Flutter (5 page)

For starters, I was going to Google “Esperanza Beach.”

For me to escape—because that was what this was now, an escape—I knew I’d have to plan it and keep it absolutely top secret. No one could know anything. This was difficult because the newfound resolve that I had to escape was making me crazy optimistic.

It took me only like three seconds to find Esperanza Beach online. It was a town with less than five thousand people in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a mountain of snow in the winter, cold and gray, nestled into the freezing and unwelcoming shore of Lake Michigan, recording subzero temperatures all winter long, with a couple of ski mountains and several snowmobile trails. There was a lot of information about the UP, but not much about Esperanza
itself. It was just a blip of nothing on the radar; even the Internet didn’t care about this town.

But I did. And it felt good to have a purpose, outside of myself and my hospital room’s walls.

The boy wanted me to go there. My loops were pushing me there. And I was anxious to go back to my loop and figure out exactly why, although I was all too aware that when I went to the loop, I often lost my resolve to do, well, anything, and I would just spend my time dancing, braiding weeping willow leaves, or eating a particularly well-made piece of blueberry pie in the meadow with my boy.

Esperanza Beach. I had to leave, I knew this. Now I had a destination as well.

The next day, I quickly got myself together. I researched the bus routes. I slipped out to the bank and withdrew a big chunk of my college account, forging my dad’s signature. I flirted mercilessly with the young teller, batting my eyelashes, feeling like a moron, hoping he wouldn’t study the withdrawal slip too closely.

In the end, I gave him a fake phone number, and he gave me my money. I stuffed the cash in my backpack and headed back to the hospital. I reminded myself that I would have to toss my cell phone and my bank card. I wouldn’t want to be tempted to use them, because, of course, I knew they could be tracked. I bought a new notebook, a purple one, in the hospital gift shop, my pink one nearing full capacity. I threw a few magazines on the counter too, for the ride.

I was leaving—and soon.

The following morning, I found myself in a nondescript conference room within a nondescript medical research wing, facing my new research team: three new doctors plus Dad and Dr. Chen.

It was a briefing, complete with a PowerPoint presentation and red file folders marked for levels of clearance. Me, my loops, my total existence, were boiled down to bar graphs, statistics, and percentages. A recap for the old team and a summary for the new doctors.

They sat across from me at a long table. The lights were low and eerie in the conference room, and that really put me in a black mood. I also found it interesting that Dad chose to sit on the side with the doctors rather than next to me.

My case was confidential to almost everyone involved at the hospital. No one was allowed to know all that was going on, not nurses, med techs, orderlies. Only the core team knew everything.

“The variables have changed,” Dad said as I took my seat.

“Yes, good morning to you too,” I said blackly.

Dad ignored me and introduced the new members of the team.

“The fact that we have had one episode from a completely wakeful state, with little to no warning, means that we are going to approach things a bit differently, more aggressively,” this new doctor with the impossibly shaggy
mustache was telling me. Dr. Curne or Curtin, something. It didn’t matter. I was leaving. I was escaping.

But I nodded and pursed my lips, knit my eyebrows, and feigned interest.

Dad watched me closely. I let myself imagine that he might sense something was off with me.

The tiny blond doctor now took over. “How are you, Emery?” she asked in a tiny voice.

This level of humanity took me by surprise. “Fine, thank you,” I answered automatically.

“I’ve read much about you. You are a very bright young lady. I see here in this report that you are actually the one who brought the idea of time travel to the core unit here. That you are the one who explained the wormhole idea—the loop, you call it?—to the original team.” She paused here and looked at me with a smile.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “There is a lot to the new theoretical physics of time travel.”

“Of which you understand?” Dr. Mustache chimed in.

I glared at him. “I had plans to go to Yale next year, sir. If any of you had done your job, I’d be getting ready for that instead of sitting here. I think I can grasp the gist of a scientific abstract.”

