“Oh.” She’s silent for a couple of seconds. “You don’t know. I thought you knew.”
“What?” My pulse is pounding.
“I’m sorry to inform you Mr. Baltos is no longer with us. He hanged himself in his hospital room at six o’clock this morning.”
I call Ethan from the car as I drive to Teaneck to pick up the package. I tell him what happened. I cry when I tell him and I don’t even know why. Andrew Baltos was a murderer who single-handedly destroyed our future. He is very possibly the man who murdered my father, and it’s better that he’s gone.
These are tears of relief if anything, but as I picture Baltos in the hospital bed, longing to go home to his first girl, it all feels more complicated than that. His death seems to blend with the other deaths I’ve seen these last few days. I cry different kinds of tears for each of them.
The package is waiting with a receptionist at the front desk. It’s my envelope, as I guessed it would be. Baltos wanted to return my stuff. I wait until I am home and in the privacy of my room before I open it to check that it’s all there.
It is, and there’s something more too.
Dear Prenna,
Theresa Hunt is dead. Her son, my son, Jason, is also dead. Allan Cotes is dead. I made some calls after you left, and that’s what I found out. Josie Lopez is not dead, but her mother tells me she’s been ill. I suspect it’s only a matter of time.
I don’t have any illness that I know of. If I had known, I never would have … It doesn’t matter. I am the cause. I read your report. I know what’s coming.
The two other people I’ve slept with since I’ve been here are Dana Guest and Robin Jackson. I’ve written their phone numbers and addresses below, along with Josie’s.
Will you please help stop what I have done? I don’t know what you can do, but I beg you to try.
I stare at it for a while. And then I fold it in half and retrieve the red folder that my father began. I go downstairs to the kitchen and hand them both to my mother.
I tried to be cool in my meeting with my mother and Mr. Robert yesterday, but by four o’clock that afternoon, I am sweating. I am pacing the floor of my room, glancing out the window to the street in front every couple of seconds. At four-thirty I can’t stand it anymore, and I go downstairs and out the front door and start pacing across the front lawn. At least that way I’ll see her sooner if she comes.
My mother has been closed up in her room since I gave her the red file and the letter from Baltos. A few times I’ve overheard her speaking on the phone. I want her company, but I don’t want to disturb her.
I stare at the street in front of our house, and I wonder how my mom wants this to go.
No, I know how.
I know because of the breakfast she made. I know because of the thing she said about the world waking up.
She wants Katherine to come. She wants to fix the damage that’s been caused. She wants us to be okay. And for the first time, I think she wants more than that too.
I know in my heart that if Katherine comes, our lives are going to be better. It won’t be easy, but we’ll muddle through. My mother might even be happy for a few seconds. Would that be something? Hard to imagine, but not impossible.
At five I am resigned to my sorry fate, and at 5:02 a silver car pulls up and Katherine gets out of it. The driver is a grim-looking Ms. Cynthia, and I don’t care. I run to Katherine and throw my arms around her. She looks shell-shocked but also happy to see me.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“I’m fine,” she says under her breath. “But what did you do? I just had the weirdest car ride of my life.”
I practically crush her in my arms. I am so happy to see her, I am crying. “Things are changing,” I say. I don’t care who hears me. “I have so much to tell you.”
After a few minutes Katherine gets back in the car to go home to her dad, but Ms. Cynthia lingers for another moment, glaring at me through the open window.
“You’re not going to get what you want, you know.” She’s a spider. She’s full of poison.
I turn to her. “What are you talking about?”
“You can flout everything we stand for, Prenna, everything we’ve tried to do.” She is practically spitting her words at me. “But if you care about this young man of yours and you care about fixing the future, as you say you do, you can’t have him. Not the way you want.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You’ll see.”
I can’t hide my astonishment and my disgust.
“Try not to look stupid, Prenna.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Later that night I can’t fall asleep.
I pack my bag for Friday night. What do you pack for a night like this? I gaze at the pile of dull cotton underwear in my drawer, the tank tops and boxer shorts I wear for pajamas. What can I do? Before now I never got to dream there would be a night like this. I throw in a box of Tic Tacs with a few peppermint ones shaking around the bottom. I add the little speakers for my phone.
I suddenly have an idea. I pull my desk chair into my closet so I can reach the highest shelf. I feel around for the New York Giants sweatshirt. I pull it down and shake it out. I hold it to my face and try to smell if there are any molecules of Ethan left in it.
I spend a few minutes making a playlist on my phone. Who knows?
I smile as a text pops up in the middle of it.
43 hours.
I glance at the time on the phone. I count in my head. 42 hours 40 minutes, I type.
A minute passes. 42 hours 39 minutes.
I love you.
I love you.
I am surprised to hear a knock at my bedroom door and my mother come in.
“You asleep?” she asks.
“No.”
“Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Sure.” To my amazement she sits down on my bed. The light is dim, just moonlight rolling in through my window, but I see she’s taken off her glasses again. She has the red folder in her hands.
