If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  The question hit me. I had to think about it. “Well,” I said, considering my two different lives in two totally different times. “I really don’t know.”

  25

  March 13, 1986

  Sleepwalk

  “Your dad is really gone for the whole weekend?” I looked at Jenny as she drove us home from school. She swerved to avoid a cat sitting in the middle of the road who looked at us like he had no place to go and not a single worry in the world.

  “Yeah. He went to Maine to visit his sister. She has cancer.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, like she’d just delivered the weather report or told me she had Algebra homework for that night.

  “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”

  Jenny shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t know her very well. She and my dad aren’t that close, but she’s gotten really sick, so he felt like he had to go.”

  We had an early release from school that day, and Jenny needed to go to the grocery store and get a few things. She’d apologized twice for dragging me along, but I never minded doing anything with her, really. We could grocery shop, walk Lisa to her Girl Scout meetings, do homework, or just listen to music together—I loved all of it. Anything I did with Jenny was fun for me. And her dad being out of town was an added bonus. I’d spent very little time in her apartment, and the times we’d been in my room there’d always been someone else in the house.

  We pulled into the parking lot at the store and she grabbed a cart on our way in.

  “I need to get enough to eat for the weekend.” She pulled a folded list out of the back pocket of her jeans. “And I also need to replace the light bulb in my closet and get some tile cleaner.”

  I nodded, looking around the store as we made our way up and down the aisles together. The floors were polished to a high shine, and all the boxes and cans were faced out neatly on the shelves. “You’re really on top of this,” I said, glancing over her shoulder at the shopping list. She paused near the cookie aisle.

  “I have to be. It’s just been me and my dad for as long as I can remember, and it’s kind of my job to make sure the house stuff gets done. He gives me money, but I do the shopping.”

  “Impressive,” I said. The most I’d ever done for myself was buy pizza or fast food when my mom left cash for me on the kitchen counter. I had no idea how to plan a meal or shop for more than one person.

  “It’s really not. It’s just what people do, you know?” She turned a corner and paused, pulling a box of pasta noodles from the shelf and dropping it into her cart.

  “So how do you know what to buy?”

  She gave me a long look like she wasn’t sure if I was kidding or not. “Well. I decide what I want to eat for the next few days, and then I make sure I have all the ingredients.”

  “So what’s for dinner tonight, honey?” I asked in a deep voice that sounded like a man coming home from work and expecting a hot meal.

  She stopped walking and raised an eyebrow at me. “How about steak and potatoes?”

  “Steak sounds good.” I folded my arms like I was considering this. “Yeah, let’s have steak.”

  I followed her through the store as she got the rest of the things she needed. When we got to the meat department she stopped the cart and looked at me. “Did you really want steak? I know how to cook it.”

  “Seriously? Isn’t that expensive?”

  “Well, I’ll have to cut something else off my list if you want it, but we could have steak.”

  “No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head and looking at the contents of her cart. “What were you going to have if I wasn’t with you?”

  “Probably just grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said, reaching in and shuffling through the items she’d already selected. ”I have tomato soup at home already.”

  “Then let’s have that. I’m easy.” I smiled at her and put my hands on the cart to steer her away from the meat counter. Truth be told, I was starting to feel a bit of anticipation at the idea of getting back to her place, so a full dinner didn’t even sound appealing. Jenny sounded appealing. Just some time with Jenny.

  We finished shopping and I stood next to her in the parking lot while she loaded her paper grocery bags into the trunk of the car. I watched her expertly set the bag containing eggs and bread to the side, and then wedge them into place with two heavier bags so nothing would move. She slammed the trunk.

  At her apartment, we carried the bags up the stairs. I stood behind her while she unlocked the door, balancing one paper bag on her knee and twisting the key in the doorknob. The door flew open and we spilled through the entryway, laughing. She switched on a light and nearly slipped on the tile because of her wet shoes.

