Unhappenings (52 page)

“Are you staying this time?” she asked without looking up.

I sat down with her. “How long have we known each other?”

She put down her tablet. “Stingrays. Anything you want to tell me?”

“Not sure,” I said slowly. “Can you tell me again what happened today?”

“At work, or after?”

“After,” I said.

“You and the girl jaunted off to the future, and I curled up with a novel.” She touched my face, and moved closer to see it. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

“Only a few hours,” I said.

She shook her head. “I mean
you
. How many days?”

“A few,” I admitted. Assuming thirty or more still counted as a few.

“Something big unhappened today,” she said. “Didn’t it?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Athena and I took care of it. Any calls while we were out?”

“None. Were you expecting any? And are you going to tell me what really happened just now?”

“Good, no, and no,” I said. “Let me get some rest and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

She frowned. “No you won’t.”

“No,” I admitted, “I won’t. I’m just not ready.”

She tapped her lips. I gave her a kiss.

“Take your time. But do tell me eventually, okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I need to talk to Athena for a bit. Time traveler stuff. Just a minute or two. Then I’m off the clock.”

“I’ll be here,” she said, picking up her book.

In the kitchen, quietly, I said, “So, total net result of that last jump: one harassing vid call erased from history.”

“Was it worth it?”

I looked into the other room at my fiancée curled up on the couch.

With no idea if Athena was asking me seriously or condemning my actions, I said, “Yes.”

“Well, you’re not going to be able to keep this up. And you upped the stakes with this stunt. You know that, right?”

“I know,” I said. “It’s not worth anything, but I am sorry.”

“You’re right,” she said. “That’s not worth anything.”

And in that moment, in the bitterness of her tone, I finally connected the dots.

“When we went to 2155,” I said, as evenly as I could, “all that stuff my older self told me, how much of that did you already know?”

“All of it.”

For years, this woman had concealed things from me, including the fact that I was her father, and while it nagged me, I always trusted that her reasons for doing so were sound. Of all the obfuscations, this was the most unconscionable.

All I could bring myself to say was, “Why?”

“Because you needed to hear it from yourself,” she said, without apology. “And frankly, it really doesn’t change anything at this point. There are more important things on the table. We are going to need to start exploring a more decisive approach to this problem, and that’s not going to be as easy as you might imagine.”

She was right. I willed myself to let it go.

“You’re the tactician,” I said, looking back to Helen. “Tell me what to do. Anything at all.”

“You won’t like it,” she said. “Take care of her. I will see you in two weeks with a plan, assuming the world lasts that long.” She flashed out.

I sat back down with Helen.

“Is she gone?” she asked.

“She’ll be back in a bit,” I said. “How much time can you take off without warning?”

She eyed me suspiciously.

“Where are we going?”

“I think it’s time for that trip to Hawaii.”

he wealth I had accumulated by clever application of time travel enabled us to afford the lavish vacation that followed. We stayed on three different islands over two weeks. We snorkeled. We hiked the volcano. Helen learned how to surf… sort of. The second week we were there, we went scuba diving off Oahu, and Helen and I saw stingrays. She seriously wanted to touch one, and had to be told multiple horror stories of overeager tourists who went home in boxes before she relented.

There was absolutely no way to predict when the next attack from Carlton would manifest itself, or what time frame he would visit to make it happen. It could be weeks, or months, before we would see the effects. There was no way I was going to ask Helen to spend that time cowering in pointless terror.

It was a dream vacation. Helen spent those weeks in a perpetual state of enchantment. I wish I hadn’t been too numb to share it with her.

On our second to last night there, as we were lying in bed, I finally told her.

“We were gone for a month.” I said it without preamble. There was no need.

“What happened?”

“There was a virus. A plague. A lot of people died.” I did not bother to be specific. There was no way I could rationally convey the proper sense of scale. I expected questions. What caused it? How did you cure it? Is it still a threat?

“Were we still together?”

I held her a little closer.

“Yeah,” I said. “We were.”

“Good,” she said, and closed her eyes. And that was it. She didn’t need to know anything else. Perhaps it was her feeling of invulnerability for us that made her dismiss the possibility of these side trips holding any real danger. Perhaps she simply accepted that there was nothing she could do to protect me. Or perhaps she truly did not want to know anything that no one else in the world would be privy to. The conversation I wanted to have, about the very real possibility that Athena and I would need to kill Carlton to keep the world safe, would just have to wait.

n our last day in Hawaii, while we were packing, Helen asked me something entirely unexpected.

“What would happen if you and I went back a hundred years or so and started over? You have money, or the means to get it anyway. We could have a life there, right?”

My skin went cold. Making Helen a traveler had been a consideration for a while, before I fully understood what that would do to her.

“Why that far back?” I asked as neutrally as I could.

“Or farther maybe,” she said. “Far enough back that Carlton can’t find us. He could keep unhappening the present to his heart’s content, and we would never know it. Would that work?”

“What about the people here? Your family? Your friends?”

“Nigel, I have only their word that I ever even knew any of them. They might have all appeared in my life this morning, and they might all be gone by lunch time, and I would have no way of knowing.” She sat down on the bed. “I think about this all the time now. Every time my mom calls, I wonder if she’s even going to exist tomorrow, or if she is even supposed to still be alive today. All my attachments are breaking down like sand castles against the tide of what Carlton is doing. I don’t know how much longer I can take the uncertainty. The only constant in my life is you.” She patted the bed beside her, and I sat. “And I don’t even know how long that will last. What if he eventually finds the one event that will pull us apart for real? I know I won’t remember you, but that just makes it worse for me. If we run away, we have a better chance, don’t we?”

I took her hand.

“You don’t understand what it means to be what I am. What Athena is.”

“I know that I would be with you in a way he could never break,” she said. “Right? Anything you remember I would remember too?”

“Yes,” I said. “And a lot of what I remember these days I would never wish on you.” We sat in silence for a bit. “I almost offered you that choice,” I admitted. “Before I knew about Carlton.”

“I accept,” she said.

“I can’t. I…” I shook my head. “I need to think about this.” She leaned against me and curled up under my arm, but said nothing. “If you do this, there’s no going back.”

“Why would I ever want to go back to a world that might not have you in it?”

As I contemplated the possible answers to that question, Helen, our luggage, and any temporary sense of safety I had been enjoying all vanished.

Without hesitation, I said to my module, “Find Helen.” The world flashed.