3
“She’ll be all right?” immediately followed my exclamation and awkward embrace. I pretended I hadn’t buried my head in his black coat and that he hadn’t stroked my hair. But his lemony smell was still in my nostrils.
“Do you want to make sure?” he said. I nodded, and a few more tears blurred his image.
He disentangled himself and stood; I sprang to his side, unwilling to be alone for another second.
“Jess,” he said rather quietly, but his voice carried. She turned to look at him, at us together, and he waved.
She went still and quiet, confusion still struggling in her hazel eyes, but at least she had relaxed a little. Dad beckoned her back to the house.
“Don’t try to speak,” he murmured at me. “I don’t want to agitate her. She just needs some sleep.”
The cruelty of the situation struck me. How could I treat my aunt as if she had become a frightened house pet? And yet I was doing it with my dad, who was as unremembered as I was.
Jess floated into the house after us. In silence, I handed her a favorite sweater. After wrapping it around her, she did something that surprised me—collapsed into her brother’s arms.
My dad… get that, my dad, cool as you please… scooped her up and tucked her into bed like a little girl. I drew the shade but watched them from the corner of my eye, thinking, He’s so gentle. She just lets him hold her as if she still knows him, knows she can trust him. That must mean it’s true. He is my dad and I can trust him.
But why’s he here after all this time?
Time… he mentioned time.
My eyes narrowed at his straightening form. Pressing his finger to his lips, we slithered out of the shadowed but not night-darkened room.
He said I was out of mine. But he’s no more a nutter than the rest of this family…
I took a last peek at the woman who’d raised me before I closed the door. She had fallen asleep and looked collected, her wispy blonde hair wearing away the angles of her pale face. The closest memories I had to such calmness were the days in my early teen years.
When I couldn’t handle life in general, I let it out it through sulks to arguments to screaming. Aunt Jess understood enough to wrap her arms around me even when I wouldn’t even try to wrap words around my feelings. She held me when I sobbed and told me, often, “Everything’s going to be all right.” She never said why or how or claimed to be the one to fix it, but she reminded me how much I loved the parts of the world that didn’t need to remember me. I loved her.
She forgot me, but she never abandoned me. I could almost believe that if I walked out of here now with my dad, I’d come back to live with her again and it would all be right. Really, though, I got the sick feeling that I would never even see her again.
I scooped my handbag out of the front doorway and slung it over my shoulder. In this manner, my dad and I walked off together, out of the house and down the street, as if we’d known each other all our lives. Sad, isn’t it?
“Want to get a Coke or something?” Dad suddenly asked.
My eyes fell on the edge of his trench coat. I had just drunk Coke with Brodie, hadn’t I? It hurt to remember. Less than twenty minutes ago, too.
“How about chips?” I said at last. I hoped I wasn’t too far behind our conversation.
“Quite right!” Our walking took direction. “Don’t really like caffeine anyway. I know a chip shop in this time that’s superb… They serve in newspaper, even. Never too greasy or burnt.”
“Lovely,” I said, so meaningless that I was ashamed of myself.
“We’ve a lot to talk about,” he said in contradiction to my thoughts.
Truthfully, I wanted to hear all about him—and to tell him about me. But I couldn’t think of a solitary question to start that wouldn’t probe the huge mystery of our past.
“Like what?” I said, bracing myself for my own awkwardness. If only I’d braced for him.
“Like, I’m a time traveler.”
I was so shocked I couldn’t even trip. “What?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
Dark hair invaded my vision in the wind. I furiously pushed it back. “You’re mad!”
He grinned sarcastically. “That’s harder to believe. No, really, I am a time traveler. Oh, the people I’ve met in the past and future, the events I’ve taken part in, the movies premiering next year!”
I felt as if I’d missed the last stair in the dark. My stomach lifted, my heart skipped, and my lungs contracted. That’s not the moment to say, “Prove that the floor exists!” No, I just wanted the moment of relief on the floor, hugging the wall and laughing at myself.
So I didn’t ask him to prove it. “Today’s been really scary,” I told him, “and my whole life’s been just weird enough to let me say this. Dad, I believe you.”
He flashed me a smile of relief that mirrored mine. I could see the family resemblance between him and his sister in the smile: it grew upward instead of stretching out.
“It’s impossible, but I believe you,” I repeated.
“Want breakfast?”
“What?” I said again.
“Lewis Carroll wrote… Never mind. Someday we’ll meet him.”
What precisely had he said about time?
“I know a chip shop in this time that’s superb…”
No, before that.
“You’ve been out of your time too long.”
“What did you mean, I’m out of my time?”
He crossed the street, and I followed. “Sometimes people are misplaced in time. And time doesn’t try to help. I don’t even think it wants them back.”
“Are you talking about… wormholes or something?” I squinted at him.
He scratched his chin, deep in thought.
“Because I haven’t skateboarded through one, not if I’m your kid. ‘Cause I know for a fact this is your time.”
“My time used to be sixteen years ago. One day changed that. I was only nineteen when we found the machine. I thought, ‘Ooh, I’ll pop off to a Beatles concert in the past and be home in the present for tea!’ But that isn’t how time travel works. All of time isn’t my sandbox… It’s more like a beach. Because I’m out of my personal time, the boardwalk, the waves keep erasing my footprints. When you’re out of your time, people don’t remember you, but you can remember other time travelers.”
He crossed his arms, lowering his head as if cold. I knew he wasn’t. “We are both out of our times, and that’s why Jess is so confused, and I’m so sorry about that. She’s a wonderful sister.”
How can this happen to me if I was born in your time? I started to ask. But I remembered Jess’s words: “He was too old when he came… One day nineteen, the next thirty...”
I turned the “How?” my mouth had formed into a breathless, “I have loads of questions.” I threw my windswept hair over my shoulder. “But I don’t know where to start.”
“Seize your first random thought! I like random. I could tell you a story about being random that resulted in the great work of art known as—”
“I turned sixteen yesterday.”
“Hm? Oh, you started. Yes, I know that.” He took a deep breath of the smell of decaying leaves. “I always liked October birthdays.”
“Does my age make you… late forties?” I scrutinized him—probably just over one meter and eighty centimeters, brown hair like mine, deep-set blue eyes and deeper laugh lines. Then I blushed. “Oh, right. Time traveling. You probably dropped me off a week ago.”
He shook his head. “At first my plan was to visit you once a year for both our ages, but it was so long… and far too hard, so I cut it in half. I’m forty now, give or take. Blimey, how do you track birthdays when any day of the year is available?”
“You married late.” Some great curiosity about this tickled my brain, but he kept on talking and wiped it away.
“Settling down… also hard. Notice I didn’t just visit you once a year, though.” He grinned. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“About that.” My eyes narrowed. “Could have said a word now and then, eh? Paced all this information? You didn’t have to come for me sooner, but we could have talked! Fathers and daughters tell each other… stuff, don’t they?”
“I’m talking now,” he said softly. “I wanted you to live as normal a life as you could for as long as you could.”
“Then why would you take me out of my time in the first place?” I whispered back. I didn’t realize how angry I was until later, but it started there.
“Rhosyn. My Rhosyn.” He seemed to savor my name and face. “Look at you. And listen! Going Londoner—practically Cockney.”
My eyes widened. I had just thought about how nice my name sounded in his Northern accent.
“I bet you hate ‘Wotcher, Watcher’ jokes,” he continued. “Sorry, I know that’s an exaggeration…” Abruptly, he shifted his eyes—glistening almost imperceptibly—to the road and swung one foot in front of the other. Hesitating. All desire to rush left his voice. Each word heavy, he said, "Your'e here... because... of your mother."