Flutter (19 page)

I picked up the pet carrier to move it, stow it under the bed, but when I did, I noticed a small folded piece of paper inside. I set the carrier down and opened its door. I took out the note, unfolded it. Ash’s elegant print. “You’re not alone, Emery. I’m here.”

I shook my head against the many reasons why I shouldn’t go out there, against the embarrassment of what a fool I had acted like earlier.

But I threw on my down coat, my Gia scarf, and my boots, and I went out to him. I knelt inside his tent and caught him for a moment, unexpectedly. He was lying quietly on his back, his hands folded over his chest. His lips were moving quietly.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, and backed out of the tent. He had been praying. I was instantly sure of it. I had heard the word
forgive. Oh God
, I thought.
I’m such an ass
.

“Emery,” he called, and I heard him scuffling out of the tent.

“I’m sorry.” I avoided his gaze. How stupid I was to just think it was okay to wander into his tent. How stupid I was to assume that we were … to assume anything. “I apologize for interrupting you … for everything earlier. I never—”

“Emery,” he said again, and waited for me to look at his face. “You don’t need to apologize.” He smiled. “What did you want?” he asked.

“Thank you for finding Dala.”

He nodded.

“Where was she?”

“Not to make you feel too bad, but it wasn’t easy.”

“Did you risk life and limb?” I smirked.

“Several times.”

I blushed, kicked my feet in the snow.

“I had to climb an evergreen about twenty feet up to grab her out of there. Something must have scared her up there.”

“Oh, Ash. I apologize.”

“You were right,” he said, his eyes lowering.

“No, I wasn’t. Nothing I said was—”

“No, you were right. If I’m going to be here, then I’m
here
, you know?”

He looked up after a long moment, and I could see that a decision had been made. There was a look in his face, a defiant set in his jaw.

With some effort, I recalled why I had come out here in the first place.

“This is crazy, Ash,” I told him. “You can’t sleep outside. You’ll freeze.”

“I won’t,” he said simply.

“I see you checking on me through the window.”

“I know.”

He stared at me and he reached toward me for a moment, but then thought better of it.

“What?” I asked, breathless.

“I can’t come in. I can’t stay with you.”

My head felt swimmy then. For a moment, I wondered if I might loop, but no, this was a different sensation. “But I …” What did he think I was inviting him for exactly? “I was just offering a place next to the fire so you wouldn’t freeze,” I replied. But it didn’t sound true even to me.

“Of course,” he said, his face reddening. He brushed a snowflake off the tip of my nose.

“Good night,” he said. And he kissed me. Just a light brush of his lips against mine. His soapy scent filled my lungs, and I felt my vision going fuzzy along the edges.

It was too much. I couldn’t stop it this time. My eyes fluttered.

No!
I told myself.
No!
I told my body.
Not now!

But my eyes rolled back, my body went rigid. Ammonia. The look of horror on Ash’s face was the last thing I saw as he reached for me, and I was gone.

I’m in my Nan’s backyard. She has her watercolors and her easel set up near her garden, which is in full bloom at the moment—big purple and white hydrangeas, yellow sundrops, pink and orange Oriental poppies. The colors are glorious, swimming with depth here in the loop
.

Nan’s gray hair is loosely tied up in a red bandana. She looks over to me and gives me a big smile. She looks like Mom
.

I smile back
.

I briefly wonder where my boy is. But as usual I’m glad to be here in my loop, and I’m happy to see Nan here, a first in the loop
.

“Come,” Nan says, and I walk toward her. She looks young, vibrant. She moves more quickly, deftly than she does in the home loop. She hugs me tightly for a moment. She feels real, substantial. She lets go of me and holds me by the shoulders, surveying me
.

“Remember, sometimes it’s better to get at things from around a corner than to come at them straight on.”

I nod and smile. I remember when I had been in the home loop. I was nine or ten, and Nan had been teaching me how to paint. I had been copying one of Monet’s water lilies. Nan had told me that it looked too real
.

“Isn’t that good?” I had asked. “To look real?”

