The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  “It may sound weird right now, but you’ll all be doing it soon. It’s great for some things—like the crime rate, for example. Nobody gets away with anything. The problem starts when other people besides you have access to your life.”

  I hold up a deck. “These are my dad’s. This one’s from 2058. That might be the earliest one. Here. This is 2086. That’s the year I was born.”

  He tugs on a strand of my hair. “I could see you being born?”

  “Yeah, maybe. If we get through this week.” I pull out decades of my father’s memories and under them find decks with my mother’s initials.

  “Unbelievable,” Ethan says.

  I pull them out, re-creating the years in order. My eyes are aching, but I strain to read the dates. I find my own memories. Four and a half decks of them. I didn’t start banking until I was seven. And then I see there is one incomplete deck that comprises the brief life and memory of Julius. I put it all back, close the box and latch it. I put my hands over my face. What would I see if I looked through his eyes?

  I stand. That’s all I can take for now.

  Ethan is studying a yellowed piece of paper he found among the memory banks in the last box. Something about his posture alarms me.

  “Ethan?”

  No answer. I walk over to him. He is staring at a deeply faded drawing. I strain my eyes to make out the pencil marks. “That looks old,” I say. “What is it?”

  Still no answer. I bend closer to see it. It’s a sketch of a storm of some kind. It’s got some arrows and diagrams to one side. Across the bottom is a map.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  Ethan looks up from the drawing. I have never seen him like this before. “Do you know what this is?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “It’s mine. It’s a drawing I made of the day at the river I described to you. The day you came through and I found you.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “No. That’s what I don’t understand, Pren. It is sitting in the bottom drawer of my desk in my room.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am absolutely sure.”

  “Did you make a copy?”

  “There is no copy.”

  I consider this. “So you mean you haven’t given it to him yet.”

  January 2012

  Dear Julius,

  Mom caught me writing this letter to you. She says I can’t write to you ever again or she’ll tell Mr. Robert. I told her I write in the dark and no one knows, but she still said no.

  So this is my last one for now, and I just want to say that this place we live in now is beautiful. It’s hard being here in a lot of ways, but yesterday I walked home from school through the park and snow was falling, and I felt like the luckiest person in the world.

  The hardest part is not having you here with me, but it’s not nearly as hard as it used to be. It used to be that your life had ended, but now that we’re here, it hasn’t even begun. We are fixing things, so when your life does begin you are going to get to do the greatest stuff. You’re going to swim in the ocean and eat mangoes anytime you want. And you’re going to see squirrels and carpenter bees and maybe have a dog for a pet. And I’m going to show you how to plant these oniony bulbs that become flowers in the spring.

  It’s going to be a better life for us, J. You are going to get to grow up this time, I promise you.

  Love,

  Your sister, Prenna

  FOURTEEN

  It is still early Friday. We are driving along the Meadowbrook Parkway as though in a dream. The sun is shining and I’ve got one bare foot out the window, feeling the wind through my toes.

  We stop at Target to buy a prepaid phone.

  “Go ahead, splurge,” Ethan says to me jokingly when I hold up two. I guess it’s not every day we come upon thousands of dollars.

  I use one of the phones to call my mother. I’ve been wondering what she knows, whether they told her I got away. I know how they hate to admit mistakes or ever let on that they are not in control.

  “Molly, I can only talk for a second,” I tell her breathlessly when she picks up. I have a lurking fear they will somehow trace the call if I stay on too long.

  “Prenna! Where are you?”

  “I’m fine. I got away from Mr. Robert, and no one is hurt. I need to try to fix something Poppy told me about, but I’ll be home by Sunday at the latest.” I hear voices in the background. I realize she’s not alone. “Mom?”

  “Prenna?” Now it’s a different voice. I think it’s Ms. Cynthia on the phone. It’s a voice that curdles my blood. “Can you hear me, Prenna? You’ll make life very unpleasant for your mother if you persist in this. And for Katherine.”

  She is grotesque. I should hang up. “They didn’t do anything.”

  “All the more reason you should bear them in mind.”

  “I’m not the one wanting to hurt them!” It’s the twelve-year-old me, rising to defend us against the insidious Ms. Cynthia. I need to calm down. She starts to talk but I talk over her. “I’ll be back in two days. You leave them alone, and I will go straight to Mr. Robert’s door and turn myself in. You can do whatever you want to me then. But if you hurt them, I swear I will bring EVERYTHING down.” I hang up. I crack the phone in two at the joint and throw it across the parking lot.

  I walk a few yards away from the car, crouch down and put my face in my hands. A minute or so later I feel Ethan’s hand on my back.

  “That didn’t go so well.”

  “Not so well.” I stand up. I wipe my eyes. “It’s going to be okay, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” And somehow I know it’s true, because for the first time in the history of Ms. Cynthia it wasn’t me who sounded scared. It was her.

  This may be the first hour of freedom I’ve had in my life here, so we decide we ought to go see the ocean in person. “We’ve got to be somewhere,” Ethan says philosophically, and that does appear to be true.