  “You can put those in the kitchen,” she said, reaching for my arm to steady herself. I walked into the small galley kitchen and set the bags on the clean counter. Everything in the room was neat and organized: the toaster was wiped free of fingerprints; the refrigerator had a few papers held to the front with magnets; the counters were wiped down, and a kitchen towel was folded in half and hanging from the handle of the oven.

  “Is this all you?” I called out to Jenny, not realizing she was standing right behind me.

  “Is what all me?” She set her bags on the counter next to mine and started unpacking the eggs and spaghetti noodles, opening the refrigerator and the cabinets to put things away.

  “This clean kitchen? Do you do all this? When I just lived with my mom, we never kept things this nice.”

  Jenny froze with her back to me. She moved something from one shelf to another in the refrigerator. “When did you ever just live with your mom?” I could hear the frown in her voice.

  “I meant when it was just me and my mom at home,” I said quickly, scrambling to cover that slip-up. Of course I’d never lived alone with my mom in 1986. All Jenny knew of my life was that my mom was my kid sister, and my happily married grandparents were my mom and dad. “One time when my dad took Andy and Lisa camping and we stayed home. We let things get messy.” I pulled the vegetables she’d bought out of the bag and thrust them at her. “Here. I’m not sure where these go.”

  We finished putting everything away and then stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking at each other. “It’s only one o’clock,” Jenny said. “Do you have to be home at a certain time?”

  “Nope. I didn’t even tell my mom it was early release.” I gave her a lopsided smile. “I can do anything I want.”

  “Anything you want, huh?” She looked at me with a gleam in her eyes. “And what is it that you want?” Jenny leaned against the counter and propped the heel of her boot against the drawers behind her.

  “What do you want?” I tossed the question back at her.

  “Hmmm…” She reached out a hand and grabbed ahold of my shirt. “I want…” She pulled me closer by tugging on the front of my shirt. “I want you to help me do my housework.”

  I was already leaning into her, expecting her to say that she wanted me to kiss her. Instead I laughed out loud. “You want me to help you do housework?”

  “Mmmhmm,” she said, nodding and smiling up at me. “I want you to vacuum.”

  “Okay.” I mentally switched gears from an image of me making out with Jenny in her empty apartment to a vision of me pushing a Hoover around her carpeted living room. “I can vacuum. Just show me where it is.”

  I followed her out to the front room and she opened a closet. “Here you go.” She looked at me over her shoulder like she was challenging me to say no to her request, which I wasn’t about to do. If my lady had an interest in seeing me do housework, then that’s what she’d get. “I need to start some laundry,” Jenny said. “Do you want music?” She walked over to the stereo and switched it on. “Depeche Mode?”

  “Sure. Why not?” The cord was wound around the hooks on the back of the vacuum, so I let it loose and plugged it into the wall. She put a cassette in the player and music filled the room.

  Jenny disappeared down the hall and I hit the button on the
vacuum, bringing it to life. A light on the front of the machine illuminated under the edges of the couch and chair as I pushed it around, finding my rhythm. I moved around the carpet, making lines and paths in time to the music.

  Jenny came through the room with a load of dark laundry in her arms and smiled at me approvingly. “Missed a spot,” she said, nodding at the area under the coffee table. I ran the vacuum underneath it pointedly, moving to the beat of the music to entertain her. She shook her head and walked into the laundry room.

  It was fun, working alongside Jenny like that. She came back and put her arms around my waist from behind as I finished the task at hand, and when I switched off the vacuum, she took it from me and pushed it to the closet.

  “What next?” I rubbed my hands together eagerly. “Scrubbing showers or toilets?”

  “No,” she said, shutting the door to the broom closet where she stowed the vacuum. “I thought we could mop and make the beds.”

  “Oooh.” I got a chill at the mention of the word “bed.”