“Truth is a funny thing” was all she had said
.

Here in the loop, with Nan, now it makes perfect sense
.

More than that, it seems to be very important
.

Nan lets go of my shoulders then and carefully selects a brush for me out of her canvas apron. She hands it to me, and I set about mixing a perfect blue for the hydrangeas. I put my first strokes on the sturdy art paper, my fine motor skills sloppy and imperfect
.

Nan clears her throat, and I look over to her. “Emery, some people have a hard time with things.” She narrows her eyes. “Especially some things … truth, beauty … when all they’ve known is pain, hurt.”

I nod. I think of Ash. Her eyes speak to me … of Ash … or is it of me? That’s when I see the colors. They are coming, around her head, her face. “Not yet,” I say, reaching for Nan
.

She reaches back, and our fingers touch for an instant
.

My eyelids fluttered open. I registered the cabin, Ash. I was lying in his arms. I took a big gulp of air, my throat feeling raspy, dry.

“Emery,” Ash whispered. He tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear. He looked scared, wide-eyed.

“I’m here,” I whispered.

We stayed like that for a long time, me in his lap, his arms around me, my head against his chest, tilted up toward him. He traced the lines of every feature of my face with his fingertips. My eyes never left him. I reveled in the warmth of his body beside mine, the perfect fit of my body next to his, the natural and relaxed way he held me to him.

“Tell me,” he said.

I sat up then, realizing we were on the floor, next to the
hearth. Ash seemed reluctant to let me go. He grabbed my hands, held them tightly. I stared into the fire, the waves of exhaustion pummeling me, my headache throbbing. I noticed Dala curled in a ball on my pillow. My vision tunneled, and I shut my eyes against it.

“Emery, just tell me already. You look so damn fragile right now. I need to know. I can’t … I won’t leave.”

I considered the weight of this sentence. I opened my eyes and my vision steadied. I stared at our hands knotted between us, and Ash rubbed my knuckles with his thumbs, and somehow this calmed me. I didn’t look up, though. I didn’t know if I could see the look of horror or disbelief in his eyes and still continue. I couldn’t. But I knew I had to tell him. The time had come.

“When I seize like that, when I leave …”

I closed my eyes and took a breath. I held it in for a long moment, weighing what hung in the balance, knowing in order to be completely honest about how I wound up here, how we wound up in this cabin, I had to tell him the truth. Yet I was also fully aware that he might just laugh in my face. He might just roll his eyes. Or worse, say that he believed me for months, like Gia, only to eventually flake out when I most needed him.

I took another deep breath. “Fuck it.” I looked him square in the face and said, “I time-travel.”

A spark from the fire jumped then and crackled, startling us both. I glanced at Ash briefly and saw a look of confusion
on his face. A moment passed and he squeezed my hands tightly.

“Go on,” he said.

I took a deep breath, and I didn’t look at him. I just jumped in.

“I go to a different time, the past or the future, and then I come back here. I don’t always go back to the same times, but there are a few times, a few people, that I seem to frequent a lot, especially lately … this little boy. Anyway, it’s been happening since I can remember. It used to always be in my sleep, from a dormant state. Just recently, I started to initiate from a wakeful state, which makes things a lot more hazardous.” I let out a shaky laugh.

But I continued quickly—I didn’t want to lose my nerve. “I think of it as two lines, two parallel lines—two dimensions, really—running along beside each other ad infinitum.” I ran my two fingers next to each other for a long distance on the fireplace hearth. “Whether these are different ends of one dimension, one time, just wrapped around, I don’t know. But I go back and forth. I loop. That’s what I call it.”

“Loop?” he said.

“I might seize for, say, twenty minutes, but I know I’ve been gone for an entire afternoon. I think my other dimension exists with loops of time that meander away from the straight line, and then come back, meeting up at the same point with my home loop, with this dimension. So nobody misses me.” I looked up at him then, just for a moment. “The
way I explain it, to doctors, to myself, is always with a drawing like this. Just exactly how you drew the curls in my hair.”

