Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1)

by Julie Drew

  “There is one,” she said, and pointed to the very end of the wing, the highest point of the L. “This is the stair’s window. All the rest is for those rooms with no windows to the outside.”

  “That’s right,” he said, speaking very slowly now. He stared at his daughter with an odd expression. “Tesla, do you know how many diapers your brother has left in the house?”

  “Twelve, not counting the one he has on,” she answered without hesitation, her hands busy with her shovel as she poured sand into the bucket by her side.

  “And how many steps is it from your sandbox to the back door?”

  “Thirty-six, unless I take giant steps, and then it’s thirty-one,” she said.

  “How many little girls, just your size, could sit in the sandbox with you?” he asked, his voice oddly tense.

  She thought for a moment. “Are the girls all sitting Indian style, or with their legs out like this?” she asked as she demonstrated the two positions.

  “Indian style,” he said, choking a little on the last word.

  “Twenty-five, and they’d have to be touching each other,” she said with absolute confidence. “But there wouldn’t be room for any toys, or for sand castles. We’d all be squished, and bored.”

  Her father could only nod, and watch his daughter as she returned to her task.

  At the corner of the house, Tesla’s hand shook so badly she had to put the camera back in her bag. Her mathematical skills, her strange, intuitive grasp of the spatial realities around her, were old news in her family. It was too weird to watch her father as he recognized them for the first time. Way too weird.

  Tesla felt like she’d already pushed her luck, so she walked quickly and quietly back to the gate, slipped out, and closed it again. It took her only a few minutes to make her way back to Sam, who paced nervously next to his bike.

  “What the hell took you so long?” he hissed as soon as she was close enough to hear him.

  “It wasn’t that long,” she said defensively. She took the helmet from his hand and put it on. “I was looking around. Like I said.”

  Sam exhaled in exasperation, a scowl on his face, and got on the bike without another word. Tesla climbed up behind him, and before she was fully situated he gunned the motor and they took off like a shot. She had to grab him quickly around the waist to stay on the bike, and for a brief moment this Sam, and an older Sam, a taller, stronger Sam, who had pulled her to him, his mouth on hers, were one and the same.

  He drove too fast, took the on-ramp to I-76, and they flew. The wind tore at their eyes, their cheeks, pushed its way into their nostrils, made conversation impossible. Sam drove for ten minutes, then slowed and took the next exit. Only when they’d stopped at the first traffic light in town did Tesla loosen her grip around his waist. She’d had to hold on for dear life.

  “Sorry, Sam,” she said, her chin on his shoulder so he could hear her.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” he said, but he did not turn around. “Let’s go see what your mom’s up to—and try not to do anything stupid, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. “If you try not to kill us in a fiery motorcycle crash.”

  “Okay,” he said, and they moved forward as the light turned green.

  They found Tasya Petrova’s car—a faded old Peugeot with rusted-out wheel wells—in exactly the same spot.

  “What now?” Tesla asked, crestfallen. “We’ve got to get into my dad’s office, but my mom’s is right next door, we can’t risk it as long as she’s in there.”

  Sam thought for a minute. “I’d be really surprised if she’s still in her office,” he finally said. “She hates paperwork, and she makes as quick a job of it as she can. Your dad teases her about it all the time.”

  “It’s so bizarre that you know my parents better than I do,” Tesla said, and the jealousy she felt was apparent in her voice.

  “I don’t, not really,” he assured her. “I maybe just know more about their work habits, and only right now, not in your time.”

  Tesla grinned. “It still makes my head explode when I try to think about it,” she said. “Time travel. Me.”

  He smiled, too. “I know. It’s so tight.”

  “So what should we do? We don’t have all day. Literally.”

  “True,” he conceded. “I guess I should go check. I’ll bet she’s over in the lab by now, but we can’t be sure.”

  “And it wouldn’t be too weird if you showed up?” Tesla asked hopefully.

  “No, not really. I’m around sometimes before my shift, and it’s Friday—I could be here to pick up my check. Actually, I do need to pick up my check.”

