The sheriff’s office was empty.
He stood in front of the desk, looking around to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. “Hello?” he called tentatively.
No answer.
Feeling cold, he walked down the hallway to his left, looking for someone, anyone, but the building was deserted.
He hurried outside.
The town was empty, he saw now. The lights were on but no one was home.
He let out a crazy laugh that sounded far too loud in the stillness. “Hello!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. There was no response, and the only movement he saw was a lone chicken walking down the middle of the street.
His heart skipped a beat.
No.
The chicken saw him.
Stopped.
Slowly looked him over.
And walked purposefully toward him, clucking madly, as roosters and hens began streaming onto the road.
PICTURES OF HUXLEY
(2016)
It wasn’t possible.
Just home from work, Jillian stared at the framed photo of Huxley on the breakfront, the one from picture day at preschool, where he’d been holding Tina Valdez’s Paddington Bear. Parents were supposed to have brought their child’s favorite stuffed animal to school that day, but it had been a hectic morning, and she’d forgotten, so he’d been forced to hold Tina’s bear for the picture. The photo was still cute, but Jillian had always regretted the fact that he hadn’t been holding his own Thumper, the stuffed bunny he’d slept with each night.
Now he was holding Thumper.
It couldn’t be. But it was. She picked up the frame, examining it closely. There was dust on the glass, and on the wood of the frame itself. It hadn’t been touched in who knew how long. So, it was clear no one had tampered with the picture.
Could she have remembered it wrong?
No. She had seen that photo a million times, and she recalled exactly what had happened that day.
Then how could he be holding Thumper?
Jillian looked carefully at the other photos on the breakfront to see if any of them had changed. Here was Huxley at Disneyland, sitting on Mickey Mouse’s lap and crying. There was Huxley at the beach, red plastic shovel in hand, intently focused on digging a hole in the sand. She went through each and every picture, and they were all as she remembered.
Except the one from preschool.
Her gaze fell upon a family photograph, one her mother had taken when they’d visited one Christmas. It was of Gene, Huxley and herself, and the three of them looked heartbreakingly happy. They were standing in front of her parents’ Christmas tree in the corner of the living room, and Huxley was so small that Gene was holding him. How old had Huxley been then? One? Two? He was laughing, and she remembered his laugh at that age, a high-pitched infectious giggle that rolled out in waves without stopping for breath. She herself was smiling broadly, wearing a gaudy sweater she’d bought on sale at Dress Barn that at the time had seemed stylish. Gene was his normal disheveled self, and even in such a small photo, she could see the kindness in his eyes, the warmth and easiness of his smile.
Gene.
Where was Gene now? Jillian wondered. It was something she wondered often. They’d had a no-fault divorce with no alimony involved, so there was no reason for them to keep in touch after the marriage ended, and they hadn’t. He’d been manager of the Borders Books in Brea, so at first she’d sometimes seen him there—she’d sometimes stopped by just to see him—but after the store closed, she’d lost track of his whereabouts. She wasn’t even sure if he was still in Orange County. Or Southern California. Or the western part of the United States.
A feeling of sadness settled over her, and she moved into the living room, turning on the television so as to hear another human voice. In the kitchen, she thought about making lasagna—she’d bought all the ingredients over the weekend—but cooking for one took too much effort, and she ended up heating a Lean Cuisine casserole in the microwave.
She’d had a long day at work, completing Frank Becker’s assignments as well as her own, since he had quit his job with no notice and left behind a mountain of paperwork to be processed. She’d barely had time for lunch. Maybe the stress of it all had affected her perception, had made her think she was seeing things that she wasn’t. But that was a scary concept. Was she really so rattled by having to do some extra work that she could actually hallucinate an alternate photo of Huxley or misremember a photo of him that she had seen every day for the past decade and a half? Because those were the only two choices here, and to her, both of them seemed perilously close to mental illness.
Just to confirm that she’d seen what she thought she’d seen, she went back to the breakfront and looked at the preschool picture. Neither time nor a full stomach had changed anything. Her son was still holding Thumper.
Actually, she still had Thumper, along with all of Huxley’s other baby toys, in the garage in a series of marked boxes. She was tempted to go in there right now and look through the boxes for his stuffed animal—she had sorted through the boxes before, more often than was healthy, probably—but Jillian knew it would make her sad, and instead she went into the living room, sat on the couch and watched an hour or two of mindless comedies on TV before deciding to go to bed early.
Crawling under the covers, she lay there staring up at the ceiling, aware for the first time in a long while of how big the bed was and how empty. Her left hand reached out to the spot where Gene had once lain, and the sheet was cold, the mattress firm and unyielding.
