Someday Jennifer

by Risto Pakarinen

  There was no song for this moment.

  I couldn’t think of a thing.

  My brain was like a jukebox with a stuck mechanism.

  I let out a long, deep scream as the Beetle roared along the highway toward Helsinki.

  I pressed that gas pedal with everything I had, as if pushing it harder would somehow make the car go faster. Dots of rain began to fall and were picked out by the Beetle’s headlights, whizzing past me like stars at warp speed.

  “Come on, move!”

  The speedometer’s needle was creeping upwards, past fifty, climbing toward sixty. At seventy, the steering wheel started to shake. I shook it some more, leaned as hard as I could on the gas, jumped up and down on the seat, trying to make the car go faster. I wanted warp speed. I wanted light speed. No—I wanted something better than that.

  “Give me eighty-eeeeeight!” I screamed.

  The lights of a gas station blurred by. A truck going the other way barely registered. The car was shaking, rattling, and rolling as the needle edged past eighty, eighty-five, creeping up . . . toward . . . ninety . . .

  And then all around me were blue and red and white flashing lights, and I thought for a moment the car had done it—ripped a hole in the space-time continuum—until I heard the siren.

  I finally lifted my foot—it felt dead, like lead—and the car slowed down. I steered to the side and stopped. I closed my eyes and shook my head in disbelief. It wasn’t the middle of the night, but it was late and the road was empty. Didn’t the police have anything better to do? I opened the glove compartment, chucked the Time Machine aside, and found my registration. When I sat back up, I saw the police officer standing next to my car, giving me the “roll down your window” gesture.

  I rolled down the window.

  “Good evening, sir,” said the officer. “Would you mind stepping out of the car? You may have noticed that you were speeding.”

  “Sara?” I said, astonished.

  “Hello, Peter. Step out of the car, please.”

  “This is weird.”

  “Just get out of your car and into ours.”

  I did as she asked. I couldn’t really see what the problem was. The road was deserted, but her partner was glaring at me like I’d driven at ninety through a school zone.

  I looked back up the road. In the distance, by the village we’d just passed through, I saw the unmistakable yellow glint of a school zone sign.

  Ah.

  Sara escorted me to the police car. She opened the back door and I hopped in. She then sat down in the passenger’s seat while her colleague punched some numbers on a big computer console in the front.

  I thought it looked a bit like the set-up in the car in Knight Rider, but kept that to myself.

  “Didn’t you see the school zone signs?” Sara’s partner asked.

  “I’m sorry, Officer. I didn’t.”

  I wanted to point out that it was 11 p.m., but I didn’t think that would help my case.

  “And I bet you didn’t think you could drive so fast in one of those old Beetles, did you?” He glanced at me in the rear-view mirror.

  “I wasn’t thinking. Period.” I bit my lower lip. I wanted to say as little as possible.

  “I mean, fast enough to lose your driver’s licence,” he added gravely.

  “Lose my licence?” I whimpered.

  “Two months maybe,” he said. “Profession?”

  “Right now, unemployed,” I said, partly because I was feeling sorry for myself and partly because with no income I would get a smaller fine.

  Sara turned around and looked at me; she grimaced.

  “It’s true, isn’t it? I don’t have a job.”

  “Do you know each other?” asked the other policeman.

  “We went to high school together,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  I slouched back, not paying attention to what the policeman was saying as he droned on; something about no street lighting and elks going through windshields and blah blah blah. Sara didn’t say anything either, and after they had checked my details on the computer, I was given permission to leave.

  Sara escorted me back to my car. She seemed to be appraising me. I wasn’t much to look at. I had paint stains on my hands and my face, and I was wearing faux Adidas sweatpants—two stripes only—a dirty T-shirt, an orange hoodie, and a denim jacket. And deck shoes.

  “Are you okay, Peter?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Let me know if you want to have that cup of coffee sometime. Maybe you need to talk to somebody?”

  She handed me the ticket.

  “You know I saved your butt here, right? My partner wanted to drop the hammer on you. It’s not every day we have car chases here,” she added, and waved my driver’s licence in front of my face.

  “Thanks. It was stupid of me.”

  “Very. Drive safe now.”

  I promised her I’d do that, and when I saw her get back inside the police Volvo, I looked at the ticket. The fine was 250 euros.

  The limit had been fifty kilometres an hour. My speed? Eighty-eight.

  Chapter 31

  Don’t Talk to Strangers

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up to a knock on my bedroom door. It was Dad.

  “Hello, sleepyhead, time to get to the Atlas!”

  “Really?”

  “Of course! You heard Taimi. We’re in a bit of a hurry now. Better get a move on! I’m heading out now, so I’ll see you there. Mom left your breakfast in the fridge.”

  Then he was gone.

  When I walked into the Atlas fifteen minutes later, Dad was already busy at work, unclogging the toilet. Again. “Can you see if you can find me a coat hanger? Must be one somewhere . . .”

