All Our Yesterdays

by Cristin Terrill

  “Finn?”

  His eyes roll back in his head and his eyelids start to flutter spasmodically, the only part of his body not frozen into place. I put a hand on his arm, which is rigid under my touch. When he doesn’t respond, I shake him.

  “Finn?” I say again. I can feel the hysteria rising within me. I’m sure he’s having a seizure or something when it hits me that this must be what happened to me earlier in the parking lot. Finn has been swept away to some other place inside his mind, like I was when I saw the day I met James. He neglected to mention how terrifying it is. Finn is gone, and nothing but his body is left. I shake him again, even though I know it will do no good.

  I’m not sure how long the fit lasts—thirty seconds? forty?—but it feels like longer. Finally he blinks, slowly, and the light comes back into his eyes. I let out the breath I’ve been holding.

  “Em?” he says.

  “You okay?” I try to sound calm. “You sort of went away there for a minute.”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Did you see something?” I ask. “Was it a memory?”

  He rubs a hand over his face and nods. “It was that house we stayed in for a few weeks in Delaware. Remember? It was right after the attack in Providence, and everyone was jumpy as hell. Pete and I were watching the news in the basement. It was the night the president announced that Congress had pushed through Patriot Act IV. I went to wake you up so you could watch with us.”

  “I remember,” I say. I had shoved him for waking me, but he caught my hand and quietly told me about the new laws Congress had passed in the middle of the night. No unauthorized interstate travel, harsher punishments for citizens refusing to present government-approved ID cards, a repeal of the ban on military personnel policing American streets. We both knew James was behind it.

  “What is this? Why does this keep happening?” I say. Seeing Finn yanked away from me like that, feeling so suddenly alone in this world that’s not really mine, has left me shaken.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  We sit in silence and stare at the little green row house down the street, and I cross my arms to ward off the chill from the cold air that blows in through the smashed window. I don’t want to remember these things. But James always said time is complicated, that it has a mind of its own. Maybe this is its way of punishing us for messing with it.

  Finn eventually falls asleep, his forehead pressed against the glass. I swear he can sleep anywhere. My eyes are heavy and itching but remain fixed on the house. My resolve has returned. I don’t want Marina to ever have to hide out in Nowhere, Delaware, and watch the world end on an ancient little television in a basement that smells like mold and stale air freshener.

  I try to imagine what Marina is doing at this moment. It’s so strange that she’s experiencing things now that I never have. It makes me feel distant from her—from myself—like we’re really two different people. In a way, I guess, we are now.

  Which is sort of the point of all of this.

  Marina has finally seen Finn’s secret, which he hid so carefully from me for so long. Maybe she’s even met his mother, who he would only ever speak to me about when it was dark and quiet and he could talk in a whisper, as though keeping her a secret between us and the night would keep her protected somehow. Marina comforted James after his brother’s shooting, which I did once, but also after someone shot at him, too. She could be doing anything right now: sleeping or showering or booking a plane ticket to Buenos Aires for all I know.

  The thought sends a shiver up my spine. Is she okay, there inside that house, divorced from me? I suddenly have to know. I can’t stand this feeling of separateness from myself.

  Quietly, careful not to wake Finn, who would only tell me what a monumentally terrible idea this is, I unfold my frozen limbs and slip out of the Honda. I don’t close the door behind me, just let it rest shut. The agents assigned to James are still camped in front of Finn’s house, but the street is deserted and silent this early in the morning. I hop the fence into the backyard of the house on the corner. That’s one advantage of row houses: there are no spaces in between where the agents might glimpse me approaching the Abbotts’. As long as I’m quiet, they should never know I’m here. The yards are separated by chain-link fences that are easy to climb over, and I’m soon in Finn’s tiny backyard, which is even more overgrown than the front. I creep up the back steps, freezing when one squeaks under my weight. I take the next two steps more carefully, keeping my feet as close to the edges as possible.