  My vision is really clearing, and it feels miraculous. It is different and better than it ever was through those piece-of-crap glasses. Driving along the shore under a blue sky and a washy yellow sun with the dunes of the Atlantic Ocean just beyond my window, the planet feels scrubbed new and so beautiful.

  Ethan glances at me and smiles.

  We drive out to Jones Beach, to Field Two, and park near the snack bar. It is already filling up. Why not? It’s a beautiful and very warm Friday in May.

  “This is perfect,” Ethan says as we watch clusters of people in beach gear stream by, dragging coolers and umbrellas and a few small children. “What better place for a couple of folks running for their lives and concerned with the fate of humanity?”

  For the moment, though, we stay in the car. Ethan takes out the New York Times from this coming Sunday and divides it into parts.

  “You can properly read now, can’t you?” Ethan asks, watching me trying out the small print on the front page, as proud as if he’d taught me himself.

  We are playing it cool, but I can tell we are both uneasy, afraid to open the paper and look inside. When my family emigrated, we travelers brought so few artifacts back with us that this newspaper is almost as strange to me as it is to Ethan.

  I start with the weather at the top. “You could find success as a weather forecaster with these papers,” I say.

  Ethan is glancing uncertainly at the sports section. “And make a bloody fortune gambling on sports scores. I always start with this page, but it seems so wrong to look at it.”

  “I know what you mean.” I take that and the business section and put them to the side. “Let’s not worry about these for now.”

  Together, we page through the front section. Just glancing from headline to headline, column to column, I don’t see anything that strikes me as out of step with the general stream of news, at least not so far as I follow it. The immigration has apparently done a good job
of not fixing anything. Maybe it has also succeeded in preventing uncontainable changes.

  At one point Ethan puts down the paper and just gazes at me like, How did we get here? My heart goes out to him. I am used to the world being out of order.

  I think of the look on his face when he found his drawing in Poppy’s storage box. He’s been through a lot today and it’s not even noon.

  I touch my fingers to his wrist. “I’m sorry to get you mixed up in all this.”

  For a moment he looks at me in our old way. “I’m already so mixed up over you, Henny. Since the first day I saw you. There’s no getting out of it now.”

  “I think we should look at the Metro section,” I say, after we split a corn dog, a bag of chips and a lemonade from the snack bar and get back in the car. I unfold it and put it in front of us. Under the fold there is a prominent article accompanied by a photo of a man and a photo of a woman.

  Ethan leans in. “Holy shit, do you know who this is?” He means the woman. I move aside so he can scan the columns. His finger stops on her name at the top of the article. “Yeah, it’s definitely her.”

  “Who?”

  “Mona Ghali. The scientist who wrote the papers I told you about. At the lab where I interned last summer.”

  “The paper you wanted to show to Ben Kenobi.”

  “Exactly.”

  “My God. What happened to her?”

  We’re both so agitated and flustered, we are reading all spasmodically and out of sequence. I go back to the headline. “I think she’s dead.” I read aloud, “Lovers’ Quarrel Turns Deadly.” I try to slow down and read the first couple of paragraphs carefully and in order. “I guess it turned deadly for her.” I point to the man. “This guy”—I look for the name—“Andrew Baltos killed her.”

  Ethan looks aghast. He’s stopped reading. “She’s dead?”

  I check the date again, just to be sure. “No. She’s alive at the moment. She’ll be dead on Saturday night at around seven-forty-five.”

  Ethan is staring at the article without quite bringing himself to read it. “Why? Why would anyone do that to her?”

  “It seems to say this guy Andrew is her boyfriend and they had a fight.” I read on a little ways. “The guy is not denying he killed her. He claims he did it in self-defense and that she had a gun.”

  Ethan takes a moment to absorb this. “Do you think this could be it?”

  We both know what “it” is. It’s too momentous a coincidence not to be. “I think so.” My hands flutter nervously as I refold the paper to get the crease out of the middle of the picture. “Did my father know about her?”

  “I told him about her work. Not the wave-energy work as much as the dark-matter stuff she was doing on the side. I don’t know if I said her name. I never got the chance to give him that paper she wrote.”

  I rest my eyes for a minute before I read on. “And it was her birthday.”

  “She got killed on her birthday? Gets killed?”

  “Like Shakespeare. Shakespeare died on his birthday.” I finish the article. “I thought we’d be looking for something like a political assassination or maybe even a corporate assassination. You know what I mean? I wasn’t imagining a girl on her birthday in a fight with her boyfriend.”

  Ethan is staring at the picture. “Well, but this girl is kind of a special case.”

  I go back to the paper. “The lab is in Teaneck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s where it happened. Happens.”

  He is shaking his head. “Crazy. I’ve been there probably a hundred times.”

  “That could be useful, right?” I lay the newspaper on the dashboard to study the man’s picture up close in full sunshine. “We have to find out who this guy is. We should find out everything we can about him.”

  Ethan is nodding. “I’ve still got her paper in my backpack. I can’t believe she’s dead.”