  I walked to the office and looked around. I’d given it a good tidy up, throwing away all the promotional material for nineties films that didn’t exist yet, and I didn’t remember seeing a coat hanger. Then I remembered the storage room, accessed through a little door under the stairs up to the balcony. When I got there, though, a shiny brass padlock prevented me from checking it out. I didn’t remember that being there before, and none of the keys on my key ring seemed to fit it. I was just heading back to ask Dad about it when I head a toilet flush.

  “Eureka!” he yelled, and then came out to find me, holding a plunger aloft.

  “Dad, why’s that door padlocked?”

  “What door? Oh. I was going to ask you, have you spoken with the film distributors? When are the reels coming? What about tickets? Do you have tickets?”

  “Yes, they’ll be here shortly, they said. The bookstore sells generic numbered tickets we can use, I think.”

  Dad continued his rapid-fire interrogation.

  “How are you going to let people know about the event? What about the lobby—are you going to get to work on the walls today? And who’s going to take care of ticket sales? What about candy? Will there be candy?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know.”

  He put his arm around me and pulled me closer.

  “Hey, Pete. I get it. But today’s a new day. And don’t worry: we can work it out. Oh, and I’ll let you choose the music all day,” Dad said.

  “Deal,” I said, and got changed into my overalls.

  By noon, Dad had moved to the balcony to bolt the chairs into place.

  “I don’t know what people have been doing up there, but some of those chairs are really loose!”

  I was at the far end of the hall, under the balcony, operating a carpet-cleaning machine. It was a rental from a friend of Dad’s.

  “That looks like fun,” someone shouted over the noise of the ten-amp electric motor, startling me. “And it’s probably safer than trying to break the land-speed record in a Beetle.”

  It was Sara. She was back in her civilian clothes—jeans and a leather jacket.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” I said, a
ware of my dad working above our heads.

  “Understood. Listen, would you like to grab a pizza with me?”

  “What, now?”

  “How about in an hour? Or do you have other plans?”

  “Well, Dad and I always—” I began to say, but was interrupted by a hoarse man’s voice yelling something from the balcony.

  “I forgot my lunchbox at home. I’m going to drive home and eat there,” Dad said.

  Sara looked up and waved.

  “La Favorita it is, then,” she said. “See you there at one.”

  LA FAVORITA, RUN BY a Greek guy, was Kumpunotko’s first pizza place. It was also the best.

  The walk from the Atlas to the corner of Main and Market only took five minutes, but I left early to make sure I wouldn’t be late. I checked the big digital clock on top of the bank building on my way there: 12:50 p.m.

  I waited for Sara outside, like a true gentleman. After what I estimated to have been ten minutes, I started to look around to see if I could spot her. After another ten minutes, I took a peek inside the restaurant, but no Sara there, either. I walked back toward the square to check the time. It was now 1:11 p.m.

  I couldn’t understand why Sara would have stood me up. But I’d waited too long to just leave, so I walked back to the restaurant. When I got there, Sara was standing outside, tapping her watch.

  “It’s polite to text if you’re going to be late,” she said, and before I could protest, she added with a smile, “. . . but I don’t have your number.”

  As soon as we sat down, Sara cut the small talk.

  “How are you doing? Are you okay? How’s the project going?” she asked. “When will you open? I want to come to the premiere. There’ll be a red carpet, right?”

  “October 26,” I said, as casually as I could.

  “That soon? Great!”

  “It’s the date when Marty McFly goes back in time,” I said.

  “Nice touch. You must be almost finished, then.”

  “Almost, but even in the worst-case scenario, we should be ready in a week or two. I hope,” I said, and felt cold sweat running down my temples.

  We sat there silently for a while. Sara fidgeted with her left ear; I looked around the restaurant. The walls were covered with photos of local celebrities smiling with the owner, and newspaper clippings from Kumpunotko’s two papers, with reviews and stories profiling the owner on his fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays.

  “I haven’t been here for a while, but this is the first place I ever saw somebody roll up an entire pizza and eat it like that,” I said. “Actually, the only place,” I added.

  “Who eats a pizza like that?”

  “Mikke,” I said.

  Sara couldn’t help but laugh. Mikke had been such a joker. I felt a tinge of sadness that he’d moved to another continent. Why couldn’t he have been here instead of Sami?

  “Do you remember when he went to school dressed as Horny Jesus?”

  “Ha! Do I ever. And do you remember—maybe you weren’t there—when he sat in chemistry with a garbage bag over his head? He pinched it tight under his nose so he could breathe in through his mouth and inflate it through his nose. It swelled up like he had a massive head, and he’d even drawn a smiley face on it. Even Seppo Laine was cracking up, though of course he was trying to tell him about the dangers of suffocation . . .”

  The waiter came and took our orders, and we both knew ours without looking at the menu.

  “Hey, I had this great idea back in high school and I think it’d still work. Want to hear it?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What if there was a phone number you could call to get an answer to any question? Like, anything. ‘What’s the capital of Jordan? I’ll hold . . . oh, it’s Amman? Thank you.’”

  Sara looked at me, her mouth open.

  “And if they can’t give you the answer immediately, they’ll call you back,” I said.

  She closed her mouth but said nothing.

