“Yeah, because that’s where my focus is right now.”
“Just sayin’,” I mumbled.
“I caught some of it in the car, but I was more worried about booking time in the scanners than taking notes. So you had to go back for this—Teresa? Whose family reported her missing a couple of days ago?”
“Yes. But by the time I stopped feeling sorry for myself and jumped, she was dead. Then I yelled at King Henry VIII and got thrown in the Tower.”
“Right, and Anne Boleyn brought you Tootsie Rolls and leeches.”
“No, Mary Boleyn brought me a bolster, which looked like a giant Tootsie Roll. The leeches part is correct. But not the kind of leeches you’re thinking. No wonder you think I’m lying. You weren’t paying attention so you’re only getting half the story. And since I only know half the story, that’s bad. You know, math-wise.”
“Please don’t misunderstand,” she said gently, which was terrifying. “I don’t think you’re lying at all.”
“Just batshit crazy.”
“I would never use that word to describe you. You know I fucking hate bats. So after King Henry let you go …”
“Thomas Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey’s bastard and I went to The Gray Horse Inn where I had venison pie and raw milk and then took a nap but first Other Thomas tried to talk me into hanging around for a cream-eating festival.”
She was rubbing her forehead again like she was trying to fend off a migraine. Which was—huh. Why did that suddenly feel important? Lisa had never had a migraine in her life. She gave migraines; she’d never take one.
But it wasn’t important. It was just my brain trying to distract me from the fact that I was doing a piss-poor job convincing my friend I wasn’t clinically insane.
“Cream-eating festivals. Uh-huh. And how’d you get back to I.T.C.H.?”
“The Gray Horse Inn is only half a mile down the road from the gate, so when nobody was watching I went to the willow.” It had been a five minute wait, and I’d been less anxious about it than usual. The innkeeper’s husband had shared an interesting tidbit: locals think the willow is haunted and keep clear. Can’t imagine why. “I only had to wait a couple of minutes.”
“For a gate to open.”
“Yes.”
“One just eventually opens for you?”
“Yes.”
“But not for any of the others. They’re stuck unless you come along and rescue them.”
“That’s right.”
“And it’s always on a significant date in Tudor history. Like Anne Boleyn’s execution.”
“That hasn’t happened yet!” I protested. “Um. You know what I mean. But yes. I never seem to show up on a random Tuesday for poker night. Come to think of it, I’ve never showed up at night at all. Or in the winter. Huh … don’t ask me to explain.”
“Well, who should I ask?”
“I don’t know, okay? The I.T.C.H. scientists? They explained it to me and now I’m explaining it to you. Of course it doesn’t make any sense—it’s goddamned time travel as accidentally invented by frauds!”
“All right, calm down. So this morning you were in the past. And this afternoon you made it back to the—what? Transporter pad?”
I rolled my eyes at ‘transporter pad’. It was almost as if she was deliberately trying to make it sound like I’d seen too many sci-fi movies, which was impossible, because you can never see too many sci-fi movies. “Yes. And the first thing I did when I got back was yell at I.T.C.H. because they’re duplicitous jerks and sentenced Teresa to death with their tomfuckery, and then you came with your rental guards. Which was kind of awesome now that I think about it. Nice of them to drop us off at the hospital, by the way. And then they vanished into the night. Which reminds me. Where’d you find them? Why’d you find them?”
“Your note. When you didn’t come back last night—”
“I couldn’t—I was in the Tower by then, in the custody of the Crown. On San Dimas time.”
She sucked in a long breath and let it slowly out her nose, which is what she sometimes did when she was trying to restraining herself from felony assault. “Right, you said that earlier. Bill and Ted, right? However long you’re in the past, that’s how long you’re gone in the present? So you were in 1532—”
“No, that was two trips ago. This time I was in 1535.”
“Uh-huh. You were in 1535.” I didn’t care for the borderline-indulgent tone she was using at all. “When you didn’t immediately return, I took steps. To tell you the truth, I already knew something was up.”
“Reading all the Tudor non-fiction of my own free will,” I guessed. “And telling you I was going to write a book when you know—”
“When I know you’d never do anything that would call that kind of attention to yourself. Yes. Exactly. Weird as shit. So I was never going to keep clear—you were a moron to think otherwise.”
“Nice.”
“But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to take precautions.”
“So you can just rent personal security guards on less than a day’s notice?” How had I reached my twenties without knowing this?
“You can rent just about anything on short notice if you have the money,” the 17th winner of the Online Poker Series reminded me.
“Okay, so you got my note—but why didn’t—”
“I never looked in your lockbox. There wasn’t time. But I imagine you had stashed trinkets in there you ‘found’ in Tudor England that you smuggled back.”
“Jesus. I can actually hear the air quotes. And they’re hardly trinkets, though with that attitude, it’s probably just as well you didn’t look. Besides, there’s proof all around you.” I gestured to the silverware and gown. “Even if you think this incredibly authentic and heavy and impractical silverware which should literally be in a museum is a case of ‘ho-hum, doesn’t everyone in England have a set in their basement?’, the dress proves I’m telling the truth!”
