t real. It hasn’t happened yet. It is one possible future, and there are infinite other possibilities. This is not going to be the future. I don’t believe it.

And even though I don’t believe it, my mind spins around and around it. How does he die? What is the cause? It’s the same day as the death of Mona Ghali, so is it linked to that? Because the future this newspaper describes is not the future I am part of. I was not here yet and neither was my father. It
could not include the possibility that Ethan and I would team up to intervene in a murder.

The version of the future where Ethan dies on May 17 can’t have to do with me. What about Mona Ghali, though? He knows her. He often goes to that lab.

I wish I had more information. I don’t have any other newspapers from the future to cross-reference. I can’t investigate a death before it happens.

I realize I am crying. Tears roll down my face, drip on the folded newspaper and on the back of my hand.

Can’t I keep anything I love?

I watch the water for a long time when Ethan, beloved, appears next to me. I’ve dried my eyes by then.

“You got up early,” he says accusingly. “I don’t like waking up and not feeling you there.” He laughs at himself. “Sorry. I got used to you.”

I stand up and boldly put my arms around him. It’s not really so bold—I mostly don’t want him to see my face. “I did get up early,” I say. “I wanted you to sleep.”

He kisses me on the neck and behind my ear and then, in open rebellion, on my mouth. “Have I mentioned,” he says a little breathlessly, “that I don’t feel a bit sick? That I’ve never felt better in my life?”

I smile. I want to look happy.

“Just saying.”

Everything is breaking my heart.

“They’ve got an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet this morning. You want to go?” He says it like we’ve won a prize.

“Yes, okay,” I say. I am still afraid of what his eyes will find on my face.

He is so enthusiastic over the buffet it makes my heart hurt. He helps himself to four giant waffles, two doughnuts, a bowl of granola, a cup of yogurt, a side plate of sausage and bacon, a tall glass of milk and a glass of orange juice.

“Henny, they have these little chocolate éclairs,” he shouts to me joyously across the restaurant.

I put an éclair and a few pieces of fruit on my plate, knowing it will be a struggle to eat any of it.

We have most of the place to ourselves. We sit at a table for two by the window from which you can see the ocean. The water is especially bright, the color of mint mouthwash.

“This is our day,” Ethan says between bites of waffle.

Last night I was excited to take on our day. Now my heart is plunging.

“We should take off after breakfast and get close to Teaneck by early afternoon.” He spears a sausage. “And during our downtime, I’m going to teach you Hearts.”

“We’ve got to have our priorities,” I say.

“We do. Because once you’ve got Hearts down, you’re set.”

“And then I’ll be a proper early-twenty-first-century girl?” I ask. I feel like crying. I don’t want to be set.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But there’s got to be something else you can teach me. You can’t be done with me yet.”

He stops chewing for a moment and looks at me carefully. “Are you kidding? Not even
close
. There are plenty of things I am going to teach you.”

I watch him eat nearly all of the all-you-can-eat buffet,
most of it with a dot of syrup on his chin, and I make a vow to myself.

I will not let him die. No matter what it takes. I don’t care about any version of the future besides the one I am making, where Ethan is not going to die because I am not going to let him.

SEVENTEEN

Ethan watches the road and I watch Ethan. I’m scared to take my eyes off him. He turns his head briefly to glance at me.

“You okay?”

Should I tell him? I twist my fingers together. Maybe I should, but I can’t. Putting the words into the air would give them a degree of reality I won’t allow. As it is, it’s an idea that exists only between me and a tiny line of print in a soon-to-be-inaccurate newspaper. Nobody else needs to know.

And anyway, what if knowing it made Ethan feel fatalistic and hopeless? Or what if he tried so vigorously to make it not come true that it came true in spite of him?

No, I can’t say the words. Since I am the only one who knows them and I love him to the point of agony, I will be his guardian today.

I force myself to stop staring at him. Now my excellent eyes are ticking along the exits of the Garden State Parkway, seeing strange poetry in the place names: Manahawkin, Forked
River, Island Heights, Pleasant Plains, Asbury Park, Neptune. Something occurs to me.

