Stealing Time

by Rebecca Bowyer

  We pass the Green Coat Lady, as we’ve creatively named her. I’m not sure why she got named after her clothes while a bird gets an entirely new name from Kir. I suppose it’s because the bird can be a playmate. I shiver slightly as we pass, as though passing a graveyard. Except that the inhabitant of this body has simply walked on into the future. She’s older, Green Coat Lady, even older than me, I think sometimes. Chances are she’s walked into her Rest Time by now. I wonder briefly if I could somehow move this figure, stash her where I don’t have to look at her any longer. I glance back and notice Daniel gives her a wide berth.

  “Slow down, Kir!” I call out, panicked, as I turn back and realise I’ve lost sight of him. He’s only gone around the corner, past the pharmacy, but I worry anyway. He doesn’t hear me. His mop of curls reappears as he bounds across the road, giving a high-five to the blue SUV parked right out the front of the music store. It’s not like he’s going to get run over. That car hasn’t moved in years. Kir waves and sticks his tongue out at the toddler in the rear seat. I swear sometimes that little girl moves her eyes when he passes by. I’m not good with ages of children, it’s been too long since I was surrounded by them, but if I had to guess I’d say she’s about two? Or was about two years old. I wonder if she told her mother about the little boy at the window. Her mother’s head is bent forward, about to collect her handbag from the passenger footwell of the car. There’s another booster seat in the back next to the little girl. I like to think that they were popping into the music store to buy a guitar for the young child that seat belongs to. Maybe for a birthday? A sixth birthday, if he—or she—was at school? Two-thirty-six in the afternoon it is. Two-thirty-six forever and always. Fifty-four minutes for this mum to unclip her toddler, go into the store, select a guitar, and hide it in the trunk before going to pick up her other child from the school gate.

  He’d be quite good at guitar by now, I’d imagine. Or she. After a few years of lessons. Or maybe it wasn’t for them. Maybe they passed it onto their little sister. Maybe it’s in landfill by now.

  This is how I amuse myself; this is how I pass the hours. By telling stories about each of these frozen montages. What they’re doing at two-thirty-six in the afternoon on the main street of a small town, surrounded by mountains. What they might be doing now in the unfrozen world. Where they moved on to.

  “Nanna, Nanna!”

  I can see Kir through the window. He’s got ‘his’ guitar already, a tiny blue model with four nylon strings that are easy for little fingers to strum. Daniel has overtaken me and joined Kir inside. Kir hands him a tiny red guitar. I’ve showed Kir how to use a pick, but he insists on using his fingers. He likes to listen to the individual notes, moving his fingers up and down the frets to hear them change. Again and again and again, with the obsessive attention to repetition that only a child of his age can muster and appreciate.

  I enter the store and take my place on the stool in front of the grand piano.

  “What are we playing today, Monsieur Maestro?” I demand grandly, looking down my nose at Kir. Kir giggles.

  “Castle on a Cloud!” he shouts.

  “Of course, young sir. An excellent selection.” I begin to play the classic child’s fantasy song from Les Misérables. I avoid looking at Kir while I play, and he sings. Daniel remains silent, withdrawn. Kir loves this song because it speaks of rooms full of toys, and dozens of other kids to play with. I always dread it just a little. My mind has a cruel habit of conflating little Kir with the image I have of a lonely girl dressed in rags on a darkened stage. Cold, starved, abandoned by her mother, and worked near to death by her supposed caregivers. It’s not real, of course. Kir is happy enough. I glance at the man behind the counter, leaning on the flat surface, reading the same magazine. The same line, over and over. I smile as I remember Kir escaping my supervision a week or so ago and climbing up onto the chair to tickle him on the back of the neck. I imagine, again, him shivering slightly at two-thirty-six in the afternoon and looking around, perhaps catching the faint strains of light opera played on the grand piano. Perhaps shrugging, shaking his head, and going back to his magazine.