  “So let’s go in, and you can make sure she’s not in her office,” Tesla agreed readily. “I’ll hang back, and as soon as you confirm that she’s in the lab, we’ll let ourselves into my dad’s office.”

  They stowed Tesla’s helmet, locked the bike and went inside. There were a few people in the corridors, what looked like a grad student or two who spoke with great animation. Their hands flew about as they argued about some obscure piece of data. Bor-ing. Sam led the way as though he belonged here—which of course he did. Tesla found two comfy chairs by a window, just outside of the department offices but around a corner, and Sam agreed that she should be fairly safe there. He would be back momentarily, anyway.

  Tesla sat down and clutched her messenger bag in her lap with both hands. She sat straight up, her back about four inches from the upholstered back of the chair. Calm down, she thought. You must look like you’re about to jump out of your skin. She made herself relax, slouch down a little in the chair, lean back. Just another student on a much-needed break from classes.

  She waited patiently. And then a little less patiently. She chewed on a nail, drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair. Crossed her legs and shook her foot furiously back and forth. One person walked by, some woman with gray hair and a lab coat on, and she smiled absently at Tesla. The minutes dragged on.

  Where is he? Tesla thought. Talk about how time slows down for a ticking clock! Finally, she couldn’t take it, got up and walked purposefully toward her mother’s office.

  The door was slightly ajar, and she heard the murmur of voices from inside. No one was in the hall. Tesla stopped just outside, pressed herself against the wall, and listened.

  “That sounds really cool, Dr. P,” Sam said.

  Tesla heard a woman laugh. “Well, I don’t know about cool, but it could turn out to be important—or at least useful. It’s not the direction I had thought to go with my work on chaos and pattern, but I am intrigued.”

  Sam replied but Tesla couldn’t hear him. Her ears buzzed loudly and there was a strange constriction in her throat. That was her mother’s voice, her mother’s melodic, Russian accent. Her mother—the mother she missed so badly it was a physical pain—sat at her desk and laughed and talked about her work only a few feet away from where Tesla now stood, silent and still. Did she stay hidden because she knew she didn’t have the right to alter the world—what would happen if she took that one small step into the office and revealed herself? Or was it because the voice she had wanted to hear so badly didn’t sound familiar, not the way her dad’s had as he’d chatted with her younger self in the sandbox?

  Either way, Tesla felt sliced wide open, all that had held her together suddenly gone, her insides exposed.

  Tesla was startled when the door suddenly opened and Sam almost walked right into her. His face registered shock, but he didn’t speak, merely pushed her ahead of him, back down the hall. They didn’t stop until they reached the stairwell and went inside. The door clicked shut and the sound echoed off the concrete walls.

  “What the hell—I thought you said you wouldn’t do anything stupid?” Sam asked, clearly angry.

  “You took too long,” Tesla said, unable to conjure any anger of her own. “I’m sorry. I know I said I’d wait. But then I couldn’t.” She looked at the ground, miserable.

  Sam didn’t answer, but his expressio
n softened.

  “It’s no big deal,” he said. “She didn’t see you. I tried to leave sooner, but she wanted to talk about some new pattern experiment with audio.”

  Tesla still hadn’t looked up, and Sam heard her sniff.

  “Hey, really, it’s fine,” he said, alarmed. “She’d already packed up her briefcase when I got there, she’s on her way to the lab right now. We can go to your dad’s office. Tesla?”

  Tesla looked up then, and Sam saw her blue-green eyes awash. She blinked hard. “I didn’t recognize her voice.”

  “Oh,” said Sam. “It’s probably just been too long.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said as she swiped at her nose with the sleeve of her hoodie. “What if it’s been so long, and I’ve changed so much, that she doesn’t really mean anything anymore?”

  On instinct alone, because he certainly had no experience with distraught teenage girls—he steered clear of his sister whenever she had a meltdown—Sam took her shoulders in his hands and forced her to look at him. “Tesla,” he began. “It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, how much you’ve changed, or what you can’t remember. She’s your mother. Nothing can ever change that, or how important that fact will always be. Nothing.”

