Chapter 12
Lyle took me to breakfast. He’d forgotten the waffles he’d made for me before I jumped, and I didn’t let on. I wasn’t so full I couldn’t eat a little more.
He drove us. That he was driving at all hit me hard, and I sagged in the passenger seat of his beat-up little hybrid and tried not to come apart.
I felt disconnected from my body, almost afloat, unable to process the world around me.
Before, the lengths between jumps were short enough that I could connect Lyle to who he’d been.
Not now. Now he was my eighteen-year-old son driving us to a café to have breakfast.
It was a Friday, and Lyle told me Amy had gone to work for the day.
Amy still left home early each day, had a long commute, and kept long hours even in the summer.
She was vice principal of a high school.
Lyle had returned home from the university for a brief break before going back for summer classes.
I took deep breaths and tried to stop my hands from shaking, to keep my heart from pounding out of my chest. I watched the world go by outside the windows. My little boy was in college. UC Berkeley, in fact, on an academic scholarship. He’d graduated high school early.
The café was a cozy hole in the wall. Lyle led me inside and a waiter waved us to a table.
As we sat, I took in the styles of clothing.
Not much had changed. Businesspeople dressed in suits and smart dresses.
Young people dressed in jeans and T-shirts.
At a glance, it could easily have been the day before all this started, if not for the small issue of my now eighteen-year-old son across the table from me, ordering a double shot of espresso and a plate of French toast.
I ordered the same, and we sat back. The café clattered and hummed around us, oblivious. “So,” I said. “Tell me.”
Lyle, his eyes large now that he wore contacts, blinked. “Tell you what?”
I tried to smile. “Everything.”
Our espressos arrived, and I sipped mine, but he left his on the table, looking down as if he’d forgotten what it was or why he’d ordered it. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “Almost six years.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t get anything. With that thing I built, I mean.”
“The Device?”
He looked up, and a faint smile crossed his face.
“Yeah. I forgot I called it that. Capital D. The Device. My Device. It didn’t work.
Well, it worked fine, for what I designed it for.
Took all the measurements and spat them right back at me, clear as day.
Problem was, there was nothing to measure.
It picked up all the normal background radiation and the minute amount your body puts off.
Then you vanished, and that tiny amount from your body was gone.
There was no spike, nothing across the spectrum it could detect.
I was so na?ve. Stupid. I thought I was smarter than Professor Paulson.
Thirteen-year-old me, thinking I could figure it out when she and her grad students couldn’t.
” He met my eyes, and I saw for the first time the depth of the pain hidden behind them. “I’m sorry.”
I sat forward and put my hand on his. He looked down and for a heartbeat seemed as though he wanted to snatch his hand free.
“Lyle.” I took a second to compose myself, then continued.
“You did all you could. More than anybody else. More I could ever have hoped for, and more than anyone could have expected. You didn’t fail. There was nothing more you could do.”
“I haven’t figured it out. I don’t know what it is. It’s—it’s impossible. But it’s happening anyway.”
“Bud, look at me.” I waited until he met my eyes. “This isn’t your fault. What’s happening, it’s not your fault. It isn’t.” I wanted to say more, to explain every bit of emotion I was feeling, but I couldn’t form the words.
Lyle’s shoulders dropped. “It’s been hard.”
The waitress came by with our French toast. I let go of Lyle’s hand and sat back. She left the plates and swung away.
“Tell me about it.” I picked up my fork and knife and began poking at the toast—my attention on my son and the distant expression on his face.
“After you jumped again, I knew how long it would be. I’d calculated years earlier.
I’ve calculated it out all the way, you know?
All the way to … well. But it still hurt.
You left again, just like that. I had the data to go over, and that kept me going until I realized there was nothing there.
Then…” He hesitated. “I—I gave up, Dad. Closed the Batcave, dismantled the Device. Stopped mentioning you to Mom. Didn’t let on when she brought new guys home for me to meet, didn’t tell her I wanted to punch every one of them because they weren’t you. ”
I couldn’t help a little shock of air escaping my lips.
It felt like someone rammed an invisible fist into my solar plexus.
I couldn’t even begin to parse the swirl of my emotions.
I’d barely come to accept that Amy might be marrying someone else and now it sounded like that had fallen apart.
I wasn’t happy to hear that, but there was a small, guilty core that was relieved.
How the hell was I supposed to feel?
Lyle continued, oblivious. “I tried to forget. Forget you, forget saving you. Live my life, like you told me. But my life sucked.” His eyes darted up to mine and back down again.