“Again: I believe you really think this. I never called you a liar and I never would. But Joanie …” She reached out, touched the fabric. “This dress doesn’t prove you went back in time, it only proves you think you went back in time.”
Joanie. Wow. She almost never called me that. Not since we were kids, or when she was really worried about me.
“I.T.C.H.! They can prove me right even if they didn’t actually get around to proving me right but why would I pick a random tech company doing work in an area so far from my field it’s laughable and then fixate on them and convince myself they discovered time travel?” I gasped for breath. Run-on sentences were hard.
“I don’t know,” Lisa admitted.
“If I’m not running temporal errands for them, what am I doing for them?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ah-ha!” Oh. Wait. That didn’t actually prove anything.
“I would assume that when you were there, you heard about their research—quantum teleportation, wasn’t it?—and conflated it into actual teleportation.”
“But why was I there at all?”
“I don’t know.”
“The money!” I gasped. “They paid me twenty thousand pounds. It’s just sitting in my account but it’s there, I can prove it.”
Lisa didn’t say anything.
“Right,” I sighed. “It only proves that I’ve got twenty thousand pounds, not that I’m a time traveler. And I’m sure you’ve got an explanation for the non-dis agreements I.T.C.H. got me to sign.”
“Again, stop calling them that, and yeah. My assumption is that you were paid for whatever the NDAs are for. And I’ll bet if I tried to read them, they’d be full of jargon laymen couldn’t understand.”
“Well, if you’d opened my lockbox you’d have seen them, and yeah, they’re hundreds of pages of Quantum something-something and temporal something-something in
teeny type. And if I’m breaking into museums or attics to steal fancy cutlery, maybe I also stole or scammed the twenty grand. So, what?” I began stuffing my loot back into my tote. It was hard to look at her. She looked like she would burst into tears if I said one more crazy thing. “I’m making it up in a pathetic bid for attention? If I wanted attention—”
“You do want attention. But you’re also fucking terrified of attention, which is the great dichotomy of your nature.”
“Do not psychoanalyze me. If it was just about getting noticed, don’t you think I could have come up with a more plausible lie than ‘part-time time traveler’?”
“Part-time time traveler to Tudor England.”
“Don’t start.”
“Not the Wild West. Or the future. Or the Civil War. Or the British Civil War. Not the Victorian age or World War I or the French Revolution.”
“Don’t make this about my mother,” I warned, “or The After.”
“You know why I wanted you to move here with me, right?”
“Because you’re a shit cook?”
“Yeah, but that was a lesser consideration. I wanted to jolt you out of your complacency.”
We were leaving the scanners and other miscellaneous machinery behind as we headed outside, which was a shame because I’d have preferred to hide inside the MRI for a few days rather than have this conversation. But not only was Lisa still talking, I had the impression she wasn’t exactly relishing the conversation, either. We were discussing a topic so bad and unpleasant, Lisa Harris was reluctant to bring it up.
“I wanted you to be an active participant in your own life.”
I snorted. “That sounds like something you’d read on the back of a box of power bars.”
“But it didn’t work. Or it worked too well.”
“Are you sure you’re a genius?”
“For fuck’s sake!” she practically screamed, stopping so quickly I almost walked into her (it was a narrow hallway, but at least we were almost to the lobby). “Are you ever going to get tired of being a spectator in your own life?”
“How am I supposed to answer that?”
“Look, I get it …”
(People always say “I get it” just before coming out with something that proves that they do not, in fact, get it.)
“… you had to keep a low profile when you were a kid. But that’s done now, it’s been done for years, you’re not fifteen anymore. You don’t have to keep it up.”
(See? Doesn’t get it.)
“Look, Joanie, I love you and I’m glad we live together, but you’re a coaster. You got Bs and Cs because you couldn’t be bothered to work for As. And when—”
“Couldn’t be bothered? I had bills to pay, groceries to buy, a house to run on my own …”
“And Child Services to avoid,” she added quietly.
“Well, yes.” That was the whole point. It was how I dealt with The After. Lisa knew that.
“So you coasted in college because you prefer drifting to living. You went to college so you wouldn’t stand out because by then, you were in the habit of avoiding notice at all costs. But you didn’t really participate. Partly because you live your life in camouflage, but also because you couldn’t be bothered to give a fuck.”
“We don’t all have genius I.Q.s and an obsession to cure addiction because our parents were meth heads who ignored their only child’s gambling addiction.”
“Jesus, finally.” She stopped walking and squared off to face me, almost like a boxer lining up a shot. “That’s the bitchiest thing you’ve said to me all year, and look at what I had to say to get you to do it! I mean, Christ, I call you up out of nowhere, tell you we’re moving to England—”
“Great Britain,” I corrected.
“—and you were all, ‘okey-dokey, guess I’ll start packing, let me know what my new address is when you get a chance’. I was glad, I even knew you’d come, but … who does that?”
“I does that, apparently.”
By now we were outside, and I was grateful that it was after clinic hours, so hardly anyone was around to see this … this mess. “Your fear of being noticed has hardened into something almost pathological. Except scratch ‘almost’ because you’ve convinced yourself that you have an impossible, sexy, straight-out-of-science-fiction job—”
“Sexy? There’s shit on all the streets! Actual shit!”
