by MG Buehrlen
How am I supposed to do that? I yelled back at him. I’m all the way across town.
I waited for his answer, but none came. I didn’t even know if he could hear me shouting at him in my head. I felt his presence lift, then disappear, leaving me alone with Blue. I stared down at my shoes, breathing hard. Everything was tinted red.
Limbo tugged at me, tilting the Chicago skyline and making me feel nauseous like after a carnival ride. The more I fought against it, the more I couldn’t tell the difference between the past and the present. It felt like I was straddling a fence, being stretched from both sides. My body belonged in the past, yearned to stay in the past, but my soul belonged in the future.
And it was heading back to Limbo whether I liked it or not.
Blue sat next to me and rubbed circles on my back. “Sousa? You OK?”
What was I supposed to do? Ask Blue to take me back to the bakery? Back into Cafferelli territory? All I wanted to do was kiss him until the black came to take me away. I wanted to breathe him in until there was no more breath. I wanted his scent and his face and his warmth to be the last few memories I took with me to Limbo.
But if I stayed with Blue until my time was up – if I was sent back to Limbo while still sitting here beside him – the old me, the 1927 me, wouldn’t know who he was. She’d find herself in the arms of a stranger. Dressed in strange clothes. Far from her home.
What would she do? Hit him? Run from him? Tell him to never lay a hand on her again?
I couldn’t do that to Blue. I couldn’t do that to her. Going back to the bakery was the only way to leave her with some semblance of normalcy. She’d still be freaked out – she’d have lost two days of her life, with no memory of either. Two days I stole from her.
From myself.
But at least she’d know how to get home. I owed her that much.
I jumped to my feet and started back toward Michigan Avenue. I’d hail a cab and get as far away from Blue as possible before I ascended. Far enough away so he couldn’t follow. I fisted my hands at my sides, fighting off tears.
“Alex,” he called out, running after me.
I walked faster. I didn’t want to run, but I would if I had to. Luckily, though, I came to a smaller street before Michigan Avenue and spotted the bright yellow of a taxi a block away. I lifted my arm and flagged it down. Even if I ascended to Limbo on the way to the bakery, my past self would still be able to find her way home. All she’d have to do is tell the cab driver where to go.
Blue caught up to me just as the gleaming yellow Checkerboard Taxi pulled up to the curb. He caught my hand. His eyes pleaded. “Did I do something wrong?”
I shook my head, staring at his shoes. The reflection from the fountain sent orange light dancing across the leather.
“Did you remember where your aunt lives?” His voice was soft. Heartbroken.
I nodded.
He shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. I could feel his pulse throbbing in his hand. His skin felt like fire. He started to say something several times, but couldn’t seem to find the right words.
“I left the money in Helena’s bedside drawer,” I said. “I want you to have it.”
He furrowed his brow. “What? No, Alex–”
“I want you to pay off Frank’s debts. Then I want you and Helena to start fresh. Save up all the money you make and keep it hidden.” He kept trying to interrupt me, but I refused to let him. “I’ve already made up my mind. And I don’t care what you believe about taking money from a girl. You’ll take it, and you’ll do as I say. It’s my money, I can do whatever I want with it. Now promise me. Promise you’ll pay off his debts and you’ll never work for Fifth Street again.”
For a long time, he was speechless. Finally he cleared his throat and nodded. “I’ll pay you back.” His voice was thin.
“No, you won’t. Then you’ll just be trying to pay off another Frank. I won’t allow it.”
He let a ghost of a smile appear at the corners of his mouth. He brushed a strand of hair from my face. “You get a little bossy when you’re tired, you know.”
I tried to smile, but it came off as more of a wince than anything. I looked down so he wouldn’t see it. “This was the best night of my life. I want you to know that.” I spoke the words into his breast pocket. Then I tore my hand from his and climbed into the cab. I slid onto the bench seat in the back, and Blue latched the door behind me. He reached in through the window and found my hand again.
“You don’t have to go just yet,” he said. “You could stay one more night.” His voice wavered. He refused to look me in the eye.
I couldn’t look at him either. I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye.
The taxi pulled away from the curb, and Blue’s hand slipped from mine. I turned around and looked out the back window. He stood there, a hunched shadow, a bent frame, watching me go. His hands were in his pockets.
“Where to, miss?” the cab driver asked.
Through blurred tears, I handed him a five dollar bill. “As far as this will take me.”
CHAPTER 12
IMPACT
When I return to my garden in Limbo, Porter is there waiting for me. He’s still wearing his black polo and orange ball cap, but the laugh lines around his watery eyes are long gone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he says, storming up to me and grabbing me by my coat collar. “Do you think this is some sort of game?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear,” I say, cowering. “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to touch the soulmarks.”
“I’m not talking about touching soulmarks. I’m talking about ignoring me when I told you to leave. I’m talking about staying as long as you could in that body with no regard for the rules. I’m talking about making an impact.” He pushes me away like he can’t stand the sight of me, and I stumble backwards. He turns his back to me, pacing. Steam rises from his shoulders.
“I thought we were supposed to use time travel to help people,” I say. “I thought that’s what I did.”
