by Ryan Schow
“I get the concept,” he says, trying to understand. “I mean, if someone in the future ever invents time travel and they come back to anywhere, then time travel exists everywhere. But why would someone that powerful…travel back to kill you?”
This is the exact conversation I didn’t want to have with him. I sigh long and deep. Something in me wants to surrender. I’ve always been honest with Brayden (mostly), so this part of me is dying to tell him the truth and see where it leads.
Note to self: learn to keep a freaking secret better.
“Imagine what we did to Heim,” I finally say, “what I did to Cameron, and imagine it bloodier than hell, and incredibly violent, and then imagine it a thousand times worse, or a thousand times more effective, depending on who you ask, and that’s the future version of me.”
Now the silence is crushing.
It weighs so much I’m certain he can’t breathe.
Whatever future he was dreaming of having with me, I’m pretty sure he’s now re-thinking it. Not that I blame him. It would’ve been easier to erase his mind of me. The same way I did with my other friends. I can’t do that to him, though. I’m not sure it’s right to do that to anyone. Humane, maybe—and justified—but not right. Then again that’s me, the Queen of Not Right. Technically, I’m royalty.
“How do you know these things?” he says, his voice so low I almost have to strain to hear him.
“How do I know what?”
“How do you know you…become…who you become? Did that freaky kid with the explosion of hair and the raccoon eyes, is that what he told you?”
Now here’s where I take a deep breath and try to figure out what I’m going to say. Then, I think, screw it. Just say it.
“My future self came back to this time. She showed me everything.”
For a second he goes so silent I’m sure he hung up on me. But I hear him breathing and I’m like, um…hello!—say something already!
“So you’re like some immortal terrorist, or vigilante, or whatever, and now you’ve come back in time to tell yourself you’re an asshole?”
“Pretty much,” I say, letting a little laugh slip out.
“How old were you?”
“Old enough.”
“How old, Raven?” he says, clearly mortified, but committed to hearing the entire truth.
“Um…like…eight hundred years old, give or take.”
The breath he was holding expels out of him in a audible, heady sigh. Then: “So your hundreds-of-years-old-self comes back with an army of clones from the future hunting you, and then what?”
“I ask myself…to kill myself.”
“To kill yourself?”
“It’s all really confusing and messed up, Brayden. I know. But that’s what I’m telling you. All of this…this life that started out as a way for me to fix my social anxiety disorder…I mean, you know what was done to me at Dulce, you know what I can do.”
“Yeah,” he says. “One side of my brain, it knows, but then the other side is like…it’s like you’re in the circus and this is all tricks, illusions, the unimaginable with some rational explanation I haven’t yet heard. Except none of what you’re saying is rational. And nothing explains anything.”
“Welcome to the blender,” I say.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s best we don’t know each other. Or be friends. I—I just don’t want…I just don’t want any more insane thoughts swimming in my head.”
“So that’s it?” I ask.
“I guess.”
“That’s your final answer?”
“This isn’t a damn game show, Raven. This isn’t even real life. It’s…it’s just…”
He goes silent, like he can’t help himself. Like there’s nothing left to say. Then ever so quietly, ever so sadly, I hang up the phone and cry myself dry. He never calls back.
And that’s the end of Brayden.
Of all the dumb, heroic, insane and downright illegal crap I’ve done in my life, this one thing proves to be the most difficult. It’s worse than a break up. Worse than the comedown of an adrenaline high. Worse for me than the weight of sitting with so many deaths on my hands. Brayden, he’s like Netty to me. The male equivalent anyway.
Netty.
Jesus, what am I going to do about her?
Laying in bed in silence for a long time, I’m not sure what do to next, or even how to feel. Raven is dead and gone, I tell myself. She can’t survive. None of my past selves can.
How many people can I push away before there’s no one left to save? No one left to protect, or love? Isn’t that what future me did? When the world was radiated to a motherfreaking crisp and nearly everyone was dead, future me became a nomad.
I don’t want that life.
Future me lived a monk’s life all over the world, for hundreds of years at a time, and this makes me feel so alone and so flawed that even in the company of my parents, whom I have come to love immensely, I feel like an island with fifty foot swells rolling in from every direction.
3
From the dark, lonely depths of some kind of a dream I won’t remember comes the knock, knock, knocking sounds of knuckles on my bedroom door. As I’m being dragged out of sleep and into the waking world, someone comes in my room. I’m still lodged in the dream. It’s like the noise is coming from inside my head and not inside my room, but maybe it’s the other way around.
All I know is I’m so dang tired I can’t even open my eyes.
They feel puffy, stuck shut.
I halfway hear feet padding across my room. The noise that dragged me from my dream, it’s quiet enough now that I feel myself falling back into my slumber, slipping blissfully back into my mindscape. Then fingers lightly brush my hair from my face and lips kiss my cheek.
“Sweetheart?” she says.
Orianna. Mom. She sounds forever away.
“Mmhmm?” I groan, so sleepy my body feels like a block of concrete. My mouth won’t even open. Then again, as sweet as she’s being, that’s probably a good thing because I’m not wanting to melt her face with my sour ass dragon breath.
