The Insides (28 page)

Maja wakes up in the bed of her childhood home. She blinks.

A map of the constellations hangs above her bed. She pinned it there when she was ten. She lies there for a minute, looking at the familiar shapes, persistent through time, exactly as she remembered them.

She is eighteen years old.

She is forty years old.

She raises her hands in front of her face, flexes her young fingers, forms them into fists.

She sits up in the bed, looks over at her small white desk, the neat pile of school books, the row of six candles she’s placed at the desk’s edge, arranged in order of color. Everything in its right place.

She rolls up one sleeve of her nightshirt and then the other, checking for the thin black bands of her tattoos. They’re gone.

It worked
, she thinks.

Relief wells up within her, so abrupt and so overwhelming
that her body physically jerks. There’s a layer of sadness down within her: a layer that she’s operated on top of for so many years that she has forgotten that it wasn’t always there. And now that strata is breaking up, coming apart, flowing up and out of her face, which is suddenly wet with tears.

What time is it?
she thinks, with sudden panic.
Please don’t let me be too late
. But she knows it’s early. She can tell just from the position of the square of morning sunlight above her desk, surrounded by dappled bits of color thrown by the crystal pendant that hangs in her window.

She gets up. She goes out into the hall, and crosses into Eivind’s room. He’s in his bed, asleep.

The Archive speaks to her. It has a new voice now, garbled and damaged and partial from the day’s events. But it’s still there, in her head.
Hey
, it says.
I recognize that guy
.

It’s good to see him
, Maja thinks.

Why don’t you say hi
, says the Archive.

In a minute
, Maja thinks. And for a minute she just looks at him. Just until she stops crying.

Then she speaks. “Eivind,” she says.

He stirs.

“Eivind,” she says again.

“What do you want,” he says, without opening his eyes.

“Look at me,” she says.

He blinks himself the rest of the way awake and lifts his head to look at her. She’s never been so happy to see this dour expression.

“Are you going to the graveyard today?”

He lets his head drop back to his pillow. “I have no idea,” he says.

“Are you planning to go out, though? To take photographs?”

“I just woke up,” Eivind says. “I have no plan whatsoever. The future is all potential, is an unwritten page, et cetera.” He churns the air with his hand.

“I need you to promise me something,” Maja says. “I need you not to go to the graveyard today. I need you to promise not to go.”

Eivind must hear something in her voice. The import of a forty-year-old voice coming through the mouth of an eighteen-year-old, something, for he props himself up on his elbows and looks into her face, searchingly, maybe just trying to figure out if she’s putting him on.

“Promise me,” Maja says.

A spooked expression jumps across his features for a second, as though he’s seen something. “OK,” he says. “I promise.”

And she believes him. And because she believes him she can leave him there, at home, safe, while she gets on her red bicycle and rides it through the center of town and up into the hills. She remembers the way.

She rides until she reaches the ugly house with the yellow siding and the orange shutters. She leans her bike against the stone wall across the street. She sits there and looks.

Inside the house there’s a boy. Once upon a time this boy killed her brother. He used an aluminum bat that is right there, leaning up against the jamb of the house’s front door. Once upon a time she used this bat to split the boy’s skull. Once upon a time she threw this bat into the sea, and it was never found, the end.

Only now it’s not the end. It’s the beginning again. And maybe she’s changed the story by making Eivind stay home today. Maybe.

She moves her bike behind the wall. She crosses the street.

She goes up the garden walk and steps onto the stoop of the house. She picks up the bat, feels its weight in her hand, renews her sense of the way it amplifies the actions its bearer could take. She could just simply remove it from the equation altogether, take it down to the sea and throw it in preemptively. It would be another way to change the story. It could be enough.

It could be.

It’s hard to be sure, of course. You can’t be sure. Or, rather, there’s only one way to be sure.

The boy is alone in the house. The door isn’t locked. She didn’t actively look for these facts, but the Inside offers them to her. They are relevant.

She is forty years old. She is eighteen years old. She is eighteen years old and she has been given a decision to make. And she stands there in front of the door to this house with a weapon in her hands, as she has once before, in a different future, and she waits, and knows that when it’s time, she will know what to do.

Jeremy P. Bushnell is the author of
The Weirdness
(Melville House). He teaches writing at Northeastern University in Boston, and lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.