Ruth bent down to pick up the closest one and turned it over: cracked glass, no other visible damage. In the photo, Gwen looking gaunt but happy. A Mother’s Day photo from 2015, five months before Gwen had died. They were at brunch at Gwen’s favorite restaurant. In the original photo, only Ruth had been squeezing Gwen. Now both of Gwen’s daughters leaned in from either side, their heads rested on Gwen’s shoulders.
Kennidy lived.
The phone-call episode hadn’t felt like memory or imagination. But it hadn’t felt like reality, either. Ruth was ready to believe it was a dream, if not for this: evidence that Kennidy had not died in 2013. And maybe Gwen, less stressed, had lived longer as well? Could she still be alive?
Ruth had kept the memorial card from Gwen’s funeral tucked into the bottom of the frame. She got down on her knees, scanning for anything that had fallen. There were three business-size cards, all face down. Three, when there should have been only one. Ruth’s blood ran cold.
She turned over the closest, with a plain white backing. It was a floral card with an image of a rose and a handwritten note: We will meet again. Love you forever, Bob. Ruth couldn’t remember any Bob in any of their lives. She turned over the second card, familiar except for the changed date: Gwen had died December 2, rather than October 10.
Ruth’s hand hovered over the final card, hoping it was like the first—just a sweet thought rescued from a flower bouquet. But she could see the back of the card had a religious quote and an address running along the bottom. Ruth flipped the card.
Kennidy Theresa McClintock. In memoriam, June 27, 2015.
Kennidy had made it to nineteen, instead of seventeen. But no further. Something had still gotten to her: her past, her brain chemistry, simple bad luck, maybe tempered with a brief touch of good. Love you forever, Bob.
It was Czolgosz over again, Annie’s early experiment.
It hadn’t worked, except to delay the event. You could change a little. Not a lot.
Ruth was on her feet, unsteady.
Not fair.
She picked another card up off the floor. It was a condolence note from Joe. She kept it because it meant a lot to her, that Joe had written something so personal. They’d dated . . . was it only a few months? No, she could picture their anniversary; they’d lasted more than a year. Both answers seemed correct. Something had shifted there, too. Yet things had ended up in the same place: she’d broken up with Joe. Much later, she’d lived with Scott.
Things had changed and remained the same by unpredictable degrees.
Ruth needed fresh air. She walked slowly to the door and lifted a weak arm but couldn’t quite grasp the knob. She tried again, without success.
Her body was fucked. Her mind, even more so. Time-traveling back had sent damaging pulses through her brain. She moved . . . saw . . . heard . . . felt like a stroke victim.
Why don’t we hear about more time travel? Why aren’t there people having visions all the time? The question she and that boy—the helpful one with the drawing on his arm, had always asked.
Because of this. It kills you.
Ruth got a better grip on the door and yanked. There was the music: louder, repetitive, annoying. A school performance.
Then she remembered. It was already six o’clock. She’d been expected at the school two hours ago.
The sirens. Music. The halftime show.
The bass beat was overtaken by a high-pitched squeal, feedback noise and a voice over a microphone, “One-two.” Mechanical shrieking again. Technical difficulties. “One-two. One-two.”
Reece. That was his name. Reece. Another similar word. Rooks? That seemed right. Alternative, gothic. No, Rockets. His group was performing.
The football field, with everyone gathered one last time while the weather was still pleasant.
Scott.
Scott, who had been in her bed just this morning: that hadn’t changed. He’d left in a hurry, hair rumpled, white shirt rolled up at the elbows, to hide the stain on his sleeve. Even Reece had noticed. Scott didn’t wear wrinkled shirts to work. But that’s how he had looked this morning. And that’s how he had looked in the vision.
She hadn’t made the connection.
Her alarm system, sensitive as it usually was, had malfunctioned. The anxiety of that realization thrummed through her, and she instinctively wanted it—the white bar-shaped pill—because everything that could go wrong was going wrong. But that was a habit she had mostly kicked. Wasn’t it?
And now she remembered taking the tiny corner of the Xanax just before getting into the car, to drive Scott home.
It had worked.
Or, it had worked and it hadn’t. She had driven him back safely. She had kept her cool when he suddenly kissed her and even later, when they argued and made up.
And she had lost all sense of what was coming. She had lost the signal.
But now it was back, strong and sharp, piercing her bleeding eardrum and thrumming behind her bleary eyes.
The future hadn’t changed enough. Scott would be hurt today. The event was coming soon, if it wasn’t happening right now.
Ruth’s first impulse was to hurry on foot to the school. In her present condition, that could take over thirty minutes. She could call for a ride, but that would take time, too.
She just had to get there early, to do . . . what? Tell Scott? He wouldn’t believe her. Stop the shooter? She still didn’t know how, and wouldn’t know until she could see and assess the situation.
Scott. The field, the sidelines, the green grass, the taller golden grass beyond it. Somewhere in that grass was—or would soon be—a person hidden, watching Scott, watching them all: the performers on the field, the students and teachers on the sidelines, the parents in the bleachers.