“Do you want me to make you some breakfast?” she asks.
I nod my head, try forcing my eyes open. They aren’t working. When she leaves, I make my body move, slog through the agony of puffy-faced drowsiness trying to wake up. Ten minutes later, I’m in the bathroom Jonesing hard for a cup of coffee, dying for something to eat because my stomach is empty and growling, and I honestly need that little bit of a jumpstart.
Good Lord, I look like hell. I turn away from the mirror.
Serious, it’s whatever.
My hair goes into a ponytail, and my eyes are finally cooperating. They’re open, but they’re so heavy they want to be shut again. My body wants a shower, but breakfast is ready, I guess, so…off I go.
“You’re ready,” I tell myself.
Ready for breakfast. Ready to face my father and Rebecca. Ready to try on this normal life I’ve created for myself. But when I reach the kitchen, it’s just me and Orianna. I check the clock and see it’s after eight.
“Where is everyone?”
“I thought it could be just you and me,” Orianna says. “I want to eat with you, selfishly, but also I want to talk about last night.”
Part of me was afraid this would come up. Kids don’t tell their parents they pretty much had someone killed then expect that to be it. Life just doesn’t work that way. I honestly thought it would be Christian running the interrogation.
“Okay,” I say. “What can I do to help with breakfast?”
We finish making the meal, then sit down and it’s a few warm bites of food before the conversation starts.
“So how did you decide on this new look of yours?” she asks.
“I sort of threatened the doctor that did you and dad with death if he didn’t mix my genes with yours and dad’s. So on one hand, maybe I might have blackmailed him for a multimillion dollar service, but on the bright side, I’ve finally got
both yours and dad’s DNA in me again.”
“Really?” she asks, setting her fork down and looking touched, but in a sad kind of way.
“Genetically speaking,” I say, “we’re a real family again.”
Her smile beams then fades, and then it gives way to a concerning look behind an otherwise amicable façade. It’s a sort of barely restrained mania jittering behind those gorgeous eyes of hers.
She’s realizing she can’t teach or guide me. She can’t be the mother she wants to be for me. There’s no way she’ll be able to provide reasonable advice the way a mother does for her daughter. She can’t because she’s never walked a day in my shoes.
No one has.
To be kind, I almost say “No, you’re not going to get to be the kind of mother you’ve always wanted to be,” but I don’t. It’ll be easier for her to figure that out on her own than for me to be a dour brat and tell her.
“You going and…doing what you did,” she says, changing subjects, “was that entirely necessary?”
There it is. Take a deep breath, I tell myself. Steady yourself.
Okay, here goes…
“Several years ago, two girls killed themselves over a rash of cyberbullying. The bully was country singer Patrick O’Dell’s daughter, Cameron.”
“I remember hearing something about that.”
“One of the girls who died, her father was molesting her regularly. She killed herself. And this girl’s mother? She knew what was going on, so she killed herself, too. The father’s name is Tad Blalock. He heads up one of the nation’s foremost mental health facilities. Well, he did anyway.”
“As in past tense.”
“Like I said, he committed suicide after giving a written, detailed confession.”
“What did he confess to?”
“Sexually abusing thirty-three of his patients,” I say. “And two murders.”
She looks horrified.
Breathless.
“So you made him kill himself?” she asks.
“He had choices.”
“So he had the choice to live?”
“He did.”
“Yet he chose otherwise.”
“Yes.”
“With a shotgun.”
“I watched him do it, just to make sure he didn’t chicken out.”
I feel her crumbling inside. She’s sad that I had to see that, sad thinking of what something like this will do to me. She’s taking my hand into hers, looking at me with love and compassion in her eyes, eyes that tear up. I work to stay out of her head, but I can’t.
It’s damn near impossible.
Her eyes flood. She wipes at them, sniffling once, twice. The person I am now, I’m not sure she’ll be able to handle that. The truth of me anyway. She can’t just pretend I’m her perfect little girl anymore. I’ll never be that girl.
“I’m not a monster, mom.”
“You’re not judge, jury and executioner either.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why? Because you can read their minds? See their crimes?”
“Yes.”
Her face continues to pale from blood loss. She looks stricken. Letting go of my hand, she wipes both eyes and tries to pull herself together. I can feel the weight this conversation is having on her mind. It’s becoming too much.
“How can…I mean, how do you just…how can you be so young and just blackmail people, kill people, make them kill themselves…how can you do all that?”
When I figure it out, I think to myself, I’ll let you know.
“You’ll never understand, mom,” I say. “Just know I’m doing things for the betterment of…whatever, a high school, a mental health facility, a nation, humanity.”
“You’re right, I don’t understand,” she finally says, unwilling to hold my eyes anymore. Her gaze falls to her plate of food, specifically her eggs. They don’t look hot anymore. Stupidly, I wonder if this conversation will spoil our breakfast. Then I wonder if this conversation will spoil her whole life.
“Part of my future, part of the isolation future me felt, was that there was no one who understood her. And everyone who tried, well, they died.”