  Tesla gulped and nodded, then flung her arms, cast and all, around Sam’s neck. She held him tight and drew one deep, ragged breath. After a quick beat, Sam put his arms around her, and they stood like that for a full, long minute. Tesla thought about the loss Sam would have to bear when his father died in just a few years, and she could not tell him. The bond they shared, she realized, ran deep.

  Sam, for his part, would never again think of Tesla as beyond his reach. No matter how foolish it might be, how badly he could be hurt, he knew as he held her, his black hair brightened as it mingled with her red-gold curls, felt her breathe against his chest, so warm and soft and achingly lovely, that he would never want anything as much as he wanted this.

  And then she pulled away from him and smiled. “Come on, let’s go see if my dad has any secrets we can steal.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Five minutes later they were safely inside Greg Abbot’s office, the door closed and locked behind them.

  “Okay, first to the drawer I didn’t get to last time,” Tesla said. She moved the chair back from the desk and crouched down on the floor. She got her dad’s flashlight out of the drawer again and worked quickly on the lock, thankful that her father had apparently not discovered the theft of papers and tapes and changed the combination when she heard the tumblers fall into place and the drawers in the front of the desk click open.

  “Nice,” said Sam, who stood off to the side by her father’s overstuffed bookshelves.

  Tesla opened the drawer she’d abandoned last time and felt a rush of disappointment when she saw that all it contained was a single, large yellow envelope.

  “What is it?” asked Sam, who’d taken a step closer to the desk and peered over Tesla’s shoulder.

  “Just an envelope.”

  “Well, see what’s inside it,” Sam said, clearly excited.

  She laid the envelope on the desk in front of her, opened the flap, reached inside and slid the papers out. It was a meager stack—only a few pages. Tesla pulled the desk lamp on its flexible neck closer. A page of handwritten notes. She moved it aside and quickly glanced at the other two sheets, both of which appeared to be sketches of a building, one an exterior elevation, the other an interior layout. She took out her camera, took several shots of each page, then slid the papers back inside the envelope, in the same order she’d found them, and shut it back in the drawer. She spun the combination lock and stood up.

  “Ready?” asked Sam.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Tesla said. But on their way out of the office she glanced to the left and saw three framed photographs on top of the filing cabinet beside the door. She’d been in such a hurry to leave last time, she hadn’t noticed them.

  The first was a picture of her mother and Aunt Jane, probably from their undergraduate days, before her parents had married. Aunt Jane’s hair was long, like her mother’s, but where Tasya’s smooth, fine auburn hair was flawless against those incredible cheekbones, an elegant, sophisticated young woman, Jane’s thick brown hair hung in great hunks, uncombed and a little frizzy, and she’d made the classic mistake of cutting bangs into her wavy, otherwise all-one-length hair. Tasya sported a wise little smile, while Jane’s mouth was stretched wide in mid-laugh and her frumpy sweatshirt clashed with the tailored, silk blouse that Tesla’s mother wore. They both held ice cream cones, but Tasya held hers awkwardly, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

  The second picture was her parents’ wedding photo that Tesla had seen a million times, the same photo that sat on the mantel at home. She turned to the final frame—a photo of both her parents, and Tesla and Max—and stared, not exactly sure what fascinated her about this fairly ordinary family photo. Her mother sat in a chair outside on a summer lawn. She looked beautiful in a simple, sleeveless green dress, and she held a very tiny Max in her arms. He couldn’t have been more than a month old when the photo was taken, Tesla thought. Her father was turned away from the camera because he was looking at her—at Tesla as a little girl—and little Tesla, who ignored whatever commands the photographer had given her, stood upon a crumbling garden wall made of stones. Greg Abbot had his arm near her, probably to steady her or catch her if she fell, but he did not touch her. The little girl stood on the narrow wall, on one foot, arms crossed over her chest, her red hair held back with a lacy, flouncy, flowery headband of some kind, a robin’s egg blue dress with a big skirt puffed out around her like a parachute. She scowled ferociously, right at the photographer, in defiance of everyone.

