If I Could Turn Back Time (26 page)

If I could dive into this and stay, knowing that time would go forward from here, would I? What would I do differently? I didn’t know. I didn’t know from moment to moment what to do differently, and every change I made felt like a misstep, so maybe it was really a curse being thrust back in time.

Maybe I’d seen enough of this car back when we had it. Maybe now it was time to see the sun bouncing off another windshield. Maybe soon there would be yet another one. Maybe someday, if
The Jetsons
were to be believed (which I feared they weren’t), I’d be looking at the sun on my spaceship. I mean, come on: George Jetson and Mr. Spacely Skyped, which a few years ago we thought was impossible, so why not?

In other words, maybe I had to stop looking for answers in my past. Maybe I needed to stop trying to
fix
my past.

Yet, given how empty my present felt, I didn’t know where else to look.

I turned my attention back to my father and watched him carefully sand the handle.

“I don’t think I can get all the tooth marks out without making this half the size of the others,” he said with a chuckle. But he was right, some of the cuts were deep.

“No one will notice,” I said. “I don’t think anyone noticed for years that it was gone.” I focused on the handle, trying to recall whether or not it had been returned, chewed, to its original spot. I looked up to ask my father when the dog had been in the house, but he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there.

What the hell?

“Dad?” I looked around. Had I gotten so lost in thought that he’d stepped away and I hadn’t even noticed? “Dad?” I called again, louder this time.

But there was no answer.

I was alone in the garage.

The handle wasn’t there. In fact, the sandpaper was gone, all the tools that a moment ago had been strewn all over the table were gone. It was tidy and clean, the way my mom kept it.

I glanced at the driveway, half expecting to see her BMW or my Lexus there, back in the future, but there was nothing there. No easy answer. When I looked at the back wall of the garage, the tennis rackets and cables and old jump ropes and everything else that had been there for thirty-plus years were still there. No clue struck me.

“Dad?” I called again, but a little softer this time. I was self-conscious that maybe I was back in my thirty-eighth year and someone would hear me and grow concerned that I was calling for a man who’d been dead for eighteen years.

I went into the house, via the garage door and the laundry room, where my mom had just gone in. “Dad?” I called again. Then, louder, “Mom?”

No one answered.

“Zuzu?” That was when the panic grew. Zuzu always came running when I called, no matter where she was. Even she was gone. “Zuzu!” I tried again, but nothing. There wasn’t even a sign of her around. No water bowl in the laundry room, no treat box on the counter.

The eeriness was overwhelming.

I looked for clues of the year, but on the main floor there really weren’t any. It had never changed much. Which wasn’t to say my mother was stuck in the past, but only that the d
é
cor was kind of timeless and she had never been compelled to change it.

I looked in the kitchen, hoping a newspaper might be lying around, even the small community one, but she was so fastidious about not letting junk sit around that of course there was nothing there.

My head hurt.

And I was scared. Honestly, I was really scared. Nothing was predictable right now; nothing was making sense; the universe had lost all the order I had believed it to have. So I was as vulnerable as I’d ever been in my life.

I went and sat down on the couch. Right in the same spot where my father either had died eighteen years ago or was going to soon. I sat and put my aching head in my hands and cried. What if this was some weird new permutation of this disturbing event? What if now I was here, alone, trapped in time—or the lack thereof—possibly forever? It felt like a
Twilight Zone
episode. Maybe that one where the bank teller is in the vault reading when the end of the world comes, and when he comes out he steps on his glasses and has to spend eternity alone in a fog.

That was my idea of hell.

Had I done something to deserve hell, and was I in it now?

I started to cry. Then the tears came faster and hotter and I cried and cried and cried, sinking down onto the sofa where my father had fallen, and wishing, like him, I could just be gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I woke up. Completely disoriented, still quaking with confusion and grief, but I woke up.

