by Edward Aubry
“What if you weren’t a traveler?”
“Retroactively dead as a dishrag,” she said, and finished her second scotch. I could see the alcohol beginning to affect her body language. “You haven’t asked me the thing I was sure you were going to ask first,” she said.
I took another swig from the bottle. The scotch was hitting me, too. I was getting drunk with my daughter. Something about that made me feel very warm.
“Do I want to know the answer?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you do.”
I laughed, hoping we were thinking about the same thing. If not, my laughter would come back as pain. “Okay, here you go. Am I going to lose Helen? Is she going to unhappen to me?”
She shook her head. “No.”
My heart nearly exploded with joy. “Never?”
Athena waved her hands in retraction.
“Well, I mean, she could still ditch you, so don’t do anything stupid. But she can’t unhappen. That’s the one thing Carlton has never successfully changed, and believe me, he has tried. Good lord, how he has tried. But your relationship is as fixed as anything we have been able to measure. The only time he even came close was when he threw that girl Wendy into your bed. I fixed that in one try. Snapped it right back.” She snapped her fingers for clarification. “Even in that timeline you were eventually going to leave her for Mom anyway, by the way. I just made it tidier for all of you.”
I took another swig of scotch. My stomach briefly reminded me that alcohol is poisonous, but got over it. This was amazingly good news. In the face of all this uncountable horror, this was a ray of hope.
“Can I tell her?” I asked, dimly aware that I was slurring my speech.
Athena rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Why do you think I’m avoiding her today? She can’t know any of this. It would break her.”
“Even the part about her not unhappening?”
“And how would you explain that without owning why everything else unhappens?” she said. “Don’t put this on her, Dad. Let her be happy for a little while. God knows she has her own trials ahead of her.”
Struggling to find a way to ask about that, I must have reacted visibly, and probably drunkenly, to this omen, because Athena’s face suddenly sank. She looked at her empty glass.
“Damn it,” was all she said.
“What trials?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“Nope.” Said Athena, getting to her feet, more than a little wobbly. “We’re done. Give Mother my love. And sober up before she gets home.”
She blipped away without further comment.
hen Helen came home, I had dinner waiting for her. Grilled salmon, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, wild rice, white zinfandel. I was attempting to put her at ease with some of her favorite foods before revealing that our relationship was in no danger from my curse. How I would avoid telling her that my curse now had a name—and its name was Carlton West—I had yet to work out. My preparations went underappreciated, however.
The very first thing she said to me when she came in the door, after a hello kiss, was, “Have you been drinking?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“Alone?” Helen had a clear look of concern on her face, doubly so given that alcoholism was not yet on the very long list of things about me which she should reasonably have cause to monitor closely. The conversation hadn’t even started and I was already behind.
“No,” I said. “Athena was here.”
Helen’s face lit up. Then fell. “Wait. ‘Was’? She’s gone already? Poop. I wanted to see her. Did you tell her I wanted to see her?”
“I told her,” I said.
“So she popped in and you started drinking? That feels like a story with a missing scene.”
“She had a stressful day. I offered her a drink, and had one myself. Can we stop talking about this?” The defensiveness in my voice was obvious even to me, and did not help my case.
“Ooooo-kay,” said Helen. Her face lit up again. “Do I smell salmon?” I led her into the dining room, where our meals sat on plates under covers to keep them warm. When I lifted hers off, and the hollandaise and salmon scented steam rolled out, she made a little squeal of delight, clapped and pulled up her chair. She took a bite without waiting for me to sit down. We were back on track.
“Mmmmm,” she said. “Why are you trying to butter me up?” There was no accusation in her tone, but I knew her well enough to know there didn’t have to be. Helen was not prone to anger or suspicion. But she was keenly perceptive, and had excellent reasons for wanting full disclosure from me in every aspect of our life together. I still tried to dodge her.
“What do you mean?”
She put her fork down. “What happened today?”
I sighed, hoping to seem like a surprise had been spoiled.
“Athena just gave me some very good news, and I made a little celebratory dinner to share with you.” I pouted. “I’m not very good at this kind of thing, I know.”
Now she did look suspicious.
“Okay,” she said evenly, “what’s the news?”
“Wow. I wanted to give this a little more fanfare or something, but here goes: she says our relationship can’t unhappen. For some reason, it stays constant even when other things around it change.”
“That’s very convenient,” she said. Not exactly the stirring hurrah I hoped for. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, then got up from her chair. Waving for me to pull my chair out, she waited for me to do so, then sat on my lap, still no indication of excitement or joy evident in her features. She kissed me softly, once.
“Please tell me what else she said.”
I sighed, this time for real.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Come on,” she said. “We are way past this. Big girl? Remember? Just tell me what it is.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sit. Eat your dinner.” She returned to her seat. I took a bite of my fish, with absolutely no awareness of how it tasted. “She really did say that our relationship is safe.”
