“No!” Erin cried. “I can’t go back to that!”
“The sim showed something about the depth of it. About us. Our consciousness. Whenever these waves strike, they steal time from us, and something about us …” He drew a fist to his chest. “Something in our consciousness affects how much we lose.”
“Can you do anything?” Erin looked at the clock on the wall. It was only seconds until 9:32. She reached toward him, to hold on to him. “What can you do?”
“There’s nothing to do,” he said. “And we won’t remember this.”
PART V
Once Again
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten toward their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60
Chapter Forty-Six
8:25 AM
Friday, February 7, 2020 | 371 Nysa Vale Road, Boulder, Colorado
Erin charged down the stairs, struggling into her new dressy coat, with her purse, phone, and keys in her hand, torturous high heels clacking against the wooden treads. According to the weather app, the high would be thirty-nine and the snowstorm would last much of the day, but she couldn’t show up to this interview in her old hiking boots.
In the kitchen, Zac’s soft humming mixed with the sound of the kettle beginning to whistle. Erin approached him, drawn as always to the sensuous orbit of warmth that radiated from him. He stood near the counter with a mixing bowl wedged in the crook of his elbow and a wooden spoon in the other.
“Whatcha making, mister?” Erin said.
Zac looked up. “Yikes. Who’s this strange woman in my kitchen?”
Erin smiled and looked down at her interview outfit. “Do I look strange?”
“You look like a stranger.” He stirred the batter in the bowl. “A very strange stranger.”
“Thanks.” She half-rolled her eyes. “Is this why you came home early from your trip, so I could have the benefit of your style commentary?”
“That and my world-famous banana bread.”
“Oh,” Erin said. “Banana bread.” It was one of the things he made as well as she did. She kissed him. “I hate to miss out.” As she buttoned her coat, she said, “I have to go. I have to get Korrie to school, and I can’t be late.” She woke her phone to confirm the time.
“I’ll keep it warm until you get back. I’ll make ginger butter. We’ll have tea.”
“Perfect.”
“What time do you think? I have that wrap-up call with Walter in Hingoli.”
“I have no idea.” She tapped the appointment in the calendar on her phone. “Ten? Ten-thirty?” It was hard enough to make herself go to the interview, feeling like a mannequin of someone else, but now with the storm outside and the prospect of warm banana bread and hot tea inside, it was even harder to rush out of the house. But it was Sledding Day at school, and she needed to drop off Korrie on her way.
“That’ll work, I guess.” Zac smiled.
She turned to go find Korrie, who stood near the front door, fortressed inside heaping layers of lavender outerwear. Hat, scarf, mittens, button-up sweater, thermal pants, parka; permission slip for Sledding Day poking out of her pocket. On her right foot, a furry white boot; on her left, a pink sock.
Erin stopped. “Where’s your other boot, Squid?”
“I don’t know.” Korrie looked down at her sock.
“Go find it.” Erin said. “We’ll be late.”
Korrie didn’t move. “I already looked.”
“Korrie.” Erin deepened her tone. “We have to go. The roads are bad, and I can’t be late. You have sledding, and I have my interview. Please go find your other boot. Right now.”
Erin made an instant parental inventory of her daughter. She looked tired, Erin thought, hadn’t wanted breakfast; she’d have to check on her later, after the interview. “Go find your boot. Please.”
Korrie stayed planted in place. “I told you I already looked.”
“I don’t have time for this, Squid.” Erin felt artificially upright inside her coat.
“But I’m having a hard morning.”
“Well, so am I,” Erin snapped back. She stopped. She called a halt to this frenetic drive, one that was not even her own. This is not me, she thought. She put down her purse. “Why is it a hard morning?”
“Because I feel weird.”
“In what way, Squid?”
“Hot,” Korrie said. “Melty and sleepy.”
Erin knelt in front of her and laid her hand across her forehead. So warm. “That’s because you have a fever, sweetheart.” Erin took a closer look. Korrie’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bloodshot and glistening. Something purled in Erin’s head, something she couldn’t quite grasp, as if it were submerged and drifting away in the current ahead. Something about time being so short. “Does anything hurt?”