He wheels around and aims a finger at me. “That’s not what you did. You played dress-up while you chased after some ridiculous teenage fantasy. You can’t make that much of an impact on the past. You can’t fall in love.”
“I didn’t.”
He gives me this cynical look that makes me think twice about my answer. I hadn’t fallen in love, had I? It was one day. One date.
“What about him, then?” Porter says. “You don’t think he fell in love?”
I don’t know how to respond. I’m too shocked to form a coherent sentence. Surely Blue hadn’t fallen in love with me. We shared a kiss. A single kiss. We held hands. It didn’t mean he was in love.
Porter squeezes the bridge of his nose like he has a migraine. “Our impact on the world as a whole, as humans, is microscopic compared to the ebb and flow of the universe. We think we’re so important that if we go back in time and move a pebble in the street in 1943, we’ll send the world toppling off its axis. It’s simply not true. What can change the course of the world, however, is the impact we make on individual lives. This is why we never stay longer than a few hours, and we never manipulate historical events. We never interfere in the lives of historical figures. We are spectators only. We are listeners. Gatherers of knowledge. Now and again we move something – an artifact, a document – to a secret location so we can recover it in Base Life, but we do so after years of meticulous research. We only take things that are deemed lost or destroyed in the present time. We change things that no one will notice. We don’t make an impact. But you?” His short laugh is dry and hollow. “You broke just about every rule we have – short of killing someone – on your first run. I think that must be some kind of record.”
I sink down to the black and hug my knees to my chest. I feel like throwing up.
I hate screwing things up. I don’t take things apart and leave the pieces scattered across the floor. I finish what I start, and I ma
ke it work better than it did before.
Porter heaves a sigh. The steam rising from his shoulders starts to fade. “We all remember our first loves, Alex. Second and third loves come and go, but first loves…” He pauses as though recalling his own. “They change our lives. They make an impact. That boy is going to make decisions now that he wouldn’t have made if he hadn’t met you. Those decisions will change the course of his existence. They’ll make a ripple effect. It will change things on Earth. If you go back to your Base Life now, there’s no telling what could be different. He may decide to take a different path in life because you left him that money. And worse yet, he may miss out on another love because he was looking for you or waiting for you to return. In that case, a child who was meant to live may never be born. Generations would disappear overnight. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
My tongue is thick and stuck to the roof of my mouth. Of all the things I could possibly screw up, I had to go and delete entire generations from existence. With my first kiss.
“Is there a way to fix it?” My throat is so dry, I can hardly hear my own words.
“You think I would’ve let you go if there wasn’t?”
I scramble to my feet. “What is it then? I’ll do anything.”
Porter hesitates. He looks like he doesn’t trust me. “You’ll have to go back to 1927.”
“OK. Then what do I do? Tell him he can’t keep the money? Tell him I really am married to a mob boss?”
“No. This time you won’t be speaking to the boy at all. You’ll go back to when you first landed, when you woke up in his apartment that morning. You will dress yourself in whatever suitable clothes you can find, and you will sneak out without speaking to the boy or his mother. No sleeping in until lunchtime. No pickled cucumber soup. No date. No kissing. And you’ll take the money in the bedside table with you.” I open my mouth to interject, but he continues. “You’ll take a taxi back to the bakery, leave your host body there, and report back here. Understand?”
I stare at him like there are marbles spilling from his ears. “You can’t be serious. Everything I went through, everything that happened… You want me to erase it?”
He lifts his chin, daring me to defy him. “Yes.”
“But…” I grasp at straws, trying to delay the inevitable. “I didn’t sleep in until lunchtime. I landed at lunchtime.”
“You landed in a sleeping body. You slept for hours before you woke up. This time you’re going to wake up before morning. You’ll sneak out without a sound. That way all he’ll remember of this whole fiasco is that he saved a girl’s life in front of the bakery, and she saved his in the alley. He brought her home, nursed her wounds, and she was gone the next morning. It’ll be a story he can tell his grandchildren, a mystery he’ll wonder about from time to time, but it won’t make a life-changing impact.”
“How do you know about all that, anyway? The bakery? The alley? The pickled cucumber soup? I didn’t tell you about any of it.”
“I saw it when I tapped into your soulmark.”
“You mean, when you were inside my head, you were spying on me?”
“No. When you tap into a soulmark, if you have the strength to touch it and not be pulled into the past, you can see fragments of that soul’s entire timeline. I saw bits and pieces of what you saw. Peg Leg. Buckingham Fountain. The soup.”
I look out at all fifty-six of my soulmarks. “So your past is written on your soulmark like a record? If I tap in, I can see what my other lives were like without traveling into those bodies?”
“Theoretically.” The word is short and clipped. “But you don’t have the strength. And you’re not allowed to touch a soulmark again without my express consent and supervision.”
“So you know what I was like in 1927, don’t you? You know what the money was for. Why I could fight and run so well.”
He purses his lips. “Yes, but I’m not going to tell you. Maybe never knowing the truth about that life will be sufficient punishment for what you’ve done. And after you return, I’m going to remove that soulmark so you’ll never find it again.”
