The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  Which meant those guards with guns hunting for me didn’t either. It was the perfect hideout.

  “This is insane, I hope you all realize that,” I said to Carter. “You’ve been holed up in this house for a year and a half. I saw you like two hours ago or something, we went into the Slipstream at the same time, and you beat me home by a year and a half.”

  “That’s about the size of it, yes.”

  I wasn’t sure why I felt so guilty – it wasn’t like I had known about the Chrono-Splice, obviously, and I could hardly be upset about it when it had clearly saved my life – but they had all been busy keeping the Gemstone investigation alive, hiding from the authorities and even being tortured, while I was stuck in the Slipstream for what felt like five minutes. Thank God I was bringing them helpful information or I would have felt completely useless.

  “You’re reproaching yourself for something, aren’t you?” he said, smiling.

  “I feel badly,” I said. “I can’t believe you sat in this house for a year and a half just waiting for the Gemstone file.”

  “You idiot,” he said. “I’ve been in this house for a year and a half, waiting for you.”

  There was something in the way he said “I” and not “we” that I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to. So I took the safe route and just said “oh, shut up” and walked away to join Calliope in front of the screen where she was taking notes. I heard both Carter and Leo laughing as I walked away.

  Eighteen

  Boughs of Holly

  Our family Christmases tended to be fairly low-key affairs. Usually Mom and I went to visit Leo, who would cook us a big dinner on Christmas Eve and a big brunch the next day – while attempting to prevent us from arguing – and then we’d be back at our desks on the 26th.

  But Carter came from a big family who took Christmas very seriously, and had appointed himself the master of ceremonies for the occasion. The tree had been his idea, he told me, and on one of Leo’s many secret trips out here, hauling documents and equipment from Mom’s condo, Carter made him dig out the Christmas stuff too.

  There were four stockings hanging up by the fire – mine and Leo’s, made decades ago by our grandmother on the Carstairs side, and two crocheted ones which Carter had apparently made for himself and Calliope.

  “He’s been driving me insane,” said Calliope, nodding towards Carter as she scrolled through the Gemstone documents on the projector screen. “We made cranberry garlands. We sang carols. Did you notice that the whole room smells like a grandma’s house? He did a thing with a pot of water and some cinnamon sticks and sliced apple.”

  “It smells good,” I said.

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “The point is that I’ve been trapped in this house with Santa Claus and Julia Child for a month now with no escape. It’s so – festive,” she shuddered.

  “A little Christmas cheer will do your cold dead heart some good, Calliope.”

  “I like Christmas!” she said defensively. “I have no problem with Christmas! But I draw the line at trying to work in a house that’s a hundred and seven degrees inside because Carter’s teaching Leo how to make quince jam.”

  “What the hell is a quince?”

  “This is what I’m saying,” she exclaimed. “God, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad I’m here too,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime.”

  “No, I mean it,” I said, and she turned to me, looking me in the eye for the first time since I had walked into the house earlier that day. “Thank you,” I said again. “You saved my life. And you risked your own to do it. What they did to you—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “What does Grove think about what happened?” I said. “About you being hurt, I mean. He must have seen it.”

  “Grove never came back,” she said.

  “What do you mean, he never came back?”

  “He was still on medical leave when your mom went missing,” she said. “There was a thing with his heart. Something to do with the long-term effects of the Incongruity. They wouldn’t take him back on active duty. I don’t know if he’s formally retired, exactly, but he never came back to the office after you brought him back from Ohio. I was warned never to contact him again.”

  “So you haven’t seen him since the investigation?”

  She shook her head, and blinked back tears, which she attempted to conceal by turning her attention back to the screen. I felt sad, and angry.

  Calliope had done nothing wrong except work hard and be excellent at her job for years, and the Bureau had rewarded her for it by treating her like a criminal, torturing her, taking her job away, and – the part I knew she felt the most keenly, even more than the flogging – keeping her from the side of the man she had devoted her entire career to. Grove wasn’t just her boss, he was her mentor and her North Star. That she was prevented from even visiting him in the hospital felt like the cruelest blow of all.

  “We’re going to fix this,” I said. “We’re going to make it right.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  Carter bounded down the stairs just then, carrying an armful of boxes wrapped in shiny paper, and that was the first time I noticed that the tree in the corner had piles of presents underneath it.

  “Did you really all get each other presents?”

  “There’re presents for you here too,” said Carter.

  “But I didn’t get you guys anything. Although, in my defense, that’s because yesterday I was in the middle of July.”

  “You brought the Gemstone file,” he said. “That’s the best gift in the whole bunch. But if it makes you feel better, you can put it under the tree when Calliope’s done with it. I think I have some ribbon left over.”

  “You are ridiculous.”

  “He’s making up for lost time,” said Calliope absently. “Last Christmas pretty much sucked.” Then she stopped short, realizing what she had said. Leo looked up from the stove. Carter paused halfway down the stairs. It took me a second to piece together why they were all acting so strange.

