Chapter 13
Lyle drove me back to the house. It was still odd to see him driving.
So much that was routine and normal to him was new to me.
I was the stereotypical coma patient waking up to find out they had missed an entire decade.
And I would be gone tomorrow. I’d jump eleven years further into the future.
I looked sideways at my eighteen-year-old boy, trying not to let him see me look.
He’d be twenty-nine tomorrow.
I had to clench my hands together in my lap to keep them from shaking.
Back at Amy’s house, so cozy and tidy and stuffed full of all the furniture, pictures, plants, and knickknacks Amy acquired over the years, I asked Lyle if I could use the phone. He set me up in front of a flat-panel wall screen and spent five minutes explaining how to use it.
I tried the number I’d memorized years ago and was unsurprised when it didn’t go through.
With Lyle’s help, I trolled through an online directory looking for Henry and Victoria Treder.
My parents. Lyle didn’t have their new number.
Without me being there, they had fallen out of touch.
I could understand why Amy hadn’t made the effort to keep Lyle in contact with my parents, but even so, it made my heart ache.
One more familial connection missing from his life thanks to me.
I had to input several filters to narrow the list. I found them in Missouri.
My mother’s family was from the Columbia area.
I had memories, when I was young, of my parents driving us down from our home outside Chicago to visit my aunts and uncles and cousins.
We’d all go camping down in the St. Francois Mountains area.
Those trips had grown infrequent as I grew older and stopped altogether after my father got into a shouting match with my mother’s younger brother.
That’d been, what? Thirty-five years ago, now?
My mom must have convinced my dad it was time to patch things up.
I was sure it was cheaper to live there than in the Chicago suburbs.
The call rang three times before my mother’s face appeared on the big flat-panel screen. “Hello?” She stopped. “Oh my God.”
“Hi, Mom,” I said. I gave her a little wave.
She put one hand to her chest, and the other came up to cover her mouth.
She looked much older than I remembered, and frail.
Lines creased her face; her jowls sagged; she wore too much makeup.
She was too thin. In the vivid, hyperreal resolution of the display, I could see liver spots on her hands and make out the individual strands of gray hairs she had tied back in a bun.
“Oh my God,” she said again, the words muffled through her hand.
She turned from the screen and shouted, “Henry! Henry!”
“Mom—”
“Scott, my God, look at you. Where have you been? Look at you…”
My father, moving fast for a man his age, huffed into the picture.
He’d gained at least thirty pounds since I’d last seen him, and the hair left on his head was gray.
Still, he looked healthier than my mom. “What is it?” In character: irritated, edging toward anger.
I spun back to my childhood. Then he focused on the screen over the top of the reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.
His eyes first widened, then narrowed. “Scott.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Where the fu—” He cut himself off with effort. “Where have you been? Eight years without a single word? Nine?” He looked over my shoulder to Lyle and softened. “My God. Is that Lyle?”
I nodded.
“Amy hasn’t spoken to us,” my mother said. She, too, stared at Lyle. “She wouldn’t let us visit. She wouldn’t even let us call. Our grandson.”
“How are you, son?” my father asked, and for a fleeting moment—in which a painful, familiar ray of hope stabbed through me—I thought he was talking to me. But he was looking at Lyle.
I glanced back over my shoulder at Lyle. “These are your grandparents.”
Lyle raised a hand. “Hey, um, Grandpa and Grandma Treder. Nice to see you.”
“You look great, Lyle,” my mom said. “You’re so handsome, so grown-up.”
“You take after my—your grand—your great-grandfather,” my father said. “He was a handsome devil, too. Knockout with the ladies, a real heartbreaker. Just like you, I’ll wager.”
“Thanks,” Lyle said.
My parents stared at him for a few more seconds, lost for words. Then their attention, simultaneously, focused back on me.
“Where have you been, Scott?” my mom whispered. “You look—you haven’t changed at all. We haven’t seen you in, what? How many years?”
“Eleven, maybe twelve,” my father said. “And nine goddamn years without so much as a frigging email.”
“Henry,” my mom said, reaching up to grip his hand.
“No, Vicky, it’s not right. He can’t call out of the blue like this and expect us to be happy to see him.”
“It’s not his fault,” Lyle said.
My father blinked. “What?”
“It’s not his fault. He can’t help what’s happened to him.”
“What’s happening…”
I turned, addressing Lyle but also keeping my parents in the conversation. “I haven’t told them everything, bud. I couldn’t think of a way to explain it, to have it make sense. Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?” my father asked.
His fists clenched, and he looked at them in surprise, as though they belonged to someone else.
With visible effort, he unclenched them.
