Yesterday Is History

by Kosoko Jackson

  “Someone who will put him first?”

  “Exactly.”

  The quiet settles once more, but it’s heavy with a tenseness and tenderness I’ve never felt. Should I squeeze her shoulder? Let her sit and absorb what I said? I don’t turn to face her; that seems wrong, like I’m expecting too much from her.

  Eventually, Claire sighs. “I don’t know how to do that,” she whispers. It seems like it’s both terrifying and cathartic for her to admit that. “I don’t know how to be that for him. But you obviously do. Case in point: this whole experiment. That’s why I wanted him to teach you time traveling, not me. I thought that being close to his brother might give him, in some way, some closure. Help him work through his feelings. Put his anger and hurt to good use.”

  There’s a momentary pause as Claire wrings her hands together.

  “I’ve failed at being his mother, haven’t I?”

  I shrug. “That’s the good thing about being a time traveler, isn’t it? We get do-overs.”

  She smiles, and for the first time, she lets the tears fall down her face. I don’t move to comfort her. I just sit there, we both do, in the moment, listening to the faint sounds of the world outside and silently agreeing to never come back here again.

  Twenty-Seven

  Together, holding hands, Claire and I jump back to 2021, in a gust of wind that makes the living room shudder. The dizzying feeling of returning to the present is worse this time, and my stomach feels like it’s in my throat. But I swallow the feeling back and push through it, trying desperately to ignore the pain clawing at my side.

  “That was a piggyback jump,” she informs me. “You latched on to my jump and came with me. Don’t try that with just anyone. Or, better yet, at all.” She turns toward the stairs. “Blake,” she says with the type of firmness that doesn’t leave any room for disagreement. “Come down here. Now.”

  “Wait, what?” I ask, turning to her. I step in front of her, like that would change anything. “He had nothing to do with this.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you calling him? I did this on my own. He’s been doing what you said, training me.”

  “Again, I said I know, Andre.”

  I hear footsteps as he walks across the hallway upstairs and takes the stairs two at a time. Blake’s not stupid. He’ll know something is up when he sees me down here, especially with his mom. And I don’t have time to come up with a good-enough lie by the time he’s at the bottom of the steps.

  “What’s going on?” he asks. “Andre? What are you… Why are you and my mother together?”

  My heart rate speeds up. My blood pumps so loudly, I swear it’s all I can hear. But Claire’s words, as she turns to me, break through the noise.

  “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”

  “He doesn’t need to know,” I answer.

  “It involves him, since you were doing it for him, Andre. Plus, you can’t move forward with him while you’re keeping this secret.”

  “Someone tell me what’s going on!”

  The ball’s in my court. Claire isn’t going to save me.

  This isn’t how I wanted this to go down.

  Part of me was hoping that this, as Claire called it, brave kindness would fix everything between us. I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore.

  “I was trying to fix it.”

  “Fix…what?”

  “This. Everything. Dave. Your family. I was—”

  But Blake cuts me off, the anger and confusion in his face shifting to understanding. “You did not.”

  “Oh, he did,” says Claire. “He broke rule number two in the process too.”

  “I thought it was the right thing!”

  “Why in the world did you think… Did you think I wanted this? Is that what you thought would… What? Make up for what happened on our date?”

  Claire feigns disinterest, but I can tell, judging by how her eyebrow quirks, that she’s interested—like any parent would be. But she interjects herself, raising her hand like she can control things with a single motion.

  But Blake does fall quiet, and I don’t speak either.

  “What he did was foolish, rash, shortsighted…” she says, looking at Blake, speaking to him. “But his intentions were good.”

  “I’m furious.”

  “But he did this for you. Remember that. And in the end, everything will be okay. Nothing was broken. Or rather, nothing will be for long.

  “Now, I need to go back in time and make sure that Andre didn’t make any…unexpected changes. Can I trust that neither of you will kill each other or try to travel back in time and change something else?”

  I want to say yes. No, I want to say, Yes, ma’am. But the words won’t leave my throat. Blake keeps his gaze firmly fixed on a spot of warped wood on the floor.

  “That wasn’t a rhetorical question, boys.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Sure,” he replies.

  “Good.” Claire walks over to me, cupping my cheek again, forcing me to look into her now kind eyes.

  Before I can speak, she disappears.

  Blake and I stand in silence, letting his mother’s aura disappear from the room. It feels like she’s still watching us, and if we move too soon, she’ll know. Eventually, Blake turns, curtly, heading upstairs with heavy stomps that pulse out his frustration and hurt.

  “Blake,” I say, hurrying to the base of the steps. “Blake, I’m s—”

  “Don’t,” he orders, standing at the top of the steps, his back to me. He’s gripping the railing so tightly that I think his fingers might actually leave marks on the wood when he lets go.

  “Did you not hear what your mom said? Did you not listen? I was trying to d—”

  “I don’t care what the reason is!”

  He turns so fast that he almost falls off the steps. Angry swatches of red cover his cheeks, and his eyes threaten tears, but he’s doing everything he can to hold them back, even if he is failing. This must be the McIntyre way.