“I read through what you gave me.”
“Pretty incredible, huh?”
“Certainly is. And you said he killed himself?”
“Yes. Early this morning.”
She lets out a deep breath. She shakes her head.
“Reading his letter, I guess I can see why he did it.”
“I guess I can too.” She looks down at the folder. “You know you’ve given us something truly extraordinary here. Between these names and our knowledge of the future, we have a real chance to contain this illness. It’s not something I ever dreamed could happen.”
Her face is as animated as I’ve ever seen it. I feel awash in pleasure and pride. “You think so?”
“Unless there’s some complexity we don’t know about. Some other time traveler or …” She glances at me. “Something else.” She takes my hand. “But this information together with everything I studied as a physician and experienced in Postremo is fitting together in a way that makes me very, very hopeful.”
I’ve never heard her say that word. I have never seen these expressions on her face before.
“So Baltos brought the plague back with him to our time and started spreading it?”
“Not exactly. I suspect there was no plague where he came from, or at least not this plague. I suspect not that he brought it back, but that he started it. He harbored some virus or set of viruses, very likely originating from birds or pigs from his time. That’s how it usually works. They were harmless to him and probably to other people in his time, but once the transmission was made, they were devastating to his lovers and close contacts here. It makes sense that the blood plague could begin in this way.”
“Okay,” I say slowly.
“This virus appears to be blood borne at this stage, but there’s no clear information yet on how difficult or easy it is to transmit. There’s no diagnostic test for it, but I hope with this information you’ve given me we’ll be able to create one.”
I am starting to get an uneasy feeling about the ramifications of this. “So when the leaders said we could cause harm to the natives by the microbes we carry, they weren’t just trying to scare us?”
“They may have wanted to scare us, but it also happens to be true.”
“Not in the category of the pills?”
My mother looks distressed. “No, different.” She sighs. “I know how you’re feeling about Mr. Robert and the rest. I feel the same way. I don’t agree with their methods, but the rules are meaningful, for the most part. The discipline and caution they demand from us are crucial. Andrew Baltos was ruthless and sloppy. Taking a young woman’s life, sleeping with multiple time natives, fathering a child. These are things we are respectful enough never to do.”
I nod. I know what she’s saying is true. “Do you think Mr. Robert and the leaders are going to leave us alone? I know they brought Katherine back, but it’s hard to imagine.”
“If you stick to your terms, they will stick to theirs. If they break theirs, you will have the support of every member of the community I can muster.”
I hardly know who this person is. “Really?”
“More than that, I’m hoping for a change in leadership. I’m tired of standing by. We had a meeting last night, and I’ve called another for tomorrow night including every member of my generation. I’ve spread the word about the pills already. I’ve shared it with the medical team, and it was a surprise to all but one. If I can run the meeting properly tomorrow, we’re going to vote on a new slate of leaders, new counselors and a new set of policies. Or at least we’ll start on it. I’m going to personally argue for getting rid of the surveillance altogether.”
I am stunned by this. Stunned by her tone and her conviction. I don’t know who she is, but I am glad she’s here.
She looks at me carefully. I see sympathy in her face, and I’m not quite sure what it’s for. “But not everything will change, you know.”
“The important stuff,” I say. I’m a little giddy. “Getting rid of the leaders and the counselors? No more answering to Mr. Robert? Or that witch Cynthia? Getting rid of the glasses? That’s more than I ever hoped for.” I can’t wait to tell Ethan. He will be floored.
She takes my hand again. “That’s not really the important stuff.”
I don’t love a certain sound I hear buried in the bottom of her voice. “It’s important to me,” I say childishly.
“If we want to set the world spinning back on its proper axis, put time back in her proper order, reverse the misdeeds committed by Andrew Baltos, we have to be more careful than ever. That’s the lesson of Andrew Baltos, and it confirms much of what we feared. We aren’t free here to live the way we want. We can’t let the rest of the world know where we came from or how we came. It would be hopelessly disruptive and make it almost impossible to prevent time travel in the future. We have to keep our secret, and it’s a burden for all of us.”
“It’s hard, I know, but we can do that,” I say. “As long as we can talk honestly with each other, it will be much less of a burden.”
Her face is eager. “I agree with you about that. I agree we must be allowed to support each other.”
“So what else is important?”
She pauses. “It’s our first job to contain the changes that have been made. You and Ethan are heroes in that effort. But it’s our second job not to make any more changes.”
“Okay.”
“And that means we have to be careful and disciplined all the time. We can’t live like regular people. We can’t choose our relationships like regular people. We can’t start families like regular people. We can’t risk starting new pandemics just as we’re trying to bring this one under control. We have to be the solution, not the problem.”
“I understand that.” I feel tears coming to my eyes.
“We have to agree, all of us, not to form relationships or allow marriages outside the community.”
“You’re talking about Ethan, aren’t you?”
“I’m talking about all of us. I know it doesn’t seem fair to you. And it’s not. Ethan’s done so much to help us.”