“And, no matter what I did, my brain kept coming back to you. I have dreams about it. Dreams where I figure it out and stop it, even manage to send you back in time. Back to when it started, so you were never gone, and we’d never moved across the country, and I never had to be friendly to those assholes who just wanted to bang my mom even after they fucked up and proved they were the assholes I knew they were.
And I wouldn’t be the sad little smart kid at school with the dead dad, because that’s what I told people because the truth was too complicated and insane and no one would believe it anyway.
” He ran out of breath and sat there, chest heaving, not looking at me.
“Lyle.”
He shut his eyes.
“Lyle. I’m so sorry.”
He jerked his head, a short, angry movement. “I’m not asking for—”
“But I’m giving it anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry.
I can’t control this. I don’t even know what this is.
But I’m sorry, so sorry, as sorry as any person who has ever lived.
I never wanted anything but the best for you.
The best life.” I took a shuddering breath and blinked away tears.
“I’m so sorry this has affected you the way it has. ”
“I know, Dad. I’m sorry, too. It’s not your fault.”
We sat for a moment, and I started eating again.
“But I turned it around,” he said.
“Hm?”
“I tried to forget about you, about my failure and everything. Turned out, I couldn’t.
I kept coming back to the problem, gnawing on it.
I convinced Mom to stay in that tiny little house all this time because I knew that’s where you’d come back, where you’d reappear, even when she got her new job and had a much longer commute.
Although I almost stopped believing you’d come back. Almost.”
I pushed the remains of my food around the plate with my fork.
“I wondered for a while,” Lyle said, “if I’d imagined it. If you’d just left one day, abandoned Mom and me, and I’d taken that pain and changed it into an elaborate fantasy. But then you appeared, right on time…” He trailed off, and I could feel his eyes on me, but I didn’t look up.
I stared at my half-eaten food. The world receded to the edges of my vision. I felt like I was falling, and I choked, unable to breathe. My chest compressed, like I had a weight on me.
“Dad?”
The word shot through me, and I drew in a hard breath.
“What am I going to do, Lyle?” I managed to raise my eyes, and saw him staring at me, worried.
“I can’t make this stop … I can’t go back, can I?
I can’t go back, and I can’t stop it. I’m going to keep jumping forward, doubling the amount every time.
It’s already—what year? I don’t even know, but you’re already eighteen years old, in college, when not even two weeks ago you were seven and barely came up to my chest.”
“Dad…”
I knew I was putting too much on him, but I couldn’t stop.
“Why me, Lyle? Is it just random? Maggie—Professor Paulson. She didn’t think so.
She thought this is deliberate. That someone, something, is doing this to me.
Making this happen. If this was random, I’d be tossed out into space, because the Earth would have moved on in its travel around the Sun, and the Sun around the galactic core, but no, this—it’s intelligent.
And if it keeps happening…” I trailed off, shaking, trying to tamp down on my racing heart, trying to slow my breathing.
Lyle’s lips compressed. “There are times I envy you.”
“What?” It brought me up short. Of all the things that he could have said, that cut through my budding panic attack.
“The things you’re going to see, the experiences you’ll have. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“No. No, I don’t want this, Lyle, not at all. There is nothing good about this. I’ve missed most of your childhood, all your adolescence, because of this. I lost your mother, the only woman I’ve ever loved.” I stopped, seeing the wince of pain go through Lyle. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no, I know you loved her—love her, I mean. It’s good, really, good to know, and I’m glad you did. Do.” He sighed and met my eyes, earnest and resolute. “I can’t bring her back to you.”
“I know.”
“But I can do my best to stop this.”
“Lyle—”
“No, Dad, listen. I don’t have anything else.”
“You could, though. You should.”
“This is the most fascinating thing that has ever happened to me. Maybe the most fascinating thing that has ever happened to anyone, period. That this is even possible opens up so many possibilities, in math, in physics, in our knowledge of the structure of the universe…”
I frowned at him. Maggie had said something similar. “What are you studying at Berkeley?”
He smiled, a slight, sly grin. “Theoretical physics.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t help but give a short laugh and shake my head. “Not because of me, I hope.”
“Not only because of you. It’s fascinating. I’d say, besides you—what’s happening to you—what really got me interested was that book. The one that professor loaned me, the guy who didn’t believe you.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded again. Then his smile slipped away. “I’m going to figure this out, Dad. No matter what it takes.”
And I looked at him, at his large eyes and thin face, and I believed him.