“I’m serious, asshole. Get up and comb your hair,” Radbourn said. “Sillow Cash of 1363 Seaview Avenue, Jacksonville, Florida. Says on my sheet that he’s your father. He’s in the visiting area now. What? You didn’t know he was coming?”
What the hell is my father doing here? Kyle wondered to himself. He’d thought a million times about what he’d say to his dad if he ever saw him again, but his mind was blank now. He’d found a phone number for his father last year and left a voicemail inviting him to be at Kyle’s mother’s funeral, but he never showed.
Kyle walked toward the door of his cell in a daze. “Alright,” he said, running a comb through his hair. “Let’s go.”
Radbourn put his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “You know I’m just fucking with you . . . You alright? I didn’t even know your old man was around. Thought he was a deadbeat like—”
“—He is, and I don’t have anything to say to him,” Kyle answered. “This’ll be quick.”
Kyle could feel himself shutting down mentally, something he had done each day during his trial. It was the only way to get through a process where every single person around you has come to work for the day with the express purpose of deciding how much you should be punished for the horrible thing you did. And, all of them—even the ones working for you—look nauseated to be in your presence. Kyle trained himself, over those two months, to almost come out of his body on his days in court. He observed the process as if it were happening to a stranger. The biggest torture he faced was having the realization over and over that there was nothing he could do to make things okay again for the kids from Bus #17, or for their families—nothing at all.
Stevenson Correctional used its auditorium as its visitor’s center, too. The room had good natural acoustics, so the buzz of fifty different conversations going on at once was jarring at first, especially coming from a calm Saturday morning in Dormitory H with most of the other inmates sleeping.
Radbourn pointed out his father, sitting and waiting for Kyle, looking antsy in his small wooden chair. Sillow dabbed at his forehead with a paper towel. The age difference aside, Kyle’s memory of the way Sillow looked from the picture was pretty dead-on with the man in front of him. Kyle stood there for a little while, gathering himself before walking over.
Kyle usually blamed only himself for crashing into the bus on the drawbridge and killing twelve kids and their driver. He’d been the one to get high and drunk. He’d been speeding. He’d let Joe distract him from the road.
Every night, he read their names on the piece of notebook paper taped to his wall—his personal memorial to them. He did everything he could to keep the kids alive, at least in his memory. It was the least he could do, since the bus crash was something he could never make okay, no matter what he did.
Every once in a while, though, when Kyle felt like spreading the blame around a little bit, he turned his thoughts to his father. What, Kyle wondered, would life have been like if I’d had a father around?
Sillow stood up when he saw Kyle, and straightened his wrinkly button-down. Kyle looked past him at first, not wanting to give him the satisfaction that he had recognized him so easily.
“Hey,” Sillow said, as Kyle closed in on him.
“Hey.”
Sillow extended his hand to Kyle, but Kyle just let it hang there. “You wanna sit?” Sillow asked, stepping out of the row of theater-style seats to let Kyle in.
“You wanna tell me why you’re here?” Kyle asked.
Sillow looked deep into his eyes. “You don’t remember, do you? Neither of us were sure what you’d remember.”
“Uh . . . No, I don’t remember you, Dad,” Kyle said, already annoyed at him. “I remember one picture . . . I remember my mother seeming broken until the day she died because you left us for your new family . . . What are you doing here?”
“Wait, Kyle . . . That’s not what I—” Sillow started.
“Oh? That’s not what you came to talk about?” Kyle asked. “Fuck you.”
“Dammit. I should’ve waited another day,” Sillow said. “I just wanted to make sure I caught you before—”
Kyle stood up. What was he talking about—waiting another day? he thought to himself. “Don’t come here again.”
“Just sit down, please,” Sillow said, dabbing his head again with a paper. “I need to tell you some things.”
What could he have to say that I would care about? Kyle wondered. He wanted to deny this time to his father. For once, in their relationship, Kyle got to call the shots. But, curiosity got the better of Kyle for the moment and he sat down on the arm of one of the auditorium chairs.
“This doesn’t need to be confrontational between us,” Sillow said. “I know I’ve done a lot that was wrong. But I’m tryin’ to make it better. I swear I am . . . ”
Before Kyle could say anything, a tall woman with her chestnut hair tied into a long braid, moved loudly down the aisle toward them. She clutched her purse as her heels clicked against the floor. She looked like she was in a rush. “Excuse me,” she said.
Sillow stood up and the woman brushed past him in the narrow aisle, her bag practically smacking him as she passed. Kyle stood up from the armrest to let her pass too.
“Sorry. Excuse me,” she said again.
After she passed, Kyle noticed something on the ground. He bent down to pick it up and saw it was a wallet sized photo of Sillow with a woman about his age, and two little girls. The picture looked like it was taken a while ago by a professional, in a park somewhere. They looked happy, happier than Kyle could remember ever seeing his mom, with a small number of exceptions.
“Nice family,” Kyle said, handing the picture to Sillow. “Do they know about me? Or Mom?”
Sillow wrinkled his forehead as he looked at the picture. “This picture isn’t—”
“—Yeah, I thought so,” Kyle said. “If you didn’t care enough to take some responsibility for almost eighteen years, why start now? You should get back to your real family, Sillow.”