  It had been August in my time when Mom sent me back to 1972. When she came to give me the Gemstone file, she had already been gone for two months, so it was sometime in late October or early November. It wasn’t hard to imagine why none of them felt particularly festive last Christmas – with me stuck in the Slipstream for another year, Mom newly missing, the investigation at its height.

  Leo was being watched; Calliope was being flogged; Carter was in hiding. They would have been frightened. They would have been alone.

  “It’s not fair,” I said to them all. “It’s not fair that all these things happened to you, and I wasn’t there to stop it.”

  “There was never anything you could have done,” said Leo. “You would have been arrested. You know that. You’d be in jail for treason right now and we’d never see you again. You can’t protect us from this. Neither could Mom. That’s not a failure on your part. That’s just reality.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but I still feel—”

  “Look,” said Calliope. “You can choose, if you want, to keep feeling guilty about the things that happened to us, as though they were all somehow your fault. You can do that, if you feel like it. Or you can do what the rest of us have done and let it make you stronger.”

  “These scars,” she said, indicating her back, “that’s what keeps me going when I get frustrated and tired. I know the face of the man who did this to me. But I don’t know the face of the person who made him do it, the person whose orders he was following.”

  “And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that when we find out who orchestrated Gemstone and who planted the Chronomaly that started the war, we will also know who manipulated the Congressional Committee into shutting down the Bureau to keep from getting caught. And I am very, very interested in finding out who that person is. That’s the meaning I give these scars. If you need to
feel something about them, feel anger, not guilt.”

  “Go easy on her,” said Carter gently. “Don’t forget, she only found out about Gemstone twenty-four hours ago.”

  And I realized with a shock that he was right. It hadn’t even been a full day. Mom had arrived in the middle of the night, then the next morning we had split up, Carter to Short-Hop to Election Day and me to go see Detective Barlow. Then that evening I had gone to meet with Woodward and Bernstein, and been force-jumped away the second their backs were turned.

  There’s a big difference between spending years studying the intricate complexities of Chrono-Interference and experiencing a rift in the Timeline of your own life. One day had passed for me, including a period of just a few minutes that I had been stuck inside the Slipstream. When I emerged on the other side, everything in my world was eighteen months older.

  I had seen my mother twenty-four hours ago. She had not seen me for a year and a half. Both of these things were simultaneously true.

  I leaned my head against the back of the couch and closed my eyes.

  “Let her sleep a little,” I heard Carter say. “Dinner won’t be ready for a few hours anyway. She needs a break.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, Carter,” said Calliope.

  “We have time for this,” he said firmly. “We’re going to have dinner tonight. We’re going to have Christmas tomorrow. Gemstone can wait. And in the meantime, Reggie has lost a ton of blood and has just found out that a year has been taken out of her life, so I think she’s earned a nap, don’t you?”

  I wanted to thank him, but I found that opening my eyes or sitting up had suddenly become impossible, as had forming coherent sounds. So I simply mumbled something unintelligible and curled my feet up on the sofa underneath me. Someone, I don’t know who, spread a soft thick blanket over me, and that was the last thing I remembered.

  * * *

  I slept heavily, and dreamed strange dark dreams of being trapped inside the Slipstream. Sometimes I was reaching out for Carter, sometimes Grove, sometimes my father.

  I dreamed of Saturn, crashing down from the sky towards me, spinning a million miles an hour, its rings transformed into murderous whirling blades. I dreamed of Mars, staring down at me with its angry red eye. I heard my mother’s voice and frantically tried to run through the thick darkness towards her, but it was like swimming through molasses. My limbs were drowsy and I wasn’t strong enough to push through to find her.

  I heard Leo’s voice suddenly – not calling my name, like my mother was, but speaking in a normal voice, and I followed it like a beacon back into the light.

  As I eased back into wakefulness, eyes still closed, I smelled rosemary and roasted meats and the comforting, ancient scent of a wood fire in a brick fireplace. At some point, Calliope had vacated the couch and I had stretched out my legs into the space she had left; I heard her behind me, in the kitchen, talking to Leo. They weren’t talking about anything in particular – he seemed to have recruited her assistance with stirring something on the stove and was criticizing her technique – but the very ordinariness of their conversation was the most wonderful thing I had experienced in ages.

  This was all a temporary reprieve, I knew; a way to keep me out of the city while those black-uniformed guards with guns hunted high and low for the fugitive who had snuck through the Slipstream right under their noses. We were all on borrowed time. But for now, for this moment – lying on the couch and breathing in the woodsy scents of fireplace and Christmas tree – I felt entirely at peace.

  Footsteps came down the stairs and I heard Carter’s voice. “Is she awake yet?”

  “No,” said Calliope.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty,” called Leo from the kitchen. “Come set the table.”

  “I’m too comfortable,” I murmured sleepily. “It’s nice here.”

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. “Get off your ass and come help.”

  I dragged myself up from the couch, moving as slowly as possible to proclaim that I was only doing this under duress. They were all busy in the kitchen, however, and nobody noticed.

