Unhappenings (41 page)

“Mmmmm,” she said. “Why are you trying to butter me up?” There was no accusation in her tone, but I knew her well enough to know there didn’t have to be. Helen was not prone to anger or suspicion. But she was keenly perceptive, and had excellent reasons for wanting full disclosure from me in every aspect of our life together. I still tried to dodge her.

“What do you mean?”

She put her fork down. “What happened today?”

I sighed, hoping to seem like a surprise had been spoiled.

“Athena just gave me some very good news, and I made a little celebratory dinner to share with you.” I pouted. “I’m not very good at this kind of thing, I know.”

Now she did look suspicious.

“Okay,” she said evenly, “what’s the news?”

“Wow. I wanted to give this a little more fanfare or something, but here goes: she says our relationship can’t unhappen. For some reason, it stays constant even when other things around it change.”

“That’s very convenient,” she said. Not exactly the stirring hurrah I hoped for. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, then got up from her chair. Waving for me to pull my chair out, she waited for me to do so, then sat on my lap, still no indication of excitement or joy evident in her features. She kissed me softly, once.

“Please tell me what else she said.”

I sighed, this time for real.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Come on,” she said. “We are way past this. Big girl? Remember? Just tell me what it is.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sit. Eat your dinner.” She returned to her seat. I took a bite of my fish, with absolutely no awareness of how it tasted. “She really did say that our relationship is safe.”

“I believe you,” she said. “And if I had to guess, I’d say she also told you why that is, without using the words, ‘for some reason.’ Am I correct?”

Despite myself, I laughed.

“Actually, she really doesn’t know why that is.”

“So what’s the other bombshell?”

“You are really not going to like it,” I said.

“All the more reason not to drag this out. You tell me, we face it together. That’s how we roll, right?”

“Right,” I said, bracing myself. “Okay. Please don’t be upset. She said the reason my life keeps unhappening, even counting all the times before I met you… is because of Carlton.” I paused there, holding for questions.

“Keep talking.”

I forged on. “She says he is a time traveler, like her, and that he has been using the technology to torment me. I’m sorry. I feel like this is all my fault. Like I dragged you into this, and now we’re both being punished, and that’s not fair.” By the time I heard how badly I was rambling, it was already out there. Still, she did not react.

“Is that all? Was there anything else?”

Don’t tell her.
“Yes. She said Carlton becomes some kind of dictator in the future. There’s a war, and a lot of people are going to die. And that feels like my fault too.”

She took another bite of her fish. Swallowed. A forkful of rice. Still no reaction. I had no idea what to do or say.

“Helen?”

“Yes?”

“Are you… are we okay?” I couldn’t think of an even remotely adequate question, but in my attempt to do so, I had stumbled across the worst possible one.

“No,” she said. Then she ate a spear of asparagus.

I sat, helpless, silently begging her to say something else, knowing whatever I said next would continue to make things exponentially worse. I tried to eat my meal, and watched a tear fall onto my plate. This went on for about ten more minutes, which was just enough time for Helen to finish everything on her plate and drain her glass of wine.

Then she got up, put her jacket back on, and walked out the door.

elen did not return that night. Now that I was working from home, the next day was one long exercise in patience. Unable to do anything productive, I spent the entire day waiting for her to walk in the door at the end of it. I made beef stroganoff, another dish for which she had a fondness. Half of it ended up in a container in my refrigerator, after my solitary dining experience. Mary Sue offered me vague feline consolation, but even she seemed to be asking where Helen was.

Day three consisted mostly of me trying to work up the courage to go after her. By noon, I had pulled myself together enough to attempt to call her, which was rewarded by an immediate forward to voice mail. Seeing her face on my tablet screen cheerfully asking me to leave a message gave me a very brief opportunity to imagine her being happy to see me. At two in the afternoon, I called the library with a fabricated story about her tablet being on the fritz, and asked if they could page her to the vid at the circulation desk. I was told she had not been to work in two days, in a tone that implied the librarian finally had an idea why his curator had gone missing.

Day four, I manned up and ventured out to her home. There was no sign of her car, and predictably no answer at the door. I took out my key card hesitantly, trying to decide just how inappropriate it would be to let myself in. The decision was taken away from me by the lock’s failure to recognize my code.

Day five I spent in the reading room of the print collection, with no realistic hope she would show up. Day six I spent at the aquarium, quite alone.

By the end of one full week without her, I began to understand how things unhappen to normal people.

ay eight ended with me sitting on the floor, my back to the couch in front of my fireplace, staring at the blue and orange flames. In their hypnotic dance, I found a sort of focus I was unable to achieve on my own. The topic of my contemplations that evening was a plan for how I would return to my own time. Abandoning my work would be easy, as it was all meaningless to me now. My time nomad plan from months earlier was no longer viable, as I considered that too likely to be enjoyable. What I really needed was to return to my life of inconstant drudgery, with a new unfulfilling job randomly assigned to me every few weeks. Athena said I lived in purgatory, and I was ready to embrace that as my destiny.

I didn’t hear the front door open, but I did see her walk into the room. For a moment, I considered the likelihood that I was hallucinating her, and didn’t dare leap up to greet her, for fear that the resulting crash of reality would break me for good. Real or imaginary, she planted herself on the floor next to me.

“Watcha doin’?” asked Helen.

“Watching a fire,” I said.

“How come?”

I shrugged, without looking at her.

“Fire is pretty. This place has been in a beauty shortage for a while.”

She leaned against me, slipped her arm into the crook of my elbow, and rested her head on my shoulder. We sat like that for a while, with no sense of time, and no need for it.

Eventually, I asked, “Where did you go?”

“Paris,” she said.

I had no possible reaction to that. “Oh,” I said. For a while, I decided I was waiting for her to offer some further explanation, or maybe even a clear path to reconciliation, but by the time I had worked out how to ask her for either of those things, she had already fallen asleep.