“You don’t understand,” Sillow said.
“I have to admit,” Kyle said. “I used to be a little jealous when Mom told me about your perfect little set up in Florida. But, now? I just pity them, because they’re stuck with you.” Kyle’s voice cracked getting out those last words. It felt good to unload on his father. He turned and started to walk away. Don’t look back, he said to himself. Do not look back.
“I need to tell you something,” Sillow called out after him. “I failed! The whole thing . . . It didn’t work!”
Kyle walked to one of the guards, a tall twenty-something guy named Andrews. “I’m good,” he said to Andrews.
“Transport,” Andrews said grumpily into his walkie-talkie. “Inmate Cash to Dorm H.”
Kyle felt someone behind him and turned to find Sillow there. His father looked frazzled now, trying to get words out faster than his mouth could move. “You’ve got to listen to me . . . Just listen . . . You can’t change anything . . . I don’t think it’s even possible. Just tell them ‘no.’ I tried . . . I did what you told me . . . ”
Sillow put his hand on Kyle’s shoulder, but Andrews stepped in between them. “No touching,” he growled.
“Please,” Sillow screamed as Andrews led Kyle out of the auditorium.
Kyle turned and looked at Sillow once more. Did what you told me? What the hell was he talking about? he wondered. Then he thought about the picture of Sillow’s happy family. Who cares? He thought, as anger washed over him and he walked back to his cell.
CHAPTER 5
January 31, 2016
* * *
Later that day
Saturday afternoons were leisure time. For some inmates at Stevenson Correctional, that meant hoops in the yard, or a walk around the grounds of the prison for some fresh air. For Kyle, it meant Internet research on the kids he’d killed in the bus accident on March 13, almost two years earlier. It was not an activity that would qualify as “leisure” to most people. But, h
e was very protective of this time, which he’d sworn to his victims. He’d studied them until there was literally nothing more to learn.
Kyle would take up residence in the prison’s computer lab from lunchtime until right before dinner on Saturdays without fail. A guy who wasn’t gang-affiliated could wind up getting beat up, or worse, for squatting on one of the computers like Kyle did. But Ochoa never failed to quickly end any threats that came Kyle’s way.
No one bothered getting to know people after they died, and Kyle felt that that was at least part of the finality of what made someone Dead with a capital ‘D.’ Seeing a family member’s Facebook recollection, or finding an old school picture he’d never seen, made the kids who died on Bus #17 just the tiniest bit alive to him for a moment. He collected information about the kids as if it would eventually add up to a complete set, like baseball cards.
Ridiculous as it may have seemed to anyone else, he never wavered from his Saturday afternoon tradition of Internet stalking the dead kids of Bus #17. Kyle’s photographic memory allowed him to collect these facts and images in his mind forever—making for more detailed and comprehensive ways to torture himself.
His father’s visit had caused him the inconvenience of being stuck today with the slowest of the three 1990s-era PCs. It also had a sticky keyboard from someone’s juice or soda spilling on it.
Just as Kyle began to settle into Lisa Carigliani’s stagnant Facebook page, the door to the lab opened and a mountainous guard, Officer Gee, stared his way. “You already had a visitor today, didn’t you Cash?”
Kyle nodded.
“You’re real popular,” Gee said. “Let’s go.”
Kyle stood up from the computer, but didn’t move toward the door. “If it’s my father again—”
“It’s a lady,” Gee said. “Let’s go! Fuckin’ hustle. Visitors are a privilege. You want it taken away from you?”
Kyle hadn’t had a visitor since before his mom’s suicide last year. Now, two in one day. Very strange, he thought. He walked behind Gee down the same corridor as earlier. When they entered the auditorium, Gee pointed him to the chestnut haired woman with the braid. It was the same woman who had been sitting right near Kyle and his dad earlier.
Kyle walked up, skeptical that there wasn’t some mistake. When he gave her another look, the woman looked slightly familiar to him, but he couldn’t place her. “Do we know each other?” he asked.
“We do. We’ve never met, but we do. I’m Myrna Rachnowitz,” she said, extending her hand frostily.
Immediately, Kyle knew. He’d been to her Facebook page. “Etan’s sister, right?” If he hadn’t done detailed research on their family he might’ve assumed she was Etan’s mother. He shook her clammy hand.
In his folder of articles about the crash, he had a clipping from a Flemming Weekly Press article with the text of the eulogy Myrna gave at the school’s memorial service. Kyle remembered it by heart. The ending was beautiful:
They haven’t passed away; they’ve ascended.
They haven’t died; they’ve been born into another world.
They may have been taken from us, but that they were given to us in the first place is a miracle.
“Hi,” he said.
When he was first sentenced, Kyle expected that he’d get visits from time to time from angry family members of “The Children of Bus #17,” as the national media called them. But, it hadn’t happened that way, the long trial perhaps giving everyone the closure they needed.