“—where you’re always the heroine who saves the day—”
“That’s demonstrably untrue.”
“—where you’re the only one who can go back and forth between centuries, a job even scientists can’t do. A fantastical dream job—”
“Spend some time locked up with a drowned corpse, then tell me about dream jobs.”
“—where you can swoop in out of nowhere, do something incredible, then go back into your own life to hide.”
Nothing. I had nothing to say to that. I just glared at her. And I wasn’t going to yell. And I wasn’t going to cry.
“Where’s the rest of it?” she asked quietly.
“What?”
“The bulk of your clothes. Your furniture. Your lifetime of stuff.”
I blinked. When that didn’t help, I blinked more. After about a thousand blinks, I managed an answer. “You know where. It’s—it’s mostly in storage. You know I don’t need every single scrap of clothing, every chair and plate.” So what if I only had about a week or so of outfits at any given time? I liked to rotate. I also liked keeping an eye on the bulk of my things, safely locked up where no one can take them away from me. It’s called thriftiness, Lisa!
“It’s like living with someone who is constantly on vacation. Or on the run. You keep the bulk of your possessions where you aren’t. Most people put things in storage. You put your life in storage.”
“I’ll bet you think that’s profound.”
“No. Just the truth”
I opened my mouth to say—I had no idea. But in a feat of magnificent timing, my phone rang and that was a call I would be taking. Survey? Bill collector? Death threat? It mattered not. And even better, a quick glance told me it was Warren.
“Sorry, gotta take this. The fake scientist who helped me with my fake job needs me to fake something else that’s fake because you’re always right and I never am.” Huh. Kind of lost it at the end there … well, she was smart. She’d know she was being savagely dissed. “Hello?”
“Joan. I’m so sorry to bug you, I just wanted to—”
“Yes.”
“—ask if—you will? That’s wonderful! I didn’t—jeez, thanks! I’ll text the address.”
“Great.” Dinner? Another Lostie? An audit? My murder? It mattered not. Wherever he wanted me was better than here.
“Joan—”
“No. We’re done. I didn’t expect you to believe me, and I appreciate you showing up with guards in case you had to rescue me, but you could have saved the bullshit psychoanalysis.”
“Joanie—”
“Now I’m going with Warren, who not only doesn’t think I’m crazy, but who actually cares and actually understands what I’m going through and understands what I’ve accomplished in the face of, yes, I’ll say it, incredible odds. Not ‘incredible odds’ that I made up because I’m a pathetic introvert who yearns to be an extrovert, but actual and factual incredible odds. In fact, he’s the only one who understands.” Even as I said it, I knew it was true. Lisa—well. Enough said. Other Thomas? He was great, but he thought I was just robotically following orders from a heavenly choir so I’d get into heaven, not undertaking dangerous tasks of my own free will with no hope of everlasting grace. “Don’t call me an ambulance. And don’t try to put a Psych hold on me, either.”
“Joanie—”
“And don’t wait up, either.”
Then I realized I had no way of getting to Wa
rren, because the guards had dropped us off at the hospital and I had no idea where Lisa’s car was. So we had to wait on the sidewalk for separate cabs while simultaneously fuming and avoiding eye contact. Probably should have saved my dramatic blistering exit speech for when I could have followed it with a dramatic exit.
Chapter Sixty-Three
I’m not so shallow that the way to my heart is through my stomach.
But a seven-course meal doesn’t hurt your chances. Especially one at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, the mega-posh hotel restaurant in Great Milton where an overnight stay started at £800 and dinner could set you back … well, I had no idea. They also had cooking classes. Which, again, were so expensive it hardly bore inquiry, much less consideration.
“Please don’t worry about it,” Warren said after I opened the menu and gasped in horror. “Have whatever you like. It still won’t even come close to what we owe you.”
Ahhhhh. (You’ll excuse me while I bask in some praise.)
“This isn’t necessary,” I said, because I was the epitome of modesty. “I only did what—ooooh, confit of sea trout! I love trout … I haven’t had it since before The Af—never mind.” Yes, never mind. Lisa was not in my head. The After was a logical response to the untimely deaths of my caregivers. I was having an exquisite dinner with a man with lovely forearms. All was (temporarily) well. “Hey! Fillet of Cornish Turbot. What is a Cornish Turbot?”
“It’s a flatfish.” Warren puffed his dark, messy bangs out of his eyes—he was still overdue for that haircut, though he cleaned up nicely and looked wonderful in his understated dark suit. “Please, have whatever you like.”
“Be careful,” I warned. “Most people say that to be polite. I’m not one of them. I will have whatever I like, because eating here is a once-in-a-timeline chance I won’t squander. You’d better make sure there’s room on your Visa.”
“Of course. I have.”
“How are you rich?”
“I—I’m sorry?”
“I know that’s a rude question. But you didn’t sign on with I.T.C.H. to get rich—they get government funding, right? That’s the problem—that you could get in trouble for fraud?”
A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII Page 27