The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  At sixteen, however, I did not have quite this pragmatic attitude. Getting caught misbehaving and being forced to sit for an hour in some unforgiving metal chair in some drab office while waiting for my impatient mother to stride in, tall and majestic, impervious to the giddy swoons of the receptionist, shoot a look full of daggers in my direction and say, very quietly, “I was called out of a meeting with the Director for this, Regina Theresa, what did you do?” was a mistake I made exactly one time and never again.

  Looking back, I can see that it could have been worse. I’m sure she knew early on that I had decent enough judgment to avoid any really stupid situations — I never went home with the bad boys, I never tried mystery drugs at a party, I never got less than a B on an exam — but it still drove me crazy.

  This is the most important thing you should know about my mother. She may be a feminist hero and the most iconic legend in Bureau history, she may be able to Chrono-Jump six hundred years round-trip without mussing her hair, and she may be the rumored top pick to replace the Director when he retires this year, which would make her the first woman Director ever. (Oh, you thought because this is the 22nd century, the patriarchy has been dismantled? That’s adorable.)

  But she has one huge, all-encompassing trait that to me, her daughter, outweighs everything else, which is that she is my mother and every time some junior apprentice gushes to me about what it must have been like to grow up “in the shadow of a legend,” I flash back to that metal chair in the school office and I want to tell them, “You have absolutely no idea.”

  Katharine Silverton Bellows, six-times decorated for injuries suffered in the line of duty, youngest field agent in Repairman history and current Deputy Director of the United States Time Travel Bureau, is one of those rare living legends who actually lives up to the hype.

  My mother is very tall and very pretty. I got her huge green eyes, my one point of vanity — the Silverton women all have them — and Leo got the impossibly shiny, dark-chocolate hair she inherited from her Iranian grandmother. Mom’s has a little bit of gray at the temples – not nearly as much as there ought to be given that she’s well on the other side of fifty, but just a perfect, aristocratic sweep of silver at the brow and temples.

  I did not get Mom’s hair. I would also have been fine with Dad’s — thick and cornsilk-blond — but I wasn’t even that lucky. I don’t know which blight on the Silverton-Bellows-Carstairs family tree bestowed their coiffure on me, but it is a goddamn nightmare, coarse and curly and a dull mousy brown, impossible to do anything with except tie it back in a knot and forget about it.

  So to all my various mother complexes, please add to the list the fact that she is prettier than me by such a dramatic margin that people meeting us side-by-side for the first time are palpably startled.

  I’ve lost count over the years of every government official who looked me over and then instantly dismissed me as a frumpy low-level aide until my mother introduced me, at which point they would look from me to her and from her to me and from me to her, and then cough awkwardly and extend a too-hearty handshake to cover their discomfort.

  Other mothers, I learned from books, said comforting things to their plain daughters like “You’ll grow into your looks” or “Boys love curly hair” or “Don’t worry, it’s just an awkward phase.”

  Katie Bellows stood for none of that nonsense. When her teenage daughter cried in the mirror and lamented that she would never be as pretty as that blonde volleyball player who sat behind her in Advanced Algebra, Katie Bellows would fire back the same crisp retort, “So what if she’s prettier? You’re better at math.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” I wailed.

  “It ought to, in math class.”

  “Mom, you know what I mean!”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “You’ve always been pretty, you don’t know what it’s like,” I grumped. My mother laughed at this, actually laughed out loud. Nothing could have stung more.

  “Listen to me, Regina. I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m not pretty at all.”

  “Yes, you are, dummy.”

  “No, not the way you mean. When you say ‘pretty’ what you’re thinking of is a very narrow definition of how a woman is meant to look which is basically defined by whatever traits fifteen-to-thirty-five-year-old men currently happen to be attracted to.” (I hated when she talked like this.) “Look at me. Really look.” I did, reluctant to humor her but curious to where this was going.

  “My eyes are proportionately too big for my face,” she said. “I have a very long nose. I have a sharp jaw. I’m taller than most men. I have the body of a woman who has birthed two children, which means my ass has a mind of its own sometimes. But none of that actually means anything. First of all, what people are attracted to varies dramatically, and my very long nose and your father’s terrible mustache did not stop us from falling in love. Second, if you have a good haircut and good shoes, you’re clean and neat, 90% of the entire human race will find you perfectly presentable and you can accomplish anything you want to.”

  I thought “perfectly presentable” sounded not that much of an improvement on “hideous,” and I said so. She sighed the particular and specific sigh of the feminist mother.

  “You will be astonished, Regina, at how little any of this matters in the real world. You’re kind and competent and unbelievably smart. You work hard. You’re trustworthy. Those are the things that count.”

  “Not to boys,” I pouted.

  “They’re idiots at this age,” she said calmly. “The right things will matter to the right boy. In the meantime, math is more important than boys.”

  “But I want Jamal to like me!”

  “Well, maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” she said, her voice annoyingly reasonable. ”But there’s nothing you can do to control that, so you might as well spare yourself the headache.” And with that, impervious to my I-hate-you glare, she sailed out of the room.

