The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too.”

  We get back to work.

  I keep searching for Andrew Baltos on the Web and finding nothing. He seems like somebody who’s good at self-deleting. Finally I get off the bed and retrieve the red folder from the safe. I flop back down. Ethan is still deep in the newspapers. I touch my toe to his knee, just because I can.

  “Don’t get me started, Jamesie,” he warns me, not looking up from his paper.

  “I know. Sorry. We’re working.” Even so, I feel his hand settle just inside the waistband of my shorts. We are not making it easy.

  The first thing I do is go to Theresa Hunt’s Facebook profile page. It hasn’t been updated in a few months, and I wonder if she’s okay. Aimlessly I scroll through her pictures. I see pictures of her with her son, who seems like the right age to be Jason Hunt.

  “You finding anything?” Ethan asks me.

  “Not so far. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. You?”

  “Just freaking myself out, mainly.”

  I scroll down through her pictures to when Jason was a baby. Theresa looked young and happy then. I go back farther and then I stop. I take a breath. I click on a picture. I’m not sure I totally trust my eyes yet. I slide the computer toward Ethan. “Who does that look like to you? The man standing next to Theresa.”

  He looks at it closely and then sizes it back down. “Do you think it’s Andrew Baltos?”

  My heart is starting to thump. “Do you?”

  He looks again. He scrolls down farther. “There’s another one of him. It’s tagged. It says Andrew.”

  “I really think it’s him.”

  “Who is she, though?” Ethan asks.

  “She’s the first person documented in that red folder. He wrote ‘Patient Number One’ on her page with a question mark. I think my father was trying to trace the earliest cases of what later became the blood plague. I cannot figure out what she could have to do with Andrew Baltos.”

  Ethan keeps looking through the pictures. “I think they were a couple. That’s how it looks.”

  “It does. Wow.” In one of the pictures they are in full PDA. “That’s not very complicated.” My mind is jumping around. “So what does it mean? Maybe she gave the illness to Andrew Baltos.” I’m trying to figure out the timing; in the early phases the disease had a much longer incubation period. “But what does that have to do with Mona Ghali? Does Mona Ghali get sick too? Does the murder have something to do with that? I thought she was targeted because of her energy research. All the stuff he took from her computer.”

  “But it can’t be a coincidence. Can it?”

  “No. I don’t know.” I put my head down on the bed. It’s tiring. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe that was the angle your father was working.”

  “But I’m not sure he discovered the connection to Mona Ghali’s murder.”

  “So we’re getting somewhere, right?”

  “Yes.” I push the computer away and lie on my back. I put my hands over my face. “I kind of wish I knew where.”

  Ethan rolls on top of me. How long could we lie on a bed together and not let that happen? I put my arms around him. I feel his shoulders, his back. “Is this a good idea?” I ask, a tiny bit suffocated.

  “Yes.” He puts an elbow down next to my head to relieve a little weight. “It’s a great idea.” He leans his head down to mine and kisses me long and deeply. I want it so much it scares me. I push him off. I sit up.

  “Ethan, it’s not. We can’t.”

  He sits up too. “Here’s what I want to know. Why do you believe anything they say? What makes you think this business about you hurting me is not another lie to keep you scared and isolated? Why should this be different from everything else they say?”

  “It could be a lie. I’ve thought of that.” I put my hand on his thigh. “But what if it’s not?” My voice is strained. “I come from an awful place and you come from this lovely one. I am so scared of what I brought from there putting you in danger. We’ve already done too much.”

  He kneels over my legs and puts both of his hands on my face. His eyes are serious on mine. “Listen, Prenna. Do you know how long I’ve loved you? Being with you is not going to hurt me. I refuse to believe it.”

  “But what if—”

  “And you know what the truth is?”

  “What?”

  “If I could make love to you right now, I wouldn’t mind if I died.”

  My eyes are teary, but I can’t help smiling. “Well, I would mind. I really would.”

