Chapter Thirty-Four
Guess who we bump into at the park?
He’s walking a small scraggly mutt with a sweet face and one of those adorable little beards. Lily stops for a sniff and Tyler drops to his knees to give her a scratch.
‘Can I give her a treat?’ he asks glancing up at me. But then recognition clouds his face as he realizes who I am. ‘Oh.’ There’s a cold edge there.
Jesus, I’m bored of having to explain to him that we’re not mortal enemies any more, that actually we’re kind of friends now and even if we weren’t the universe really, really, really wants us to spend time together.
‘Hi, Tyler,’ I say, deliberately keeping my voice light and breezy. Oh, and trying not to think about the way he’d braced himself against the wall as he leaned into me last night.
‘Hi, Bethany.’ There’s a question there. Why are you being so nice? he’s asking. Why aren’t you being a bitch to me?
Lily has now rolled onto her back so he can tickle her tummy and her cuteness erases all the doubt from his demeanour as he fusses over her.
‘She likes you,’ I tell him, wondering if Lily is normally like this or if Tyler has a magic touch.
‘Dogs are good judges of character,’ he replies. He’s trying to be flippant, but I can still hear the edge there, the silent accusation that perhaps my dog is a better judge of character than I am. He might just have a point, to be fair.
I contemplate my options. It’s obvious that I need him. Whatever my views on fate and the last Tyler’s mythical personalization of the ‘universe’ as a somehow sentient being, I can’t fight it any more. Tyler and I need to work together. But first I have to tell him the truth.
‘If I tell you something, do you promise not to have me committed?’ I ask, turning the words into something akin to a joke.
He’s still on his knees and Lily uses this moment to climb into his lap. ‘If I had you committed I could take this beauty home,’ he replies. ‘But seriously, what’s going on? You seem …’
‘Different,’ I answer for him. ‘Because I am.’ And then I tell him everything and once again he’s quiet and contemplative as he listens to the madness.
‘So, how long do we have?’ he asks, immediately taking control of the situation.
That’s one of the things I love about him, that ability to take what I’m telling him and – despite it sounding utterly fantastical – just rolling with it.
Taking it all in his stride as if this kind of thing happens to him every day.
I glance at my watch. ‘Well, I personally don’t have anything more pressing for today.’ Does he think I would have? ‘So how much time can you spare?’
He cocks his head and appraises me, those green eyes so perfectly focused, as if he’s trying to figure out who the hell I am. ‘I meant how long until you skip again?’
‘Oh.’ Well, I guess that makes more sense. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, spreading my arms out wide in a gesture of defeat. ‘It’s random.’
‘Random?’ He pauses for a moment to give me a look that is somewhat disappointed. ‘Dr Raven, you know better than anyone else that nothing is truly random.’
Perhaps he has a point.
‘How about I go grab us some coffees?’ He points to the coffee hut in the distance. It’s the same one I’ve already been to in another world with another Tyler. ‘Then we can sit and figure it all out?’
I nod in reply and flop onto the grass. Lily stares at Tyler as he walks away. ‘He’ll be back, doofus,’ I promise her and she wags her tail.
Is there a pattern to when I skip? I root around in this Bethany’s bag and find what appears to be a slim notebook with a pen tucked into a loop of elastic and a keyring with a token attached.
Looks like this Bethany is the kind who likes to be organized because I open it to reveal it’s a special shopping list pad.
I dig deeper inside and find a tiny folded-up shopping bag and a mini nail care kit.
A very organized Bethany indeed. I rip off a piece of the shopping list pad and turn it over to reveal a plain sheet. It’ll do.
I carefully make a list of all the times I’ve skipped, wracking my brain to ensure I haven’t missed any. At the beginning I was skipping every day, but now it’s more like every three to five.
Tyler returns with the coffees and I show him the list. He squints at it in that frustratingly adorable way. ‘Have you tried to run the sequence?’
I give him the look. Like I wouldn’t have already thought to run it through a programme designed specifically to look for patterns in data. ‘Well, no.’ I’m forced to admit that I had in fact not thought to run it. In my defence I have had rather a lot going on recently.
He raises an eyebrow at me, only slightly, almost imperceptibly.
But it’s still irritating as hell. Then he reaches into his backpack and pulls out his laptop.
He opens it, unlocks it and then taps a few times.
Then he hands it over to me, the screen showing a range of analytical programmes developed by various clever shits.
I sigh deeply as I balance the laptop on my knees and then navigate to the programme I’m most familiar with.
