Once Again

by Catherine Wallace Hope

  “What?” Her mind scrambled for the next step. Should she look for someone else? No, only Drake. Maybe it didn’t matter that he wasn’t on the force. Maybe all that mattered was that he had been then. “Are you still in Boulder?”

  “Yes, but I—”

  She cut off the end of his sentence. “I need to tell you something, Tom. You remember Zac.”

  “I do … remember.” He sounded reluctant.

  “He works at NIST. He predicted these waves. They’re changing the order of time. And the abduction is happening all over again.”

  “Oh, Erin.” Tom let out a loud breath. “Lord, I can’t do this.”

  “Please, Tom, just listen to me.”

  “I’m not the person you need to call.” He sounded hollowly serene. “I can’t do this. I can’t talk to you.”

  Erin pleaded into the phone. “You’re the only person I can call! I need you to get there before he does. Tom, please.”

  “I have to go, Erin,” he said, and again his voice seemed set off at a distance. “Call your doctor. Don’t call me. Please.”

  “You said I could call for anything, and I need your help!”

  “I wish you well, always—you know that,” he said, and the phone went silent.

  “Don’t hang up on me!” She watched the screen as the call disappeared and the background image of Korrie returned.

  She stormed out of the garage. “I need help!” Her voice fell into the quiet gaps of light between the trees. Even though she was doing things differently this time, she hadn’t managed to change anything. The feeling of being smothered descended over her. She had to find someone who would do something, or Korrie was going to be taken again.

  Chapter Eleven

  11:00 AM

  Sunday, June 20, 2021 | 2075 Theseus Drive | Boulder, Colorado

  Tom Drake roused himself. He’d been swamped in a muddy dream until his phone bleated, and some residue of the dream clung to him, a thin overlay of remorse for sins he left behind as he crawled out. He wasn’t sure of what he’d said during the call, not clear on what was mixed in from the dream.

  He rolled to the edge of the bed and sat up. The watch they’d given him at his disability send-off gleamed on the nightstand. He picked it up and looked at the hopelessly complicated face with the clear dial leaving the innards of the movement on display. Hard to tell what time it was. Eleven? Another day cut loose in a headwind.

  He stood and let his frame settle into its center of gravity before he took the three or four steps to the bathroom. In the mirror, he saw himself as the forty-year-old Tom who’d taken the wrong path and ended up looking sixty. He leaned on the counter and examined his reflection. Why were his eyes so red? And his hair looked like weedy stalks. Shower? No shower? When did he shower last? He tried to remember what day it was. Foggy day. Another one. But that phone call. The call from Erin Fullarton. Not sure if he’d dreamed what she said.

  He picked up his pill bottle. Paxil, the bottle read, for depression, which somehow didn’t do justice to his problem. Maybe cumulative duty-induced post-traumatic stress disorder would have been too many words to fit on such a little label. He tipped the bottle and found it empty. His chest deflated with a sigh. Now he would have to go out. He’d have to go to the pharmacy and get his prescription refilled. He hated to go out, but what choice was there?

  He didn’t smell great, but he put on clean shorts and a T-shirt and slipped on some shoes. As he walked toward his car, he checked his phone. There it was. The phone call. It hadn’t been part of the dream. That poor woman.

  He got in his car and backed out of the driveway. When he was still on the force, he’d always wondered how people survived what happened to them. He’d admired them for trying to continue living even when the situation drove them out of their minds. Like Erin. What was all that stuff she was saying? That her husband had prophesied something, and the abduction was happening all over again? Lord. He knew she’d been in treatment, but it sounded like her treatment wasn’t working. Or maybe she, too, was out of pills. Whatever, it was tragic. He shouldn’t have hung up on her. He turned onto Broadway and headed toward the pharmacy.