  We eat dinner on the patio of a Mexican restaurant spangled with twinkling white lights. Ethan brandishes his fake ID and comes back with a pitcher of sangria.

  We are happily chowing down our enchiladas suizas when a mosquito lands on Ethan’s arm. I am not prepared for the adrenaline that bursts through my bloodstream. Without thinking, I fling out my hand and smack it with the wrath of Satan.

  Ethan looks stunned and almost fearful.

  “Sorry,” I say. My head swims. Maybe the sangria isn’t a great idea. I am too emotional tonight to begin with. I look at my hand with the smeared bug and hold it up for him. “Got it.”

  He opens his eyes wide. “I’ll say. I hope my arm’s not broken.”

  I get up and put my napkin on the table. “I’ll be right back,” I say. I go to the bathroom and wash the remains of the vile creature down the sink. I scrub my hands with soap.

  I look at myself in the mirror and see tears in my eyes. I feel strangely off balance. What business do I have being happy? Falling in love? Thinking I know what happiness is?

  I go back to the table. I try to arrange my face back into my beach girl persona, but there is no point.

  “Are you okay?” Ethan asks, his eyes reading mine astutely, as they usually do.

  “Yeah. I guess. Sorry about your arm.”

  “Was it the mosquito?” he asks. His face is concerned.

  I put my elbow on the table and rest my head in my hand. The enchiladas, which had seemed purely delicious a few minutes before, look nauseating. “Yes, sort of.”

  He doesn’t pester me with questions. He waits to see what I’m ready to say.

  I guess I’m ready to say a lot, because I open my mouth and all kinds of things come out.

  “I used to have two younger brothers,” I say. “They died in the plague. My brother Julius was two years younger than me. I was closer to him than anyone else. He was almost seven when he died, and the little one, Remus, was just a baby.”

  Ethan reaches for my hand.

  “That wasn’t the baby’s name officially. At least, not according to my mother. People stopped naming their babies in the worst plague years because so many of them died, but my father made each of us a birth certificate with an official name, and insisted on using them even in the days after my brothers died.”

  “Your mother didn’t?” Ethan asks.

  I shake my head. “Since we came here my mother has referred to them a handful of times at most, and never said their names. I understand. Her heart was broken too.”

  Ethan looks devastated. His face reflects the expression he must see on mine.

  “I remember seeing the red swollen spot on Remus’s cheek with absolute dread. The plague had taken other people’s brothers and sisters and parents, but it hadn’t come to my house yet. Nobody saw the mosquito that bit Remus. There were screens everywhere, and we all slept and sat under nets. We zipped our nets and sprayed our toxic sprays and said our prayers, because mosquitoes carried death. It’s hard to unlearn it, even now. By then, you know, the world was a lot wetter and a lot hotter. Every worry and unhappiness in the world, and there were a lot of them, took the form of the mosquito.”

  I close my eyes. I gather a picture and then I push it away.

  “I obsessed over that red spot on the baby’s cheek. It could have been a pimple or some other kind of bite, my mother said. But on the four
th day the telltale symptoms started—the fever and the rash and the red eyes. Remus was still smiling then. He had no idea what was overtaking him. That nearly killed me. And there was nothing we could do.”

  He squeezes my hand.

  I am surprised by the stuff I am remembering. I guess memory is a deep well, and you don’t know what’s down there until you lower the bucket and start hauling it up. “It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. That’s the thing. You couldn’t feel sorry for yourself. It was happening everywhere. You couldn’t let it pull you under, because you didn’t know what was next, whether it would be your mother or your father or you. Looking back, you can see the complete arc of tragedy where each thing sat, but in the moment it is just panic. Was it the beginning? Was it the end? Were you about to die, or were you supposed to get through it alive? You kind of wished for neither. I knew a kid who lost both of his parents in a day. He sat on the floor of his house with the bodies. He didn’t know what to do.”

  “Jesus,” Ethan says.