  I inch toward one of the two windows, which is dark with dust and the netting of a black screen.

  Inside is a woman in bed, an oversize sweater pulled around her body, her hair swept up into a messy ponytail. She shares Finn’s coloring, and she was obviously pretty once, before illness dulled her skin and hollowed her cheeks. She’s watching television, flipping the channels in a listless way, like she’s already been through them a dozen times.

  I don’t linger at the window. Spying on Finn’s mother like this makes me feel like some kind of thief.

  Instead, I tiptoe to the second window and peer inside.

  What I see stops my heart.

  Thirteen

  Marina

  I sleep fitfully. I’m exhausted but I can’t seem to get comfortable or switch off my brain. Maybe I’m too exhausted. I fade in and out of consciousness, dreaming that I’m still at the hospital and waking up grasping for things that aren’t there before slipping under again.

  At some point, I open my eyes and the drowsiness drops away long enough for me to realize how thirsty I am. I get up and creep over Finn, who’s sound asleep on the floor, his face buried so deeply into his pillow that I have no idea how he’s breathing. I slip into the kitchen and drink straight from the tap, cupping my hands under the flow of water, too sleep-addled to bother looking for a glass. I take gulp after gulp of the water, which is too warm to be refreshing but tastes almost sweet against my parched tongue.

  “Finn, is that you?”

  I straighten and twist off the tap. “No, Mrs. Abbott. It’s Marina.”

  “Oh, come here!” she says. “I want to have a look at you.”

  I pad on bare feet toward the door of the master bedroom and push it open. Mrs. Abbott is lying down, flopped back against a sea of pillows. There’s a bar along her side of the bed, which gives me a terrible flashback to Nate in the hospital, looking pale and absent. In fact, there are bars all over the room and a walker by the bedside table, which is littered with prescription pill bottles. Suddenly Finn’s demeanor in the hospital makes sense.

  “Oh, Marina,” she says. She looks just like Finn—blond-haired, blue-eyed, with the same mischievous curl to the lips—except she seems faded, like a bad photocopy of herself. “It’s so good to finally put a face to the name. Finn’s told me so much about you.”

  “Really?” I hover in the doorway, feeling uncertain and foolish. I’ve never been around a sick person before. And . . . Finn’s told her about me?

  “Oh yes,” she says. “You and James are practically all he talks about.”

  I don’t know what to say. Mrs. Abbott struggles to sit up straighter against the pillows, and I think maybe I should offer to help, but I can’t move from this spot.

  “That’s nice. . . .” I say.

  “Well.” Mrs. Abbott smiles at me. “I’ll let you get back to sleep. It was nice meeting you.”

  I swallow. “You too.”

  I close the door and turn back to the living room, but my gaze snags on the door to Finn’s bedroom. Has James managed to fall asleep? I don’t like the idea of him lying there awake and alone. Finn may think I’m smothering James, but I know him better than Finn does, and he shouldn’t be alone right now. Besides, the last time I left him alone, he was shot at. I knock on the door with one knuckle, lightly enough that it won’t wake him if he’s asleep.

  “Come in, Marina.”

  I push open the door and find him sitting up in Fi
nn’s bed, the blanket twisted around his feet.

  “You haven’t slept?” I say.

  “A little, I think,” he says, “but my mind keeps going around in circles. I just . . . I can’t believe things changed so much, so quickly.”

  I sit beside him on the narrow twin bed, which dips under my weight, tilting him toward me. “I know.”

  “If he dies . . .” James stares forward at something I can’t see. “I can’t live in a world with no Nate in it.”

  “He’s going to be okay,” I say, even though the words taste empty on my tongue. “Everything’ll be fine.”

  James’s face collapses, like the facade of a building crumbling into a pile of bricks, and he starts to cry into his hands. I’m relieved. Racking sobs shake his whole body, but it’s so much easier to take than the blank face and dead eyes he’s been wearing for hours. I wrap my arms around him, and he leans into me.

  “Can you stay?” he asks.