  He descends the steps again, standing at the bottom of them. There’s space between us, but it’s filled with his anger and his frustration, pulsing off him like fire off a heated ore.

  “Did you even think before you jumped? How long have you been planning this? Did you consider who you’d hurt? What could go wrong? How you could die? Did you even care? That’s not romantic! That’s not sweet and generous! It’s selfish and stupid!”

  Each sentence is like a knife, with pinpoint accuracy, reminding me with each word how I messed up. But it wasn’t just that—it was how I hurt him, how he felt like I betrayed him in some way. And that hurt more than the shame.

  “I can understand, logically, what you thought you were doing,” Blake says while pacing back and forth. “But emotionally? Did you even stop to think, for one freakin’ second, about me?”

  “I did this for you!” I insist.

  “Really? What would have happened to us if I forgot about you? If you forgot about me? I wanted us to try. What if things changed? Time travel does that, Andre! It changes things in ways you can never understand, like my mom said. And if getting Dave back was something that I wanted, I could have asked her to do that a long time ago!”

  “You know that wasn’t…”

  “No, Andre! I don’t know. I don’t freaking know, because what I thought I did know was that I could trust you. And look where that got me!”

  I narrow my eyes and ball my fists by my side to still my anger. Blake needs this. He needs to rant and feel…well, whatever he feels…about my failed attempt to change the past.

  “I did everything I could, Blake,” I say quietly. “You might not understand, but I was trying to do the right thing.”

  “That’s the thing about trying to do something, Andre. You either do it, or you don’t.
There is no try.”

  He lets out a deep breath. “Just leave. Go home.”

  “I can try again,” I whisper. “I…I can still fix this. I know I can.”

  “Stop trying to be something you’re not. You’re not a time traveler; you’re just someone who stumbled into it. And you know what? You’re the worst type of time traveler—someone who does more harm than good.”

  Each word hurts. Each syllable is like a needle finding my weak spot and jabbing in deep.

  But before I can fight or fly, a surge of pain, worse than before, sharp and deep, stabs at my stomach. I double over, grabbing my body and almost buckling to my knees. I squeeze my eyes shut, and all I see are stars, colorful stars, black stars, white stars. It’s like I can see, in this brief moment, almost every color. There’s a ringing in my head that sounds like every cell in my body screaming all at once. It drowns out everything, even my own inner voice.

  When I open my eyes after the worst of the pain stops, I’m no longer in Blake’s house. I’m outside.

  And there’s snow on the ground.

  As the colors all around me start to come together and objects take form, it’s clear to me where I am. I’m in Boston, at the edge of an alley, a familiar one based on the street signs I see across the street.

  Someone bumps into me. Someone familiar, despite the longer hair, dingy clothes, sharper stubble, and darkened features on his face.

  Someone who is just as surprised to see me as I am to see him.

  “Andre?” Michael gasps.

  Twenty-Eight

  I’ve seen many versions of Michael since jumping through time, but never a version like this.

  His face is sullen, his skin a shade grayer than before. His hair is longer and unkempt. Matted. Jaggedly cut. He reminds me of pieces of a puzzle that don’t fully come together to make a complete person. Like something is missing.

  The light in his eyes is gone. And I didn’t know how much I missed it, truly missed it, until now.

  “So,” he says, rubbing his nose with his sleeve. “You came back, huh?”

  I reach forward to grab him, but he moves back, far enough that he’s unreachable. Farther than he’s ever been before, even through time and space.

  “Do you remember what happened when you last left? What you said? Do you even know what year it was then?”

  “Nineteen seventy.”

  “And now?”

  I can’t answer that one, and he knows it. He sucks on his teeth in disgust.

  “Seventy-three. It’s been three years.”

  I do a quick mental check. What do I know about 1973? We don’t learn much about the seventies in school. Maybe I should have done some research before I left.

  But every other time I’d always had Michael by my side. It had been us versus the world or creating our own world.

  Not anymore.

  “You left,” he seethes. “You left me, and you didn’t care, and you just went off to do whatever it is you went to do. I thought I’d never see you again. Every day, I woke up and felt both happy and furious that I remembered you. Remembered us. I kept waiting to forget you. I wish I could forget you.”

  He turns his back to me, walking away with hurried but sporadic steps. And, like always, I follow.

  “I went to fix things.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Seriously! Michael. Michael!”

  I grab his shoulder, and in that moment, that fraction of a second, that quiver of a heartbeat, I see a side of him I never thought I’d see.

  “Don’t. Touch. Me,” he hisses. “Don’t you ever touch me again. Don’t you ever…”

  He growls, an animalistic groan that comes from deep within his stomach. He runs his fingers through his shaggy hair.

  For the first time since I met Michael, I feel something new: fear.

  And I have to push through it.

  “What happened to you?”

  Slowly, Michael pulls himself out of his own mind and turns to me with a wild fury in his eyes. “What happened to me.” He says it like a statement. “You want to know that badly?”

  Michael takes a step forward, and in response, I take a step back.