She didn’t mean to invite the vision to overtake her, but she’d dug a rut for this. It was easier than ever to slide back onto the ever widening, slippery path.
Not again. Her body might not be able to take it.
But there was the deep trail, like a chute, its edges smoothly rounded. And once she was on it, she knew where she’d go, toward the color red or the color of white just before the red. She tried to calm her mind and stop the fast-forward from coming too soon by thinking: green. The leafy trees on either side of her, the upper boughs overhead, blocking out part of the sky.
Take a breath. Slow down so you can see.
Ruth knew she had used up her strength by traveling back in time to the call with her mother. And for what? Nothing had changed in the end. The past had only distracted her, as it always had. It was possible she only had one chance left.
She let herself think of him once again, with as much calm as she could muster: Scott, the silver thread in his hair, a worried look on his face. His white shirt with the rolled-up cuffs.
Then she was there.
48
Ruth
His mouth was moving and he was saying something, but she couldn’t read his lips. He started to turn and look over his shoulder. Then he looked forward again. His arms went out to the sides, with fingers splayed.
Deep breath. Find a way further back.
But Ruth could move back only seconds. She watched him perform the motions again: speak, look over his shoulder, arms out. Scott was protecting someone, while shouting to someone else far away. His mouth formed the word: Don’t. Now she was sure. The first word was What? The second word was Don’t.
And then he was bleeding, falling, down.
Ruth had to detach herself again from the desire to stare at only him, to lighten her attention, to wish less, to want less, to react less, to be like one of those World War I balloon observers, floating above the trenches. They couldn’t stop the massacre; their job was only to watch and report. And yet they were traumatized, too.
She perceived streaks of motion in the background as other people dar
ted away, fell and tried to get up. Several people collapsed on top of each other just behind Scott. Some of them might be injured, others weren’t. Some were knotted together into a panicked mass.
Slow it down.
A girl’s long hair whipping in the wind. The bottom of a teenager’s shoes as he scrambled and tried to get purchase, toes digging into the turf to sprint as far from Scott as the boy could. Kids. Students. Teachers.
Keep looking.
Scott was positioned at the edge of the football field, facing the sidelines.
Just to the right, on the sidelines, stood the Rockets cheerleaders, in their purple shirts. Reece. A small black girl who must be Mikayla. And next to her, with his arm over her shoulder, Vorst.
Behind that group were the bleachers. Too many faces. Metal seats, concrete steps, shadows.
Ruth kept panning, the blur in her mind like the worst case of the drinker’s spins she’d ever experienced. She saw, far to her left, behind the football field, the boy lying on the ground, propped up on his elbows like a biathlete or sniper, aiming something long and narrow at Scott’s back.
The first spotting of the weapon made her flinch. As if she had pulled back from a parted curtain, she found herself in velvety darkness. She lowered her head and pushed forward again, willing her way through the asphyxiating folds, until she saw the glimmer of green fields again, backed by higher, tawny grass.
Reece, who is he? Reece, are you there?
It’s the boy, she thought, the one who was blamed for making a threat. She remembered his name: Caleb. She struggled to remember the rest of what she’d heard from Scott and Reece. Neither thought Caleb was a problem. So why was he here in the grass with a weapon?
Before, she was only watching. Now, she felt her heavy breathing, the weight of her body and the pain in her knee as she staggered. Ruth felt herself moving toward Scott, but she was on the farthest end of the field, just stepping onto the oval running track around it, still too far to do anything.
Hundreds of feet in the distance, Scott was on his feet, waving his arms, but not at the boy in the grass behind him. He was waving in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, she could smell a hint of smoke—not pleasant, like burning leaves, but something else that hurt her throat, like chemicals or burning rubber. A brown wisp rose from far behind Scott, outside school property. It was coming from the direction of Ruth’s own neighborhood. Those sirens she’d heard—were they police, ambulances, firemen?
These questions and the sensory stimuli threatened to overload her. There was too much to feel and smell and hear, too much to look at. This was harder than the phone call with her mother, in which she had sat and stared ahead and merely focused on the words in that frustrating but controllable conversation. There was too much of everything here: movement, colors, sensations, sound.
Her eye couldn’t resist being drawn to the bleachers at which Scott was staring and waving and shouting, though she had trouble deciphering the words due to the white noise fizzing in her ears.
The students in purple shirts—Reece, Mikayla, a half-dozen others—turned as well, to look toward the shadowy place behind the bleachers. Toward the figure who was provoking Scott to shout and wave.
Ruth swung back to see Caleb. He was rising, one hand still on the ground, rear up, legs ready to push off, like a sprinter in the blocks, except his right hand gripped the long weapon, curved at the end. A hockey stick. Caleb was getting ready to charge onto and across the field with a hockey stick.
Not a gun.
But there was a gun, somewhere. She’d seen Scott get shot. She’d seen him fall.
Look harder.
Scott was facing the sidelines and the bleachers. He was shouting at the person—Ruth finally spotted him, only now—with the raised rifle.
The rifle. Another man. It wasn’t Caleb.
And then Scott was down. Her vision blurred.