Korrie shook her head. Her lips were dry, and Erin wanted to smooth some balm on them. She unzipped Korrie’s coat and unwrapped her scarf. The manic pressure she’d felt about the interview began to dissipate and, with it, the desire to be that other person. Maybe she would just have to settle for being who she’d always been. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said, “but you’re going to have to stay home today.”
Tears filled Korrie’s eyes. “It’s Sledding Day.”
“I know,” Erin said. She slipped Korrie’s coat and hat off. “But when you’re all better, you and Daddy and I can go to Kinnikinic. We’ll go sledding together and then we’ll go to the Dushanbe Teahouse and have lunch, okay?”
“Okay.” She sounded disappointed but resigned.
“Sound good?” Erin smoothed back her hair from her forehead.
“Yep.” Korrie leaned into her arms.
Erin picked her up and felt the heat as she laid her head on her shoulder. She headed into the kitchen. “Zac,” she said, “we have a sick girl here.”
He put down the bowl and the spoon and came over to them. He pressed the backs of his fingers to Korrie’s cheek. “Pretty hot,” he said. “Want me to take her?”
“No,” Erin said. “I’ll get her into her pajamas and get her under the covers.”
“What about your interview?”
“Let me make her comfortable.” She turned and took Korrie upstairs to her room and sat her on her bed. Thrown in the jumble of covers was her pair of hand-sewn pajamas. “Back into your reindeer jammies, m’lady?”
Korrie nodded. “Yes, please.”
Erin helped her undress and get into her pajamas, and once she was tucked beneath the covers, she got a thermometer from the bathroom and returned to take her temperature. “One oh one, Squid,” she said. “Not too bad.” She sat next to her and laid her palm across her forehead. “I’ll get you some medicine and some juice, okay?”
Korrie nodded again.
Before Erin went back down to the kitchen, she ducked into her bedroom and stripped off her horrible plasticky interview clothes. She unknotted her hair and put on sweats and a T-shirt. Comfort clothes.
When she returned to the kitchen, Zac was filling a loaf pan with batter. He looked up at her and smiled. “There you are.”
“Here I are,” she echoed. She reached into the fridge to get Korrie a juice box.
He put down the bowl of batter. “So we’re having a change of approach? Or just a change of wardrobe?”
“Both, I think.” Would this disappoint him? Would he have less faith in her if she didn’t do what they’d talked about? “Could you hand me the elderberry stuff?”
He reached into the cupboard above the toaster, retrieved a dropper bottle of syrup, and handed it to her. “I thought the die was cast,” he said, and he slid the loaf pan into the hot oven.
“But time is flying so fast, Zac. And I don’t want to spend another minute feeling like someone else’s project. And I don’t want to be gone all day. And I don’t want
to give up on myself.”
“That’s what this was going to be? Giving up?” He looked at her quizzically, with a half-smile.
“I want to figure out something else.”
Then, from the doorway behind her, Korrie said, “Mommy?”
There she stood, cheeks pink, eyes glazy, in the pajamas Erin had made for her. She’d put her pink socks back on.
“What’s up, Squid?” Erin crossed to her, knelt, and gave her the juice box.
“Can I stay down here with you guys?”
“Of course you can,” Zac answered.
“Sure,” Erin said, and she lifted her into her arms.
Stepping over the clutter in the living room, she aimed for the sofa and eased Korrie down with her head on the armrest. She sat next to her on the edge of the cushion and squeezed a dropperful of syrup between her lips.
“Now,” she said, tucking a pillow under her head, “we can do a quick story, and then you can sleep while the medicine works, and when you wake up, we can have your daddy’s banana bread, okay?” She covered her with a quilt.
Korrie nodded.
“You start,” Erin said.
“Um.” Korrie curled deeper under the quilt. “Once there was … an elf,” she said.
“Who lived in the woods,” Erin followed. The smell of batter baking started to fill the room. She felt conflicted: glad to be keeping Korrie home on this bitter day, relieved not to have to negotiate the minefield of the interview, but fearful about the future.