“He has. It isn’t fair.”
“But what about the dangers to him? What about the possible seeds of a new plague? You’ve uncovered the birth of Dama Virus X right in front of us. You’ve seen both the beginning and the end. You understand it’s not just the two of you at risk.”
We look at each other and I know the people we’re both thinking about.
“Prenna, if you love him, think about what you can offer and what he’d be giving up. Beyond the question of illness, what about his chance to live an unrestricted life? To have a family?”
I put my hands over my face.
“I don’t care what Mr. Robert or Mrs. Crew think. I have no respect or loyalty to them. But what would we tell the other members of our community if they saw you had found happiness with a time native?”
I try to stop the tears with my hands. She puts her arms around me, and I can feel we’ve both broken our rule now.
“We are all lonely, Prenna. We are all wishing for freedom. We all want to belong to this time—not just to skim over it. We all desperately miss what we lost. Imagine the difficulty if every one of us tried to find your happiness?”
Time passes and I lean in to her. I give my whole weight up to her. She holds me like she hasn’t since I was a baby. Since maybe ever. I feel like a baby, and I just want to rest. I feel like her baby.
“I am sorry, my darling,” she whispers to me.
TWENTY-SIX
I don’t bring the boring tank tops or the boxer shorts or the Tic Tacs. I’ve still got the playlist on my phone, but I know I won’t play it. I hold the New York Giants sweatshirt for a long time before I put it back on the top shelf of my closet.
We meet at the parking lot of a trailhead at Haverstraw. Ethan comes toward me with his tent folded up under one arm and his one sleeping bag under the other. I think my heart will break.
As soon as he sees my face he knows something isn’t right. His intuitive eyes are on mine, discovering the truth as always, but he keeps his voice light.
“Is it not Friday?”
“It is Friday.” I can barely keep my head up.
“Is this not our night?”
I feel my chin quivering. I wish it would stop. “I think maybe it’s not our night.”
He puts his things down on the bench at the trailhead. We start walking into the woods. He reaches for my hand. “What happened?”
“Good things. That’s what’s so strange.”
“Tell me.”
It’s easier, in a way, to be walking and not looking directly at his face. “There was a second big meeting of the community last night. My mom organized it. They voted in new leaders. They fired the counselors in one shot and invited all community members who are interested in those jobs to submit applications. They voted out the pills and the glasses. They got rid of the systems of punishment and the so-called safe houses. They determined that the new counselors should actually provide support and encourage us to talk, not just browbeat and intimidate us.”
He glances at my face as we walk. “Prenna, that is wonderful. I’m happy for you. For all of you.” He says it sincerely, but he’s steeling himself for the next thing. “Is your mother one of the leaders?”
“No. They wanted her to be, but she prefers to head up the medical team and focus all her energy on containing the virus Baltos started. She thinks they can stop it before it turns into the plague.”
“Who are they, then? The leaders?”
“Mostly people who were aligned with my dad at the beginning. People like my mother who’ve been marginalized and silenced since we got here. You only know one of them.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
“You are kidding.”
“No. I wasn’t at the meeting when it happened. I found out about it from my mother when she got home. She said she did
n’t put my name up for consideration, but a couple hundred other people did.”
“Unbelievable.”
“I know.”
“That’s my girl, Henny. You beat ’em and you joined ’em.”
I smile. “I guess so. It’s a heavy responsibility, though. I guess it’s easier being a rebel than being in charge.”
Ethan nods. He looks sad. “I have a feeling we’re getting to my part of it.”
“Yeah.” I slow our pace.
“A rebel can have a native boyfriend, but a leader can’t?” He’s trying to sound sardonic, but he’s not wrong.
We get to a rocky part by the river. I sit down and he follows my lead. I have to look at him when I say this. “It’s not just that.” I hold his hands. “I would give up all of that for you if I could. The problem is that the threat to you is real. Baltos proved it. He didn’t bring back a preexisting plague. It was his contact with time natives that started it. My mom says we can hope to contain it, but not if we’re sowing new seeds of it.”
Ethan puts his head down.
“What if everyone in the community was doing what we are doing? None of us knows how to avoid the risks because we don’t understand what we’re carrying yet or how it could spread.”
“Yet.” He lifts his head. He pounces on that word.
“Yet or if or never. There’s no way to know.” I lean close. I need him to understand. “Being with me would ruin your life, Ethan. It could ruin your health. It could destroy your hope of having any freedom, having a family. You can’t give that up. I won’t let you.”
“Being with you is all I want.”
I start to cry. How long could I hold it back?
He pulls me toward him and cradles me against his chest. “From the first time I saw you right up the river from here, Penny, I never stopped thinking about you. I didn’t see you again for two years and I thought about you every day. The fact that I was there when you came, that I can see the things I see, that we have taken this insane ride together. We are meant to be.”
I cry some more. I wipe my nose on my hand and look up at him. “How can you say that? I’m not supposed to be here at all. It’s wrong. Time doesn’t want us to be together.”
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