  I nod, and we lie back on the bed. His arms curl around my waist, and he buries his face into the crook of my shoulder. I’ve never been this close to him, and I’m a terrible person for enjoying it a little. How many nights have I lain in bed by myself, imagining James beside me? Just last night I was plotting to have sex with him. My mind knows this is only a sick mockery of my fantasies, but my body doesn’t quite realize it. He’s so warm. I run my hand up and down his back, and I’m sure no one else would feel this good.

  When his sobs start to subside, James presses a kiss to my jaw and rests his forehead against my temple.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, kid,” he whispers.

  My chest constricts into a hot, tingling ball. “You too.”

  James kisses me again, this time on the cheek, only a breath from the corner of my mouth. He lingers there, his mouth hovering an inch from mine. My mind goes white and fuzzy, the world narrowed to the space between our lips.

  James moves away, resting his head on my shoulder, and I inhale sharply. God, I don’t think I was breathing that entire time. I should get up, go back to the sofa, but James is heavy against me, his body pressed to mine from shoulder to knee. His breathing has slowed, and I think he might finally be asleep.

  He might not have kissed me for real. But maybe I’m just what he needed.

  I close my eyes.

  Em

  I stare at the two of them, tangled up in each other, until the bitter wind makes my eyes water and blur.

  I could do it right now. The gun is tucked into the back of my belt. I could take it out and shoot James through the window and be done with this forever.

  But there’s Marina curled up next to him, her fingers clutching at him even in sleep, and I remember so vividly what it was like to be that girl, to clutch with those fingers, to be close to that boy. The feel and smell of him. How much she—I—loved him.

  I pull the gun from my belt and hold it in front of me. It’s warm from being pressed against my skin, and my hands are suddenly clammy as I flex my fingers around it. I flip off the safety, and the soft click is like an explosion in my ears.

  I should do it now. Spare myself and Finn any more of this misery. In five seconds it could all be over. I won’t exist anymore to regret this horrible step I’ve been forced to take.

  James shifts in his sleep, pulling Marina closer.

  I close my eyes. The sight of them weakens me. I try to remember that the boy in the bed is already gone. The man who wears his face in the future has been twisted and warped beyond recognition, made cruel by ambition and his own perverse determination to do what he thinks is right.

  I squeeze the gun in my hands as I picture Luz, my dear Luz, thrown away like a piece of trash. Vivianne dying in a one-car crash in the middle of the night on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Mrs. Abbott, who will have nothing left of her son but a few scribbled postcards. Finn screaming as they torture him for information he doesn’t have. All the people who will suffer and die because of James.

  I open my eyes and look at the two of them, lying together in that bed, so beautifully unaware of what’s about to crash down on their heads, and I raise the gun. Two feet, maybe less, separates the barrel from James’s head. It will be quick.

  My eyes drift to Marina. God, was I ever really that young? I’m not sure what will happen after I fire the gun. Finn and I will cease to exist, our time line snuffed out along with James’s life, but where—or when—will Marina wake up? Will she see what I’ve done? The thought makes me shudder. It would destroy her.

  Maybe I can give them one more moment together.

  I start to lower the gun, and as the barrel tilts toward the ground, a familiar sensation grabs hold of my belly like a cold hand. I don’t have time to panic or resist before it yanks me backward.

  Back and back and back.

  I fall through nothingness at dizzying speed. When I finally open my eyes, I’m in the little white cell that was my home for so many months.

  James is sitting across from me. He has a Taser held lightly in his hand.

  “Please, Marina,” he says. “Tell me where the documents are. Then I can help you.”

  “Oh really?” I say. “The way you helped Vivianne? Or Luz?”

  He stiffens. “That wasn’t my fault. I never would have—”

  “Vivianne’s dead, James!” I shout, my voice leaping out of my control. “I guess she knew too much, but Luz didn’t know anything, and when she couldn’t tell you where we were, you had her put in a detainment camp. For terrorist activities!” Tears sting behind my eyes as I vacillate between grief and rage thinking of Luz, her careworn face and her strong, gentle hands. “A sweet old lady who never got so much as a traffic ticket, imprisoned as a terrorist. That woman loved you, and you ruined her life just because you could!”