“And slept in a nest,” Korrie said.
“In the white winter night.” She patted Korrie’s leg and said, “Hey, Squid, I think a fire would be nice.”
Korrie nodded yes.
As Erin stood, a feeling illuminated within her, the sense that she had the strength to take on whatever might lie ahead of her. She couldn’t know what the future was, but she knew she could rise to meet it. She began to look for one of the boxes of the new matches she’d ordered, the special ones with the Christmas picture of the three of them on the front.
Chapter Forty-Seven
9:00 AM
Friday, February 7, 2020 | Patrol of the University of Colorado campus
Tom Drake was in no way ready to be back. He’d paid five hundred dollars for his One-Day Test Out in Commerce City. In Block Three, he had used more than the required half speed and force to maintain physical control during the cuffing procedure. He’d lost points there, but he’d passed. He passed the driving test easily. He scored twenty-five of twenty-five on his firearms skills test, with twenty-four body shots and one head shot on the silhouette. The testing was on one of the days when his shakes were under control. If it had been on a different day, he might have failed all of it.
But today at least, he was back. Snow fell slowly from the pearl-gray cloud cover, and he just wanted to be a competent vessel on this pure white day.
The dispatcher called out his unit number. She said, “You’ve caught a couple of PNBs, Tom.” Pulseless non-breathers. Hopefully something he could handle. She gave him the address and let him know he would join the coroner at the scene. Rebecca. Tom would be glad to see her. She was the new coroner now, and Tom hadn’t run into her for several months. The two of them had gone out a couple of times back in the day, once for a casual lunch, once to The Bitter Bar, where they got sloshed on one Kiss the Sky after another. But nothing ever came of it, no matter how Tom wished it had.
When he arrived at the scene, the light seemed to brighten. There was another PD vehicle and the coroner’s van in front of the residence. Tom checked himself in the rearview. Okay, Tommy? He stepped out of his vehicle, onto the icy street and drew a breath of cool, crisp air. He tromped through the snow drifts, up to the open front door, and into the residence.
He greeted the other cops, who seemed to be unconcerned and unhurried. In a tidy little back bedroom, he found Rebecca. She walked up to him, and it seemed like such a warm greeting when she said his name. “Drake.”
“Beccs,” he answered.
Her tech moved out of the room, peeling off his nitrile gloves.
“Not much to see,” she said. “Come have a look.”
On the bed, lying in what seemed like very deliberate positions, lay an elderly couple, fully dressed, side by side.
Rebecca held ID cards and pill bottles in her hands. “Would you like the details?” she said, with a smile.
“Sure.” Tom took his notepad and pen from his pocket.
“The decedents are, respectively, eighty-eight and eighty-six. Our lady here,” Rebecca nodded toward the body, “seems to have cleared out a month’s prescriptions of zolpidem and hydromorphone.” Tom looked at the old woman and wrote down his impressions. Delicate bone structure. Skin finely wrinkled and slightly spotted, with the beautiful translucency of being ancient. Still lovely, he thought. Though the lips were tinged blue, they were colored with traces of a shimmery pink lipstick that gave them a lavender cast, a certain ghostly loveliness.
“And this fine gentleman,” Rebecca continued, “cleaned out his supplies of zolpidem and hydromorphone followed with a bit of a bourbon chaser. Quite a party.” She pointed to a bottle on the dresser. The old man’s head was slightly tilted toward the old woman.
Rebecca stepped closer to Tom, and as she typed on her tablet, he noticed her hands. Purple nitrile gloves, long fingers, no rings. “So what are you thinking?” he said.
“No injuries,” she answered, “there are no signs of entry, nothing missing.” Now two of her techs came in with body pouches and gurneys.
Tom stepped aside.
“Let’s go out,” Rebecca said, and for a second Tom’s heart flopped happily in his chest. Then he realized she meant “outside.” He followed her through the living room and out onto the front porch. She wrapped her arms around herself in the cold, and snowflakes drifted to her feet. He considered offering her his coat. Or was that too old-fashioned?