Blondie kept going. “Your physical state is suffering, of course, from the many episodes of low oxidation to the brain, to your temporal lobe in particular. We are especially wary of brain damage. Several organs are showing early
signs of imminent failure. Your optic nerve has aged. You know all this, of course. However, your heart rate remains calm and normal throughout all of your recorded episodes, which leads us to have hope that cardiac arrest is not imminent. Although in most situations that closely resemble this one, the patient does have that risk at all times.…”

I nodded and bit my lip. I didn’t want to tell them, but this bit of data, that my heart rate never changed dramatically, this information that so comforted the doctors, well, I think that had changed this last time. When I woke after the ballet studio, I felt my heart racing. But I wasn’t going to tell them; I knew to them it would be a harbinger of death.

Dad caught me biting my thumbnail down to the quick. “Emery, tell us what you are thinking.”

I threw them a bone. “The time that I left from the awake state, at the ballet studio, I didn’t have my physical warning signs.”

“What are these signs?” asked Dr. Mustache.

“The fluttering eyelids,” Dad answered, his eyes still on me.

“We’ve recorded this each and every episode while she’s been monitored,” Dr. Chen added.

“I had no warning at the studio. And I didn’t have the smell either.”

Dr. Chen was writing madly on her paper, and she shoved this over to Dad.

“What is the smell?” asked Dr. Blonde.

“Emery says she usually smells ammonia as soon as she begins to loop,” Dad answered.

I was comforted by the fact that he used the terminology
loop
, since mostly the doctors refrained from accepting anything that had to do with my theories.

I smelled lilacs, though
, I almost told them. But then Dad added to the rest of the group, “The subject may be encouraging the sense-inducing behavior in order to have some stability.”

I laughed under my breath—because Dad and Dr. Chen were writing back and forth madly on their legal pads, and I was reminded of why I needed to leave. Dad had just referred to me as “the subject.”

“I’m time-traveling,” I said. “Why can’t we discuss this, research it, accept it?” My voice trembled, betraying me.

There was silence at the table. They were not taking me seriously. I knew this. I just had to give them one more chance. I had to give Dad one more chance to do right by me.

I watched the team shift around in their seats, averting their eyes. Dad shook his head then, and I saw him rub his temple nervously.

I could feel the tears coming to my eyes. But I willed them back.

And then I felt my eyelids flutter. A funny thought hit me the moment before I looped. I smelled the ammonia, and I wondered, when I did die, what Dad would miss more, me or my data.

I’m standing inside a tiny, one-room house … no, a cabin. The boy sits at the small kitchen table, tracing his little fingers over the cracks in the red Formica of the table. He smiles and motions around the room
.

The first thing I notice are the horses. Dala horses, I think they are called
.

I stumble a few steps over to the gigantic limestone fireplace and pick a horse off the mantel. It is cherry red with a flowery saddle painted on its back, all in primary colors. It is Nordic or Scandinavian, this I know. I think they are for good luck, good fortune
.

The cabin is stark and clean, yet has a homey feel. A full bed in one corner has a handmade red-and-white quilt on top of it. The kitchen is tiny, with a sink, a small refrigerator, but no stove.
The focal point of the cabin is the fireplace. I sit down slowly and clumsily on the worn yellow love seat facing the hearth, taking in the room. Its one extravagance is the collection of Dala horses on all its surfaces, the windowsills, the mantel, the bookshelf. There are mostly small ones, only a few inches high, but there are also a couple of larger ones standing on the hearth, at least eight inches tall. They are all painted in blues and greens, reds and yellows. Their colors are bright, happy
.

I decide I like the cabin
.

“Hi,” I say to the boy
.

For a flicker of a moment, I want to ask the boy a million questions. For just a split second, I feel this utter urgency to ask him if there’s something he wants, something he needs from me. But then the moment passes, and I feel serene, calm, enjoying the rustic-firewood and clean-sheet scent of the cabin
.

The boy gets up and opens the cabin door. A freezing wind blows in. I shiver and the hair stands up on the back of my neck
.

“You have to leave now. Before it’s too late,” he says
.

“What’s going on? Too late for you? How?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “Too late for you.”

He’s gesturing outside. I see the snow, and then I realize the edges of the snow, the edges of my vision, are turning a rainbow of colors, and I am going
.