‘You know I wrote that one,’ he says, pointing at the screen.
I sigh even more deeply. I wish I’d picked another programme.
Because of course I know he wrote this one.
And not recently either; he wrote an algorithm to look for patterns in short data series when he was fifteen years old and then sold it on to the university.
He is the epitome of a clever shit. I tap slightly more forcefully on the keys as I enter the data.
‘You’re doing the days?’ he asks.
‘I’m doing the gap between them. I can’t be any more accurate because I always skip when I’m asleep.’
‘So it could happen at any point in that eight hours,’ he adds, nodding slowly.
‘Eight?’ Who gets eight hours’ sleep?
‘Well …’ He blushes. ‘I like my bed.’ The tips of his ears turn red.
I try to stop myself thinking of his bed. Of him in his bed. Of him in his bed with me. He catches my eye. Is he thinking the same?
I turn my attention back to my screen. The programme will look for a pattern in a sequence and extrapolate to suggest how the sequence could continue. ‘Shit,’ I hiss as I look at the possible permutations in front of me.
‘How many?’
I scroll down and down and down. Hundreds of possible sequences.
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah.’ I close the screen and rest my forehead on the cold silver of the laptop casing.
It’s pointless. I’m no closer to learning anything.
No closer to being able to figure out what is happening.
Or why. Or how. Or even when. I could wake up here tomorrow.
Or I could wake up somewhere new, in another Bethany in another timeline in another bizarre echo of my real life.
I’m tired and I feel like this is some awful Groundhog Day emulator that keeps fucking up because every time I skip I have to go back to the beginning and find Tyler and explain everything and then try to work out what has changed and if it means anything.
Or if this whole thing is just completely random and meaningless and I’m just going to keep skipping over and over again until I lose my mind.
‘Hey, hey.’ His voice is soft as he touches my shoulder. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
‘Is it?’ I look up at him and he recoils at the sight of the venom in my eyes. ‘Because right now it seems like we are no fucking closer to an answer. And what happens if we can’t stop me from skipping? Oh my Go—’
I stop myself. Oh my God!
‘What?’ Panic overtakes Tyler’s concern. ‘What is it?’
‘What happens if there’s no me? In the world I skip to …’
He looks confused. ‘What do you mean, no you?’
‘I mean …’ I pause for a moment, trying to corral the thoughts somersaulting through my brain into some semblance of order. I’m painfully aware what I’m about to say may come across as utterly unhinged. ‘What if … in the timeline I skip to … well, what if something happened to that Bethany?’
‘You mean … like she die—’
‘Yes.’ I cut him off. I don’t want him to say the word, it feels far too much like tempting fate. Even if I believe in science and order and rules and absolutely not in superstition and certainly not in fate.
‘Um.’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘Uh.’
And then a cold hand reaches in and squeezes my chest, my heart skipping beneath its icy fingers. Because I’m sitting on a ticking time bomb. The arrythmia.
What if …
As if to prove my point, I wake up a few moments later with a rather large bruise forming on my forehead where it banged onto the surface of the laptop still in my lap as I fainted.
‘Bethany?’ Tyler’s face is bleached of all colour. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I reply, taking slow breaths and trying to bring myself under control.
‘You just passed out.’
‘It’s just … I have a heart defect. A minor heart defect,’ I add for emphasis. ‘I’ve had it since birth, so I’m going to assume that all of us Bethanys have it. But it’s not really a problem, unless I get hugely overstressed. I had an … episode. In one of the other worlds.’
The reality of what I’ve just said starts to settle into the silence around us.
And just like that the sword of Damocles swings over my head.
We need to fix this situation. Fix it and find a way for me to get home before my fear becomes a reality and I skip into a universe where there is no Bethany.
Lily’s warm nose presses against my leg, her way of checking I’m okay; she must be able to sense the shift in dynamic in the air. I reach down and stroke her silky ears, grateful for her calming presence.
‘Maybe you’d be a zombie,’ Tyler says, his voice a whisper.
I snap my head to look at him, ready to reproach him for being an insensitive shit. But that cheeky grin is tugging at the corner of his mouth and I can’t help but start to laugh myself.
It’s like a dam has broken and soon we are both in a fit of giggles, Lily and Doris – that’s the bearded cutie Tyler is dog-sitting – yapping and running around us.
It’s exactly what we needed to break the atmosphere.
After all, there’s no point worrying about the things we can’t change.
That way lies madness and indecision and curling up in a tiny ball to wait for death to take you.
Entirely unconducive to figuring out this problem.