His hair, I thought. It was shorter. Parted to the side, rather than the haphazard storm of brown waves it had always been when I knew him. But his face was the same. Maybe a little … I don’t know … older? No lines, really, but something about the set of his expression was more serious. Less goofy than the guy I’d known.
Then again, what had I known? A boy. In high school. Two years seemed like infinity then, but ten times that had passed and I’d grown enough to know that no one’s eighteen-year-old self tells you who they really are.
“Man, that baby’s really taking it out of you, huh? I haven’t heard a coherent sentence come out of your mouth in a month.” He laughed. “Even Barnaby makes more sense than you.” He nodded at the dog.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just … confused.” I glanced around. Baby? Did we have a baby in this new old life? “What baby?”
He didn’t laugh this time. He tipped his head to the left and frowned. “What baby?”
“Well, you know…” Of course he didn’t know. I didn’t know. Whatever he was talking about, it sure wasn’t the kind of thing a person just completely forgets and has to ask about, outside of a Lifetime movie. Do I have children? Are you my mother? This was, to him, insane. “I’m so foggy. I just woke up and had so many weird dreams.”
He came over to me then and cupped my face in his hands. “You need to take it really easy. You know the doctor told you that. I don’t think you should go to work today. I’ll call the school and tell them you can’t.”
“The school?” I was echoing everything dumbly. I know it made no sense to him. “I work at a school?” Then an idea came to me that might just work. I smiled, sleepily, like I was just teasing him. I was hoping he’d play along.
And he did. “Yes, Mrs. Riley, you teach seventh-grade math at the local middle school, you’re twenty-six years old, I made you an honest woman five years ago, and now you’re pregnant with your first child”—he gestured at what I now realized was a slightly puffed-out and definitely queasy stomach; I wasn’t hung over, I was pregnant—“and Barnaby is going to be very jealous as soon as he is born.”
“He?” Barnaby?
“Okay, or she.” It was clear we had no idea but that he was hoping for a boy and I was hoping for a girl. This was obviously a conversation we’d had more than once. “But Barnaby is going to be jealous, so can you please say hello to him? He’s been eyeing you pretty desperately since you walked in here.”
“Oh.” I looked at the dog with a sense of recognition, but I’d had golden retrievers growing up, and in my experience they all looked very similar. I’d seen L.L.Bean dogs who looked so similar to my beloved lost Bailey that I did a double- and triple-take.
So while Barnaby was looking at me with expectant familiarity, I wasn’t sure if I knew him or just knew dogs.
In either case, I found myself saying, “Hey, Barnaby. Hey, Barn.” He galumphed over to me, and I reached out and scritched him behind the ears. He smiled and turned his face up, leaning into my touch. Dogs. They were so easy. “Good boy,” I cooed.
“So what do you say?” Brendan asked me. “Want me to call the school? I think you should rest.”
Well, hell, whatever job I had wasn’t real to me now, so I didn’t see any point in going out of my way to protect it. Feeling like I could step back into my teenage “do-over” was one thing, but there was no way I could step into a twentysomething life I’d never lived. A life I had no feel for whatsoever. “Please,” I said to Brendan. “I really want to stay in today. Tell them I don’t know when I’ll be back.” Truer words were never spoken. At least not by me.
He nodded. “If you want to add anything to the grocery list, give me a call.”
He did the grocery shopping? How sweet he was. I guess I’d really lucked out in this incarnation.
“You know where to get me,” he said, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Make sure you keep drinking water. We don’t want to go back to the hospital.”
“Right.” Better not to push my luck asking too many obvious questions. “I’ll do that. And … you know where to find me too.”
He gave me the thumbs-up sign and went out the front door. I stood there for a long moment, watching the nonexistent jet stream that followed his path. Then I turned to the dog.
“Well, Barnaby. What the fuck do I do now?”