  What the hell kind of a brat was I? Tesla wondered. Geez. She looked at her father’s face in the photo, his eyes on her, the edge of his mouth just starting to turn up—

  He had liked her, she realized. Felt some pride, even, in her stubborn rebelliousness, her obstinate, combative nature.

  I bet he doesn’t like it anymore, she thought, surprised by her own wistfulness. She hadn’t known she cared, one way or another, what he thought of her now, and the million small ways she chose to punish him.

  “Tesla?” Sam whispered as he stuck his head back in the door from the hallway.

  “Yeah, coming,” she said and closed the door quickly behind her, anxious to put some distance between herself and the past, courtesy of Sam’s motorcycle.

  Tesla and Sam were early, but the server at Dodie’s had agreed to let them have the table for the rest of the afternoon, if only because the place was dead. Tesla had a coffee, and Sam ordered one too, but he hadn’t touched it, which amused Tesla enormously.

  “You can order a different drink,” she said as she looked pointedly at his now-cold mug of coffee.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, cool as he shrugged with studied nonchalance. “I don’t like it as much when it’s hot.”

  “So why didn’t you order an iced coffee?” she said. She had found that making him feel young and inexperienced helped her to feel less so regarding the kiss they’d shared. Would share.

  Whatever, she thought, exasperated by the confused timelines.

  Sam blushed a little, but Tesla had already turned back to her smartphone to scroll through the pictures she’d taken earlier. Sam watched her for a minute, and then he noticed that her expression had changed dramatically.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, as she moved her finger across the touch-screen to look at the pictures in quick succession. “But—”

  “But what?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s weird. You know, like deja vu.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s impossible.”

  Sam shrugged and manfully sipped his tepid, black, diner-quality coffee and pretended he liked it.

  “Well you did used to live in that house. I mean
that was you that you were watching, you that you were taking pictures of, so it seems reasonable that you—”

  “What did you just say?” Tesla demanded.

  “What?” Sam asked, startled and a little confused. “About what?”

  “You said ‘it was you taking pictures of you.’”

  “Huh?” Sam said.

  “These pictures,” she said, her eyes riveted to the twenty or so shots she’d taken. Her finger swiped the screen obsessively, the photographs on a continual loop.

  As the truth of it hit her, Tesla felt the blood drain from her face.

  “I’m not sure how to explain it,” she began haltingly.

  At that moment Finn walked in the door, and his pace quickened considerably the moment he caught sight of them in the booth, though he had the presence of mind to arrange his face in a look that suggested amusement and boredom. The intensity of the relief he felt at the sight of Tesla, however, ran alarmingly deep.

  “What’d I miss?” he asked, as he slid into the booth next to her.

  She turned to him then, and away from Sam, pulled toward Finn, she realized, because Finn already knew the past—which was actually the future—and didn’t need her to explain it to him. “Remember those photos that somebody sent my dad for his birthday? The photos none of us had seen before?”

  “Yeah,” Finn said, inexplicably wary.

  “I took those pictures,” Tesla said, slowly and clearly. “I took them today.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Tesla, you look great in that, you have to wear it!” Bizzy sounded every bit as exasperated as she felt.

  “I don’t know, it’s not exactly my style,” Tesla said as she stood awkwardly in front of the full-length mirror in Bizzy’s room, which was neat to the point of sterility.

  “You have a style?” Beckett asked from the doorway, where she stood fully dressed—stunningly, of course—for the Physics Institute Gala. Her blonde hair hung straight and shone like glass as she leaned seductively in the doorway. She wore a silver-beaded white dress, fitted and slim to the floor, where just the tips of her silver sandals peeked out from below the hem. She shimmered when she moved. Hell, she shimmered when she breathed, Tesla thought, as she noted the deep neckline and impressive cleavage. She looked like a hot—albeit lethal—mermaid.