Chapter 8
They were waiting for me when the garage door opened.
Cameras and microphones jostled. Men and women shouted questions at me, muffled by the Civic’s rolled-up windows.
I recognized the letters: local news. Nothing national.
They had wry expressions on their faces, the kind people wore when they thought they were in on the joke.
It was like Amy had said: they were out to catch me, to expose me as having hoodwinked a bunch of scientists and physicians.
I backed out, gritting my teeth as the reporters banged on the glass with their hands and microphones, leaving marks. I kept my foot on the gas, enough to make sure the car kept moving, while they shouted questions.
“Mr. Treder, are you really claiming to be the first known time traveler?”
“Is this a hoax? What are you trying to gain by doing this?”
There were more, the words blending into a half-audible cacophony of sound. Then one more question emerged from the chaos. “Mr. Treder, what are you running from?”
I looked at the reporter who’d shouted it, a dour man in a cheap suit with a frayed collar. Instead of a microphone, he held a cheap audio recorder. We locked gazes. There was judgment there. Some harsh thing born of decades that had left him jaded. That had already decided what I was.
Then the man was pushed aside by an aggressive, severe-looking woman I recognized from one of the local broadcast morning news shows, and the crash of overlapping questions fell back on me.
The moment broken, I continued to back the car out into the street.
I faced forward as I started driving. They briefly resisted the car but then parted when it became clear I wasn’t going to stop.
I pressed hard on the accelerator and watched them scurry toward their vans and TV trucks in my rearview mirror, waving instructions at one another.
I took a random route at first, heading into Middleton before getting onto the Beltline highway and doubling back through the city.
I lost them after the first couple turns, but I was paranoid enough about leading them to Amy’s mother that I kept up the serpentine route all the way to the freeway.
It wasn’t until I was headed toward Minneapolis that I began to breathe normally.
Beads of sweat ran down my forehead. I wiped them away and focused on driving.
I kept my speed just under eighty, slower than the fastest cars but still fast enough to let me feel like I was making progress.
It was the longest drive of my life.
It was afternoon when I reached Minnetonka.
I kept hearing Amy’s voice. It’ll be two months next time.
Lyle doing the math, telling us in his innocent, proud way how it would soon be forty-five years.
The steering wheel was clammy under my palms. I hadn’t had a coherent thought in the last four hours.
When I saw Amy’s minivan in the driveway, my shoulders slumped.
I hadn’t even realized how tense I had been.
I parked next to the van and shut off the car.
I leaned forward and put my head against the steering wheel.
My shoulders and neck ached. I closed my eyes, feeling the faux leather against my forehead, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.
Amy’s mother opened the front door when I knocked.
“Hello, Beth,” I said.
She was an older, more imposing version of my wife.
Her hair was gray, and she wore a pair of reading glasses, either perched on the end of her nose or, as they were now, settled on top of her head.
She looked at me with veiny eyes. “Scott.” Then she surprised me by stepping forward and wrapping her arms around me.
It was a motherly embrace, pulling me downward, comforting in its strength.
“Amy and Lyle told me what’s happening,” she said into my ear.
She patted my back, then held me at arm’s length.
“I don’t know what to think, to be honest. But I do know one thing: you might be able to fool those old professors and maybe even my daughter with some elaborate trick.
And if you were, I’d find you and cut your balls off with a rusty spoon.
” She smiled. “But I know you couldn’t fool my grandson. Not our Lyle.”
“No trick, Beth. I don’t know what to think, and I don’t know how to stop it.” I let out a long breath as my voice edged toward cracking. “I’m totally in the dark.”
“Well. They say the wise man knows he’s a fool.”
I gave her a bleak smile. “I must be the wisest man of all.”
She stepped to one side and held the door open. “Come in. It’s too hot to be standing out on the porch all day.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I’d always liked Beth.
Amy and Lyle sat together in the small living room down the hall from the front door. They looked up as we came into the room.
“Dad,” Lyle said as he saw me. He ran forward, and I swung him up to my chest. “You came back.”
“Of course I did,” I said, his glasses digging into my skin. “Of course I did.”
“Thirty-two days,” he said.
“Yeah. Thirty-two days.”