“I want you to know, I don’t hate you,” Myrna said. “My little brother had a devilish streak too. I had the daddy who was a deadbeat, and I became an overachieving corporate lawyer. When my mom remarried, she picked the dearest, most responsible man you could imagine. They had my brother in their forties and he was a handful and a half for them.” Based on Kyle’s research, Etan had been a bully, plain and simple. But, even bullies had people who loved them. And, of course, no one in middle school was doomed to be any one thing forever.
Myrna shifted in her seat. She was poised and confident, but clearly choosing her words carefully. Kyle wondered why she was there.
“I’m sure Etan would’ve gotten into his share of trouble too,” she said. “Most boys your age make mistakes . . . They’re just usually lucky enough not to have a bus and a bridge, and twelve kids, on the other end of their bad decisions.”
“Listen,” Kyle said with a bit of impatience in his voice, “not a day goes by that I don’t . . . ”
“No,” Myrna said, “that’s not why I’m here. You don’t have to . . . I mean, I’m not here to . . . ” she cleared her throat and leaned in closer to Kyle. “We have an opportunity,” she said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Out of here?” Kyle asked, looking around nervously now. “I don’t understand.”
Myrna smiled politely at him. “Out of prison.”
“Ms. Rachno—” Kyle started.
She put her hand up to stop him. “Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as opening the door to your cell and walking out. See, you made your bed in the here and now. I can’t change the fact that you were sentenced to eight years any more than you can.” She paused. “But, what if I told you it was possible to go back?”
“Go back? Go back where?” Kyle asked.
“Not where,” Myrna answered, lowering her voice again. “When . . . What if I said I could give you the chance to go back in time and change the events leading up to the bus crash so that it never happens in the first place?”
Kyle searched for words. She appeared so put together at first that he was surprised to hear her sound so crazy. “I am so so sorry for what happened to your brother, but—”
“You don’t have to be sorry anymore. You can create a future where there’s nothing to be sorry about. Where Etan and the others are still alive, and you aren’t in prison here . . . Or here,” she said, tapping him gently on the forehead with her finger.
“Please believe me,” Kyle said. “I would do anything, truly anything, to fix what I did. But I think we both know you’re suggesting something that’s not possible.”
“Listen to me,” she said, her eyes growing stern. “You took away my brother and you are going to help me bring him back.”
Perhaps humoring her was the kindest thing Kyle could do right now. He accepted this, deciding that the next time she asked to visit, he would simply decline. For the moment, he would play along. “So, what do I do, jump in a spaceship, turn the clock back to that morning, fly in a different direction and then everything just turns out okay?”
“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid,” she said. “If you went back to the day of the crash, there’d be two of you there. It’d be too risky.” The way she answered him seemed so rational and automatic.
“Risky how?” Kyle asked.
Myrna looked a little frazzled by the question. “I don’t know exactly,” she said curtly. “It just would be.”
“So what do I do?” he asked, humoring her.
“You need to go to your father, before he was your father. You’ll go to early 1998—right before you were born. Tell him as little as you can, but tell him enough to make sure that, whatever happens, he stops you from getting into a car on the morning of March 13, 2014. That’s it,” she said. “I know your relationship with your father is spotty—”
“Spotty doesn’t begin to describe it,” Kyle said, feeling the slightest bit of regret for sending his father off so harshly earlier. “So, I have to convince a guy who failed me my whole life that in sixteen years, the son he’s going to abandon is going to need his help on this one particular day? What do I tell him to do? Steal my car keys?”
“I’m hesitant to suggest an exact course of action for him,” she said. “Simply by sending you back to 1998, things may change enough by 2014 where too specific a plan could become useless. Your father’s just going to have to think on his feet.”
“Why does it have to be him? What about my mother?” he ask
ed. “Can’t she help us instead?”
Myrna looked away from Kyle. For the first time, her confidence seemed less than one-hundred percent. “I’m told that she’s not a good candidate for this,” she said. “That’s all I know . . . ”
In the course of five minutes, Kyle had gone from feeling bad for Myrna to being totally engrossed in every word she was speaking. There was nothing Kyle wouldn’t give for the chance to change what happened on the day of the crash. And, here was someone telling him that maybe he could.
“So, let’s say it works . . . ” Kyle said. “Then what?”
“If you convince your father in 1998 to do what you need him to in 2014, then when you leave him in ’98 and come back to 2016, everything should be better.”
“Just like that?” Kyle said.
Myrna nodded. “My brother and those other kids will still be alive, and you won’t be in prison.”
Kyle almost smiled and then whispered to himself. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Just be careful,” she said. “You don’t want to do anything when you go back that’s going to have unintended consequences. You could really mess up 2016 if you’re not careful in 1998. Think of the butterfly effect.”
Kyle had never heard the term before and squinted at her.
Myrna rolled her eyes. She lifted her hand and held her pointer finger out to the side. “Pretend my finger is this year, and that there’s an invisible line extending out from my finger forever. That invisible line is everything after this year.”
Kyle nodded.
She still held up her finger, but now pushed it slightly with her other hand, changing its angle in the air. “Now imagine that some tiny change moves my finger just the teeniest bit. It wouldn’t affect this year very much, and maybe not even next year, but eventually that invisible line is going to be further and further from the original line. Eventually, even the tiniest thing—like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings—can have a major impact on the future.”
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