  * * *

  The elevator door slid open and I saw Calliope waiting for me, tapping her foot anxiously. She knew as well as I did that in my entire career, my mother had never once called me into her office.

  “Are we getting fired?” she mouthed. I shook my head.

  “She’s my mother, she’s not going to fire me,” I said, hoping to God that it was actually true.

  “Is she going to fire me?”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just did what I told you to do.”

  “But she’s never —”

  “I know.”

  “And you had to —”

  “I know.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment. Finally she sighed, straightened my jacket, made a valiant attempt to tidy my un-tidy-able hair, and shoved me down the hall like a military general sending troops to certain doom.

  The clomp of my shoes down the white tiled floor felt unbearably loud, like the whole department had fallen silent to watch my walk of shame to the solid wooden door with its elegant brass nameplate at the end of the hallway.

  Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

  It was the longest hallway in the world. It went on for eons. Whole civilizations were born and died in the time it took me to round the corner away from the hot uncomfortable stares of my coworkers. I knocked on the door to the Executive Wing.

  Yasmina, my mother’s tech of the past seventeen years, opened the door and let me in. I could tell from the stoic set of her jaw and the way her dark eyes avoided contact with mine that she was thinking what Calliope was thinking.

  “It’s gonna be fine,” I whispered, and Yasmina’s face relaxed ever so slightly.

  “Heads up. They’re in the Council Chambers,” she said under her breath.

  “What do you mean, ‘they?’” I asked, heart sinking.

  “It’s not just her. The committee is in there too.”

  “The Congressional Time Travel Committee is here?” My voice came out high-pitched and squeaky, and Yasmina hushe
d me with a sharp gesture. “What is happening? Is this about Grove?”

  “Nobody knows,” she whispered back. “Promise you’ll tell me. If you can.”

  “Promise.”

  She patted me on the back with the same pitying expression I had gotten from Calliope. Nothing instills confidence like well-meaning people looking at you like you’re about to die.

  I sighed and followed her through the anteroom, down the short hall where my mother’s office adjoined the Director’s, until we stopped in front of the door that led to the Council Chambers. She knocked three times, waited a moment until an unfamiliar man’s voice uttered a brisk “Come in!” then opened the door.

  * * *

  The last time I had been in this room, I was six. My friend Ruth, whose dads both worked in Wardrobe, had come upstairs to play with me and Leo while they finished outfitting six agents for a patch on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  It was late in the evening and we mostly had the run of the place while our parents worked. Someone from the cleaning staff had left the Council Chamber’s back door unlocked; on a dare, Ruth opened it and we all stared in.

  We were strictly forbidden to go inside, but were unable to resist temptation when it was dangled right in front of our faces. Ruth, infinitely braver, tiptoed in, and after a few breathless moments of silence, heart pounding, I crept in after her, Leo close behind.

  The chairs seemed like empty thrones to us, waiting in hushed anticipation for the return of the kings and queens and heads of state who belonged there.

  We crawled under the table, hid behind flags, chased each other in and out of the maze of chairs, and generally scampered around like puppies who have been trapped in a small room too long, until suddenly Ruth knocked something off the table — a pen or something — and the crashing sound it made on the hard wooden floor made us freeze with terror as all the awe and panic of that daunting room fell down around us at once.

  * * *

  It was the same now.

  The first thing I registered about the room was how full it seemed. My first impression was of an absolute sea of faces staring at me in stern disapproval.

  I took a small step forward, tripped over the doorframe, and stumbled into the Council Chambers with a drunken lurch, flailing around for the doorknob to steady myself. Once the world slid back into focus and the hot waves of mortification subsided, I noticed that what had looked like a mob of angry faces was in fact only fifteen, sitting around the large central table.

  But they were all staring at me. Except my mother, who was studiously examining her notes. I sent her a little psychic I-hate-you wave, gathered up what little dignity I had left, and took the empty seat at the end of the table which was clearly reserved for me.

  “Thank you for joining us, Agent Bellows,” said a familiar voice, and I looked up to see Director Gray at the head of the table directly opposite me.

  I opened my mouth to respond, closed it again quickly after nothing came out but a nervous squeak, coughed in an attempt to cover it, caught the tail end of a repressive glare from my mother, glared back, coughed again, just to be on the safe side, and then carefully responded, “Thank you, sir.”

  Though why I was thanking him if he was about to send me packing, I wasn’t sure.

  “Medical informs us that Grove is unconscious but stable, and that you are fully recovered. Are you well?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “I’m being fired for bringing Grove back without proper authorization,” I said promptly, and was completely befuddled as the room burst into laughter.

  “You’re not in trouble, Agent Bellows,” the Director said kindly. “Just the opposite, in fact. The Council has called you here because we need your help.”

  “I’m not getting fired?”

  “No, Agent Bellows, you are not getting fired.”

  Well, this was an unexpected development.