I took my hands from his and drew the two lines in the hearth, with one looping out to the side and then coming back to meet the other line at the same place. I watched Ash carefully then, watched him consider this, letting it sink in.

He nodded. I had told him. I had given up my secret.

“So you’re saying you are mentally aware? Or really physically gone, in the other time.”

“Physically, definitely.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m physically there. I just know I am.”

“So it’s not like a dream, or an out-of-body-experience, or …”

“In some ways it is. It’s kind of slow-moving. My thoughts get cloudy there. But the physical part is not a question for me, although that is often what my team gets hooked on.”

He gave me a look. “Team?”

“The doctors.”

I continued, “See, I’ve never been able to replicate the book light. But I took a book light with me into the loop. This was probably four years ago. And I didn’t bring it back. It’s still there. This little boy has it. I tried to take other things, like his jump rope once. I tried, but I don’t have that much control. But that is changing. That is changing lately. And I get information about future stuff sometimes. I’ll know things when I come back.” I didn’t tell him about the key yet.

I wasn’t exactly sure why. Something inside told me not to.
Slow down
, I reminded myself.

“What kinds of things do you learn about?”

“I have this song. I learned it, heard it in the loop long before it ever was out, on the radio. Long before it was ever thought up or written. And in one loop, I sprayed a whole bunch of perfume on me. And although they would never admit it, my team could smell it when I came back. I could tell. They couldn’t quantify that, you know? But it was real.” I watched his face carefully and added, “And I’ve met my father there, in the future.”

“Really?” Ash asked, shaking his head. “You know, I have seen quite a few epileptic seizures at the farm. A stallion of ours had seizures a lot. They weren’t the same as what is happening to you. I could tell that even after the first time. Your seizures are more savage.” He continued, “Einstein believed in time travel. The possibility at least. Wormholes.”

“Exactly. And there’s a whole new school of thought that discounts the grandfather paradox and explains time travel as a possibility within theoretical physics.”

“And the seizures?” Ash asked. “Medication doesn’t do anything?”

“Not a thing, because they aren’t really seizures.” I was excited now, animated.

“Stop for just a second,” he said. I felt myself instantly recoil. Was he going to doubt me?

He must’ve seen the frightened look on my face. He
grabbed my hand. “Back up just a bit. What is the grandfather paradox?”

I smiled, relieved, looking at his hand in mine. “It’s the biggest theoretical argument against the possibility of time travel. Simply put, if you can travel in time, you can affect events that would change the present and the future, such as you could go back and kill your grandfather, making yourself cease to exist.”

“So how is that solved?”

“Well, the new theorists say that the universe simply won’t let you kill your grandfather, either physically stopping you somehow or just by the fact that you will go back in time and you will change your mind. Your sheer existence keeps the grandfather paradox from coming true. The universe steps in to make sure that you can’t kill your grandfather.”

“Do you believe this?”

“Absolutely. It puts words and explanations to so many things that happen when I go to the loop. I can’t use my hands very well. I’m there physically, but I don’t have the will that I usually do, the control. And I often get sidetracked. Early on, I figured that it would certainly be simple enough to prove my theories to Dad, to Dr. Chen, even Loretta. I would just find them in the loop and tell them. Or I could bring something back, or I could find someone there.…” I stared into the fire, my voice dropping to a whisper. “Am I scaring you?”

“Not a bit.”

I let out a deep breath then. “But when I get to the loop, I kind of forget why all these things are so important. And I just
am
. I’m simply in the moment, and I’m happy to be.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No, it’s not. But it’s a bit infuriating when I get back.” I turned his hand over in mine, seeing a long, skinny, crescent-moon scar on his palm that I hadn’t noticed before. I traced it with my fingertips. Ash closed his hand then, took it back, but gave me a smile.

I got up and stretched out my muscles by the fire.

“Is it exhausting?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I padded to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. “I imagine it’s like an astronaut would feel after traveling in space.”

“What does it do to you physically?” He looked at me like he didn’t want to know, but had to know.