* * *
WHAT I DID was spend the next three hours rooting through every drawer, examining every picture on the fridge, every note on the desk in the den, and looking for every other clue to my state of mind in this life. I read a lot of inspirational books. Not religious, but encouraging, self-help with your self-esteem books. Titles like Prayers for a Simple Life, The Path to Happiness, Three Easy Steps to Meditation, and What to Do When You Can’t Do Anything.
There were also a few titles on getting pregnant, like Getting Pregnant Naturally and Old Wives’ Remedies for Young Wives. Actually I thought that was a pretty insulting title and I couldn’t imagine myself buying it, but when I opened it up and leafed through I saw an inscription:
Chin up, young wife! You’ll be a tired old wife
with a brood of brats before you know it! I know
you will hate this title but I think there might
actually be some good tips in here. Let’s meet
for some raspberry leaf tea soon! XO, Bonnie
So I had friends. I didn’t know them, of course, but at least I had friends. That was good. Disconcerting, too—a whole life, including histories with strangers, that I didn’t know anything at all about—but it was good.
It was also good that I knew myself well enough, and was consistent enough, to know I would have bristled at that title no matter what life path I had chosen. I felt a private pride. I might not be living my own life, the life I knew, but at least I was still me.
With that in mind, I went back to the bedroom and looked on my closet shelf. I had always kept a box of keepsakes—letters, ticket stubs, whatever—on my closet shelf at home, and it was something I’d continued doing even though the pieces of my life had changed significantly. So when I went to this Ramie’s bedroom closet and looked, sure enough I found an elaborate hatbox, with a T.J.Maxx sticker still on the bottom.
It was heavy and my body was a little awkward. Carefully, I carried it over to the bed and sat down with it. Barnaby clicked into the room and jumped handily onto the mattress beside me. I automatically reached over and ruffled his fur. “You probably understand more about what’s going on than I do, right, buddy?”
He sighed and rolled onto his side. There was not an ounce of fear that I was going to chastise him for being up here, so I guess he was a furniture dog. My mom would have hated that. I know that because I allowed all of our dogs to be furniture dogs.
“Okay. You do that and I’ll do this.” I had a vague sense of sneakiness about this, like I was trespassing on someone else’s life, rather than my own. But the fact that it was my own meant that, if this life didn’t happen or if I made another choice, this was no one’s life, so, basically, I could do whatever I wanted. If I could somehow be sure I’d get out of here, I might have felt free to make every stupid mistake I’d ever imagined. In fact, if I really knew there would be no consequences, or memories, I could even come up with a few more.
But life is uncertain, even—or especially—in the midst of great uncertainty. Even the most ridiculous and cartoonish of dreams seem real while you’re in them. Yes, that’s Sammy Davis, Jr., riding a camel sidesaddle and holding a sign for that Chinese restaurant that closed four years ago, what of it? If Napoleon and Erma Bombeck can sit and chat with him about sewing dog coats, it must be fine, right?
So here I was, in a life I’d never had, able to predict myself by how I’d always been, but unable to see my present beyond the scope of my past. What could I do, but hope that there was some reason for this, other than some wacky Dr. Who time-space continuum mix-up that would thrust me, permanently, into confusion?
I took the top off the box, which was so full that a few things spilled onto the bed. A car key—VW of some sort—and a heavy birthday card with one of those musical buttons in it, as well as a couple of coins I didn’t know the significance of, though it probably had something to do with the dates on them or the places I’d found them or the people who’d given them to me. I was like that. I’d pick coins up and read significance into them every time, so sometimes when I had some extra coins lying around, I’d just throw them onto the street or sidewalk for someone else to find and feel lucky for having.
I opened the birthday card on top of the pile. It was from Brendan. And Barnaby. I felt an impatient little sigh inflate inside of me but didn’t want to let it complain its way out. This was nice. It was a nice card. It had a recording of Elvis singing “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog”—another Barnaby reference, I gathered. I closed the card, but the tinny music kept playing. I frowned. Pressed it together harder. It still played. I felt an irritation I couldn’t quite name, but felt I knew well, surge inside of me, and I pinched the music button hard. It stopped. I set it aside for fear of starting it up again.