  We walk home slowly. Kir’s burst of manic energy has finally wound down a little. He has run laps of the toy store, counted all the tins of blue paint in the hardware store and chosen us a new house from the realtor’s window. Today it was a rural property outside of town. Five bedrooms, a wrap-around porch, and stables for the horses to sleep in. He was a little crushed when I explained it would take a whole hour to drive there and goodness knows how many hours to walk, given none of the cars started.

  Back home I fix him and Daniel peanut butter sandwiches and send them off to prepare for bedtime. Daniel quietly accepts my offer of ‘Entiac’ to give him a few hours of oblivion. It will take him time to adjust, though I dearly hope he won’t need to stay for long. I hope he’s out of here and back in the world of the living soon. Kir reads aloud to himself for half an hour or so before the babble stops suddenly, and I know he’s fallen into what passes for sleep in here. I climb into bed myself and lay there staring at the ceiling, exhausted but awake, waiting for semi-consciousness to fill a few more hours.

  At 3a.m., according to my watch, I am wide awake. I lie in the darkness afforded by curtains velcroed to the walls. I imagine what the sounds of the night should be. Cicadas causing a ruckus, rubbing their wings together to keep small children awake? No, too early in the year. Not hot enough. An electric car quietly buzzing past on its way home, carrying its passenger to bed from a late shift at the hospital maybe? Voices out on the street, people laughing and chatting, walking home from a friend’s party? Only on weekends.

  Kir is only four years old in body, but at least twice that in years on earth. I knew it would take time to find the cure, but I never imagined it would be this long. I envisioned months, not years. I regret nothing. I’d do these years all over again if it meant giving our boy a chance to live. But I do begin to worry about what his life will be like when his time comes again. I have started a list in my mind of all the things we will have to re-teach him. How to talk to other people. How to play with children. Don’t run on the road. Dogs might bite you, steer clear.

  I fear others will think of him as a child prodigy, reading novels and playing guitar. They will expect more of him and he will fail to deliver. He is our wonderful, special Kir. But he is also just a regular, normal boy.

  I suppose time will catch up with him eventually. Maybe we can home-school him for a few years while he adjusts. It’s not unusual, especially for sick children. And it’s not like he’ll miss the company of children his own age. He’s learned to live without it.

  All the muscles in my body tense as I hear a new noise. At first, I think I’m imagining it, so I still and wait for an encore. It’s a noise I haven’t heard in many years.

  There it is again. A wet, choking sound, followed by a thump on the wall.

  “Kir!” I wail as I leap out of bed, ignoring my protesting, creaky limbs, and bound into his room.

  Kir is having a seizure.

  I go into autopilot, clearing the area around him, making sure he won’t hurt himself with the jerking and flailing limbs.

  It lasts just minutes, but it changes everything.

  Afterwards, he is still again, and I have wiped his mouth. His pale, bruised eyelids have closed again, and his breathing is regular. I sit, and I let the tears fall down my cheeks and feel the fear constrict my chest.

  Time is moving on for Kir. Maybe it’s only a minute, but it’s enough. Time is running out.

  Chapter forty-four

  Varya

  Varya sat on the couch for a long time after Zoe left. She emptied her vodka glass and still she stayed, watching the last of the day’s light refracted through the crystal patterns. The light faded altogether and still she stayed, in the near-dark, the only illumination a faint glow from the kitchen light in the next room.

  Zoe’s words haunted her. She had found a cure
to Kir’s disease, it was true. It had happened faster than she’d feared, though more slowly than she’d hoped. She’d arranged for the operating theatre at the Minor Miracles Foundation to be opened secretly. Professor Langford had arranged for the surgeon, anaesthetist, and theatre nurses to visit on a Sunday morning. They were told that Kir was the child of a major donor to the charity who didn’t want to wait until the treatment passed the myriad waiting periods and evidentiary requirements for new treatments. They were sure this would work.