  The least he could do for her now was to let someone know the state she was in. The world stumbled along outside his windows, unredeemable; or maybe it was that he could not be redeemed. But he could call his former partner and ask if he recalled any follow-up about Erin, let him know she might be a danger to herself. Why not? What day was it? Was it Sunday? So he guessed Nate would be home with his family—the little mob Tom missed like a family of his own. No harm in giving him a call. Only to report what had occurred. Anybody would do that.

  As he pulled into the Walgreens lot, he hit the number and let it ring.

  Nate answered and said, “Yes, Tom, what is it?”

  Just like that. No “hello.” No “how have you been?” Just “what is it?”

  Tom said, “Good to hear your voice, buddy.”

  “You too.” Nate said the words but they seemed smileless, automated.

  Tom found a parking spot, angled into it, and shut off his car. He felt heaviness descending on him, the inward slant that triggered his tremor. He had to have his damned pills.

  “Listen,” Tom said, “I wanted to let you know about something that happened today. About Erin Fullarton.”

  There was whispering beyond the line, Nate saying something discreetly, maybe to his wife. Then, he said aloud, “So can I get back to you on that, Tom? We’re on our way out.”

  Injecting as much bravado as he could pack into one word, Tom said, “Sure.” He let silence close over the space. “I’ll let you go.”

  “Cool,” Nate said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Vague. For a guy whose every word used to be so on point, that was completely vague. A kiss-off. Brothers no more. But he’d known that for a long time.

  He lifted himself out of his vehicle and tromped into the store. He hated for people to see him in the state he was in, but there was no other option. People were everywhere. At the back of the store, a line wove from the prescription window. A conga line of needy people like him, diseased or disabled or destroyed on some level, who just wanted to get their medicine and get home and be safe. Did they all want to go back to sleep as badly as he did?

  Poor Erin. Don’t you want to sleep too? Forever?

  Chapter Twelve

  11:20 AM

  Sunday, June 20, 2021 | 371 Nysa Vale Road

  Erin walked the dry gravel path between the garage and the house, turned the other way, tried to think of what to do, and then turned again. There had to be someone to call. Not Zac, not the school, not the police, not Tom Drake. Plodding back up the walkway, she slowed and framed the house in her vision. Here in the midst of bright summer, it seemed like such a dark place, one stone on top of another, like a tomb. Inside it, she’d seen all of the things Korrie had last touched, her reliquary. During those weeks right after the funeral, Erin had been so dismayed that none of Korrie’s belongings retained any alchemical trace of life. They were all inert and mute, when what Erin was starved for was some electrostatic thread of contact.

  She took another step toward the house, now in summer, stripped of its artifacts, its stones piled around the colorless space where she’d kept herself for all these months, and words sprang into her mind: What if it’s up to you?

  It couldn’t be true that this thing, this chance, depended on her. She was the one who—Don’t go there, Erin. She knew if she went back into that terrain of fault, the danger was that she would wander so far she’d never be able to find her way out again.

  Her father had tried so hard to cover his anger at her in the months after Korrie’s death. But she felt it. With every stiff hug abruptly broken off, every reproachful glance when she looked to him for comfort. For all his silence was worth, he might as well have said what he felt. You are responsible for this. You.

  She went back into the house, back up the stairs, and looked in
to Korrie’s room. There was no spectral six-year-old looking back at her, which was what she almost wished for. She stood in the doorway, immobilized.

  When her mother had been in town again in the months after the funeral, she’d embarked on a mop-up operation of their life—cleaning, sorting, storing. Somehow, she had found both of Korrie’s white fur boots. Erin walked into the room and saw her lowering the pair into a box.

  “No,” Erin said. “Not those.” She grabbed the boots from her mother’s hands.

  Her mother flashed a look of exasperation at her. “Erin, you have to stop doing this to yourself.”

  Erin folded her arms over the boots.

  “You have to stop,” her mother said.

  “I can’t stop.” Erin took the boots to her room, brushed the fur into place with her fingers, and set them down in the closet next to her own shoes. She sat cross-legged on the floor, locked in a loop of memory: “Where’s your other boot, Korrie? Where’s your other boot, Squid?” as if Korrie might hear her thoughts and emerge somehow from between the clothes hanging there and slip the boots onto her feet. Erin had remained transfixed until her mother came and got her and hauled her down to the kitchen and heated up a bowl of soup for her.