  “You weren’t supposed to touch the victims after the plague symptoms began. You were supposed to quarantine them and then get rid of the bodies as quick as possible. Even before it was carried by mosquitoes, it could be passed from person to person.” I rushed on, because I knew if I stopped talking, I would not know how to start again. “Of course people were terrified of spending time in public places, touching each other and taking care of sick people. Our neighbor was a medic, one of the rare survivors of the disease and supposedly immune. He took the baby away to let him die in his yard along with dozens of others. I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t stand the idea of our baby going with a stranger. I chased the neighbor and took the baby back. I guess I was eight. I kept him in our yard, and he died in my arms. I didn’t care if I died too.”

  Ethan’s face seems to absorb my sorrow. He shakes his head. “But you didn’t get it.”

  “No. That poor neighbor died within the month, but I think I really was immune. The night I held the baby I got stung by a mosquito. I didn’t tell anybody about it; I just waited to die. Maybe I wanted to. But I didn’t.”

  He looks sad. He puts his head down.

  “My brother Julius did.” I look up at the sky, the brightness of the stars dimmed and blurred by the bright beach lights. I can’t say anything more about that.

  Impatiently I wipe the tears from my eyes. “When I really want to torture myself, I picture Remus’s smile on that day when he first got sick.”

  Ethan shakes his head. “Why would you want to torture yourself?”

  I don’t need to think to answer. “Because I’m here and he’s not. Because I lived.”

  SIXTEEN

  I take a scalding shower. I brush my teeth to an extravagant degree. I try to enjoy the simple pleasures of clean hair and unworn clothes. Ethan holds me for a moment when I come out of the bathroom in my towel. “No more sand in my ears.”

  He laughs, but I can tell he’s being careful. A story like the one I told can really bring down the mood.

  I see that he’s made up the scratchy-looking couch with a sheet, a pillow and a blanket. “It doesn’t fold out?” I ask.

  “No. It turns out not. That’s okay,” he says brightly.

  It is really more a love seat than a couch. I am tall and Ethan is taller. He is going to have to fold himself in half to fit on it.

  I look guiltily at the vast bed. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. No problem at all.”

  “I hear you are really good at sleeping sitting up.”

  He laughs again and goes into the bathroom. I listen to him brushing his teeth.

  I turn off the main overhead light. I unwrap the towel and pull on a tank top and a pair of fresh underwear. I strip off the rubbery bedspread and get under the crisp white sheets and blanket. I turn my head on the pillow and search with my excellent eyes through the balcony doors for our partial ocean view.

  Ethan emerges from the bathroom in his boxer shorts. He turns off the last lamp, and I watch with pity as he contorts himself to fit onto the little couch.

  I lie there thinking of what to say. I prop myself up on my elbow. “After the story I told tonight, do you still want to share a bed with me?”

  He’s instantly up and out of the couch. “The most of anything.”

  I lift the covers and he climbs into bed, covering my body with his. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything nicer. “After the story I told tonight, we’re keeping it casual, Ethan Jarves,” I whisper to his cheek.

  “Awwww. Please.”

  “No, or it’s back to the couch.”

  “Fine, then, cruel girl.”

  Bit by bit I feel his hands searching around my body, pushing up under my tank top.

  “Ethan,” I whisper. I put my hands over his. “If this is casual, what do you call intimate?”

  “I was just about to show you that.”

  I shouldn’t laugh. “Back to the couch.”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  I wake up with the first light of the sun. I try to draw out the moment as long as possible. So many mornings I’ve woken with the burden of reassimilating sadness and loss. This morning I assimilate joy. I take in Ethan’s bed hair, his scent, the freckles on his shoulders, the feeling of his legs tangled with mine. I don’t want even the tiniest tendril of it to get away from me.

  But eventually I have to pee. I gently extricate my various bits and parts from his. Luckily, he’s a deep and happy sleeper. I sit on the edge of the bed for an extra moment and admire the freedom of his sprawl. It’s hard not to touch him, now that I can. It’s difficult to separate my body from his.