  The day she’d brought Kir out of the Time Lock was magical. So much hope, so much excitement from the little boy who’d spent two years already locked away. He’d wanted to touch everything in the apartment; he’d commented on everything he saw from the car on the way to the research facility. Varya had been too tense to respond to most of it. Marisa answered his questions. Yes, the other cars move too. Yes, it is very dark at night-time, but the lights come on so that everyone can see. No, this isn’t the same area he lived in with Nanna. Yes, Nanna was fine back at the apartment.

  “Oh no, I have no interest in coming with you to the operation. I am very much looking forward to having myself a nice, long, hot shower here in your apartment, thank you very much. With running water. Lots and lots of running water,” Elena had told her. That was another anomaly of the Time Lock—no running water. All the water had to be brought in from the outside in large containers and fed into the plumbing system. The pipes had frozen in time.

  Six weeks, Elena and Kir and spent outside of the Time Lock. The operation was difficult. A new procedure, a small mistake resulting in significant blood loss. Kir pulled through though, transfusions of donor blood were close at hand to replace what he lost. A new learning for the research team; a mistake that would not be repeated on the next child. The post-operative treatment was successful. Varya had started to turn her mind to her mother’s Rest Time Ceremony. After gaining an extra two years of time, she had just one day left.

  Kir was home in his own bedroom in the apartment when he’d had the first seizure.

  Varya positioned him so he wouldn’t hurt himself, and waited. Then she called Professor Langford, who called the medical team back in. Varya and Kir met them at the research facility late that night. The scans were clear. The cancer hadn’t returned.

  “What, then?” Varya demanded.

  “The treatment successfully destroyed the tumour. But it also appears to have caused problems with his Rest Time Chip,” he explained quietly.

  So, it was her fault. She was the one who had rushed the treatment through, who demanded it be carried out on a live patient before all the hurdles had been cleared. The hurdles were normally just administrative hoops that never showed up anything else they hadn’t anticipated. Her research teams were nothing but thorough.

  But the Time Chips. How could the treatment have affected them? It just wasn’t something that had ever come up before.

  “I think we can isolate the particular chemical which caused the reaction, test it out on other Time Chips to be certain.” The doctor paused. He looked down at his feet. “It won’t be a problem in future patients.”

  “And Kir?” Varya tipped her head, trying to catch his eye, trying to force him to look at her and tell her the truth, but make it a good truth. An easy truth. A certain truth.

  He shook his head and met her gaze with pain and sorrow. “I don’t know. It will take time to find a way to neutralise the reaction. And I don’t think the young lad has enough time to wait. I’m so sorry.”

  And so, Kir was stabilised again and Elena went back into the Time Lock with him, with just hours to spare until her own Rest Time Ceremony. Kir sulked for days, asking about the moving people and why he couldn’t go and play with the cat in the stairwell again.

  At least, this is what Elena told her daughter when Varya finally came to visit them after six days of absence. By then, Elena and Kir had settled into their routine again. Although Kir remained a little more sullen and cross than usual.

  Varya ran her finger around the rim of her crystal vodka glass and relished the musical ringing it elicited. She was just starting to feel calm enough to consider getting up for a refill. The doorbell buzzed and Varya shuddered, both at the jarring sound and the concerning meaning that came with it. She wasn’t expecting anyone. The doorbell buzzed again. This time she got up to answer it.

  “Sebastian.”

  “Hey.” He held up his hand in a half-hearted wave. Varya thought he looked tired, defeated. She still didn’t want him in her apartment, nor in her life. His presence forced her to confront things in a more immediate fashion than she cared to. His physical proximity scrambled her mind and his scent distracted her. She stood, her hand on the doorhandle and her body blocking his entrance to the apartment, waiting.

  “Can I come in?” he said at last.

  “Why?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Because it seems a little odd to be having a conversation...”

  “I mean, why are you here?” She cut him off.