  “Floors first,” she said, taking out a bottle of something called Mop & Glo and an empty bucket from under the kitchen sink. She showed me how to fill the bucket and dip the long mop with its sponge head into the hot, soapy water. I felt dumb watching her, and I wondered who actually mopped the floors at my house, because it had certainly never been me.

  “And then you just take the mop and push this little handle,” Jenny was saying as I watched, “and it wrings out the sponge into the sink.”

  “Ahhh, right.” She dipped the mop back into the bucket and ran it across the kitchen floor again. “Okay, let me try.” She handed it over without complaint and disappeared into the laundry room again.

  The window over the kitchen sink steamed up as I ran hot water over the mop. I used the handle to wring it out and the smell of lemony cleaner filled my nostrils. There was something pleasing about the whole process, and about the way it felt like I was playing house with Jenny. As I mopped the tile, I thought of what it would be like if we really shared an apartment. We’d shop for our groceries together, planning what we wanted to eat for dinner each night. She’d start the laundry while I cleaned the floors, and then we’d make our bed and she’d stand by the window, her silhouette backlit as she pulled the sheets tightly over the corners on her side while I pulled them over the corners on my side. We’d look at each other from across the Queen sized mattress, eyebrows raised at one another as if to say—

  “Hey.” Jenny’s voice interrupted my daydream. “The dryer stopped. You gonna help me?” She was holding a pile of white sheets with pink rosebuds sprinkled all over them. I noticed she’d kicked off her shoes, and that her socks were mismatched.

  “You’ve got two different socks on. A red one and a striped one,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah? So? They’re two different feet.” Jenny pulled a pillowcase from her pile, balled it up, and threw it in my direction. I caught it in one hand. “Come on.”

  The tape in the front room finished playing Side One and flipped over to Side Two. I followed her down the dim hallway and stopped in the doorway to her room, watching as she dropped the clean sheets on top of her bare mattress. Her walls had posters of all the bands I would have expected to see in her room: Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, The Smiths. And in one corner was a tall, white dresser with chipped paint that was covered with stickers. Jenny switched on a lamp on the nightstand, pushing a stack of books and magazines aside as she did.

  She hadn’t asked me to, but before I crossed the threshold into her room, I slid my feet out of my Converse and left them by the door. I took my spot across the bed from Jenny—just as I had in the scene I’d visualized while mopping—and waited for her to hand me one side of the sheet so we could make her bed.

  Jenny’s room. I was leaning across the mattress she slept on every night, imagining her dark hair spread across the pillows. The light from the lamp cast a pool of yellow on one side of the room. The sky was growing darker outside as the clouds rolled in.

  “Here’s a pillow and a case,” she said, handing them to me. She sounded shy all of a sudden. I took the pillow from her hand, my fingers brushing hers. I don’t know what it was about the moment—I don’t want to say anything cheesy like “an electric current ran between us”—but as her fingers brushed mine, I knew exactly where things were going.

  The sound of the tape playing in the front room grew more distant. I watched the rain start to fall outside Jenny’s second floor bedroom window. Her back was to the glass, and drops of water pelted it from the outside. I stared at her. She was so pretty.

  When she realized I’d finished the sheet on my side of the bed, she stood up straight and looked at me. The sound of our breathing was the only thing in the room.

  “Hey,” I said in a quiet voice.

  “Hey,” she said back. She blinked twice, hesitating only briefly before she put her hands and knees on the bed and crawled to the center. “Come here.”

  I didn’t need her to extend that invitation twice. With a single movement, I grabbed her comforter from the floor and brought it with me, spreading it over us as I lay next to her on the bed. The lamp was still on beside us, and the rain was falling faster, making a tick, tick sound against the window. I kissed her. And then I kissed her again.

  It took no time at all for us to realize what it felt like when the rest of the world ceased to exist. I don’t know how much time disappeared as we held each other in her room, all I know is that we passed the afternoon together and ended up tangled in each other’s arms beneath her comforter, our clothes in a pile next to her bed.

  “Hey,” I whispered, putting my lips to her hair. My arm was around her shoulders under the covers and her naked body was pressed against mine.

