The Time Traveler's Boyfriend (12 page)

Anyway, this place doesn’t have stadium seating and is practically empty because of the holidays. There are literally three people sitting in the theater, and Adam says, “All the good seats are taken.”

I smile at him, and think to myself, “I can’t believe you’ve been making that same corny joke for fourteen years.” But instead, I say, “Where should we sit?”

“This is actually an important question,” Adam says. “Like, for us, as a couple.”

“Is it?”

“It sure is,” he says. “I mean, if you like sitting near the front and I like sitting near the back, then I don’t see how this could possibly work out.”

He’s being cute, although I hate to tell him that either way, there’s no way that we can work out as a couple. And he ought to know that. I haven’t been secretive about the fact that I’m not here for the long term. It makes me a teeny bit nervous he’s talking this way.

“So what do you think?” he asks me.

I point to a row in the mid-back of the theater. “Let’s sit there.”

“You really are psychic,” he says to me. “That is exactly the row I would have picked.”

Of course, it helps a bit that I know exactly where he likes to sit in a theater from the several dozen movies we’ve seen together.

I get in to my own seat, and Adam transfers out of his wheelchair to sit next to me. When the previews start up, he puts his arm around my shoulders. By the time the movie starts, he’s giving me these very meaningful looks, and I know what’s coming. It turns out that it really didn’t matter that I already saw
The Talented Mr. Ripley
twice, because I really don’t get to see much of the movie at all. If you know what I mean.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I don’t get back to my parents’ apartment until the evening. Adam wanted me to spend the night again, but I begged off, saying I needed to change my clothes. I’ve been intentionally vague about the details of how long I’ll be staying here, but I know (well,
hope
) he senses that our time together is limited.

When I get back to the apartment, I’m sort of horrified. I shouldn’t be though, because I now remember having thrown a party here on the night of New Year’s Eve 1999. Still, I can’t believe what a mess it is. There
are beer bottles everywhere, chairs overturned, crumpled up napkins all over the floor. The entire apartment reeks of stale cigarettes and alcohol. Even though it’s freezing out, I have to throw open all the windows just to air it out.

And what’s maddening is that Claudia isn’t even here. She just left the place this way. She doesn’t even
care
.

The phone rings in the apartment and I nearly jump out of my skin. I reach for it, thinking it might be Adam, although it occurs to me as I’m picking up the phone that I never gave him my number. “Hello?”

“Hi, Claudia!” It’s my mother. Holy shit, it’s my mother! “It’s your mother.”

“Hi, Mom,” I say, trying my best to sound … twenty-two.

“Thank you so much for bringing the paper in for us,” Mom says. “I can’t believe I forgot to cancel our service.” Well, that explains the huge stack of newspapers nearly blocking the front door. Great job, Claudia.

“No problem,” I say.

“Did you do something fun with Jed last night?” Mom asks.

I guess Claudia hasn’t said anything about the break-up yet. And I’m not going to be the one to break the news. “Just some dinner,” I say.

“That’s nice,” Mom says. “Now, Claudia, I know you’re only twenty-two and you think everything is just about having fun, but you do have to start thinking about long-term commitments at this point. You don’t want to wake up and find you’re thirty-five years old and still single.”

Try thirty-six years old.

I hate that I actually agree with my mother. I should have been thinking more about long-term commitments when I was in my twenties and the nice guys were still single. Then again, I wouldn’t have met Adam if that happened. In any case, I can’t show any sign right now that I think my mother is right.

“Mom,” I whine, doing a remarkable impression of my younger self. “Will you quit it? I’m only twenty-two, not forty.”

“All right, all right,” Mom says. “Anyway, hold on. I’m going to put Daddy on the phone.”

There’s the usual shuffling on the other line, and I finally hear a loud, clear voice boom out: “Hello, Claudia!”

I grip the phone tighter. I forgot that in the year 2000, I would be talking to Don Williams, high-powered malpractice attorney, not Don Williams, stroke survivor. It’s been so long since I’ve heard him speak without his words slurring into each other. My eyes start to tear up.

“Hi, Daddy,” I whisper into the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Dad barks into the phone. “Is that boyfriend of yours making trouble? I don’t like him! I never liked him.”