I hadn’t realized I hated those cards, but I do. I hate those cards.
Next there was a birthday card from my mom. Nice but totally unremarkable. Bless her, she was one who would just put Ramie—above the prewritten message, then, Love, Mom, beneath it. There was never anything more specific, more personal than that. It was always just basically, This message is close enough to the mark for me to give it to you from me, and I have always accepted it as just that.
Recently she’s gotten into sending e-cards instead, which drives me absolutely insane. They always go straight to the junk file, and if I don’t find them, they remind her I haven’t read them, which she always takes personally. And I feel guilty. It’s this dance we do.
So in that way, it was kind of fun to see her handwritten impersonal card to a twenty-sixish me.
But I wasn’t sure why I’d saved it.
The more I dug into the box, the more evidence I unearthed of a life that was very different from the one I’d created. A life in which I valued things like preprinted movie stubs and impersonal cards and a D.C. Metro ticket from a date that had no great significance that I could tell, but that was, for some reason, worth saving. Barnaby’s first collar and tag were in there—I gathered they were his first from the collar’s size and the fact that the tag had a different address from the one more recent correspondence told me I was in now; in Maryland, it turned out—as were his bill of sale and a computer printout of a picture of his litter from the Washington Post online.
Fertility books, self-help books, daily affirmations, cards and keepsakes from a small circle of friends, a house that could have been glued right onto the one I’d grown up in and not had any style differences … all told a story I didn’t quite know. I couldn’t relate to it. Yet clearly my psychology was written all over the place here.
Nature versus nurture was ceasing to be a question for me.
But there was, of course, one thing I’d been ignoring. One factor that gave this “movie” a heavier implication: the baby I was apparently carrying.
I put my hand to my belly and waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I’ve never been pregnant, but I’m not a moron and I know you can’t feel the baby moving around at such an early stage. What I didn’t expect, though, was how hard my middle felt. Almost distended. Tendons were stretching and I felt heavy in a way I never had before. I had to pee constantly. While I’d gone through the keepsakes, I’d had to get up no fewer than three times, and it might have been four. It was uncomfortable, alien, but when I sat and tried to meditate on it, there was no accompanying sense of reality. I had no sense of a child, no sense of the person that child would be. No sense, even, of where my body was headed. It was like I was in a play and this was my costume.
There was no way to answer the metaphysical questions that this situation raised: Did we have many paths out there, lives being lived in accordance with every choice we could possibly make? Or could our own life shift suddenly into another, as mine appeared to have done, and did that happen all the time without our noticing it? If time wasn’t linear, did that mean we were as capable of changing the past as we were of changing the future?
All of these questions were moot as far as I was concerned because I hadn’t been able to change a damn thing in my experience. In fact, I couldn’t even figure out if my environment, or my self, was real. Presumably one of us was, but damned if I knew which.
I put the box back into the closet and searched for another, perhaps the one that contained the really interesting or juicy stuff, but I couldn’t find anything. So I went back downstairs and looked around, trying to find some sort of … I don’t know, clue? Reason I was here?
There were framed pictures of Brendan and me scattered about the house, taken over the years. I recognized one from our graduation / my birthday dinner at the Kona Kai. Others were hard to pin down. We didn’t look very different in them and I had no way to know when I had what hairstyle, so it was just a collage of a life we’d somehow had together. A trip someplace tropical—the kind of flash-front, palm-trees-in-the-back shot you might see on 90 percent of Facebook profiles. Skiing, though I’m pretty sure that was local, at Ski Liberty forty miles north. They’ll never hold the Olympic ski competitions in Maryland.
There was an office down a hallway off the kitchen, and I went in there hoping to find some paperwork from my job, some clue to what teaching was like and if it was enjoyable. I dug through the drawers and saw folders marked TAXES, UTILITIES, HOME REPAIR, MEDICAL, and so on, very neatly organized.