In her dream, they were at Disneyland, a place she and Gene had always wanted to take Huxley but never had. Gene took the boy on the Matterhorn and Space Mountain, because she didn’t like thrill rides, but she took him on Dumbo and the other Fantasyland rides, laughing with him as he squealed with delight. All three of them went on Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, but somehow Huxley got lost in the Haunted Mansion’s stretching room, and she and Gene split up, trying to look for him, and then she lost Gene, and she spent the rest of the day in the park pushing through hordes of people, searching for her missing family.
The day dawned clear and bright, and for that she was grateful. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle an overcast sky this morning.
Before heading off to work, on her way out the door, she glanced at the photos on the breakfront, her eye caught by a stray ray of sunshine that glinted blindingly off the silver frame of a picture she’d taken of Huxley on the backyard swing. He’d smiled for the photo, but there’d been a Band-Aid on his nose because an hour before the picture had been taken, he’d fallen off that very same swing and landed face-first on a small rock. It was Christmas morning, the first day he had gotten the swing set, and after cleaning the small wound, putting Neosporin and a Band-Aid on it, it had taken them forty-five minutes to convince him to try the swing again. She had taken the picture so he could see how brave he was.
One step forward and the glare was gone.
Only in the photo Huxley had no Band-Aid on his nose, and his smile was much, much wider.
She halted, feeling a pressure behind her eyes that threatened to turn into a headache.
Not again.
She reached over, picked up the framed photo and examined it carefully, at the same time sorting through her memories. She’d not only taken the picture, she’d looked at it literally thousands of times and knew every centimeter of its composition.
There was no way around it.
The photo had changed.
Just like the one from preschool.
Things did change over time. She knew that. She recalled going to a concert a few years back, a punk rock concert by a band that had been very important to her as a teenager. The first time she’d seen them, when she was eighteen, she’d been blown away by the chaos of their performance. The drummer had broken a stick but hadn’t cared and had kept on playing with his fist! A girl had handed the singer a bottle of something, and he’d dumped the cont
ents on her head before smashing the bottle at his feet and stomping on the glass! It had been amazing!
But when she’d seen them again, the drummer was dead, replaced by his son, and the rest of the band seemed to be merely going through the motions. As he was singing, the singer had walked off the club’s stage directly onto a table, stepping on and kicking over the patrons’ food and drinks. It was supposed to be anarchic and punk, but it didn’t seem real, seemed more like part of an act. People had paid for that food, and it was a stupid and immature thing to do; she knew it, and she knew that he knew it, too, and it made the whole thing feel kind of tired and sad.
So, things changed. It was an inevitability of life.
But the past didn’t change.
The past couldn’t change.
Yet it had.
Twice.
Jillian put the frame back in place and left the house, closing and locking the door behind her. She could not afford to be late for work, but all the way to the office her mind was on the altered photos. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about them. Was she scared? She probably should be, but that didn’t really describe the feeling she’d gotten when she discovered that the pictures had been…revised. Because there was an odd hopefulness mixed in with the sense of distress and anxiety the photos engendered within her. She wasn’t quite sure why, but it might have had something to do with the fact that she did not see the pictures as transformed so much as corrected, as though their previous incarnations had been wrong and this was the way they were supposed to have been all along.
At her desk for the rest of the day, her eyes kept looking toward the corner spot where she used to keep a picture of Huxley. She’d taken it down so people wouldn’t ask questions, but she couldn’t remember where she’d put it, and that memory lapse gnawed at her. She should have put it on the breakfront in the house with all her other photos, but she hadn’t. It wasn’t on her dresser in the bedroom, either, or on the fireplace mantle. Could she have put it in one of the boxes in the garage? That wouldn’t have been right, and she could not imagine why she would do something so insensitive, but it seemed to be the only possibility that made any sense.
All the way home after work, she was gripped by a growing dread that the photos would have reverted back to their original versions by the time she arrived. She liked the new photos. This was the way they were supposed to be, and she found herself speeding up to get home early.
Two more were different this time.
One was his photo with the Santa from Sears. In the original, Huxley had been smiling, but nervously, because even though he loved the idea of Santa, the man’s booming laugh frightened him a little. In the new shot, however, Huxley was grinning hugely, perfectly comfortable and at ease. In the other picture, her son looked the same as he had before, only his clothes were different, and she remembered that he had never liked that other shirt or those pants. He was now dressed in his favorite jeans and his beloved Scooby Doo sweater.
What was going on here?
Was time being rewritten?
The past couldn’t change, she thought again.
Unless…
Unless someone, somehow, was going back in time and altering what had occurred in order to create a new outcome.
That wasn’t possible. Besides, even if it was, who would care about the minor details of her son’s life? Who would make such an effort to alter specific Kodak moments in order to make them better?
Her.
That brought her up short.
Was it possible?
It couldn’t be.
But what if it was? What if a future version of herself was going into the past to…to what?
Prevent Huxley from dying.