His hair was long, and it felt like he’d grown a little. I looked over his head to Amy. Beth stood behind her, one hand resting on Amy’s shoulder. Amy sucked in a hard, shuddering breath. I set Lyle on the floor as my wife came forward.
“Scott,” she said, her voice soft. Her hair was longer, too. She wore it in a braid down her back, with a few strands loose around her face.
“Amy. I’m so sorry about the reporters…”
“It’s … not your fault. You weren’t even—you weren’t around.”
“It was one of the doctors Maggie brought in to try to help figure out what’s happening.”
“I know, she told me. It doesn’t matter.
” Then she stepped forward and hugged me.
It was tentative, light. I returned the hug, not daring to pull her too close too fast. I bent to kiss her, but she moved her head to the side, allowing me to brush my lips across her cheek.
She stepped back, and as she did, she subtly pulled Lyle with her, separating the three of us.
The gap they left, two feet across the wooden floor of Beth’s living room, was a gulf as deep and wide as a canyon.
“It’s getting worse, Scott,” Amy said.
Beth cleared her throat. “Let’s sit, shall we?”
Amy jumped a little, as though she’d forgotten her mother was there. “All right.”
Beth led her to the couch. Beth caught my eyes and looked pointedly to the love seat across the coffee table from the couch. I sat, obedient.
Lyle watched. He broke away from Amy, came over, and sat next to me on the love seat. I put my arm around him, and he leaned into me, his small body radiating warmth. “Have you traveled backwards in time yet, Dad?”
“No, bud. Just forward.”
“That prevents a causality paradox.”
Beth and Amy stared at him.
“If you were going back in time,” he said, “you might do something to change the timeline. You know? Like, if you went back and shot your grandpa, then you’d never be able to exist, even though you do because you shot my great-grandpa. They call that the grandfather paradox.”
“They do, huh?”
“Yeah. Of course, there are ways around it, like parallel timelines and alternate worlds.”
Beth met my eyes and raised her eyebrows.
I nodded a little. “What else have you learned, bud?”
“Well.” He pressed his glasses up on his nose. “What you’re doing should require a ton of energy. Like, more than the Sun makes in a whole day. And maybe something called exotic matter, though I’m not sure what that means yet.” He paused. “Did they learn anything new? Professor Maggie, I mean.”
I smiled at the “Professor Maggie.” Then my smile faded. “They didn’t, bud. Maggie told me I’m normal. That’s all she said. We didn’t talk long. All the reporters were there.”
He nodded. Then he squirmed and leaned close. “They made Mom cry,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear.
When he leaned back, I hugged him with one arm. “I know, bud. I know. And I’m sorry about that.”
“How did they find out, Scott?” Beth asked.
“Maggie brought in some UW doctors to help set up the equipment. When I disappeared, one of them saw his chance at glory and went to the press.”
“There’s footage,” Amy said. “On the news. It’s from a slow-motion camera, or something.”
I took a moment to let this new information sink in.
“Dr. Brantford must have—Oh. Adam. Maggie’s grad student.
He was helping Dr. Brantford and Dr. Nguyen.
He must have given them the footage from the first time I came to the lab, and they gave it to the press.
” I rubbed my temples. “That’s why the reporters were so aggressive.
It wasn’t just Dr. Brantford holding a press conference.
They had a video. They must have figured it was fake, like, AI generated, but they also had two respected university doctors telling them it was real… ”
“It shows you hooked up to a bunch of electrodes. Then you disappear.”
“They’re showing you reappear, now,” Beth said.
She waved one hand at the ancient CRT TV sitting on a rolling stand in the corner of the room.
We’d begged her to replace it, even offered to buy her a big new flat panel, but she was determined to use it until it died.
“One second the chair is empty, then the next you’re there.
It’s uneventful. It looks fake, like it must be a fake.
I bet Lyle could make the same thing on my phone.
It’s on YouTube and everything, but it doesn’t have that many views, and people are treating it like a joke, a hoax, marveling that anyone could think it was real.
On, um … I don’t know, one of the big websites or channels or whatever, there’s someone who laid out exactly why it’s fake.
All the tells in the video and everything. Debunkers, or something.”
“We’ve all seen too many movies. We know anything can be done with CGI or AI.”
“But this is real,” Beth said.
“Yes.”
“And it’s getting longer. The time between your disappearance and reappearance.”
“Yes.”