  “Even though I violated like” — I tried to count in my head — “every rule about transport usage?”

  “Would you like a reprimand? All right. It’s been noted on your record,” he said, smiling. “Try not to let it happen again.”

  Confused, but at least slightly less petrified now, I took the glass of water he offered me and took several long, slow sips to buy myself a few seconds of time to catch up. I looked around the room.

  Director Gray was across from me, then the Speaker of the House, the House Majority Leader, and eleven members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

  One of them, I noticed with mixed emotions, was a man named Benjamin Arthur Holmes. He had served in Congress for nearly forty years representing the good people of Boston. Twenty-five years ago, as a member of the Government Oversight Committee, he had chaired the investigative hearings on the Sharpeville Massacre.

  Our eyes met for an uncomfortable moment, as he saw that I knew who he was. And what he had done, or failed to do. Nobody was ever held responsible for the death of Leo Carstairs, and my mother had never stopped blaming Congressman Holmes for that.

  * * *

  I have no actual memories of my parents together. When I was younger, my mother talked about my father so much that I began to feel like I had really known him, and sometimes, in my childlike confusion, would tell a story about his life as though I had actually been there. Leo never did this, only me.

  He had died on assignment while Mom was pregnant, only a few years into their fairy tale office romance. He had been a green recruit, pulled from Late- to Mid-20th to help with a particularly troublesome patch, and ended up making such a good impression that the Director assigned him as the new partner to my mother, then 26 and the department’s rising star.

  Despite her clinical assessment of her ass and nose, it was clear from every photograph that young Katie Bellows was as beautiful as she was brilliant, and as brilliant as she was completely unbearable. Nobody wanted to work with her.

  Director Graham had burned through half a dozen promising candidates before plucky Leo Carstairs drew the short straw and became in rapid succession Katie Bellows’ right hand, best friend, lover and husband. He was the last partner she ever had. After he died, she worked alone.

  Obviously I remember none of this since my brother and I were fetuses at the time, but it’s been documented so often and so thoroughly that I can tell you about the Sharpeville Massacre like I was there.

  I’ve read the Congressional hearing transcripts so many times I had them practically memorized before I was fourteen. Leo thought it was morbid, but I needed to know.

  See, the Director at the time (a desk jockey known familiarly and without affection as “Lazy Daisey”) had never seen field training beyond his required stint at the Academy. He was also completely ignorant of mid-20th-century politics, his father having essentially bought the position for him with a massive campaign donation.

  So he was out of his depth from day one.

  There was a massive anti-apartheid protest in the township of Sharpeville, South Africa, which according to the General Timeline and all contemporary documentation was supposed to be peaceful — a few thousand black citizens voluntarily turning over their government IDs to the police (thereby preventing them from passing through white South Africa to get to work), which would cripple local businesses.

  Just a long line of people handing over pieces of paper, that’s all that was supposed to happen.

  But something went wrong — nobody ever found out what — and the protest turned into a bloodbath with white police officers indiscriminately firing at black citizens. Daisey had to send an agent back to stop it, and he sent my dad. My blonde, blue-eyed dad.

  Alone.

  What he should have done, I heard my mother say thousands of times over the ensuing years, was send a second agent. Send a white agent to blend in with the cops, to keep them cool and keep their guns in their holsters, and send a black agent who could move freely through the crowd and absorb whispers an
d information without arousing suspicion or fear.

  That’s what she would have done.

  But every black agent on our floor was already in that same timeline a few years away, part of a massive task force to patch the arrest of Nelson Mandela, and nobody could be spared to come back.

  Plus Daisey had pulled a total dick move on Mom the week before and she found herself benched because of one tiny blip on a routine physical, where pregnancy hormones (AKA Leo and me) had thrown off one section of her stress test. So she wasn’t there for Dad’s mission brief and she didn’t know anything was wrong until Dad missed his scheduled call-in.

  So she broke protocol to come into the office and check on him, which is how she spotted the insane HIO readings at his location and realized that all hell was about to break loose. Which it did.

  The five thousand peaceful protesters Dad was briefed to expect had swelled to twenty thousand, and the dozen small-town cops had suddenly and inexplicably received backup from a heavily armed unit of nearly a hundred police officers with armored cars.

  None of which was supposed to happen, and none of which Dad could stop by himself.

  By the time the livid pregnant woman screaming in Daisey’s office had convinced him to pull an agent off Mandela right this second and send him back for her husband, it was too late to stop it.

  Poor Agent Jenkins arrived and found a bloodbath. He put the pieces together later for the official report, fat lot of good it was by then.

  The policemen were young and skittish. They had heard tales of officers murdered by rampaging natives. Fear and distrust towards a crowd of black faces was hard-wired into them. They had been there for nearly 24 hours straight and were hungry and tired and at their wits’ end. The tension was rising on both sides, so thick and hot it pressed down on them like a blanket. Suddenly, from somewhere in the crowd, a rock sailed through the sky and cracked neatly into the police station’s metal roof, startling everyone.