  Now, Erin forced herself down the stairs and into the kitchen. What if it’s up to you to figure this out? She stepped over to the island and flipped open her notebook. She looked at the word she’d written earlier and then crossed out. “Same.” Aloud, she said, “Or not the same.” She ripped the page from the notebook and checked her phone: 11:25. She wrote it in the top third of the page.

  On the day Korrie was abducted, Jeanna was the last person to see her, at 11:45. Erin remembered Jeanna making a chopping gesture with one hand onto the palm of the other. Adamant, 11:45 was when she saw her, absolutely. Erin wrote the number toward the middle of the page. So when would the time interval happen again? Question mark. She dug back through the tangle of the morning, looking for the pattern. It was 9:30 when she’d called Zac, and then a few minutes later, the shift had happened for a small stretch of time. And then again around 10:30, right? And for just a few minutes? She wrote those times at the top. Was the day moving forward at the same rate in both times? Would the interval happen again at the same rate? Would the abduction happen again at the same time? She wrote Korrie at the bottom edge of the page and drew an arrow down to it.

  Think it out, Erin. Answer the question.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she shouted. “I’m only guessing.”

  She wrote, To Korrie first? and drew a square around the name.

  Idiot, she thought, there’s no time for this. You have to get there before he shows up. If time shifts again, you have to be at the school when it happens.

  It was a twenty-minute drive. “Just go,” she said. She ran to the door, grabbed her sweatshirt with her keys in the pocket, and flew for the car.

  She got behind the wheel, started the car, and peeled out onto their road. She was out of time.

  PART II

  The Waves

  Chapter Thirteen

  11:30 AM

  Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Fourmile Canyon

  As Erin tore through the winding curves of the canyon, a wild excitement welled in her chest, and she could see herself in the school building, could imagine coming around the corner to the hallway near the kindergarten classroom, could see Korrie trotting toward her as if nothing had ever happened.

  “I’ve been so upset about you,” Erin’s line in the scenario went, like a dream unreeling.

  “Funny Mommy,” Korrie would say.

  Erin could feel the weight of her in her arms as she held her and hugged her and kissed her forehead. The joy of it was unbelievably light, like gliding. Erin drew a deep breath and concentrated her mind on the speed of the car, taking each turn to the bottom of the canyon as fast as she could without running off the road.

  On a sharp curve, with only a momentary blur of brightness, it became winter. Snow hailed down in a thick frenzy, snowpack lay smooth and slick on the road, and the car skidded in half time. She tried to correct for it, but she couldn’t make herself react quickly enough and the car continued downhill. Her foot hit the brakes, but they had no effect. She pumped them, and still the car slid across the ice. It slipped off the road and plowed sideways into a drift against the guardrail. The car slammed to a halt. It took a second for Erin to reframe, to see where she’d ended up.

  “No, no, no!” she yelled.

  She floored the accelerator and listened to the tires whir against their own tracks. She took her foot off the pedal, made herself be still for a second, and then gently tried again. The tires spun in place.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. She tapped gently on the pedal, just enough to rock the car an inch forward, then with a turn of the wheel, she let it fall back. The car slid deeper into the drift. “Stop,” Erin whispered.

  She got out of the car, stood in the descending white, and looked at the front tire, buried in snow up to the middle of the hubcap, and then the back, the same. Stepping through the swarm of flakes, wading through the accumulation to the edge of the road, she looked both ways. No traffic, no one to flag down and ask for a push to get back onto the road.

  She returned to the car and opened the trunk, but there was nothing useful in it. Nothing in the back seat. She felt around under the driver’s seat and found an ice scraper. She glanced at the display on the dashboard. 11:35. Time seemed to have picked up now and was rapidly passing. She took the scraper, ran with it to the back tire, and used it to scrape a clear patch down to the soil of the shoulder.