  Please fix our son, she wanted to say to him. Please don’t judge me, yell at me, be furious with me. You have every right, but please tell me how to fix our son. Then you can hate me all you like.

  Instead, she glared at him, free hand on her hip, as though this was all his fault.

  “I came to apologise for the other night. I was a little hard on you and I’m sorry for that. I just needed to rule you out as a suspect.” He paused and frowned at her unchanging stance and expression. “You understand, right?”

  Varya nodded and took a step backwards. “You want a vodka?” she asked as he brushed past her.

  “I’d love a vodka,” he murmured.

  She curled up beside him, drink in hand, bare feet tucked to the side, pretending a calm and relaxation she didn’t feel. ‘Numb’ was the best she could manage right now. Sebastian seemed less able to hide his feelings. He sat awkwardly on the low sofa, long legs bent in front of him, back straight, glass resting on one knee, hand on the other.

  “We found the two little girls who went missing,” he started. He took a gulp of vodka and rested it gently back on his knee. Varya pictured the fortifying burn the liquid would make as it meandered down his chest, into his limbs. “One was a murder-suicide. The non-custodial parent.” Another gulp. “The other had the same M.O. as Daniel. Looks like they didn’t manage to leave enough life span to get her home safely first, though. The body was dumped in an alleyway, behind the Town Hall.”

  Varya tried extremely hard not to feel a thing at this news. She lifted her glass and tipped back the entire contents, flicking her head backwards and swallowing in one fluid gesture. But it didn’t silence the voice in her head, which whispered, Your fault. This is all your fault.

  Worse, Sebastian wasn’t finished. He took a deep breath and looked at her directly.

  “While the parents were identifying the body, we got a call about three more abductions. We have to consider the possibility they may be escalating operations.”

  She dropped her glass onto the carpet then. It stayed there, tipped to the side, empty.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” Great, hacking sobs that shook her shoulders started to gush out. She felt, rather than saw, Sebastian kneeling in front of her, his face level with hers. Her skin burned where he placed a hand on each of her arms and gently tried to pry them from covering her face. “So sorry, I’m so sorry,” she kept whispering, developing momentum into a disturbing yet comforting rhythm. “All my fault, this is all my fault.”

  “This is not your fault, Varya. You’re doing everything you can to get the time transfer tech ready.” He’d settled for rubbing her tensed upper arms gently, trying to inject his warmth into her cold body. She stopped whispering but continued to sob. She leaned into him slightly, testing to see if the feel of herself against his chest would fracture her completely. His smell was so good, sweet and affirming. Familiar and safe. Sebastian put one hand on her back, then an
other. It felt so good, as though anything could be overcome.

  “It’s nearly finished,” she muttered into her forearms, which still protected her face against his chest. “The time transfer tech, I think we’re nearly there. Maybe a few more days, another week.”

  He touched her hair gently and smoothed a few strands down, brushing against her neck. Slowly, trembling, she drew her arms down and folded them around her own chest. She leaned her cheek against his shirt, aware but not caring that she was staining it with her tears.

  “There, see? And there was nothing you could have done to help that little girl anyway, not without us finding the perpetrator to transfer the life span back from.”

  Varya nodded and started to pull away. The vodka was making her dizzy and the proximity to Kir’s father was making the world spin too fast. Sebastian relaxed his arms and let her sit up straighter. Did he look disappointed? She wasn’t sure.

  “I should have destroyed the technology. None of this would be happening if I had.”

  Sebastian smiled sadly. He pushed up from the floor and returned to the opposite sofa, picking up his glass and taking a large sip.

  “You don’t know that they’re using the unit you and Reg kept. I know you’re very talented, but that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t been studying what you did. It doesn’t mean somebody else hasn’t discovered what you discovered. It could simply be coincidence.”

  Varya frowned. “A coincidence that the M.O. is identical to the time thieves from ten years ago? That the second victim was my best friend’s son?”

  “It’s not identical. Similar, but less precise. The child today, she had no life span left at all.”