I hear my mother in the background, saying, “Don, please …” As for me, I’m at a loss for words. My father has no idea that in nine years, he’s going to have a devastating stroke. That he isn’t even going to be able to talk or eat for several weeks, and he’ll be left with “mild cognitive deficits.” That he’ll need to rely on a four-pronged cane just to walk down the block.

Could I warn him? I want to, but what would I say? For years, Mom nagged him to get his high blood pressure taken care of. It’s unlikely he’ll take it seriously if his bratty twenty-two-year-old daughter tells him to do it. And really, the stress was probably a big contributor. What do I do? Tell him to cut back on his hours? He’ll never do that and we’ll just end up fighting. This trip to Florida is the only vacation he gets the whole year—I don’t want to wreck it for him.

No matter what, he’s going to have that stroke. There’s nothing I can do about it. And that thought is just so depressing.

“I’m fine, Dad,” I finally manage. “How are you doing?”

“Great!” he says. “It’s eighty-three degrees down here!”

That’s one thing that hasn’t changed—the fact that my father loves telling me the weather in Florida while I’m stuck in freezing New York. These days, he texts me the Florida temperature on particularly snowy days in New York.

Dad hands the phone back to my mother, who comes back sounding a little breathless. “So, Claudia, we’ll be back mid-January. I know you’re having issues with your roommate, so you can use the apartment if you’d like, but please don’t bring other people over. And keep things clean. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say, taking a second survey of the mess around me.

I’m furious with Claudia for how she left the place. For a moment, I imagine myself marching her to the broom closet and forcing her to tidy up, but the second I hang up with my mother, I start cleaning everything myself. Honestly, I just can’t bear to see the apartment so messy. Another way I’ve changed in the last fourteen years—when I was Claudia’s age, I wouldn’t have cleaned up someone else’s mess over my own dead body.

I just hope I don’t come across any dried vomit.

I
’m in the middle of vacuuming when Claudia breezes into the apartment, looking slightly hungover but probably not as much as she deserves to be considering how much she drank last night. She sees me cleaning and her face brightens. “You didn’t have to do that, Beth,” she says. “I would have done it.”

She never, ever would have done it.
She would have half-assed cleaning the apartment and it would have still stunk to high heaven of beer and cigarettes by the time our parents got back.

“
Consider it thanks for your parents’ hospitality,” I say. Plus the two hundred dollars that I stole.

Claudia grins at me.
“By the way, where were you last night, young lady? I thought you didn’t know anyone in town.”

I shrug.
I’m not about to tell Claudia what happened between me and Adam.

“
I never asked you,” she says. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“
Yes,” I say, not really wanting to get into this conversation.

“Really?” Claudia seems intrigued and I’m suddenly sorry I said anything. She’s not the kind of person I want to confide in. “
How long have you been together?”

“
A year.”

“
Is it serious?”

I turn off the vacuum and straighten up.
“Yeah, kind of. I mean, I’d like it to be. He’s not as sure.”

“
How old is he?” Claudia asks.

“Thirty-eight
.”

“
Seriously?” She makes a face. “That’s so old! Doesn’t he want to get married and have kids or something?”

“
Apparently not,” I say. I feel a lump rising up in my throat. I hate that Claudia is making me feel this way. But she’s right. Adam isn’t young anymore. Why doesn’t he want me? What’s he waiting for? What the hell is he fucking waiting for?

“Do you want to have kids?” she asks me. She squints at me. “Can you still have them? You haven’t gone through menopause yet, right?”

I glare at Claudia. “Menopause?”

She shrugs. The crazy part is that she genuinely didn’t mean to be insulting.

“I’d like to have kids,” I say, the lump in my throat growing larger. As I say those words, I realize that my chances of becoming a mother are quickly slipping through my fingers.

“
Well, just ditch him and find another guy then,” she says as if it’s nothing.

I want to ask her if she
’s ever been in love, but there’s no point. I know she hasn’t. She doesn’t get it. I turn the vacuum back on, and thank God, she accepts that this is the end of our conversation.

***

When I’m satisfied that the apartment is spotless, I give Adam a call at the number I still have scrawled on the napkin. He picks up on the first ring. “Thank God!” he cries into the phone. “I forgot that I didn’t have your number. I thought I was going to have to wait another two years to see you again.”

I laugh.
“I could give you my number, but it’s my aunt and uncle’s number. I’m staying with them for now.”