So I wasn’t dead. Probably. I don’t believe death has as many aches and pains as I was feeling. Mostly my head. Always my head. What the hell had happened to my head? Some sort of traumatic brain injury that caused brain damage and shooting pains, and thus all this supposed “time travel”? Or was it just a hangover? Last I could recall, before my strange interlude of twenty years ago, there had been an awful lot of champagne on that yacht before I decided to go off the board.

Had I drowned? They said that was a very pleasant experience. Likely due to the cold water and slow oxygen deprivation to the brain. Anyway, that’s how I understood it, and I took that to mean that one might go back to an easier time and place, or a more pleasant time—real or imagined—or, I suppose, the more complicated and self-torturing among us might go back to our most angsty time and imagine we could change it, fix it, heal everything.

But I didn’t feel that way.

If anything, I felt the opposite. I felt
less
powerful than I’d felt the first time I was a teenager. I just wanted to roll over and go to sleep. Again and again. Actually, I could envision that going on forever. There was no reason to get out of bed ever again.

So I rolled over, and pulled the sheet with me. The bed wasn’t well made, so the sheet pulled free from my feet, which was aggravating. I know if I’d been a caveman, many thousands of years ago, any of these soft coverings would undoubtedly have been welcome luxuries. But I wasn’t a caveman, I was a lost investment banker trying to find her way back to some logical coordinate. And the sheet coming untucked from under the mattress and cutting off at my calf and leaving my foot free and cold was uncomfortable. And it called attention to the fact that my foot was hanging slightly off the end of the bed.

I opened my eyes and looked at the room, expecting to see … well, actually, I don’t know what I was
expecting
to see. I’d stopped expecting the expected. I just hoped for, I don’t know … something familiar, surely. Something that made some sort of sense. My office, my hotel in Florida, my room at my parents’ house, my room at my own apartment, the Hot Shoppes Cafeteria on the corner of Wisconsin and Old Georgetown Road. Something, anything, that would peg me in the time I’d reached and allowed me at least some insight into just how crazy I was … or, hopefully, wasn’t.

Yet … all that said … boy, I would have liked to have rolled over and gone back to sleep. Again and again.

Instead, I looked at the red LED clock on the bedside table and saw it was 6:56
A.M.

But, wait. That wasn’t a clock I recognized. It wasn’t a table I recognized. With instant and resounding reluctance, I took in my surroundings. And I had no idea where I was.

It was a room of perhaps twenty square feet, with two large windows that revealed the green leaves of a very big oak and let the sun in to slant down across the hardwood floor. Gleaming, clean, and utterly unknown to me.

I was in a four-poster bed, queen-sized, with what seemed like a million pillows at the head, hence my position squished down with my feet hanging off the end of the bed. The sheets had a small flower print that looked like Target’s version of Laura Ashley, and there was a pale lavender chenille bedspread. I hated chenille. It never felt like it got really clean. And don’t let the dog up on it; that’s a mess.

That thought came from left field, but I paused to be grateful that, with my ninety-nine—and counting—problems, a dog with muddy paws wasn’t one of them.

My head ached so much that it felt like my thoughts were squeezing painfully through cracked cement. I wanted to go back to sleep, to some sort of oblivion that allowed me to not have to puzzle out all these mysteries of time and place while I was feeling so crummy.

So I closed my eyes and tried to will it all away. Even while I lay there, like a child determined to will the monsters away, I could tell that nothing was changing. All I could do was play chicken with no one until I got so bored of lying here with my eyes closed that I got up and tried to make sense of whatever world I was in now.

I took a deep, deep breath, threw the covers back with a confidence I did not have, and stood up from bed.

If it was time for me to handle something in this insane journey, then I was going to handle it, damn it.

So I took a step forward.

Okay, yes, I know that’s anticlimactic. Yet so far all I had been able to achieve was that which happened when I believed I was asleep or was knocked straight out. I couldn’t just cross my arms in front of me like Barbara Eden in
I Dream of Jeannie
(another rerun favorite of mine), blink my eyes, and make time jump to wherever I wanted it to. Or, rather, make
myself
jump to whatever place in time I wanted to get to.

Instead I had to work with what I had.

