The Boy from Tomorrow

by Camille DeAngelis

  Outside again, Danny paused at the town hall entrance. “I bet they have the cemetery records here, too. We could find out right now.” Alec shook his head. “We have to, dude. I’ll just run in.” Danny disappeared inside and he paced the sidewalk. This was it—or at least it might be.

  A couple minutes later he’d just decided to follow him in when Danny reappeared. “No good,” he said. “The lady at the front desk says the land belongs to the township now, so the records are definitely upstairs, but I went up there and nobody’s around.”

  When Alec sighed, it was mostly with relief. Whatever the truth was, they wouldn’t find it today.

  The End of the Future

  29.

  Every night they looked forward to bedtime, when the harsh words and long silences of the day were behind them, and they could speak to their friend from the future. Now that they were at liberty to communicate every night, their respective timelines seemed to realign themselves, so tomorrow for Alec was no longer two weeks later for Josie.

  Once Cass was asleep Josie would turn back to the phonograph with a smile no one could see, for now they were free to talk of anything they wanted. Tonight, in particular, she felt Alec was waiting to tell her about something more important than motorcars powered by the rays of the sun, or typewriters that could tell you anything you needed to know.

  Is Cassie asleep?

  Her sister slept with her arms clenching her pillow and her eyes shut tight, as if she were bracing herself for a plunge. Josie thought of the Lusitania, and the Titanic, and shivered. “Yes,” she whispered. “She’s asleep.”

  I have two things to tell you. Important things. He paused. I found you in the newspaper.

  “Oh dear.” She tried to laugh, but her heart was thudding.

  Alec laughed too. Not like that. You’re a journalist. I wish I could show you these articles! You’ve written lots of interesting stuff—there’s a piece about a speakeasy in the Village getting shut down by the police, and the other one I have here is an interview with a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize. He told you he only writes in the bathtub.

  She felt the goose-pimples rising on her arms, but the strangest part of her reaction was this: she wanted to cry.

  Josie? Are you there?

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I suppose I need a moment to take it in.”

  I bet! If somebody told me for sure what I’d be doing in ten years, I know I’d be freaked out.

  “‘Freaked out,’” she murmured. “I can guess what that means.”

  But you’re glad I told you, right?

  “Of course, Alec!” She thought of what Cassie had said the night of the rally. I could sit back and look forward to it all. “It’s such a gift, and I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Nah. You’d have done the same for me.

  “What was the other thing you wanted to tell me?”

  She felt a chill blow clear through her at what he said next. It’s hard for me to talk about it, Josie. We could say . . . it’s the end of the future.

  “I see,” she said finally. Now her heart was pounding so loudly she wondered if Alec could hear it too. Did she want to know?

  Yes—yes. He wouldn’t have brought it up if it weren’t something he thought could be changed. “Tell me,” she said, and listened as he drew a deep breath.

  There’s a stone . . . in the old cemetery on the hill. It . . . it . . .

  “Whose name is on it?” she asked, all foreknowledge of her future life in print forgotten in an instant, dreading what felt like the inevitable answer: Yours.

  It just says “Clifford.”

  She put her hand to her heart. She’d never known there could be such comfort in uncertainty. “It isn’t Father Clifford’s stone? He is buried there, on the hill, under a weeping angel.”

  No, it’s a very plain marker. It looks like it’s a hundred years old. And Josie . . . this is the thing that scares me. It’s so small. It only says “Clifford” because there isn’t room for anything else.

  Her stomach lurched. “No dates?”

  No dates. There are other stones that small, but they’re always—he hesitated. They belong to babies. Another pause. Kids.

  “Mother once told us there are no other Cliffords in Edwardstown.”

  The graveyard isn’t used anymore. I know the records are kept at town hall, but . . . well, I guess I’m afraid to ask. I just keep thinking about the horrible things your mom does, acting like they’re fair punishments. I told you, nobody would be allowed to do that to their kid now. Their children would be taken away from them.

  “Yes, but where do they go? Who takes them in?”

  Other relatives—nice ones—or foster parents, if they don’t have any other family.

  “But it isn’t that way yet.”

  Still, there are people who could help you. I’ve been reading about child protection laws. There were all these cases where children were taken away from their parents because they were shut in closets or basements, or beat up, or not allowed to go to school. I’m telling you, Josie. You have to find a way to contact the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

  “There’s no way I could do that. And even if I could . . . where would we go? How would we live?” she asked, even as a tiny voice in her head said, Emily. Find Emily.

  I don’t want to tell you what to do, but . . . I’m afraid for you, Josie. I keep thinking maybe this is why . . . why . . .

  Why they were given this chance, he meant—this bridge across the century. She didn’t know what to say. More than ever she wanted to reach through the mouth of the phonograph and take her friend by the hand.

  Just think about it, all right?

  “I will. I’ll think about it.” She hesitated. “Alec . . . there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time.”

  I know what you’re going to say, but I . . .

  “Have you found it?” She couldn’t seem to lift her voice above a whisper. “Do you know when I . . . ?”