  “Good idea, right?” I said.

  “Well, hasn’t it sort of been done?”

  I wasn’t aware that any such phone service existed.

  Sara slid her phone out, pressed a button, and then spoke. “Siri, what’s the capital city of Jordan?” She stared at me while the phone bleeped, thought for a second, and then gave the reply in a cool, digitally helpful voice.

  I pasted a polite smile on my face, like a reformed alcoholic might do when his companion orders a triple vodka.

  “Peter, why did you move back to Kumpunotko? Are you sick? Is your mom sick?”

  “Why did you?” I shot back.

  “I asked you first.”

  “I have a project here.”

  “But you didn’t have the project until you got here, right?”

  “Okay. I needed a change.”

  “You call moving back to your old hometown ‘change’? Living with your parents? To be honest, you don’t seem to have changed that much at all, and frankly, that’s a little scary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s begin with your clothes. I swear you wore that same sweater in one of our high-school class photos. And last night—”

  “No, no, not ‘last night’—”

  “Yes, Peter, last night you looked like something straight out of, I don’t know, a bad eighties music video. Seriously, what’s going on? For God’s sake, Peter, look at you! You have a mullet!”

  I flipped my hair with my hand and smiled.

  “I just wanted to get back to my roots, find the person I used to be and the people I used to be with. Why do you care so much about why I’m here?”

  “Maybe I’m just curious,” she said.

  “Are you?”

  “Hell, yeah. You have to admit it’s strange behaviour.”

  I laughed. “Okay, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  She shook her head, looked away; she may have even cursed.

  “It’s just that,” Sara began, “you seem to be moving backwards, and it’s not natural. You’re supposed to go through life forwards. Nature wants you to evolve.”

  She cleared her throat. She seemed to be about to say something, but I didn’t hear it.

  Because someone had just come in and sat down at a table across the restaurant.

  It was Jennifer.

  I don’t know how many hours I spent watching the back of that head in high school. I watched her move it side to side as she listened to the teacher, and I watched her fix her hair when she got bored in class. She had the best posture of anyone I’d ever met; I always thought I could pick her out of a lineup just by her posture.

  I mumbled a quick excuse and stood up. I took a couple of quick steps toward the woman’s table, with both my arms extended in a surprised greeting. When I got there, the woman looked up from her newspaper and—

  It wasn’t Jennifer.

  I muttered an apology and thanked the heavens that the bathroom was in the same direction. I kept going, stumbling through the door, until I found a cold tiled wall against which to rest my head.

  Funny how you can go from pure bliss to bewilderment to panic to shame in five short seconds. I washed my hands and my face with cold water to calm myself down before walking out, trying to act natural.

  “Are you okay?” Sara asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said as breezily as I could. “Why do you keep asking?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the lone diner and then shrugged.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “No, no. Just went to the bathroom. You were saying?”

  “Hmm. I think I was saying that I’m not sure why you’re putting so much time and effort—and however much money—into a project that’s basically doomed. But I hope you’re getting out of it . . . whatever it is you’re hoping to get out of it.”

  I picked up the salt shaker and gave it my full focus. I twisted and turned it in my hand, afraid to look at Sara. I really, really d
idn’t want to think too deeply about what she’d just said. I had no idea how much of my savings were left, as I had no real way to check.

  Thankfully, she diverted my attention.

  “Can you at least tell me what the deal is with you and Jennifer?”

  I dropped the salt shaker, spilling salt all over the table. I brushed it off with my arm.

  “There’s no deal . . . How could there be a deal between me and somebody I haven’t seen in thirty years?”

  “Stop it. I may not be that smart, but I’m not that stupid either. You’ve brought her up almost every time we’ve met.” She stopped herself—but I saw it—from glancing at the lone diner again. “She does look a bit like her.”

  I shrugged, as if I’d barely noticed.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “Jennifer and I were pretty good friends back then, you know that, and . . . I simply lost track of her after she moved to Paris. We were friends. That’s all.”

  “Paris? Yeah, right,” Sara muttered, and went on in a louder voice: “Have you googled her? Facebooked her?”

  “It’s not that important.”

  Sara laughed, but not in her usual charming way. “If it’s not that important, why have you asked me about her, twice? I don’t know her; we’re not friends. In fact, we’ve never been friends.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “I can probably find her for you,” Sara said after a short pause. “Even if she’s not on Facebook, I can just look her up at work. I’m not supposed to do it, because every single search I do on the database is logged, but I can have a look. If you want me to,” she added.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no. No. I’m sure I’ll bump into her, you know, when the time is right,” I said.

  “Okay. Whatever. Up to you. Your call.”

  We got our pizzas. Sara rolled hers up and stuffed it in her mouth. I burst out laughing, which made Sara first laugh and then cough so hard her face turned crimson.

  “Oh, behave,” I said to her in mock disgust.

  We ate our pizzas with forks and knives the rest of the way, then paid and walked back toward the Atlas.

  “Want to watch a movie tonight? My place?” I asked Sara outside the theatre.

  “Which one?”

  “How about Trading Places?”