I must have a pitiful look on my face because Porter softens. “You can’t get attached to your past lives, Alex. You can’t get attached to the people you meet there. Trust me when I say they are but strangers on a train. Unfamiliar faces in a stack of photographs. If you try to find them in your Base Life, they’ll all be dead and gone. Long since buried.” He steps up to me and places his hands on my shoulders. “You, Alex Wayfare, won’t truly know any of them. And they won’t truly know you.”
I know he’s right – if Blue, Nick, happened to run into my 1927 self later on, she wouldn’t remember him at all. She wouldn’t know him, and he wouldn’t know her.
But I know Nick Piasecki, the deli delivery boy from 1927. That fact wouldn’t change. I would never unlearn him, never forget his face. I’d know him for the rest of my life. And he would know me.
At least, some form of me.
I drop my shoulders under the weight of his hands. They feel so heavy all of a sudden. “When do you want me to go back?”
“Right now.” He gestures to the soulmark closest to us. “Take hold of it. It’ll do the rest.”
I ease up to it, apprehensive about the magnetic pull. The soulmark sways slowly before me, taunting me. Almost like it knew what it was doing when it pulled me in the last time. I look back at Porter over my shoulder. “I have no other choice?”
The look he gives me is enough.
I reach out.
It sucks me in.
RETURN TO SENDER
This time I felt myself land. The black released its hold like a glove slipped from a hand. Porter was right, I did land in a sleeping body. It was difficult to shove off the heaviness of sleep, but I managed to do it far quicker than last time. I awoke to Helena’s darkened bedroom awash with moonlight.
I rolled out of her bed without a sound. My bare feet met the wood floor. In the oval mirror above the dresser, my 1927 self stared back at me. Cream-colored nightgown. Bony shoulders. Dark hair rolled in Sousa curlers.
Sad eyes.
I picked up the photograph of Blue, the one of him leaning against the brick wall beside Frank. My fingertips traced the outline of his face. I swallowed at a knot in my throat that wouldn’t go away. A few hours ago, I thought I’d never see him again. Now I was back under his roof, just a few steps from his bedroom door.
I guess both of our wishes came true after all.
It didn’t seem fair, erasing the best day of my life from history. Erasing my first kiss. Just when I finally began to feel normal, the universe had to call a do-over.
Maybe I wasn’t meant to be happy. Maybe I’d been happy enough for one soul over the course of fifty-six lives. Maybe this was the universe’s way of balancing things out. I took something, and now it was time to give it back.
On a chair in the corner, I found my original clothes. The black skirt, the brown coat, the worn black boots. I guess I woke up before Helena could take them with her to work. I was glad I didn’t have to steal anything of Helena’s, and glad I wouldn’t end up ruining the French woman’s white gloves after all.
When I was dressed, I pulled the Sousa ribbons from my hair. Dark ringlets fell all around my face. I held the ribbons in my open hands, wishing I could take them with me. I could see it now – I’d be the only person in history to choke up every time she heard Stars and Stripes Forever.
I kept one of the ribbons to pull my hair back in a tail, just like it was the day I first saw my reflection. I slid Helena’s bedside drawer open, and my hand closed around the roll of twenty-dollar bills. I was tempted to leave just one twenty in the drawer, but I didn’t want Porter to send me back again.
Once was all I could take.
I inched open the bedroom door and peeked out into the hall. The house was still. A grandfather clock ticked below in the foyer. A slice of moonlight shone from beneath Blue’s bedroom door.
; I wanted to open it. Tiptoe to his bed and kiss him goodbye on the cheek. I wanted him to wake up, grab my wrist, and tell me not to go. To pull me under his blankets and make me forget all about Mr Lipscomb and Dr Farrow and Tabitha and suspension and schizophrenia. Hulking shadows of disappointment. Claire’s embarrassment. Audrey’s pale, shorn head under her bandana. Something told me Blue was more than capable of making me forget it all. When I was with him, everything else seemed hazy.
Alex.
I closed my eyes and sighed. I know, Porter. I’m going.
I made my way down the stairs, biting my lip and treading lightly on the outside of each step so they wouldn’t squeak. Even though I was careful, several of them still sounded their protest against my weight.
I eased open the front door and stepped outside. The chill of black sky morning filled my lungs, making me shiver. The streets were deserted and cold. I looked back over my shoulder to take in the Piasecki apartment one last time.
Then a light flicked on upstairs. A shadow moved down the hall.
“Alex?” I heard Blue whisper.
I jerked the door closed behind me.
And I ran.
PORTER’S REASONS
This time when I return to Limbo I don’t remain standing for long. I crumple to the black and start to cry like an idiot.
The funny thing about Limbo is, the perception of crying is just as powerful as the real thing. I even go through my normal routine: start crying because I’m overwhelmed, I’ve screwed something up, and can’t fight the tears any longer; feel like a baby for crying and try battling the tears again; tell myself I can cry if I want to and let another wave of shudders crash over me; feel self-conscious because by now someone else knows I’m crying and they’re standing there awkwardly, not knowing how to react; dry my tears, insist I’m all right, and begin to mend.
The awkward person in this case is Porter. His hands are in his pockets. The bill of his cap hides his face.
I’m actually glad he feels awkward.