“
Give it to me,” he says. “I’m not taking a chance of not being able to find you.”

I give him the number, but it makes me a little nervous.
I’ll be gone in about six days, and I don’t want him calling here to try to find Beth.

“
Could I interest you in doing something touristy tomorrow?” he asks.

“
Sure,” I say.

“
Museum of Modern Art.”

“
I hate art.”

“
Me too. I don’t even know why I suggested that.”

“
Empire State Building,” I say.

“
I hate heights.”

“
Okay …” I think a minute. “Museum of Natural History?”

“
That has dinosaurs, right?”

“
I believe so.”

“
Count me in then.”

Adam wants to meet me at my apartment building, but I convince him to let me meet him at his place.
The last thing I need is Claudia seeing him around here.

I realize that I have a new mission now in the year 2000.
Young Claudia and Adam aren’t going to happen, that’s very clear. But I can still make a difference. If I can create a great relationship experience for Adam, then he’ll have more self-confidence and The Bitch won’t be able to destroy him. Maybe he’ll have the courage to ditch her when things are going badly. Maybe I can even subtly warn him about her. All I know is that when I get back to 2013, things are going to be totally different. For the better.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

My Adam never took me to the Natural History Museum, but he did take me to the Planetarium attached to the museum. He warned me in advance that he used to be “really into” astronomy when he was a kid.

He wasn’t kidding about that. Adam mostly couldn’t shut up through the beginning of the show. He kept leaning over and whispering things in my ear like, “The Big Dipper is actually part of the constellation Ursa Major,” or “Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky.” After doing this for about fifteen minutes, this guy sitting behind us hissed, “Will you shut up, please?” Adam sheepishly apologized and didn’t say anything else through the whole show.

After the show was over and Adam was climbing back into his wheelchair, he said to me, “Sorry I’m such a dork.”

“Don’t apologize to me!” I said. “I love that you’re a dork.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I do!” I insisted. “I would much rather have listened to you for the last half hour than Whoopi Goldberg.” (Whoopi was narrating the planetarium show.)

“You’re lying,” he said, although he was smiling.

“I mean it,” I said, tugging on his shirt so he’d come in close for a kiss. And I did mean it. Adam is crazy sexy when he’s being a huge dork. “I insist that you teach me more about the constellations.”

So we went through the planetarium exhibits and he talked my ear off about the stars and the planets and the big bang, but it was pretty cute. When you’re in love with someone, they could be pretty much talking about anything and you’d be fascinated. That’s sort of where we were at that point. It’s where we still are.

***

The next morning, I find
twenty-four-year-old Adam outside his building, waiting for me. I watch him scanning the streets, shifting in his wheelchair, and then his eyes light up when he sees me. He really seems to like me a lot. It’s kind of flattering.

“
You look great,” he says to me, even though I’m bundled up in my mother’s bulky black coat and look mildly Eskimo-esque. I decided against a hat, so my ears are slowly getting frostbitten, but at least my hair looks good. Well, it would if it weren’t dyed mousy brown.

“
Thank you,” I say anyway.

“
Okay,” he says. “You ready to head out?”

I nod.
“Let’s go to the West Side and get the bus uptown so we end up on the right side of Central Park.”

Adam smiles at me.
“Thank you for not suggesting the subway. My friends are always convinced that I can make it work. Not gonna happen.”

I learned that from my Adam.
The subways in this city are not exactly accessible.

I quickly get the sense from Adam that he doesn’t take the bus very often. The bus driver sees him and lowers the lift so that he can board, and Adam
struggles a little to position himself. In 2013, he slides onto that lift effortlessly, but not in 2000. Two people get booted out of their seats so that he can position his wheelchair in the handicapped spots, and I can still hear Adam apologizing to them when I finally board the bus.

“I hate this,” he confides to me as we travel uptown. I’m hanging on to the pole next to him because there
are no seats left on the whole bus.

“You’ll get used to it,” I say.

“Says you, Psychic Girl.” Adam shifts his weight in his chair and looks up at me. “You should sit.”

“No seats,” I point out.

Adam gestures down at his lap. “Perfectly good one right here.”

I laugh and look around the bus. That’s something my Adam never would have suggested. “Are you serious?”

“Definitely,” he says. “Everyone on this bus is looking at me and feeling sorry for me because I’m a young guy who’s disabled. I want them to be looking at me and feeling jealous because the hottest girl on the bus is sitting on my lap.”