Who knows? Maybe this was all a crazy dream that would never amount to anything more than the nightmare about talking strawberries in your salad accusing you of stealing kittens, the sort of dream that lingers with a question mark for a few minutes, then disappears into the ether of the day and
reality
.

I walked around the room, taking inventory of what felt like a very ordinary place. Actually it’s disingenuous for me to say it wasn’t familiar, because in a way it was. In a way it was completely predictable. It was an extension of the house I’d grown up in. A watered-down version of shabby chic, some dark wood antiques (the dresser and two bedside tables), and some things that looked like they were from IKEA (a lighter wood armoire and mission-style bed frame).

When I went to the window, I saw a picnic table, a coiled hose hanging on the brick wall of another part of the house, and a lot of green grass that I just knew was hell to mow in the summer and a bitch to rake in the fall. Particularly with this huge oak tree. There were probably a hundred thousand leaves on it right now.

The idea of those chores made me weary. I could imagine them all too well.

I peeked in the bathroom. Ordinary. A tub/shower combo (I hate those—they feel dangerous, and I never want to sit in water where people have been standing and peeing), medicine cabinet slightly open and reflecting the American Standard toilet, and a double sink with a pressed wood console. One side of the counter had man stuff: a toothbrush, a stainless steel razor, Old Spice deodorant (I confess I’ve always loved that; Brendan used to use it), and a few splatters of toothpaste on the mirror. I almost laughed at that. My ex-boyfriend Jeffrey was fastidious about that—it drove him nuts—so he kept one of those pop-up containers of glass-cleaning wipes under the sink in case any slight sign of use left its mark on the mirror or sink.

The other side of the counter was clearly a woman’s domain: there were Victoria’s Secret lotions and body spray, an electric toothbrush with Sensodyne toothpaste (I felt for her—I have sensitive teeth too and it’s really a pain), a neatly folded pink washcloth with a bottle of Phisoderm cleanser on it, and a red bottle of Olay. I used to use Phisoderm before I started making more money and could afford my favorite Alchimie Forever line, so I could have slipped into this woman’s bathroom life and not necessarily have felt that displaced.

I squirted the Victoria’s Secret body spray into the air and sniffed. It was nice. Wild at Heart. It reminded me of something. Love’s Baby Soft, maybe. It was sweet. Innocent.

I tried to imagine the life that was being lived in this house. At least in the bedroom and bathroom. There was only one way to find out. I needed to venture out of the room and find out who had brought me here and why. At this point, I figured if I was still eighteen, a friend or neighbor had probably come by and found me upset and taken me to their place until my parents got home.

If I was thirty-eight, I had to assume I had had
way
too much to drink on my birthday and this headache was indeed a hangover and now I was, embarrassingly, in the home of someone I didn’t know well enough to be passed out in.

If that were the case, where the hell was Sammy? Why would he do this to me?

I made my way through the bedroom, stopping to snoop briefly in the closet, where there were a
lot
of jeans and surf-brand tops, and more different-colored flip-flops than I’d ever seen in my life. So I was either in Florida again or in the home of someone who was so completely devoted to summer that they could stuff a closet full just for the one season.

Assuming it was Florida, that was a huge relief. I was back where I belonged. I’d overdone it, likely made a fool of myself, and now had to go face the music … and figure out who the musicians even were.

Honestly, I thought, walking through the hall and nearly tripping over a pink stuffed elephant, Sammy should have been right here by my side the whole time so I wouldn’t have this awkward moment of trying to figure out where I was and who I was with.

After all, five years ago, I’d been there to take his dumb, drunk ass away from his ex’s wedding just as he was about to take the mic and start to sing “their song” to all the confused guests. I had stayed with him all night, stopped him—forcibly—from sending some ill-advised texts, and reassured him in the morning that people
probably
hadn’t really noticed his tears or that terribly awkward moment when he’d tried to wrench the ring off Curtis’s newlywed finger. He hadn’t remembered much, but he recalled enough to feel humiliation boil up in him within thirty seconds of waking up in the morning.