  As fast as she could, she waded to the far side. The car rested in the snowpack against the rail, and the tire was completely buried. What could she do? There was no recourse and there was no time. She rushed to the driver’s side of the car, jumped in, and threw it into reverse and gunned it. The back end pitched against the drift and then rolled forward and settled. She hit it again and got the same movement. Slight but some. She gave it one more go before she jumped out and hurried to the guardrail. She wedged herself into the gap she’d made until she could reach the ground around the tire. With the scraper, she cleared the snow away down to the hardpack.

  New snow had gathered around the front tire. She cleared that too and then got in and pressed her foot against the accelerator. The car inched forward. She cranked the steering wheel all the way until it stopped, and she tried again. The car sidled diagonally toward the road a bit. Managing her panic, she cranked the wheel, edged forward, cranked it back, edged forward, and did the same thing several more times until the tires gripped the soil and she got traction. Careful to take it slow, she eased the car over the ice and back to the road.

  Her stomach seethed, and she exhaled into the cold air. With wet, icy-pink fingers, she turned on the heater and the defroster, gripped the wheel, and leaned forward, trying to see the way ahead. She turned up the windshield wipers, and even as they slapped back and forth at full speed, she could hardly see where the road went in front of her. Her tires slid and caught in jerks on the icepack. Calm down, she thought. Just get there. She had to take complete control of herself. The clock on the dash read 11:45.

  As she reached the edge of town, a black pickup truck cut her off. With a snowplow rigged on the front and hunters’ flashers on the roof, it pulled right in front of her. She raised her hand to lay on the horn but changed her mind, because at least while she followed the truck’s red taillights, the road ahead would be cleared.

  The pickup trundled along in front of her, shoving snow, road slush, and ice off to the side. She followed the taillights, steered within the wake from one slick intersection to the next, to the corner where she needed to turn toward the school.

  With a bit of luck, the truck turned there too and cleared the way around the corner and into the drop-off loop. It crept up the drive and braked in front of the school building, where two buses waited and children shuffled in lines to climb into them. E
rin noticed how the driver of the truck leaned across his passenger seat to look at the children. On the back of the black tailgate, an oversized bumper sticker read “Honk if you want to suck my dick.”

  Disgusted, Erin thought, Someone like that shouldn’t be allowed to be here.

  She looked for Korrie in the lines of children, but she wasn’t there. Her car’s clock flashed to 11:51. She wanted to shout at the pickup to get out of her way. She couldn’t believe how slowly he moved. When the truck finally pulled far enough forward, Erin revved in front of the buses, angled into the snowy curb, threw open the door, and jumped out of the car. As her foot hit the pavement, the air turned golden and warm. Summer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Day Of: Friday, February 7, 2020 | Peregrine Elementary, Main Office

  Jeanna Rattilson looked up at the clock on the wall. From where she sat at her desk, she had a clear view of the main office clock and another clock through the glass door into the vice principal’s office; and out the front window she could see, through the snowfall, the digital display on the Peregrine Elementary greeting sign in front of the building. They all said 11:45. It was past time for her break, and she wanted to get her Frappuccino and her chips and sit in the teachers’ lounge and watch her show on her phone. It was really her only chance all day to escape from the students. This new vice principal, Orlaine—what kind of name is that?—was supposed to come out and sit at Jeanna’s desk and watch the phones for an hour, but it seemed to Jeanna that the woman didn’t like her very much, and maybe she was deliberately taking her time, making Jeanna miss her break.

  When the Fullarton kid came up to her desk, Jeanna was surprised. She thought someone had picked her up already. The nurse had taken the kid’s temp and confirmed her fever, and then she’d told her to lie down in the nurse’s office. Jeanna had called then, like maybe two hours ago, and left a message for the mother that she had to pick her up, like, immediately. Who are these parents who send their kids to school sick? Just spread that crap all around to everybody else. Thanks so much.