He raises his eyebrows at me as the bus comes to a halt. Before I have a chance to respond, he grabs me and pulls me into his lap. I can’t help myself—I let out a squeal then cover my mouth because people really are looking at us now. But Adam doesn’t seem nearly as bothered by it as he was a minute ago.

We were so distracted by each other that we probably would have missed our stop if Adam hadn’t told it to the driver when we were getting on. The driver stops the bus by the museum and stomps his way to the back. When he sees me sitting on Adam’s lap, he gives us this look, like, “Now I’ve seen everything.” I quickly scramble to my feet and apologize. “There were no other seats,” I say as Adam laughs.

It’s a five-minute walk from the bus stop to the museum. I recognize the pillars of the old museum from a block away, although I’d mostly forgotten about the dozen or so steps to get to the front entrance. “I’m sure there’s a handicapped entrance,” I say to Adam.

“It’s the law,” he agrees.

We get about halfway around the block when we see a second entrance and this one has no stairs to get up to it, but instead there are stairs to get
down
to the entrance. It’s a basement entrance with about eight steps. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.

“No, it’s okay,” Adam says quickly. “I can do stairs going down. They showed me in rehab.”

He looks at the stairs a bit nervously and I’m guessing that despite being taught in rehab, this isn’t something he’s done a whole lot. But he’s game to try, so I’m not going to stop him. My Adam once said to me, “It’s not like I’ve never wiped out before.”

He puts his hands on the push-rims of his chair and does a wheelie. He grabs the railing with one hand and uses it to guide him as he bumps his way down the flight of steps. When he lands on the ground at the bottom, he looks distinctly relieved. “Okay, that worked.”

“Nice job,” I tease him, hurrying down the steps after him.

“Thanks,” Adam says, his face breaking into a smile. “All right, let’s see these damn dinosaurs.”

As a person who grew up in Manhattan, I’ve been to the Natural History Museum many, many times. It’s pretty much a requisite place to go every single year on class trips. Eventually, you get so sick of the damn place, you feel like you’ll just vomit if you see one more stuffed dodo bird.

Then at some point in your twenties, it doesn’t seem quite as bad anymore. Like maybe you can appreciate it on a whole other level, when you can go to any exhibit you want and skip
over all the boring ones. If you want to spend an hour just staring at the giant whale, that’s allowed.

Adam is mostly excited about the dinosaurs, though. He stares up at the T. Rex in complete
awe, his head tilted all the way back. “This is so cool,” he breathes.

“It’s sort of cool,” I admit.

“Beth, it’s a dinosaur!”

“It sure is.”

“I thought it would be a little bigger though, somehow,” he says, cocking his head to the side.

“It’s not big enough for you?”

“Well,” he says thoughtfully, “you think of the T. Rex as being this giant monster dinosaur, crushing everything in sight under its ginormous feet. I mean, this is pretty big, but it’s not, like,
that
big. It looks like you could probably fight with it a little bit.”

I look from the huge dinosaur skeleton to Adam. “Really? You think you could fight that thing?”

“Well, maybe not
me
,” he admits. “I’d probably be pretty screwed if I went back to prehistoric times. This chair isn’t equipped for Cretaceous terrain.” He looks back up at the T. Rex. “No, I’d probably have to outsmart it.”

I start laughing outright. “How would you outsmart it?”

“What?” Adam snorts. “You don’t think my intellectual capacity is a match for a dinosaur?”

“Well, the brontosaurus
did
have two brains.”

Adam beams at me. “Impressive. How did you know that?”

“I’ve been to this museum a lot,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I went pretty much on every class trip during elementary school.”

“You’re so lucky.”

“What? Didn’t they have any dinosaur bones in Akron?”

Adam breaks his gaze away from the T. Rex and gives me a funny look. “I never told you I grew up in Akron.”

Crap. “Yes, you did.”

“I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

We just stare at each other for a minute. I can’t even begin to imagine what he thinks of me. Somehow I know all this information about him that he never told me. If situations were reversed, I’d be majorly creeped out by now. But Adam seems to be mostly accepting it with good humor. At some point, though, I’d imagine he’s going to demand the truth.

“Let’s go see the ’raptors,” Adam says.

Not now though, apparently.