  “Yeah?” Jenny turned her head and looked me in the eye.

  “I have to tell you something.” I pulled her closer to me. Her breath was warm on my shoulder.

  “It better be that this is the best day of your life,” she said, smiling at me lazily.

  “Oh, it definitely is,” I agreed. “Hands down, best day of my life.” I kissed her on the lips and we both got distracted by that for a minute.

  “Yeah, me too.” Jenny blinked a few times and looked around the room. “I hadn’t planned on the afternoon going like this, but I’m glad it did.”

  “Me, too,” I said, stating the obvious. I paused, not wanting to ruin the moment. “But there’s something else.”

  Jenny held onto the comforter as she rolled towards me so that our noses were just inches apart on the pillow. “What, Daniel? Tell me what else there is.”

  I could see by the look in her eyes that she didn’t expect it to be anything serious, and I almost felt guilty for telling her then. But I couldn’t not tell her…that would have been wrong.

  “It’s going to sound insane,” I said, searching her eyes with mine. “You might think I’m crazy or think I’m lying, but before you jump to conclusions, you have to ask yourself why I would make something like this up. There’s no good reason for me to lie.”

  The trusting look disappeared from her face. “What is it?”

  “Jenny,” I said, rolling over onto my back. I turned my face to the ceiling. “Roger already knows about this, but no one else does. It’ll just be you and him, and I need you to believe me.”

  “You’re kind of freaking me the fuck out, Daniel,” she said. The sweet whispering voice she’d used before was completely gone. “Just tell me.”

  “I’m not the Daniel you know. I mean, he’s my uncle. Not me.” I turned to look at her face and I knew I was butchering this whole explanation. I took a deep breath and started again. “I’m from 2016. I time traveled somehow and ended up in the body of my uncle, living in a house with my grandparents. My mom is still a kid. I don’t know how I got here, but I’m not from 1986.”

  Silence. I stared at her and she stared back.

  “The night we saw the Psychedelic Furs, I think I woke
up for a minute in my old body, and I saw the hospital room and the doctor and nurse who were taking care of me.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jenny said. She looked confused and I didn’t blame her.

  “I don’t get it either. But I think something happened to me in 2016. I think I got hurt and I’m in a coma or something. For a long time I wasn’t even sure I was really here. But you’re so real…”

  Jenny sat up, holding the blanket in front of her bare chest. “I am real,” she said. She actually sounded a little angry.

  “I know you are,” I promised her, putting my hand on her back and feeling her spine through her warm skin. “I know you are.”

  She gave a huff as she tried to decide what to say next. “So why are you telling me this now?”

  I breathed for a minute before I spoke. “Because I don’t know what’s going to happen. Because I woke up in 2016 once, and I don’t know when it will happen again. What if I left you tomorrow? And you never knew?”

  “Would it have hurt me not to know?” She frowned, clutching the blanket to her chest like a life preserver.

  “Yes,” I said simply. “It would have. Because the other Daniel would have—most likely—been back here, and he wouldn’t have known anything about you. He wouldn’t have known about this—about today.” I ran my hand up and down her back gently. “And that would have crushed you.”

  Her eyes dropped to the bed as she took that in.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted that. I couldn’t do that to you.”

  Jenny listened, still not looking at me. After a few seconds, she nodded. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I reached for her chin and turned her head so she was looking at me.

  “It’s okay for now,” she said. “I want to believe you, Daniel. It does sound crazy, but I want to believe you. Because like you said, why would you lie?”

  “I wouldn’t. And if I ever leave,” I said, letting my hand run the length of her arm, “that won’t change anything. It won’t change how I feel about you. I’ll love you just the same as I do now.” I reached up to touch her cheek. “If I wake up in 2016 and you realize I’m gone, then I’ll wait for you. You’ll have thirty years to get through, but when you get to 2016, I’ll be there. I promise.”