  No! he said, with a fierceness that clutched at her heart. I don’t—I never looked for it—and I don’t ever want to talk about you being dead. I don’t think of you that way. I’ll never think of you that way. You’re the same age as me, and you’re my friend.

  Her tears fell without sniffles or sobs—she wanted to cry, but she could not wake Cass—and yet he seemed to know. I’d give anything, he said, to hand you a tissue.

  * * *

  Some days the nursery walls seemed to draw in on them, and they seized upon any excuse to venture downstairs. On those occasions Cass invariably got herself into mischief, and thus a simple scavenging for a sandwich would end in a nasty scolding.

  One overcast afternoon, having learned from their mistakes of late, they went up to the attic. The room was empty apart from a few pieces of furniture Mrs. Clifford had already decided to replace, and they found it peaceful to stand at the windows overlooking the backyard and watch as the sky went yellow like an old photograph. It began to rain, and Josie pulled up the sashes to let in the cool damp air. She breathed it in, closed her eyes, and imagined for a moment that she was scything her way through the jungle.

  She carried a cane chair into the light—what little there was that day—and opened her book as Cassie fell into a waltz step around the empty room, giggling to herself and holding Mrs. Gubbins as if the doll were her partner.

  An hour slipped by as Josie lost herself in her book. The Weir of Hermiston was another novel Emily left behind, and her tutor had told her—how long ago it seemed, that happy afternoon of her arrival, when they’d sat on her bed swinging their legs as she unpacked her books!—that Stevenson had died before he could complete it. It was the story of a boy whose father showed him no love, no affection, and it cut too true to put down.

  A scratching noise drew Josie out o
f the story. Cass was bent over the windowsill at the far end, her elbow working in and out like a bellows. “Cass? What are you doing over there?” The little girl made no answer, and Josie laid down her book and went over.

  With a long nail she must have found on the floor, Cass had scratched HELLO into the windowsill, and was almost finished carving Alec’s name.

  Josie stared, mouth agape. The night Alec had told her of the message in the windowsill Cassie had been upstairs asleep, and she could not recall ever telling her about it. “Whatever possessed you to do such a thing?” Cass finished the C and laid down the nail with a shrug. “You couldn’t have known,” Josie said. “You couldn’t have!”

  Cassie flashed her impish little grin. “Couldn’t have known what?”

  Josie shook her head. Everything was happening precisely as it was meant to—where he found a flower, they must plant the seed—and she began to suspect some hidden magic even if Dr. Jennings could someday explain it with textbook precision.

  Songs and Stories

  30.

  Neither of them went as far as to admit it, but if Mrs. Clifford hadn’t commandeered the talking board they’d have never discovered the phonograph. Now they got to talk every night, actually talk to one another, and for as long as they liked. They heard every sigh and hesitation, every comma, contraction, and exclamation point. They marveled at the strangeness in each other’s voices; the way Josie spoke was so crisp, so correct compared to the way girls talked at school. He downloaded a voice recorder app and laid his iPod on the table beside the phonograph, although he couldn’t have explained why.

  He was glad, too, for Cassie’s frequent interjections—do they still have rats and midges in twenty-sixteen, Alec? Is it true the train only takes a day and a half to get from here to San Francisco? There’s a porch swing? I wish we had a porch swing!—even though he could hear how they aggravated her sister. They would wait until the little girl fell into bed before continuing in hushed voices. He described the Little Free Library on the corner of Falcon and Juniper, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the three-dimensional cake shaped like a yellow Volkswagen Beetle his mother baked from scratch for his ninth birthday. He told her about the moon landing, and the Civil Rights movement, and the first African-American president, and how Pluto had once been a planet but wasn’t anymore. If you are traveling in space, she asked, sooner or later won’t you collide with a star?

  “I don’t think so. The stars are much farther away than they look.”

  He read whole books to her that hadn’t been written yet: The Phantom Tollbooth, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Coraline, which he realized too late had made her uneasy. From now on I shall always picture my mother with buttons for eyes.

  Sometimes he became self-conscious for having spoken so long uninterrupted, because he wanted his friend to know how much he preferred the sound of her voice to his own. But she encouraged him to speak, to tell stories from school or of his old life in Manhattan, and to go on reading even when he knew she must be falling asleep.

  One night in May, Alec set up his iPod and speakers (“it’s like a gramophone,” he said, “except it’s the size of a very small book and all the records are inside”) and played her some of his favorite songs. “What do you think?”

  It took her a moment to answer. It’s quite . . . strange, isn’t it?

  “Of course it’s strange,” he laughed. “It’s called rock music. It hasn’t been invented yet.”

  They talked until they found themselves forgetting what they had heard or said a moment earlier, and they each accused each other of nodding off, though, of course, they were equally guilty.

  * * *

  Something began to feel different. He watched his mom making plans for a future without his dad, walking to the yoga studio on Main Street on weekend mornings, and occasionally heating him up a tin of veggie chili before going out to dinner with new friends, and it was as if he’d let his hands fall from his eyes, let them open. Being afraid for Josie and her sister wasn’t the same thing as helping them. So in the end, Danny didn’t have to drag him back to town hall.

