If I Could Turn Back Time (25 page)

“But, we had plans. I think there’s Jiffy Pop in the cupboard.” Even to my own ears I sounded like a lunatic, but some part of me was still trying to push through and make this horrible thing go away. Be so determined to go about things as planned that I could make it all
un
happen.

“Ramie,” Tanya said quietly. “You can come back tomorrow after we get your mom from the airport, okay? Tonight you need to just come to my house and be away from this.”

I nodded. The house probably still smelled like firemen, whatever they smelled like. Or death. Both. But wait—was he there? Had he left his body and gotten confused? He wouldn’t have left me; shouldn’t I stay here for him?

But I pictured the reality of that; I would be afraid to go any farther in than the foyer. I didn’t want to clean up the French peanuts and baklava right now. I didn’t want to see what movie he’d been watching. I didn’t want to think about his last meal from the dishes in the sink. I didn’t want to go in and dive into a life interrupted here in the middle of the night when I was exhausted and grieving and unable to think clearly. I had the strangest sensation of being an actress in a bad play, completely unprepared to recite my lines.

I do my thinking in the morning.

And I did. By morning, I had suddenly bloomed into the completely capable, cold businesswoman I became for the next two decades. I cleaned all the mess that was left behind. I turned the heat up so it wouldn’t feel cold when my mom came in, and took down the anniversary card from him to her that had been on the mantel since their anniversary a week and a half before.

From then on I was changed. I never thought about how I wanted to
feel
because I no longer believed there was any choice in that matter. Instead I was completely focused on what needed to be done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

What was the point of all of this?

What was the point of
any
of it?

Was this just what going insane felt like? Had I lost my grip on sanity somehow, suddenly and without warning? Was this the result?

It was all well and good for me to imagine or pretend this was some sort of actual time-travel experience, but that wasn’t possible. Yet neither could it be a dream, because who ever had a dream that went on and on like this, with times of sleeping and waking within it? On top of that, I couldn’t ever remember having a dream that included all the boring parts of life. The sitting around, waiting for something; turning over and going back to sleep, or waiting on the front stoop for a ride to pick me up. I’d had so many “down moments” that I couldn’t imagine this was a dream.

If it was a real phenomenon somehow, then why wasn’t the point of it obvious?

So it had to be insanity.

With that in mind, I decided to push it a little.

In the morning, I went out with my mom for her morning walk. Two miles around the neighborhood. She did it every morning, even twenty years later. I think it is the secret to her vibrant longevity.

Under present-day circumstances, I’m not sure I could keep up that well, but eighteen-year-old me had no problem.

“Something weird is happening,” I said as we turned left out of our driveway.

“Already?”

“I mean in my life.”

She glanced at me. “Tell me you’re not pregnant.” That was such a recurring theme in our lives back then. Not Being Pregnant. Back then, that seemed to be the worst thing that could possibly happen. I didn’t blame her for fearing that.

I laughed. “I’m not! Good lord. I’m not sure I’ll ever be, but I can
promise
it won’t happen for a long,
long
time.”

It was her turn to laugh. “Goodness, that’s strongly worded. I didn’t mean to imply
never
. Don’t wait
too
long or your dad and I will never get to be grandparents.”

If this was a dream, it was so tempting to just blurt it out, to say,
Dad’s never going to know it no matter what
. But even in a dream I couldn’t be so final.

So how could I put this?

“So, like I said, something weird is happening. And I don’t know exactly how to explain it. Do things feel
 … normal
to you lately? Like, over the past week or so?”

She looked at me, surprised. “You feel it too? Yes.” She sighed. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Ever since that accident…”

“Wait, what?”

“Weren’t you talking about your father?”

“What about him?”

“His behavior seems a little off since he had that accident. I can’t put my finger on it, but he seems detached. Don’t you think?”

Well, of course the fact that he was walking and talking at all was strange to me, so I didn’t know how to gauge whether he was suddenly different than he’d been the day before I had returned.

“I wondered if he was having an affair,” she went on, as if speculating on a football team’s chances of making the playoffs. “But that’s completely out of character for him.”

She didn’t ask for confirmation, but I agreed. I knew he wouldn’t have done that. “Absolutely. In fact, he just told me the other day, you mean the whole world to him.”

I think I actually saw a pink flush light her cheeks. After all this time! That’s the way it should be. Maybe it was even worth the loss just to have had something that meant so much to both of them. “You and he mean the world to me too.” She frowned. “Still. Something’s changed. I hope he’s not ill. And that nothing happened in that accident that we don’t know about yet. Sometimes you hear stories of people who have very slow internal bleeds and you don’t know about them until it’s too late.”

I hesitated. “Well, it’s not like Dad has the healthiest habits in the world.”

“That’s true.”

“But this is kind of what I was saying. Ever since that day I’ve been in a sort of d
é
j
à
vu. Like, I feel like I’ve come back in time and I’m reliving this time for some reason.”

She stopped and turned to me. “What do you mean?”

“I was…” It felt wrong to get too specific right now. “I was older; I was having these experiences later in life, like I’d already finished college and gone into the job market, and suddenly I was back in high school, here, now. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like
something’s
a dream and I don’t know which part.”

“Maybe
I’m
the one going crazy,” she said, half to herself. But she seemed shaken. As I guess you would be if you were just talking to your daughter about your husband acting strangely and she told you she was a time traveler.

“Definitely not,” I assured her, and we started walking again. “Maybe it’s the moon or sunspot activity or something. Or maybe we’re just all overtired from the end of school and the weather getting warmer, or
something
.” I don’t know why, but I felt like we shouldn’t continue the conversation. Dream or not, I felt like it was upsetting her too much. Damaging something. “Anyway, Mom, just know that Dad loves you more than anything else in this world. No matter what happens, ever, you have something very few people ever get.”