Jillian took a deep breath. That would be the goal, of course, but there was no way it could be done. Even if she lived to be a hundred, there would be no time travel within her lifetime. That was the stuff of movies and TV. It wasn’t even close to becoming a reality. Besides, it couldn’t be the case, because if she—or someone else—had gone into the past and changed something, the alteration would have become the fact. She wouldn’t be able to recall the original timeline. She’d think that Huxley had brought Thumper to picture day; she wouldn’t remember that he’d posed with Tina’s Paddington. She’d believe that he’d never fallen off the swing, that he’d never been afraid of Santa, that he’d always worn his Scooby Doo sweater.
Her head hurt from thinking about the ripples and ramifications.
Maybe someone was just changing the pictures, substituting them with ones that had been Photoshopped.
But why? To torture her?
“Glen?” she said aloud.
No. The divorce had not been rancorous, and whatever his faults, Glen was not cruel. He would never torment her in this way.
Who, then?
She had no answer to that.
She inventoried the photos one more time before going into the kitchen and pouring herself a shot of Scotch from a bottle that Glen had bought years ago in case they ever had hard-drinking guests and that she had not touched since he left. Whatever was happening, she thought, the pace of it seemed to be speeding up. There’d been one altered photo yesterday, another one this morning, two during the day today.
Would all of them eventually be switched with pictures from an alternate reality?
She monitored things for the rest of the evening, checking periodically to see if anything had changed, hoping to catch it while it was happening, but there was nothing different in any of the photos by the time she went to bed at eleven.
The next day was Saturday, and Jillian awoke late, melancholy from the emotional residue of an unremembered dream. Sunlight was shining through the curtains, and the red digital numbers on the alarm clock next to her bed said that it was already 8:15. Slipping out of bed, she pulled on her robe and walked out of the bedroom to make herself a quick breakfast.
Framed photos lined the hallway.
She stopped outside her bedroom door, staring at the suddenly unfamiliar walls. She shook her head as if to clear it and blinked several times, but nothing changed. The framed photos were still there.
Reaching out with her fingers to reverently touch the glass, she examined the one closest to her bedroom door.
Huxley’s high school graduation picture.
Jillian’s breath caught in her throat.
Her son had been seven years old when the car hit him. He had never had a high school graduation. He had never even had an elementary school graduation. Yet now here he was, tall and handsome, looking a little like Gene, a little like her, but ultimately more attractive than either of them.
She walked slowly forward. There were other school photos of Huxley: on stage with the cast of a play, standing in the center, apparently the star; standing next to some sort of complicated science project, proudly holding up a blue ribbon in one hand and a certificate in the other; wearing a band uniform, holding a trombone.
Her eyes filled with tears. This is what should have been. This is the life Huxley deserved, the life he would have had if—
The door to Huxley’s room was closed.
Jillian hadn’t noticed it until now, but the band photo was hanging on the wall next to his old room, and the door was closed.
That door was never closed. It was always left open.
Within, she heard noise. The creak of bedsprings. Bare footsteps on the hardwood floor. The opening of a dresser drawer.
She wiped the tears from her suddenly dry eyes.
Heard a loud male yawn.
She took a deep breath. Heart pounding, she steeled herself, reached for the knob, opened the door.
“Huxley?” she said.
MY COLLEGE
ADMISSION ESSAY
(2016)
Describe the obstacles you have had to overcome in your life that have molded you into the person you are today.
I have had to overcome numerous obstacles in my life, but I believe they have molded me
into the person I am today and have made me into the kind of student who would excel in a college environment.
****
My mother liked to tell me the story of when Ronald Reagan called her parents to console them about the loss of her brother, who had died in a training accident at Ft. Bragg. The president, she said, was drunk. At least it sounded that way to her. She was listening in on the extension phone, and he was slurring his words and saying things that made no sense. The one phrase she remembered him saying specifically was, “I’ll eat a potato out of Mommy’s ass,” although she couldn’t recall the context of the remark.
He had to be drunk, she said.
But I thought it might have been an early indication of Alzheimer’s.
My dad said he was just simple.
****
My sister Suzie died when she was six months old.
****
Throughout my school years, the smartest student in each of my classes was a girl. We all knew it, we all accepted it, but now, as adults, my friends act as though men are intellectually superior and women our not-quite-equal auxiliaries.
When did that mind-shift take place?
****
I have always felt uncomfortable in the presence of clowns. Probably because, as a child, I was often beaten by my dad’s clown friends. Especially Red Butt.
As a joke, Red Butt, who often stayed with us when he was in town, would purposely stick out one of his oversized shoes as I walked by, tripping me. He would laugh when I fell, and if I dared to complain or get mad or react in any way, he would leap out of his seat and cuff my head. At that point, it was on. I would try to get away, but his big-gloved clown hands would smite me with blows, and he would cackle uproariously as one of the knees within his polka-dotted pants would slam into my stomach, knocking the air out of me.
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