My boy looks at me again. “I won’t be there, but you’ll find nine.”

“Nine what?” I say
.

Another gust of wind pushes a great swirl of snow into the cabin with us, and then I leave
.

I woke up much later in my hospital bed, the dark room glowing blue and green from the various monitors. I struggled to orient myself in the dark. My vision blurred, and my head throbbed. I vaguely remembered coming to, waking from my loop in the conference room. I remembered Dad offering me a drink of water, lots of hushed voices. I remembered sheer exhaustion. I must’ve been sleeping for hours.

Now I heard the unmistakable squeak of rubber soles on the scrubbed-clean hospital tiles.

My breath felt a bit ragged in my throat.

“Shhh, don’t turn the light on,” said a familiar voice as a figure appeared at the foot of my bed. Gia’s face leaned into the light, toward me. “I’m breaking you out tonight. Get changed.”

I smiled, felt lighter. She threw a pile of clothes at me and went and stood guard at the door. I slowed my breathing and called to the nurses’ station, even as I was pulling the jeans on under my hospital gown. “Yes?” came a familiar voice.

“Sandy?” I said, yanking the electrodes from my scalp.

“Emery, do you want us to call your father?”

“No!” I answered a bit too quickly. “I’m just awake now. I … I can’t … um … sleep. I’m going downstairs for a … some … some milk and cookies.”

Gia rolled her eyes at that one. “Okay,” Sandy answered, probably flipping to the next page in her bodice ripper. Thank God Loretta wasn’t on tonight. She would’ve seen right through me.

“Hurry up!” Gia hissed. I pulled the T-shirt on, slipped into some shoes, and grabbed a hair tie. “You can use my makeup in the car,” Gia said. “We are going
out
.”

We slid past the security desk, hiding my telltale hair under a cap on the way out, albeit a feather-covered newsboy cap from Gia’s thrift-store days, but a hat nonetheless.

When we reached Gia’s yellow VW bug, I was giddy with excitement.

“Where are we going?” I said, smiling at myself while I used the mirror to put on lip gloss.

“Look here,” Gia said, and when I turned toward her, she brushed some blush onto my cheeks. She pulled out a mascara wand and expertly did my eyes.

“Did I tell you that Chaney is a
fraternity
emo-boy?”

“Oh, really,” I said. “I didn’t know they existed.” I gave her a smirk, then stole a brush from her purse and worked it through my hair.

Gia took off toward the university neighborhoods. I switched on the radio. It had been such a long time since I had done any of this. Gia unrolled her window and started singing along with the music, as she always did. The clock said 12:45 a.m.

I felt alive. I unrolled my window too, letting the wind hit my face, blow through my hair. I leaned out the window, took a big breath of the chilly December air.

I began bopping to the beat along with Gia, and I saw the house party from a distance. It was unmistakable: kids on the lawn, the
thud-thump
of the bass music from the house resonating in my teeth as we got closer.

I felt a sharp pang in my chest when I thought about leaving Ann Arbor, about going to Esperanza, knowing Gia would care. I had gone back and forth, back and forth, over whether I should tell her.

Now I wondered if I could ever really leave her. She would be so mad. Boiling.

I looked over at Gia, who smiled back at me. She was my friend. A good friend. But she could never understand the many, layered reasons I had to leave. I decided I would keep Esperanza a secret.

We circled the block twice before we found a parking space, and once we entered the party, it was a smash of
people, lots of supposedly manly cologne, college T-shirts, and the unmistakable smell of stale beer. I tried not to feel like a fish out of water. But although it was invigorating to be where I so wanted to be, with normal college kids—my peers, as Dad would call them—doing what normal kids do, I felt like all eyes were on me. And everyone was too close, everything was too loud, too intense.

I bit my lip hard, steadied myself against the stimulation overload, and tried instead to enjoy it.

Gia and I wound up on an old tattered plaid couch, each with a Coke. Emo-boy turned out to be handsome and dressed in all black, a striped scarf expertly placed around his neck, and a guitar hanging off his left shoulder. Everything I expected he would be. Gia was smitten, and I could see why.