“Can you turn off?” I say.

“At this exit?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

I am reading all the signs I can find. “Yes, I think it’s here.”

Ethan turns. “What’s here?”

I am spinning in my seat, one way and then the other. “I recognize some of the names. It looks different, though.”

“Okay.” Ethan pulls up to an intersection. “Which way?”

I study the signs. I try to think. “Left. Maybe.”

“Left maybe it is.”

“Keep going,” I say.

He drives for a mile or so, and I have this memory. “Turn right here.”

“Okay.”

“Now keep going.” I am up on my knees in the seat. “Right there. Do you see that?”

“The school?”

“Yes. Can you stop?”

Ethan pulls up and parks in front. It’s Saturday, so it’s empty.

“I can’t believe it,” I say in a low voice, getting out of the car.

Ethan follows me across the grass to the top of a little hill where you can see the playground spreading from the back of the school.

“Do you know what this is?”

“I really don’t.”

“This was the local elementary school where we lived. Before, I mean. Before we emigrated.”

Ethan’s eyes open wide. “Really? Right here?”

“I’m almost sure.” Blossoming trees dot the schoolyard, and the sunshine is soft on our heads. The memories associated with the school are unnerving, but the place itself feels oddly comforting. It gives a sense of continuity to my life that I almost never feel.

I realize I want to stay here. Because what bad thing could happen to Ethan here? We could sit on the grass all day and watch the clouds and the birds. There’d be no danger of highway accidents or murders gone awry. I could keep my arms around him until the day is over.

“Did you go to this school?” he asks, holding my hand.

“No. I would have. I wanted to. It got shut down right before I would have started kindergarten. They said temporarily, but it never reopened.” Down goes the bucket again, into the long-abandoned memory well. I surprise myself with what comes up.

Ethan has his curious but careful look. “Where did you go to school?”

“I didn’t. We were homeschooled. My dad took it very seriously. You tease me about my superbrain. It was just my dad being a teacher with nowhere else to teach and us kids not being allowed outside.”

“Your dad was a great teacher.”

I nod. “He was. But still I wanted to go to this school
so bad
. I read all these books where kids went to school. I was always pretending.”

“What year did they close it?”

“The first real plague year was ’87. There were rumblings of the epidemic for years, but they kept beating it back and
containing it. It wasn’t until mosquitoes started spreading it that hell broke loose.”

“2087.”

“Yes. I think they closed it during the second one in ’91.”

“So you were … five, about?”

“Yeah.”

He lifts his eyebrows as he considers this. “You know, you’re kind of young for me.”

I laugh. “And you’re older than my grandmother.”

“You were born around here?”

“Not far.”

“It was still the US by then?”

“Yes. I am not an illegal alien. Not in that way.”

“So the country was still going, at least.”

“Yes. Not going well.”

He looks sad.

“Nor was any other one, really,” I say. “Not that that’s a big consolation.”

“And when did you leave?”

“We left in 2098 and arrived in 2010.”

“Why then?”

“Why 2098? I guess that was the first moment they figured out the technology to make the time path work so we could get out. My dad used to tell me about how all through the late twenty seventies and eighties there was a race to find another place to go. By then most everybody knew the planet was becoming uninhabitable pretty quickly.”

“I guess at a certain point, nobody can deny it anymore.”

“A few scientists held out for a really long time, and they had a lot of eager followers—whether out of optimism or
cynicism I’m not sure—but they came to look ridiculous as the problems got worse and worse.”

I listen to myself talk, almost as if it’s a separate Prenna carrying on this conversation. On some level, I think I understand what separate-Prenna is doing. If she keeps talking, maybe Ethan won’t notice we aren’t getting any closer to Teaneck, New Jersey.

So separate-Prenna forges on. “Some doctors and scientists were trying to fix the problems, but most knew it was too late for that; they were just trying to figure out a way to escape. There were plans to colonize the moon, Mars, a space station. There were big ambitious plans, but not enough time. People were dying. The only colonization scheme that worked was the simplest—colonizing the past.”