Ruth clapped a hand over her good ear. The shots continued. She opened her eyes, squinting, fighting the urge to stare at the bodies, falling or stumbling. She needed to see the one figure who wasn’t fleeing. She studied his outline, in fatigues and an orange safety vest. Holding a rifle. At the edge of one of the bleachers, in the shadows, back from the track that encircled the field. Aiming at the boy, Caleb.
The security guard was the shooter.
Spectators continued to panic even after the shots stopped. In the rush to vacate the bleachers, several people had fallen and been kicked or tripped over. Others were trying to help the fallen back up, and the bottlenecks were creating yet other falls as people tried to leap from the sides of the viewing stands and collided with students racing to shelter in the spaces underneath.
Ruth’s eyes found Reece, disentangling himself from a group of the trampled, hands on his leg above the ankle, bent over. He took a step, collapsed and rolled onto his back. As soon as she reached him, she tried to create a protective space with her arms as other students continued to stream past. He rolled side to side, moaning. There was a bulge below the knee of his pants-leg, like a snapped bone protruding.
Ruth found her voice. “Help! Someone!”
As she looked up, she saw the volunteer security guard who had shot both Caleb and Scott stumbling forward toward Scott. The guard no longer had his rifle. His face was ashen. He had one hand over his mouth, which was still moving. Oh my god. Oh my god.
Even though the guard was no longer armed, a large man tackled him from behind. The guard fell on his side, arms wrapped around his knees, not resisting.
“Don’t hurt him!” someone called out. “It was a mistake. Everyone calm down!”
Two other men had just reached Scott and one was hoisting him onto his shoulder, in a fire-arm carry. Don’t move him. Just wait. Voices arguing. The mayhem was too much. Some people thought there might be other shooters. And meanwhile, Scott wasn’t moving or gripping the neck of the man carrying him. She couldn’t tell if he was conscious at all.
Scott. She felt her stomach drop, like she was in a broken elevator plummeting. Scott. She wanted to touch him, to make sure he really was alive, to put a hand to his face, to do anything to stop his pain. He wasn’t out of danger.
But neither was Reece. Ruth shouted, “There’s a boy down over here!”
Go go go, she thought, willing the others to rush Scott to a hospital; searching the crowds also for any sign of paramedics or someone to come attend to Reece. She spotted Caleb, and the two men lifting him: one by the armpits, the other by the calves. It was clear even at a distance. Every part of him was broken.
Ruth turned back to Reece. “I’m too late.”
His eyes were slits. “What the fuck happened?”
“A security guard shot Scott and Caleb, too. He must have thought Caleb was aiming a weapon, but it wasn’t a gun.” She tried to sound calm. “Your leg is broken. But you’re going to be okay, Reece.”
She was about to say, Once we get you out of here, I need to go help Scott. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything. She’d only be watching him bleed, shut out of an ambulance and later an operating room, waiting to hear the same terrible news she’d dreaded since the very first vision. She needed to undo all of this—to go back, just one more time, and get it right.
Ruth tried to extract herself from the moment, to breathe, to think of anything—calm green, moving backward—but she still heard Reece groaning. Her heart should have been racing, but instead, it was beating too slowly. The edges of her vision darkened.
Nothing had worked. Not going to the past to help Kennidy, not going to the future to help Scott.
“I’m never going to dance again,” Reece said through gritted teeth.
“You will. Better than ever.”
“My leg . . .”
“You’re young. You’ll heal. The paramedics must be coming.”
“I can’t wa
it.” He opened his eyes, glanced down the length of his leg, saw the blood on his pants and the angle where there should have been a straight shin. His eyes rolled back in his head.
“You’re going into shock. Let’s keep you here, Reece.” She squeezed his shoulder.
“Go to Scott,” he moaned. “I’ll be okay.”
“They’re carrying him to the parking lot. I need to make sure you don’t get trampled. Let me help you.”
He took a deep breath and opened his eyes again. “If you want to help, give me something to take my mind off the pain. A cigarette, at least. Holy fucking Christ.”
“You don’t need a cigarette. You’re going to be a famous dancer someday.” She found herself half-laughing, half-crying, so glad that Reece hadn’t been shot or injured any worse than he was. “Your body is a temple.”
Your body is a temple.
He tried to laugh too, but it came out as a sob. “Why didn’t it work?”
“I don’t know. I saw this. I am seeing this.” Was she at home seeing this, predicting it, or just here in normal time, the first and only time it would happen? “I was too slow, Reece. Maybe it was something I took, a pill that calmed me down too much and dampened the signal I needed. Or maybe you just can’t change things this way.”
What else could she have done?
The loop back. The loop forward. She saw it in her mind. What came next?
The loop backward again.
But she couldn’t go back in time again. She was half-blind, half-deaf, heart slowing.
You have to go back to go forward. You have to go forward to go back. Were those the only options?
Her mind traced the image on her wrist, following the figure-eight curves, looking for a sign that one direction was better than the other, that one entry point was more forgiving of meddling.
For a moment, she had it. But then she lost it again, left with only a fading sensation, inadequate words, and a certainty that this imperfect understanding wouldn’t be enough.
Annie and the Wolves Page 32