I had to have a valise or something somewhere. I started to poke around for it when the doorbell rang.
For a moment I froze. My impulse was to hide. To avoid interaction with anyone. But then I reminded myself that if I wanted to figure out what I was supposed to be doing and getting from this, then I needed to dive into it.
As I went back into the hallway, the bell rang again. I quickened my pace and opened the door to the worried face of a brunette woman, about thirty years old, wearing khaki shorts and a pink camp shirt, with a Coach bag slung over her shoulder.
“Oh, my god, Ramie!” She held a hand to her chest in visible relief. “I went by your classroom and they said you called in sick, and I was just so afraid that, you know, after last week … Is everything all right?”
What was I supposed to do? Was everything all right how? As far as I was concerned, everything was not all right, but I didn’t think the subtext of her question was, Are you time-traveling? or Is anything seriously fucked-up happening to you?
The problem was I had no idea who she was or what her relationship to me was.
“Oh, no, it’s not, is it? Something’s wrong, I can just tell. What’s going on?”
“N-n-nothing’s going on,” I stammered. “Everything’s fine. I’m just not sure what you’re referring to. After what happened last week?”
“The cramps!” She bustled in, closing the door behind her with a quick glance over her shoulder, as if someone were out there who might hear this secret information. “I was afraid you were having another miscarriage!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“You’re not, right?” she went on. “You can tell me the truth. We can go to the doctor right now if you have any doubts at all. When I heard you weren’t at work, I was afraid you’d be here alone, too worried to tell Brendan something was wrong.”
“Why wouldn’t I want Brendan to know?”
“Oh, come on.” She half rolled her eyes. “He’d be all over you; you wouldn’t get a moment’s peace, and you know it. I thought we agreed that if you had any problems you’d call and say, I saw Mr. McCormick in the hall today. Hello? Did you seriously forget that?”
For a moment, I was completely baffled. Who was this woman and what the hell was she talking about? But then I smiled. Mr. McCormick. My seventh-grade m
ath teacher. He was such an asshole. If I saw Mr. McCormick coming, it would mean I was in trouble.
I guess I’d come up with that as a code to let her, whoever she was, know I was in trouble.
“Mr. McCormick is nowhere near here,” I said, though actually I couldn’t literally be sure of that. Maybe, in this world, he was my next-door neighbor.
“Thank goodness. Do you have any of that vodka left, honey? I could use a slug. Sorry you can’t join me.”
“Um … yeah. Sure. Help yourself.” Because god knew I couldn’t help her. Given some time I could probably search out where we kept the liquor, but it might be a little suspect to do that while she was here watching.
I followed her into the kitchen, and she went straight to the freezer. Of course. Vodka was in the freezer.
“You sit down, girl,” she said, gesturing impatiently at me to sit at the table. “You shouldn’t be standing around, stressing those stomach muscles. Sit down and let me bring you something. Are you hungry?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Well, I’m at least bringing you a glass of milk. You need the protein and calcium.”
“Okay.” Whoever she was, she obviously had kids of her own, because she was very, very good at issuing orders in a kind and caring, yet very firm, way. And I was glad to take them, actually, because I was really tired. Stomach muscles or not, it was fatiguing standing on the hard floor. I wasn’t used to this body. It was really uncomfortable.
“Any symptoms today?” she asked.
“I’m just peeing a lot.” How was I going to get a name out of her when we apparently knew each other so well?
She laughed. “I remember that. Bad enough that you have to drink gobs of water, but then you have a baby sitting on your bladder. It’s murder. Absolute murder.” She opened a cabinet and took out a glass, took it to the fridge, and poured in milk.
“And my lower back is kind of sore.”
She kicked the fridge door closed and came over to me, glass of milk in one hand, bottle of vodka in the other. Was she just going to sit down and drink it right out of the bottle?
If I Could Turn Back Time Page 21