Orianna forks her food around, lifts a scoop of egg halfway to her mouth, then puts it back down, looks up at me and says, “I don’t know how to be a mother to you. It’s like, whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re becoming, I can’t help you and that makes me feel…I don’t know…helpless, useless. Like some bystander in your life struggling for relevance.”
Taking her hand back into mine, I look deep into her eyes—which are big and gorgeous and predominantly sad looking—and I say, “You’re relevant. You’re my mother. And what I need from you most is for you to love me, to just be a mother by loving me and accepting me, as difficult as it might be.”
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”
Smiling a belabored smile, my own eyes now shimmering, I say, “No one can help me. In the midst of so many people, sometimes—by virtue of who I am, what I am—I feel like an island.”
Now I suppose I might be acting like a shameless drama queen, but still, this dark pit of dread festering inside me continues to expand and collapse and expand again at will. It’s like I can’t decide if this life of mine is totally boss or if I’ve just been dealt a sharp, miserable blow. Right now, looking at Orianna, seeing what I’m doing to her, I feel devastated.
At the bottom of it all, The Operator is pitching a righteous fit. From inside the box I locked his soul in—that box buried deep inside my psyche—he’s this constant, muffled wail. He’s kicking and pounding on his prison doors. He’s a vomit bag of curses and insults and deeply psychotic threats.
I wish that hateful rodent would just die inside me already. Unfortunately though, if there were such thing as a prisoner’s fit, he’s still in the throes of it without much relief for me in sight. In fact, he’s been acting out since I stuck him there.
He may never stop.
As long as I live and breathe in the outside world, though, I swear to God he will not be afforded the luxury of freedom. Not as himself. Not as the murderous boy with wild hair. Not as Jack the Ripper or even someone as charitable and as brave as Harriett Tubman’s right hand man. As long as I exist—and this may be forever—The Operator will suffer this inhospitable prison of mine.
And when I die, then he’ll get to die, too, but not a minute sooner.
“You’re never alone, Vannie,” Orianna says, startling me. Thinking of the Operator imprisoned deep inside me, she has no idea how right she is.
“I know,” I say, unburdened by her calling me Vannie. In fact, her using the nickname I once despised feels a bit nostalgic now. I actually warm to the sound of it. This might almost feel like things are right(ish) in my world, if only for a moment.
Just then, Rebecca comes wandering out into the living room in pink short-shorts (the comfortable kind you sleep in, not the all-day kind you wear in public that have your butt cheeks hanging out) and an oversized t-shirt, her hair frazzled, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She plops herself down at the breakfast table and says hello.
“Hi,” I say.
I find myself touching her arm, but then I remember I’m supposed to be a stranger to her. I’m not though and this frustrates me. Orianna wipes her eyes discretely. It’s good to know she feels, that she wants to be relevant in my life. That and her love is all I ever wanted. It’s what I needed to make me feel whole. At least, it used to be.
4
So this has grown into a girls-only breakfast and just as I’m about to talk to Rebecca, Christian comes strolling in and says good-morning like we’re some kind of a normal family or something.
As if!
After a few moments, we’re all at the table, eating as a family, and it’s like mine and Orianna’s convo never happened. As I’m eating my last piece of toast, Rebecca says to me, “So who are you to them?” and my eyes fall on Christian.
“Before she answers that,” Christia
n tells Rebecca, clearing his throat, “I want to make an announcement. Well, a formal one anyway.”
Okay, I’m thinking to myself. Normally I’d just slip into Christian’s head so I don’t have to endure the suspense, but I don’t. I promised myself that in this regard, I’d try to be more human than I’ve been.
Christian says, “I would like us to adopt Rebecca as our other daughter.”
Inside, my heart is swelling with joy. Looking across the table, I can see the same thing happening in Orianna and this thrills me. Ever since I pulled Rebecca out of Heim’s tank, I’ve come to think of her as a sister. Now it’s about to be real!
“If it’s okay with both of you,” Christian says, looking right at me, “I’d like to provide her with an ID packet that includes a birth certificate registering her birth name—per her request—as Rebecca Swann.”
I look from my father to Rebecca and see the confusion in her eyes. Rolling into Rebecca’s head (I know, I’m all moral one minute talking about not invading people’s thoughts then a stinking hypocrite the next—apparently it’s my M.O. these days), I realize the look of confusion on her face is her wondering why Christian is asking for Orianna’s and my permission.
Still looking at me, Christian says, “If you’re okay with that, Savannah, you’ll finally have a sister.”
“Absolutely,” I say, brand new tears of delight standing in my eyes.
“Sister?” Rebecca asks, more confused than ever. She’s looking back and forth between me and my father.
“Secrets between family can be toxic, and since Rebecca’s going to be your sister, she should know who you are,” Christian says. Turning to Orianna, he adds, “She should know who both of you are.”
Rebecca stops breathing.
“My name is Savannah Swann,” I say to Rebecca. “I’m Christian’s daughter, but I’m also Orianna’s daughter.”
Rebecca looks from me to Christian to Orianna, then back at me with a thousand questions in her eyes.
“Orianna isn’t really Orianna,” I say.