Chapter 3
THREE
This is so bizarre.
What are the chances of me seeing Frankie’s car right after I’ve slipped into this timeline?
I run over and peer inside one of the windows. It’s much cleaner than I remember Frankie keeping it. There’s a knitted blanket on the backseat and a Spongebob air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.
This definitely does not look like something a twenty-one-year-old boy would drive. I suppose the Spongebob thing could be ironic, but that wasn’t Frankie’s style.
I perch on a rock ledge near the car and wait. Is this a bad use of my time? But then, isn’t Frankie the whole reason I agreed to try that compound in the first place?
Yes, it is. And I think I need to hold onto that while I’m here, or I’ll get distracted.
Which would be very easy to do. It suddenly occurs to me that there might be other people I could be visiting.
Although, since I never left Shell Beach—unless you count a few trips overseas—I’ve had unbroken access to nearly everyone I grew up with.
As a result, I can tell you the entire life story of every friend and family member who was in Shell Beach in the nineties.
Except, of course, for people who left—like Frankie.
I often look him up online, but he only has a Facebook page with the highest security settings, so I can’t see anything apart from his profile photo—which is an abstract shot of a sunset.
I don’t want to send him a friend request as a matter of pride.
He’s the one who left me, so he needs to be the one to send the request if we’re going to reconnect.
He doesn’t have Instagram or LinkedIn either, and I haven’t seen anything related to his film reviews. I assume his work was always offline in print and never made it to the internet.
Maybe if I knew what he was up to, I’d be able to get over him. But that question: What if? always hangs over my head.
For example, I suddenly remember the first night we met, which was at a nearby bar called the Coral Club.
He was sitting in the corner nursing a scotch on the rocks and writing something in a notebook.
Which could have looked a little performative to someone else, but to me, he was the embodiment of Ethan Hawke’s character in Before Sunrise—arty, sexy, and interesting.
He even had hair like Ethan Hawke, but closer to what it looked like in Reality Bites.
Since Shell Beach was a small town, I always felt comfortable approaching strangers, because it would often turn out we had someone in common. And if that wasn’t the case and things took an unpleasant turn, I’d be able to hide behind a bartender or some other local I vaguely knew.
With Frankie, it turned out we didn’t have anyone in common, but I hadn’t felt the need to escape either. I’d plonked down beside him and peeked at his notebook.
“Whatcha doing?”
“Writing a review of Magnolia.”
“Ah. Is that the movie with Tom Cruise?”
He looked at me, and at first, his expression was scathing, but when he noticed me properly, it turned soft.
“Yes. The one with Tom Cruise. But there are some other brilliant actors in it too—like Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy. However, you should never judge a movie by its stars. If anything, a famous actor can detract from allowing a viewer to fully immerse themselves in the cinematic experience.”
In 1999, I had been studying art at university, but I often found my classmates stand-offish or on a completely different wavelength to me. Frankie was the first person I met who I considered an intellectual, but who also seemed to enjoy sharing his worldview with me.
I’m snapped out of my reverie by a woman stopping beside the Volvo—and it takes a moment for me to register that it’s Frankie’s mum.
I hurry over. “Excuse me?”
She looks up. “Yes?”
“Um, I was just wondering if you know where Frankie is?”
She smiles sympathetically. “Were you waiting in the hope you might catch him? I’m afraid he’s not around right now. He went to Sydney the other day to visit a friend who works for some big newspaper down there. I think he’s angling for a job on their staff as a film reviewer.”
“Oh. Right.” I frown. I hadn’t met Frankie in April 1999, and he wasn’t offered the job in Sydney until August 2000. We’d only been married for three months when it happened—and we’d only been together for a year—almost to the day—when he left.
So does that mean he’d been planning to leave before we’d even met? And if so, why did he pursue a relationship with me in the first place?
“He’ll be back tomorrow,” Frankie’s mum says. “Did you want me to pass on a message?”
“Ah, no. That’s fine. I’ll contact him another time.”
She nods and unlocks the car, climbing in.
I watch as she drives away, and my chest feels heavy.
Is this what Anna meant about time travelling causing too much trouble?
I probably should have listened to her and not my crazy cousin.
I still have just over an hour left, so I walk in the direction of my old house, which was over the hill behind Main Street. It vaguely occurs to me that I might have driven here, but I remember often getting a lift to work because there wasn’t any staff parking for me as a casual employee.
What now? Am I in the mood for talking to my parents from over twenty years ago?
I wish I could call Frankie, but I distinctly remember him being anti-mobile phone in 1999, and even if he did have a number and I called him, I don’t know what I’d say.
I reach the other side of the hill and start to walk across the pedestrian crossing at the bottom.
A motorbike suddenly comes out of nowhere, and I have no time to react before it ploughs right into me.
I find myself flying sideways before crashing into a nearby concrete wall.