  “After you left, went off to save that boy of yours, I waited to forget you. But I didn’t. And I thought maybe I had lost my mind. And you were never really real. It messed me up. I didn’t want to remember. So I had to try to forget you. And what better way to forget someone than in the bottom of a bottle?”

  He doesn’t say it like he’s ashamed.

  “One drink turned to two, two turned to four, and well, the past three years started to feel like a blur.”

  Just by looking at him, I know he’s been self-medicating with more than alcohol. I don’t know what drugs he’s on, but he’s on something.

  I swallow thickly, forcing myself to speak. “What about your family?” I ask.

  “Seriously? That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

  But his posture relaxes, even if just a fraction. He takes half a step back, and I feel my breath return. I let out a breath I didn’t even know I had been holding.

  “My parents don’t want anything to do with me.”

  “What about your work? With the paper? Or your music? You always cared about that.”

  “I sold my guitar…what? A year ago?” He shrugs. “Maybe two. You don’t have a right to judge me. No one has the fucking right.”

  I feel like I’m drowning, watching every good moment we spent together disappear into an endless darkness of oblivion.

  “I can fix this,” I say quietly.

  “You still don’t get it. No matter what you do, you still don’t fucking get it.”

  I feel a sense of weightlessness as I wait, where anything is possible, when he could say or do anything.

  “Not everything is about you, Andre. My life is my own. You can’t just go back and ‘fix’ me. Who do you think you are?”

  “I didn’t—” I sputter.

  “No. Shut up. It’s my turn to talk. Not yours. This is my life now. This is who I am. Maybe it’s not someone you want to be with. Maybe it’s not who you thought I’d be. But you know what? Screw you. I wish I’d never met you.”

  “Michael…” I want to tell him to stop. I want to tell him I’m sorry. To say so many things. To apologize, explain how wrong I was. But there’s an invisible wall between us, with a complex lock that I don’t know how to pick.

  And there’s a familiar, growing pain.

  I can fix this, I think. I can fix this. Screw what Claire said. This is worth fixing. I won’t be the cause of this. I won’t be the cause of hurting someone so pure, so good. This won’t be his destiny.

  But before I can do anything else, a pain unlike anything I’ve felt before pierces my side.

  I can’t tell up from down, left from right. Colors blur together, and every sense is going haywire. Is Michael grabbing my shoulder? I can’t tell. Is he speaking my name? Does he sound worried, or is that my imagination?

  There are only three things I know for sure.

  Pain.

  Blackness.

  And a desire to die. A desire so strong, I barely feel my body hit the floor before that darkness swallows me whole.

  Twenty-Nine

  When I wake, I’m not fully conscious. I can hear words. Mom’s voice. A doctor that’s not familiar. All slices of a giant movie reel stitched together in the most inconvenient of ways.

  My body won’t respond to my commands. Blink. Move. Scream. Twitch. Nothing. It’s like my orders are sent out and shot down in space, disappearing into vast nothingness, leaving me at the mercy of whatever this is. I have no idea how much time goes by before I finally wake up, but when I do, I can tell it’s mid to late afternoon. The sun through the window is low on the horizon.

&nb
sp; The first person I see when I open my eyes is Mom. She’s chewing on her nails, talking with the doctor—a woman with a tight bun and light brown skin—with a worried expression on her face. Dad’s back is to me, but I see him nodding frantically, causing his whole body to shake. It’s as if none of them expect me to wake up.

  But the look on the doctor’s face isn’t concern.

  I like her.

  “He’s awake,” Blake says.

  I turn my head and see him. He’s not sitting in the chair next to me but standing by the window, his arms crossed stiffly. His eyes don’t stay on mine for long; he quickly turns away.

  I try to open my mouth to speak, but before I can, Mom, Dad, and Mr. and Mrs. McIntyre crowd around me (to Mom and Dad’s surprise).

  “Baby,” Mom breathes out, kissing my cheeks and forehead more times than I think she’s ever done. “You gave us a scare. Are you okay? What happened? Are you hurt? Do you feel any pain?”

  “You gave us a fright, son,” Dad says in that way that’s softly scolding but actually caring.

  Claire and Greg say nothing, but the look on their faces says it all.

  Concern. Unbridled concern.

  The doctor squeezes past Mom and Dad, standing by my side. She pulls out her stethoscope, placing the cold metal against my chest.

  “I’m Dr. Kapoor. How are you feeling, Andre?” she asks, moving it from spot to spot.

  “Cold,” I whisper.

  “We’ll get some blankets for you. Any headache? Stomachache? Dizziness? Pain?”

  “Abdomen,” I say as confidently as I can. Maybe that’ll make them think I’m not hurting as much as I am. When, in fact, everything—every nerve—hurts.

  I don’t want to think what is screaming in my head. If I think it, I’ll say it, and if I say it, that might make it a reality.

  “Is his body rejecting the liver?” Mom says it for me.

  Dr. Kapoor doesn’t answer at first. She checks my chart, the machines, her watch, and then a few other vitals before turning to my parents.