  The foyer smelled of disinfectant and the microwaved leftovers of somebody’s tuna noodle casserole. “Room 213, right?” his friend asked the secretary at the front desk, who nodded and pointed to the stairs.

  They jogged up the pea-green linoleum steps to the second floor and found the woman behind the desk in room 213 to be the very embodiment of their worst-case scenario. “It would be impossible to dig out those records right now,” she sniffed. “You do realize it’s nearly four o’clock?”

  Now that they were finally here, it was unthinkable to have to leave again without finding what they needed. “What if we come back first thing tomorrow?” Alec asked.

  The secretary shuffled some papers on her desk. “That depends. What is it for?”

  “A summer project on Edwardstown history,” Danny replied quickly. “We’re researching some of the local suffragists, and our teacher wants us to find out where they’re buried.”

  Alec suppressed a smile. It wasn’t precisely the truth, but this was a project, and it was much more important than an ordinary school assignment.

  “Leave me your name and telephone number along with the names you’re looking for,” she said, “and I’ll have the clerk locate the records you need. I’m just letting you know, it may take him several days to get to it. He’s only here part time.”

  “What if it takes weeks?” Alec sighed as they went down the dingy stairwell.

  “Nah.” Danny hopped up on the banister and slid down the last few steps, and the secretary at the front desk shot him a stern look. “You gotta follow up with these people or nothing’ll ever happen. Let’s go back in the morning and see if we can talk to that guy.”

  The Worst Birthday Ever

  31.

  The night before Cassie’s birthday, she’d been so excited that Josie asked her three times to get back into bed. Now, what ought to have been the most festive of mornings was instead cold and subdued. Her sister came to the breakfast table with a light in her eyes—after all, the whole world knew she was seven today, and if they didn’t, well, they’d soon find out!—but with each moment that passed in silence, each remark their mother made that was not a felicitation, the light in her eyes dimmed by one degree. By the end of the meal the disappointment was plain on her face, and the sight of it wrung Josie’s heart.

  Then the little girl—not so little, as of today!—could withstand the suspense no longer. “Mother?”

  “Yes, Cassandra?”

  “Am I to have a cake tonight?”

  “Oh. I suppose it is your birthday.”

  “May I have a chocolate cake? With buttercream icing?”

  Her mother opened her mouth to answer, but she was interrupted by a shriek from an adjoining room. “Mrs. Clifford!” cried the housekeeper. “Oh—oh—Mrs. Clifford!”

  “What is it, Mrs. Pike?”

  “I—oh!—in the drawing room—the parrot, it’s . . . it’s . . . ”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Mrs. Clifford tossed her napkin onto her plate, and the girls heard her heels go clipping briskly down the corridor. Then there was a long silence.

  Josie got up and hurried out of the dining room. Her mother was standing before the birdcages, and as she approached she saw that the cage on the left was empty.

  One bird lay on the floor of the other cage in a bloodied heap of feathers, as if it had been mauled by a wild animal. That was impossible, of course, and at first Josie did not understand what had happened. Then she noticed that the head of Othello had been completely severed from his body, and her hand flew to her mouth.

  Desdemona stood silently on the perch above her dead mate, lifting her claws and setting them down again to grip the roosting branch. It seemed to be the birdly equivalent of fidgeting in one’s seat. Josie gla
nced at her mother. By now she knew this look all too well.

  “Did you do this?”

  “No, Mother!”

  Mrs. Clifford threw up her hands in exasperation. “I didn’t mean did you eat the parrot, Josephine! Who put them in the same cage?”

  Josie paled. So this was what Cass had been doing out of bed last night.

  “She was so lonely,” came a small voice from the drawing room threshold. “Mr. Berringsley said they were married, and I thought . . . I just thought they ought to be together.”

  “Come here, Cassandra.”

  But Cass backed away from the door, and their mother hissed, “I said, come here, Cassandra. Come here and see what you’ve done.”

  Cass came in. Mrs. Clifford pointed to what was left of Othello, and pulled the little girl’s hand away when she tried to shield her own eyes. “This, my dear, is what occurs when you place the parrots in the same cage without supervision. They are only let into the same cage to breed. Otherwise the female will eat the male. Clearly you were not listening when Mr. Berringsley warned us of this.”

  “I didn’t hear . . . I didn’t know . . .” Cass said weakly.

  “Of course you didn’t. You revel in your ignorance, child. Now you see what comes of being so utterly impulsive—so utterly selfish! What on earth will I tell Mr. Berringsley?”

  Cass hung her head. “I don’t know.”

  The cannibal bird opened its beak, and when it spoke the girls started in alarm. Alas! He is betrayed and I undone!

  “Do you have any idea how much Mr. Berringsley paid for that bird?” Mrs. Clifford grasped her daughter by the ear, and Cass cried out. She punctuated each white-hot word with a yank of the little girl’s earlobe. “Do—you—have—any—idea—how—much—Mr.—Berringsley—paid—for— that—bird?”

  “I’m sorry!” Cass was shrieking as she brought up her hands and fumbled against her mother’s grip, trying in vain to free her ear. “I’m sorry! I never meant for it to happen!”