My head crunches at a weird angle, and a blinding pain shoots through my body.
What just happened?
And then I black out.
***
I sit up.
And inhale like someone who has been seriously oxygen deprived.
Which I suppose might have been the case.
I breathe in and out deeply, coughing a couple of times and reorienting myself.
It’s okay, Rachel. You’re fine. That was just a dream.
Anna and Kurt are staring at me disconcertingly.
“Are you okay?” Anna asks.
“I think so.”
“It hasn’t been two hours yet. I wonder if the compound is losing its potency.”
“Maybe not,” I say after taking another few moments to collect my thoughts. “I was hit by a motorbike.”
Anna’s eyes widen. “What?”
“I think I was knocked unconscious. I wonder if I would have died if it was the real 1999?”
Anna and Kurt exchange freaked out looks.
“I guess I never knew what happened if you were gravely injured during one of those trips,” Anna says. “It’s good that it just wakes you up early.”
“How do you feel?” Kurt asks.
I take a moment to mentally probe my body. I feel the same as before I fell asleep. “Fine, I think.”
Anna shakes her head. “I’m not sure I’ve ever watched anyone under the influence of that stuff. It’s kind of creepy.”
“Well, it was creepy being back in 1999,” I say.
“What happened? Anything interesting?”
“I ran into my first husband’s mother.”
Anna’s eyes light up. “Really? And?”
“And nothing. Frankie was in Sydney. Apparently meeting with a friend who I assume eventually got him the job that caused our split.”
“You’ve never really talked about your previous marriages,” Anna says.
“Yeah, well, both of them were short. It’s embarrassing to bring them up.”
“Not if the guys were jerks, though. I mean, I totally understand why Kelsey broke up with Aaron after a year. They had opposing values.”
“Frankie and I actually had a lot in common. He was sweet and earnest, and we always had a good time together. But we were too young to understand that you need to make concessions in a long-term relationship. He accepted an interstate job without telling me, and I was unwilling to leave my friends, family, and job in Shell Beach.”
“I’m not sure either of you were wrong for wanting to pursue the path you desired.”
“But Frankie didn’t give me any notice. He just accepted the position without prior discussion.”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty crappy move,” Anna agrees.
“I wish I had known you were going through all of this, cuz,” Kurt says. “I would have made an effort to come see you more.”
“But you had your own life too! You were pursuing the biggest career out of all of us.”
“Still. I would have tried harder if I’d known.”
I press my fingers to my eyelids. “Either way, I’m now wondering if Anna was right about not wanting to meddle with the past. I thought it would be harmless if nothing changed. But that’s not true. Everything can change.”
Anna nods. “Exactly.” And then she covers her mouth. “Ugh. I feel awful. I wonder if I ate something bad.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
Her eyes widen. “Oh my God. Maybe I am.”
Kurt gives Anna a look. “Should we tell her?”
“Tell me what?”
“I guess she knows enough not to be surprised now,” Anna reasons.
Kurt faces me. “Anna went into the future last year and saw that she had kids—although she didn’t get to meet them.”
“Holy cow. So you don’t know how old they are?”
“Nope. But they were old enough to be wandering around Main Street on their own in 2044, so they would have had to at least been in their teens. But with my age, they probably would have been born in the next five years or so.”
None of this feels real. “Should you do a pregnancy test?”
“I’ll do one later. Since I know it’s going to happen at some stage anyway, I’m not in a hurry.”
“That’s crazy!” How can she be so nonchalant about everything?
Kurt frowns sympathetically. “It is a lot to take in.”
“You’ll be okay,” Anna soothes. “At least you didn’t discover your husband had a first love he never got over. Although, I suppose if you swap first love for career, then it’s kind of the same.”
“Wait. Is that what happened? Did you track down Maddie and get her to reunite with Ed?”
“Yep. I hadn’t exactly planned to end my marriage, but I knew I didn’t want to stay with someone who didn’t put me first in their heart.”
“So, hang on. How did you two meet?” I wave my hands between Kurt and Anna.
“I kept running into him every time I went back to the past. He didn’t remember me each time, but somehow, we still connected. He even got his constellation tattoo the day after he said the stars will always remind him of me. Which is insane considering it was a different timeline.”
“Aw. That’s beautiful.”
“But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, and I discovered way more than I should about a lot of things. Which is why I threw the rest of my compound away. I told Kurt he should throw his away too, but he’s been holding onto it for some unknown reason.”
Kurt looks down at the box, which is still on the coffee table, and slides it over to me. “I’ve decided I don’t need it anymore. You can have it all, but feel free to get rid of it if you don’t want to use it. However, you might need further clarity to resolve any questions you have.”
I look at the box as if it’s a ticking time bomb.
Which it kind of is in a metaphorical sense.
Do I want to mess with fate?