“We’ll run their samples through Tox, but it looks to me like those two decided to proceed together to the nearest exit.”
“Double suicide,” Tom said.
“Yep.”
Tom nodded. He thought about the two old people, how they’d gotten dressed up for each other. He wondered what someone would say on such an occasion. He thought about their last living moments together, how they had lain down, side by side, hands touching. The last romantic gesture of a couple of fine old fossils.
“So,” Rebecca said, “I think that’s it really.” He loved her smile, the way it was slightly too wide for her face.
What if he said something now? He checked himself. He was only the smallest bit shaky. Besides, she would understand. She’d known cops her whole life. Certainly, he wasn’t the first guy she knew with PTSD. “Hey,” he said. “Beccs.” He sounded more stern than he meant to.
“Drake,” she said, pretending to be very serious.
He laughed. And he hadn’t laughed for a long time. She laughed with him. “So,” he continued, “I would like to give you a call sometime.”
“Sure,” she said, but now her techs were rolling the gurneys out of the house, bringing out the old couple to load into the van. Tom stepped back. “Call anytime,” she said, and she followed the gurneys to the curb. He wasn’t sure how she meant it now. And while he tried to figure it out, she got into the van, and she was gone. Bravo Zulu, Tom, he thought. Well done.
Chapter Forty-Eight
9:32 AM
Friday, February 7, 2020 | 371 Nysa Vale Road
Erin lay on the sofa, Korrie curled asleep against her. She decided then that this was her new favorite stage of Korrie’s childhood. She’d said that about every stage so far. Newborn, infant, baby, crawler, talker, walker, quizzer, entertainer. But this was really the best. Now they were really talking about things, creating together, thinking together. And Korrie was so smart. She and Erin played a game in which they built a story in turns, five words at a time, always beginning with, “once there was a” something.
A monkey, a fairy, a flower. Early on, Korrie ended each tale with the protagonist successfully going potty, which she found hilarious. But by age six, the stories were filled with missions to save captured sisters or find undersea homelands.
Once there was a child, Erin thought. It was a little bit breathtaking to think that the universe had entrusted this small star into her care. She wanted wholeheartedly to do everything right, even when she couldn’t be sure what it was.
Her cell phone hummed in her pocket, and she pulled it out. The caller ID read “Peregrine Elem.”
“Shoot,” Erin whispered as she connected with the call. She’d forgotten to phone the attendance line and notify the school that Korrie would be absent. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Fullarton?” The voice was familiar, slightly annoyed.
Erin pressed the phone tighter against her ear. “Yes.”
“This is Jeanna,” said the voice, “in the office at Peregrine Elementary.”
“Right.” Erin sat up halfway. “I meant to call. Sorry.” She kept her voice low. “Korrie has a fever,” she half-whispered, “and we’re staying home today.”
“Okay,” Jeanna said, “thanks for letting us know,” a little jab of sarcasm attached to each syllable, a backhanded comment Erin chose to dismiss.
After she’d disconnected from the school, Erin lay back into the sofa cushion, Korrie’s head against her chest, and gazed into the fireplace. The fire she’d started was going out, dwindling embers dropping down into the ashes below. On the coffee table lay the matchbox with their Christmas picture printed on the front. If she wanted to keep the fire going, she would need to get more logs and kindling from the mudroom. But she didn’t want to disturb Korrie, and so she decided to let her sleep as long as she needed to, even if the fire went out.
Chapter Forty-Nine
11:00 AM
Friday, February 7, 2020 | 64 Ebony Lane, Boulder, Colorado
Aidon Clype slammed the door of the trailer as he shambled out into the fucking cold. Fucking freezing, god damn motherfucker. Under cover of the carport, he yanked open the door of his truck, climbed in, and started the engine. Turn on some fucking heat. He turned the blower up all the way and angled the vent toward his face. He was late. He’d overslept by two hours. Didn’t have any clean clothes to wear. Didn’t have time for cereal even.
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