“I believe you,” she said. “And if I had to guess, I’d say she also told you why that is, without using the words, ‘for some reason.’ Am I correct?”
Despite myself, I laughed.
“Actually, she really doesn’t know why that is.”
“So what’s the other bombshell?”
“You are really not going to like it,” I said.
“All the more reason not to drag this out. You tell me, we face it together. That’s how we roll, right?”
“Right,” I said, bracing myself. “Okay. Please don’t be upset. She said the reason my life keeps unhappening, even counting all the times before I met you… is because of Carlton.” I paused there, holding for questions.
“Keep talking.”
I forged on. “She says he is a time traveler, like her, and that he has been using the technology to torment me. I’m sorry. I feel like this is all my fault. Like I dragged you into this, and now we’re both being punished, and that’s not fair.” By the time I heard how badly I was rambling, it was already out there. Still, she did not react.
“Is that all? Was there anything else?”
Don’t tell her. “Yes. She said Carlton becomes some kind of dictator in the future. There’s a war, and a lot of people are going to die. And that feels like my fault too.”
She took another bite of her fish. Swallowed. A forkful of rice. Still no reaction. I had no idea what to do or say.
“Helen?”
“Yes?”
“Are you… are we okay?” I couldn’t think of an even remotely adequate question, but in my attempt to do so, I had stumbled across the worst possible one.
“No,” she said. Then she ate a spear of asparagus.
I sat, helpless, silently begging her to say something else, knowing whatever I said next would continue to make things exponentially worse. I tried to eat my meal, and watched a tear fall onto my plate. This went on for about te
n more minutes, which was just enough time for Helen to finish everything on her plate and drain her glass of wine.
Then she got up, put her jacket back on, and walked out the door.
elen did not return that night. Now that I was working from home, the next day was one long exercise in patience. Unable to do anything productive, I spent the entire day waiting for her to walk in the door at the end of it. I made beef stroganoff, another dish for which she had a fondness. Half of it ended up in a container in my refrigerator, after my solitary dining experience. Mary Sue offered me vague feline consolation, but even she seemed to be asking where Helen was.
Day three consisted mostly of me trying to work up the courage to go after her. By noon, I had pulled myself together enough to attempt to call her, which was rewarded by an immediate forward to voice mail. Seeing her face on my tablet screen cheerfully asking me to leave a message gave me a very brief opportunity to imagine her being happy to see me. At two in the afternoon, I called the library with a fabricated story about her tablet being on the fritz, and asked if they could page her to the vid at the circulation desk. I was told she had not been to work in two days, in a tone that implied the librarian finally had an idea why his curator had gone missing.
Day four, I manned up and ventured out to her home. There was no sign of her car, and predictably no answer at the door. I took out my key card hesitantly, trying to decide just how inappropriate it would be to let myself in. The decision was taken away from me by the lock’s failure to recognize my code.
Day five I spent in the reading room of the print collection, with no realistic hope she would show up. Day six I spent at the aquarium, quite alone.
By the end of one full week without her, I began to understand how things unhappen to normal people.
ay eight ended with me sitting on the floor, my back to the couch in front of my fireplace, staring at the blue and orange flames. In their hypnotic dance, I found a sort of focus I was unable to achieve on my own. The topic of my contemplations that evening was a plan for how I would return to my own time. Abandoning my work would be easy, as it was all meaningless to me now. My time nomad plan from months earlier was no longer viable, as I considered that too likely to be enjoyable. What I really needed was to return to my life of inconstant drudgery, with a new unfulfilling job randomly assigned to me every few weeks. Athena said I lived in purgatory, and I was ready to embrace that as my destiny.
I didn’t hear the front door open, but I did see her walk into the room. For a moment, I considered the likelihood that I was hallucinating her, and didn’t dare leap up to greet her, for fear that the resulting crash of reality would break me for good. Real or imaginary, she planted herself on the floor next to me.
“Watcha doin’?” asked Helen.
“Watching a fire,” I said.
“How come?”
I shrugged, without looking at her.
“Fire is pretty. This place has been in a beauty shortage for a while.”
She leaned against me, slipped her arm into the crook of my elbow, and rested her head on my shoulder. We sat like that for a while, with no sense of time, and no need for it.
Eventually, I asked, “Where did you go?”
“Paris,” she said.
I had no possible reaction to that. “Oh,” I said. For a while, I decided I was waiting for her to offer some further explanation, or maybe even a clear path to reconciliation, but by the time I had worked out how to ask her for either of those things, she had already fallen asleep.
woke to the smell of coffee and bacon, still on the living room floor, a feather pillow under my head and a blanket covering the rest of me. I shambled into the kitchen to find Helen at the stove, making an omelet.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Hey,” I said, trying to blink myself awake.
“How hungry are you?”
I thought about that.
“Two eggs hungry,” I said. She slid the omelet onto a plate, then chopped about a third of it off with the spatula and slid that piece onto another plate for herself.