She put an arm around me. “You’ll have it too, baby. Don’t you worry. It might not be with Brendan,” she cautioned—she obviously thought there was no way a high school relationship was going to become the real thing—“but it will be with the
right
man.”

I snorted. “Whoever
that
is.”

“He’ll show up.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“He
will
. Maybe not in your time frame—we’re all always so impatient for the good stuff—but when the time is right, he will come to you.”

I was going to have to hold on to that hope for a
long
time.

When we got back home, my dad was in the garage, tinkering with something at the worktable, Zuzu lying at his feet. “Ahoy!” he called, and raised a hand to us. “I dropped a quarter by the couch and reached down, and look what I found under there.” He held something up and we went closer. “It’s the missing handle from the rolltop desk. Looks like the Halls’ dog might have gotten ahold of it when they were here visiting, though.” He held it at eye level and, indeed, it did seem to be covered in tiny tooth marks. “So I thought I’d sand it out a bit and stain it.”

My mom was thrilled. “I hate to admit it, but that’s been bothering me inordinately,” she said with a laugh. “Every time I see that piece it seems lopsided because of the missing handle.”

“Worry no more, milady. I have it solved.”

“But, no,” I said, thinking about the handle more than about what I was saying. “We never found that. It’s still missing.”

“Not now!” my mom said, smiling but with a slight crease in her brow. “That’s what your father is saying, he found it.”

I looked at him, then at the handle. He had indeed. But when I was thirty-eight, it was still missing. And far from hating to admit it, my mother had told me countless times that it drove her nuts that it was missing, but she was never able to find anything close enough, even though it had become something of a life quest to look for one at every thrift shop, antique store, and flea market she happened upon.

I didn’t remember this event, but maybe it had happened and the damn thing got lost again. It’s not like it could have that much significance; we never used the drawer because we couldn’t open it, so it wasn’t going to suddenly have a lost copy of the Declaration of Independence in it or anything.

“You’re my hero!” my mother said to Dad, and gave him a peck on the cheek and squeezed his shoulder.

“All in a day’s work,” he replied.

She went in through the garage door and closed it behind her, sending everything pegged on the wall there—tennis rackets, jumper cables, and so on—into a jangle.

“Dad,” I said when she was gone. It hadn’t worked with Mom. Maybe it would work with him. For some reason, this new wrench in the works compelled me more. “I feel like I’ve been here before.” Bad intro, I know.

And, obviously, he didn’t pick right up on my meaning. “It sure wasn’t to clean up!” He laughed and looked around.

I smiled. “No, I mean, in this place and time. I know this sounds crazy, believe me, you don’t have to call the guys in the white jackets or send me to Chestnut Lodge or anything; it’s just … to me, all of this feels like a dream.”

“As the great Lewis Carroll said,
Life, what is it but a dream?
”

“Okay.” I sighed. “Maybe in the greater sense, but I’m talking about
right now
. In my head, and maybe in reality—I believe it is in reality—I have lived way past this time. I’m thirty-eight, or I was about to be, but suddenly I’ve been thrust back into my eighteen-year-old body. My eighteen-year-old
life
.”

He stopped what he was doing, and rested his hand on the workbench, still holding the drawer pull I did not yet know the final fate of. “So that’s what it feels like for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve noticed a certain difference in you, of course. It’s been an odd few days, though I guess graduating from high school forever does that to a person. You’re old and you’re young. Every time I thought you’d become very serious and very
mature
, for lack of a better word, you’d come up with something that sounded just like the Ramie I knew, and I thought it was all in my imagination.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you can’t. I’m not making much sense, I suppose. All I mean is that I sensed something was troubling you but I didn’t want to push, because the worst thing in the world you can do with someone who is struggling to regain their balance is to push them.”

I nodded.
That
I understood. “And how’s your balance?”

“A little off, kiddo. I’m a little off myself. Different situation from yours, though. We’re all on different paths, even though love keeps us together. What is it that’s troubling you the most about the way that you feel?”

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to act. I feel like a fool acting like…” I struggled for words, then just pointed at myself. “Like
this
. I’m thirty-eight, not eighteen, so how can I show up here and act like a young girl? Talk like a young girl? Every time I say
cool
I feel like a complete poser.”

He laughed heartily. Which was better than looking alarmed and asking my mom to call 911, but not quite as good as taking me seriously. “Then consider it a fun game! Playacting! That’s the best we can do. If you fight it, you’re not going to learn anything.”

“So you think I’m here to learn something?”

“We’re
all
here to learn something.” He looked at me seriously then. “Sometimes we learn it in the worst possible way. Sometimes we have to face something we don’t think we can live through in order to show ourselves that we can live through hell and still come out on the other side. Do you know what I mean?”

He could have been describing his own death. “Yes. I know what you mean.”

“I want you to remember that.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”

He touched my wrist, drawing my attention to his face. He was looking at me intently. His eyes were bluer than I’d ever realized. I felt like I was seeing him for the first time. “Everything happens for a reason.
Everything
. Don’t spend your life regretting one thing, no matter how big it is.”

I took his hand in mine. “I don’t think you fully know what you’re saying.”

“I do. You’re stronger than you think. And your instincts are better than you believe. Always. That will serve you well in all areas of your life.”

I nodded.

“Whatever your circumstances, whether it’s normal everyday discomfort or something that feels really bizarre, just go with it and do what feels most appropriate. You know what they say.”

“No, what?”

He smiled, waited a beat, then said, “When in Rome…” Then he returned to his work.

“You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” I looked down toward the street and clenched my jaw, trying to quell the tears of frustration. The sun bouncing off the car that was so emblematic of my youth was both comforting and sinister at the same time.