  I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Quietly I take the newspapers from the safe and sit on the floor by the French doors to the balcony, where the most light comes in. From the paper dated tomorrow I reread the first article about the death of Mona Ghali, and then other articles in the section—one about a fatal car accident in Ossining killing a father and two children, another about a house fire in Montclair.

  I think about finding the number of the driver from Ossining and calling him. I couldn’t tell him what I know, obviously—he’d never believe me—but I could come up with some clever way of keeping him off the roads that night. I wouldn’t have to call him at all. I could puncture a tire or put sugar in his gas tank. I could take matters into my own hands.

  And the people whose house burned down? I could anonymously report a dangerous electrical situation and try to get a fire inspector sent over to the house. I could pose as a fire inspector over the phone and get them to at least put fresh batteries in their smoke detectors.

  I am suddenly the vigilante future girl, star of my own not-very-glorious superhero comic strip.

  Naturally, I think of the fourth rule. It is among the most serious of them. It isn’t the rule the counselors talk about most, but somehow it still has more natural weight than the others.

  I turn to the last page of the paper, with the obituaries in small print. Some of them have a few lines about the person’s life or death, and most not much more than dates and the names of the family members who survive them. Most of the dead are old people, probably sick people, whose deaths you could do nothing to prevent. But what about the other ones?

  It’s an intoxicating power to think about, saving people from death, preventing tragedy, swooping in at some critical juncture to make sure a life goes in one direction instead of another.

  What if there were other moments, less than death but still important, when you could tip the balance just a little in an instance of defeat or discouragement. I guess it would be hard to find those moments in the newspaper.

  With my finger I move down the list of deaths to the youngest near the bottom. January 2, 1996–May 17, 2014. My eyes stick on that date. I feel a chill starting in the bottom of my abdomen. I move my finger across the column to the left. Ethan Patrick Jarves, beloved son. I tear my eyes from the newspaper, disoriented. I feel my vision, my excellent
vision, go out of focus. This isn’t possible.

  I look across the room at that very beloved son, beloved friend, beloved beloved, sprawled over the bed we shared, as tanned and strong and healthy as a beloved could be.

  That cannot be. I look back down at the paper, actually expecting to see something different this time, but it’s the same.

  Ethan Patrick Jarves, beloved son. Survived by his parents and his sister.

  My eyes feel like they are vibrating in their sockets. My heart is thrashing like a prisoner in my chest.

  Ethan makes a sleeping noise and kicks his leg out from under the sheet.

  I jump to my feet, holding the paper. I go to the bathroom as quietly as possible, pull on shorts and let myself out of the room. I walk toward the elevators. I still can’t see right.

  Clutching the newspaper, I make my way out of the lobby and down the path to the beach. I walk to the little rise before the water. It is still early and the beach is mostly empty but for gulls picking at the overflowing garbage cans.

  I fold the newspaper many times so it won’t blow around. I still think I could give it another chance, that when I open it again, it will say different things, and beloved Ethan Patrick Jarves will be nowhere in it.

  It isn’t real. It hasn’t happened yet. It is one possible future, and there are infinite other possibilities. This is not going to be the future. I don’t believe it.

  And even though I don’t believe it, my mind spins around and around it. How does he die? What is the cause? It’s the same day as the death of Mona Ghali, so is it linked to that? Because the future this newspaper describes is not the future I am part of. I was not here yet and neither was my father. It could not include the possibility that Ethan and I would team up to intervene in a murder.

  The version of the future where Ethan dies on May 17 can’t have to do with me. What about Mona Ghali, though? He knows her. He often goes to that lab.

  I wish I had more information. I don’t have any other newspapers from the future to cross-reference. I can’t investigate a death before it happens.

  I realize I am crying. Tears roll down my face, drip on the folded newspaper and on the back of my hand.