“Two egg omelet,” she said, placing it on my kitchen table next to a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice and a cloth napkin. “Bon appétit.”
It was cheddar, mushroom and chopped bacon, and quite delicious.
“I tried to call you,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t call back.”
I shrugged off the apology. “You were upset.”
“Not at you.” She put her plate down at the spot next to mine, and pulled up a chair.
I frowned. “It sure seemed like you were upset with me,” I said.
She took a bite, apparently to buy her a little time to respond.
“Yeah, I was at first,” she finally admitted. “Not now.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because you told me the truth, which was exactly what I asked you to do. It’s not your fault the truth was so abominable.”
I poked at my food. “Should I ask you how your week was?”
“You can if you want. I’m going to tell you about it whether you ask or not, but if it makes you feel more in control, I’ll wait for you to ask.” She paused.
“How was your week?”
“I went to see Carlton. We had a pretty big fight. The details of that probably aren’t important. What is important is that I believe you. Every word.”
“Oh,” I said. “Um…”
“You don’t have to say anything. You already said what you needed to say, and I walked out on you when I should have been thanking you.” She stopped there, and ate a bit of her omelet.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I shouldn’t have dumped all that on you. Athena told me not to, and I did it anyway, and I wish I hadn’t. I completely understand that you would be upset with me for telling you things you couldn’t believe about someone you loved.”
She took my hand and looked me in the eyes. “I wasn’t upset because what you said was unbelievable. I was upset because it rang true.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“When we first met, I was young. He was dashing, and exotic, and it was so very, very easy to fall for him. The fact that there were power dynamics in his family that made a relationship between us impossible just fueled it all the more. When he told me he loved me, it felt so dramatic, and important. Like he was willing to defy the world just to be with me.” She paused there, pushed her omelet around with her fork and took a tiny bite. After a moment, she continued.
“It’s easy to look back on a failed relationship and see all the things about it that made it wrong. At the time, all I could feel was the romance. It was so easy to see myself as the Juliet to his Romeo, and so hard to remember what a stupid story that is, and how horribly it ends for everyone involved.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shook her head. “Don’t. It’s okay. I loved an idealized version of Carlton, and I loved the story I thought we were playing out. But I’m not the smitten girl I was, and the rose colored glasses have faded to something darker over the last three years. I wanted so badly to hate you for telling me those things about him, but I wanted to hate you because it was easier than hating myself for already thinking them.”
“Oh God,” I said. “You didn’t tell him—”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t tell him any of what Athena told you. Um…” She winced. “He does know about you now, though. I’m sorry about that.”
“Great,” I said. “I don’t suppose that was going to stay secret forever anyway. So, what did you talk about?”
She shied away. “I don’t really want to go into detail. It was a huge blowup, and we both said things we probably didn’t mean. But the way he said those things… I believe he can become the man you described. I think I’ve always believed it on some level. I just foolishly imagined that I could change him.”
This would have been the appropriate time to inform her that she could, in fact, have changed hi
m. That with her help, he could find the restraint not to destroy the world. I want to believe the reason I held my tongue at that moment was I knew how badly it would hurt her to know it, and what she knew about him now might have jeopardized that influence anyway. They had just had a huge fight. It was probably too late for her to make it all better, and even if she did, it would mean sacrificing herself to a lifetime of misery married to man she now truly believed was just one bad day away from becoming a monster. That’s what I want to believe. But she didn’t ask, and that’s why I didn’t say.
“So,” said Helen. “That’s over. The answer to your question from a week ago is yes, I am okay. Yes, we are okay. I’m sorry I said no. I was mistaken.”
“Understood,” I said.
“Good. Now about this other matter, that our relationship can’t unhappen, she’s sure about that, right?”
“As far as I know,” I said. “She did say they don’t know why it’s true, but apparently there have been dozens of times it could have unhappened, and it always holds.”
“Excellent. That’s excellent. Because…” She leaned into my ear and whispered, “I do believe we have a baby to make.”
Neither of us pointed out that Athena was not due to be born for another four years
ne evening, while Helen and I were home playing Scrabble, a dull flash of light came from our kitchen. By the time my brain had registered the new stimulus, Helen was already out of her chair (having toppled it doing so), and in the next room. I came in to find mother and daughter in a tight embrace. Helen’s face was not visible from that angle, but I could see Athena balancing embarrassment and adoration in a kind of eye-rolling smile.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
Helen kissed her with a loud “Mwah!”
“I need to borrow Nigel,” said Athena.
Helen took my arm and stood her ground. “Anything you have to tell him you can say to me, too.” It sounded about as rehearsed as my bad jokes.
“It’s something I have to show him.”
“Oh,” said Helen, deflated. “But then you’ll do a time travelly thing and bring him back seconds later, and then we can have tea, right?” She nodded with an open-mouthed smile.