“Is this about that thing you called about? About you being on the news? Amy would never tell us. We never heard a damn thing. Never saw you in the news, Scott. That something you—”
“He’s jumping forward through time,” Lyle said. He said it like it was a common problem, like I’d forgotten the milk on the way back from work. Stress made me want to laugh. I fought it down.
“What?” they both asked.
“Every twenty-four hours, he jumps ahead, doubling the length of time with each jump. I haven’t been able to figure out how it’s happening yet. I haven’t been able to stop it.”
My parents wore identical expressions: mouths open, eyes narrowed, brows pinched.
“What the hell are you talking about, son?” my father asked.
“Look at him. He hasn’t aged a bit since you saw him last, has he?”
My mom shook her head, looking ill. “What is this?”
“A joke,” my father said. His eyes moved, and I felt the old fear as his gaze landed on me like a physical force. “A goddamn joke is what it is, a computer trick, and he convinced his own son to play along. What are you doing, Scott?”
“Saying goodbye.”
That stopped him. He was expecting something else. Laughter at his expense or some bizarre attempt at an explanation he had no intention of listening to.
“Scotty?” my mom said.
I couldn’t remember the last time she’d called me that. “I’m sorry, Mom, Dad. The next jump will be a long one. I doubt—uh, I don’t know that I’ll be able to contact you again. So, I wanted to say goodbye.”
“This is insane,” my father said. “Like one of those horrible shows where people play practical jokes on each other. When does the announcer jump out and yell ‘gotcha’?”
But my mother was looking closer at me now, leaning in toward the screen, and I saw understanding—partial and limited as it was—pass over her face. “This isn’t a joke.”
“No. No joke.”
“You’re leaving.”
“I’m leaving.”
“Can’t you do something? Stop it?”
“Vicky, don’t let him play you like this.”
Then my mother said something that surprised me. “Oh, hush up, Henry, and listen for once in your life.”
My father rocked backward as though he’d been slapped. My mother, for her part, paid him no attention. Her eyes moved back and forth between me and Lyle. “Can’t you stop it?”
“I—we’ve been trying, Mom. But so far, no one even knows how it’s possible, much less how to stop it.”
There was pain on her face, almost anguish, and I realized she did care about me, despite long years of abundant evidence to the contrary, years of siding with my father, no matter the cause or what he said or did.
She had shrugged off the worst of his foibles, ignoring or simply blind to the things he put me through—put us through.
She saw it in my face, saw my understanding.
But we were too far apart to say it out loud.
Instead, she nodded, and she let tears run down her cheeks.
“Thank you, Scott, for calling us. I hope, with all my heart I hope, this isn’t the last time we see you.
” She hesitated. “I promised you something. When you were a baby, when you were so small, I promised I would love you, no matter what happened, no matter what. I meant that, and I still do.”
Then it was my turn to say the words. They came out, easier than I might have expected. “I love you, too. Mom.”
The late addition was lost on no one. My father didn’t seem angry anymore, or scary, just confused and tired.
I looked at him for a moment, studying the face so sharply rendered on the high-resolution screen.
The lines and crags. The jowls. The larger nose and ears.
A monster out of my dreams, with his constant irritation and simmering rage.
And he was just an old man. I looked back at my mother.
“I’m going to go now, Mom. Keep in contact with Lyle. He needs to know his grandmother.”
She nodded. I glanced at Lyle. He pressed something, and the image of my mother and father popped out of existence.
I sat back, sinking into the cushions of the sofa.
“Huh,” Lyle said.
“What?”
“They’re nothing like you.”
He couldn’t know how much those words meant to me. “No, they’re not.”
“Has it always been like that? They weren’t around much when I was little.”
“It’s pretty much always been like that, bud.”
He bobbed his head, the contemplative look I remembered so well from a few days ago—years ago—now on his older, leaner, adult face. “So, what now?”
“Hell if I know. I was hoping you had some ideas.”
He bit his lip.
“You do have an idea.”
He nodded.
“What is it?”
“It’s about a ten-hour drive to Berkeley. We could get there well before your next jump. And then, well … you’d be there, you know?”
“When I come back.”
“Right.”
“I can’t really use Mom’s—your mom’s basement again, can I?”
“Probably not.”
“Is she expecting you to go back so soon?”
“I’ll say something came up. This is much better, easier for me to study you—it.”
I knew there was dual purpose for Lyle: it kept me from seeing Amy, something he was keen to do, and it meant I’d be at Berkeley, where he could better study the phenomenon.
“Let’s do it. What time is it?”
Lyle checked his smartwatch. “It’s only nine thirty. According to traffic, we could make it to Berkeley by eight tonight if we leave now and eat on the way.”
“Don’t you need to pack?”
“I’m kinda already all packed. We just need to put a few things in my car.”
I didn’t bother to hide my smile. “How long have you been planning this?”
“Couple months.”
I laughed. Soon enough, he was laughing, too.