  There was a stack of plates, silverware and real cloth napkins sitting on the kitchen counter, along with glasses for wine and water. Someone – presumably Carter, the Sugarplum Fairy – had placed small pine boughs in a ring on the surface of the table, with little white candles in little glass cups interspersed around them, like a deconstructed modernist Advent wreath. It was lovely against the gleaming dark wood of the table, and I took extra care in setting the plates and napkins with perfect symmetry to do it justice.

  Carter passed by me with two bottles of wine he’d retrieved from some other room, and nodded approvingly at my handiwork.

  “I’m so glad we have a professional chef and butler on hand,” said Calliope, carrying a pitcher of water to the table and setting it on an intricately carved wooden trivet. “This is much classier than my usual style.”

  “This is just a regular Wednesday for Carter,” I said dryly, watching him open the wine and pour a precisely even amount in each glass.

  “Even I can’t roast a chicken like your brother can roast a chicken,” said Carter.

  “You’re coming along,” said Leo encouragingly. “Carter made all the sides.”

  “No he did not,” snapped Calliope. “He did not make all the sides. There were three of us in that kitchen this morning, Leo Christopher Bellows.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Leo. “Carter made all the sides except for the rolls, which Calliope took out of the packaging and put into that lovely bowl herself.”

  “Thank you,” said Calliope, mollified, and they grinned at each other.

  There was a small part of me – I was ashamed of it, I admit, but it was there – that felt a pang of jealousy at the easy rapport the three of them had built without me. I felt guilty about it, because I knew what the last eighteen months had cost them, and I was glad they had all found each other. But the three of them had become a family in some way that didn’t quite feel like it included me.

  And besides that, there was something in the air from time to time between Leo and Calliope that made me cognizant for the first time that Calliope was very attractive and Leo was very attractive and they were both single and very close to the same age. There was something about this collision of my worlds that was comforting and disorienting at the same time; there were no circumstances in which it would ever have occurred to me that Leo and Calliope would have become friends – or that I would ever see Carter and Leo cooking dinner together. And yet here they were, a cozy little family with their own private jokes.

  Then Carter motioned for me to sit, and took the seat next to me, and smiled at me with such joyous delight – that I was here, that we were all together, that Leo was bringing a gorgeous roast chicken surrounded by potatoes to the table on an elegant silver tray, and that the others had clearly allowed him to have his way on every single matter pertaining to the proper observation of the Christmas holidays – that all jealousy was forgotten.

  How could I resent them for bonding together like this? How could I feel left out when the thing that connected them was that they were all waiting for me?

  Leo set down the chicken with a dramatic flourish as Calliope followed him with a heavy stoneware casserole dish of crispy Brussel sprouts flecked with almonds and bacon, and a plate of sliced blood oranges with shaved fennel. He pulled out a carving knife but Carter stopped him.

  “Wait,” he said. “Before we eat—”

  “Oh my God,” I said to him. “If you make us all go around the table and say one thing we’re grateful for I will literally murder you with this spoon.”

  “Before we eat,” he continued, ignoring me, “let’s all go around the table and say one thing we’re grateful for.”

  “It’s not Thanksgiving,” said Calliope.

  “Reggie wasn’t here for Thanksgiving,” said Carter.

  “
Fine,” I said irritably. “I’m grateful Calliope has secret powers and fixed my shoulder, I’m grateful for naps, I’m grateful not to be eating protein bars, and I’m grateful I’m not dead. Pass the rolls please.”

  “I’m grateful you’re safe,” said Calliope, entirely unexpectedly, without a trace of sarcasm in her voice, and I stopped short in the middle of reaching across her to grab the bread. “There was only about a 56% chance that the Chrono-Splice would work and for all we knew there would be armed guards with guns pointed at you the second you landed.”

  “I’m grateful I get to be with my sister on Christmas,” said Leo. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”

  “I’m grateful for your tracker,” said Carter. “Without it, I would never have found you at that restaurant. I would never have been pulled back here. I would still be stuck in 1972 in your ransacked apartment with no idea whether you were alive or dead.”

  I cleared my throat. “May I have another turn?” I asked, suitably chastened, and Carter smiled at me. “I’m grateful for—” I stopped, and thought for a moment. I wanted to find something true to say. I wanted to make it count.

  “I’m grateful to be alive,” I said finally. “And that I don’t have to do this alone.”

  Calliope raised her wineglass. “To Carstairs and Bellows,” she said, “and to finishing the work they started.”

  “To Carstairs and Bellows,” echoed Carter, toasting her.

  “To Mom and Dad,” said Leo, reaching over and clinking his glass against mine, and I could see through the tears in my eyes that his were glistening too.

  * * *

  After we had stuffed ourselves with chicken and potatoes, recovered a little, then stuffed ourselves again with a sugared-cranberry pie and glasses of brandy, Carter bid everyone goodnight and disappeared off to his room with the four stockings from the fireplace. Calliope departed soon after, taking her handheld, a second glass of brandy and the Gemstone drive to bed with her, which was probably her idea of the perfect night. I helped Leo with the dishes for awhile in amiable silence until he told me he and Carter could finish the rest in the morning.