  “She’s not.”

  “Supposed to die, I mean.”

  “We’re going to keep her alive, remember?”

  We scour the rest of the newspaper from May 18, just to be sure, and then read through the other three papers we brought, which take us through the end of the month.

  We find something important almost right away. In the paper dated May 21, an article buried deep in the Metro section describes an unusual turn in the case of Mona Ghali and Andrew Baltos. What appeared to be a lovers’ quarrel and an accidental killing in self-defense has begun to appear more complicated. Two computers in Mona Ghali’s office were wiped nearly clean and a file cabinet was emptied.

  We also have a newspaper from May 28, reporting that Mona Ghali’s apartment had been messed with too. Files had been taken from her home computer, and the place had been thoroughly searched the night she died. Is supposed to die.

  A related story from the May 27 paper, which we do not have, is also mentioned here. As soon as the plot started to thicken, Baltos disappeared before the police could take him into custody, and they think he fled the country with a fake passport.

  “That is lame,” Ethan points out as I read it to him.

  “He sounds like quite a mysterious character,” I say, looking up from the paper. “He’s not a US citizen, they can’t figure out his real name, and they have no idea how he got here. He must have gotten into this country illegally.”

  “So maybe it is more the way you were imagining,” Ethan says when I finish reading everything I can find. “Baltos wanted to kill her—wants to kill her—for her work and the work she’ll do in the future, and that is also the reason we need to save her.”

  “But this guy doesn’t know the work she’ll do in the future. He doesn’t have the kind of knowledge we have. He can’t possibly know this is the fork.”

  Ethan is staring at the man’s picture again. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, he can’t be part of our immigration.”

  “How do you know?” Ethan asks.

  “Because he’s in this newspaper. These were written and printed before we came.”

  “Right, of course.” Ethan shakes his head as though to straighten out his thoughts.

  “Still, you can cause the fork without knowing you’re causing the fork, obviously,” I say. “And he must have suspected she was onto something. Was he trying to steal her research? Use it for his own glory?”

  Ethan considers this. “Well, if he did, he didn’t get very far with it. The future as Ben Kenobi described it is a climate fiasco. It doesn’t sound like it benefits from any revolution of zero-emissions wave energy.”

  “No. It doesn’t. It didn’t. No glory there.”

  “Maybe he’s a corporate spy, working for big oil. You know, some big greedy oil conglomerate trying to squelch a new technology that could put them out of business. You read about stuff like that sometimes. Or maybe you just see it in movies.”

  I stare at my toenails, thinking. “It’s a good theory. Hard to prove.”

  Ethan shrugs. “Too bad we can’t do Internet searches of the near future. I mean, hey, it’s only a couple days away.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, what’s with that? You can’t even look up tomorrow. Who says the Internet is boundless?”

  We leave the newspapers in the car and strategize while we walk along the sand. We run in and out of the cold, thrilling surf and make big plans, “big, smart plans,” as Ethan says.

  But once we figure those out, we realize the ocean is more fun when you have a bathing suit.

  I guess without really saying it, we have the feeling that though tomorrow is a momentous day—nothing less than a day to change the world—today is something pretty momentous too. It’s a little piece of time we can steal before we have to face our lives again.

  So at Ethan’s urging we leave Long Island and drive through Brooklyn, then cross Staten Island, heading an hour and a half down the coast of New Jersey until we find a tall pink hotel right on a boardwalk fronting a wide, crowded ocean beach.

  It isn’t a beauti
ful hotel or anything. It is your standard beachside tower from the 1970s with a lot of stucco and balconies, but it feels weirdly perfect.

  Checking in is a little awkward. Ethan strides to the counter full of purpose and comes back from it looking confused.

  “There’s only one room available. It’s got a queen-sized bed and a pull-out couch or something like that. I’ll take the couch. Do you mind sharing?” This is such unfamiliar territory, he hasn’t quite figured out how to joke about it.

  “No. That’s fine.”

  Our room is on the seventh floor and has a partial ocean view, which means if you go out to the tiny balcony and crane your neck pretty far to the right, you can see a tiny sliver of it. Mostly the view is of a parking lot and an IHOP, and it is beyond my best hopes.

  In one day I went from total hopelessness in a basement prison to being here, on the edge of the ocean, the edge of a true accomplishment and the edge of a pancake house, for God’s sake, with a person I think I might really love. It is strange and thrilling to know that nobody else is watching what I do, seeing what I see, listening to what I say. For once.

  Before I get too high, I think of Katherine. I wish she could taste this.

  Two of the walls of the room are white and two are aqua colored. The bedspread is a rubbery floral, and the couch looks certain to be uncomfortable, but the room is bright and clean. There is a rough straw mat under my feet that smells like the beach. I go into the bathroom to check it out. I am euphoric over the little soaps and shampoos.

  Do you know what this is like for me? I feel like shouting. I can see! I can say what I think! I can use one little shampoo and take the other one home! I can imagine the future opening up so that none of us knows what’s going to happen anymore!