  He stands so abruptly that the legs of his chair scrape against the concrete. I can see the tension coiled in his body, ready to snap, as he clenches his hands into fists over and over. For a second he could be the James I loved, pacing the room as he tried to work out some mental puzzle, but the line of his jaw is too harsh, the look in his eyes too cold.

  “I did it because I needed you to understand how important it is that you hand over the documents,” he says. “If anyone else gets a hold of them, the consequences are beyond your imagination!”

  “Yeah, I never was smart enough to understand any of this,” I say with a grim smile. “I guess I don’t get how planting bombs all over the country is supposed to make us safer. Or how your quest to save the world is doing anything other than serving your ego. Stupid me.”

  He looks down at me, and he actually looks sad. “Please. They’ll hurt you.”

  I stare back at him. “And you’ll let them.”

  He turns away. “Sometimes you have to hurt someone you love for the greater good.”

  “Why do you get to decide what the greater good is?” I say. “These are people you’re talking about, not just numbers in one of your equations. Don’t you get that? Did you ever?”

  His face doesn’t change. “Just tell me what you did with the documents.”

  I spit at his feet.

  He sighs and knocks on the door to my cell, summoning the guard. I see him swallow before he says, “Make her talk.”

  The guard nods and slaps me with the back of his hand as calmly as if he’d been told to make his bed. He hits me again and again.

  “James!” I sob when he heads for the door.

  He pauses, but then slides the cell door shut without looking at me, leaving me alone with the guard. I swear to myself in that moment that I’ll never say the name again. James is gone. There’s only the doctor now.

  I come back to myself with a gasp. I’m lying on the Abbotts’ porch, writhing with the pain of the remembered beating, the gun beside me. How long was I gone? I scramble to my knees and peek into the bedroom.

  Marina and James are gone.

  Fourteen

  Marina

  The sliding soun
d of wood on wood wakes me. I blink, not recognizing the faded blue paint or the piles of what look like computer pieces heaped onto the desk in the corner.

  Or the arm slung around my waist.

  My head starts to feel heavy as it all comes back to me. Nate. The blood. The hospital. Each thought weighs me down until I can barely turn my head toward the sound that woke me.

  Finn is standing at a dresser near the foot of the bed, staring down at James and me, curled up together in his bed.

  “I just came for some clean clothes,” he says.

  “Finn—”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  He leaves and closes the door behind him. My chest aches when I inhale, like the look in his eyes rubbed me raw, though I’m not sure why. I slip out from under James’s arm and follow him to the kitchen, where he’s cracking eggs over an open skillet.

  “So, you finally reeled him in, huh?” he says, wiggling his eyebrows at me.

  “What?” I say, thrown by the sudden change in his demeanor.

  “You’ve got to give James credit.” He stirs the eggs with a spoon so forcefully that some slosh over the edge of the skillet and onto the burner, where they sizzle and turn black. “He put up a good fight, but I guess your feminine wiles—or is it graces? I’m never sure—anyway, your feminine qualities finally hooked him. Your friends will be so proud; did you text them yet?”

  “You’re an asshole,” I whisper. “His brother was shot last night.”

  He ignores me. “What’ll you name your kids, you think? I’m sure you’ve already got some options picked out.”

  I push him. “Shut up.”

  He holds up his eggy spoon in surrender and laughs. “Easy, M. Chill.”

  James enters the kitchen, all rumpled and creased, his hair sticking up in ten different directions. Normally I would find this unbearably charming and add it to my mental photo album of James, but Finn’s teasing has shaken me for reasons I can’t quite pin down. The way it made me and my friends sound so . . . mercenary? The creeping insecurity that James just needed someone and I was the one there?