Pinball (19 page)

But he didn’t wake up. He shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs and began to get dressed.

Chapter 68

Steven had to admit, getting cleaned up and into fresh clothes did make him feel much better physically, but his heart still ached. He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, reaching for a beer, then thought better of it and selected a Diet Coke instead. Nicolette, who was in the process of cleaning the kitchen after the other kids had finished dinner, looked at him and said, “Hi, Daddy. Good choice.”

“Hi, sweetheart. Thank you for playing the hardass a little bit ago. I feel a hundred percent better.”

“I knew you would,” she smiled, and went back to scrubbing dishes. Steven made a sandwich out of some chicken patties that were left from dinner and headed back to his room. 

He walked in to discover Callie sitting crosslegged in the middle of his unmade bed. He had almost dismissed her as a hallucination, but there she was, still shimmering and smiling like the Cheshire Cat. He stopped, staring at her, and closed the door behind him.

“Okay… you’re still here,” he said to her. “I kinda thought…”

“You imagined me? No such luck, Grandpa. I’m not the Ghost of Christmas Past or Present, but you might call me the Ghost of the Denver Family’s Future if you don’t listen to what I’m telling you.”

“All right,” Steven said. “Let me put on some music so that the kids don’t hear us talking and come in to check on me.” He plugged his mp3 player into the speakers and set it on random. The Greg Kihn Band kicked things off with
(Our Love’s In) Jeopardy
. He thought to himself how appropriate that seemed.

Steven looked at Callie and heaved a sigh, realizing that this was really happening. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her. “You mind if I have dinner while we talk? I haven’t exactly been eating right lately.”

“No, not at all. Go right ahead,” Callie said.

“You want something? Chicken sandwich? Diet Coke?”

“Fried foods… yeah, I remember reading about those. Tempting, but no thanks. And we figured out in the 22
century that artificial sweeteners… well, let’s just say that you really don’t wanna know what that’s doing to your insides. You help yourself, though. I’m good.”

Steven dug in while Callie produced a tiny silver device from her pocket. “I brought this ‘cause I figured you’d need a little convincing,” she said. It resembled a cell phone but turned out to have all the functions of a laptop, plus the ability to project its display image as a holographic image in midair.

She pressed a button on the device and set it down on Steven’s desk. A halo of rainbow-colored light appeared in midair in the middle of the room. It swirled like a tiny globe spinning for two or three seconds, and then resolved to a rainbow-shaded cascade of text that made Steven smile.

Welcome to

Portal

©2799 Microsoft, Inc.

So Microsoft is still around after 800 years,
Steven thought,
and they’ve moved on from Windows to Portals.
He laughed softly to himself, but then stopped as he had another intense bout of déjà vu.

“Something the matter?” Callie asked.

“No, I just… er, the copyright date on that kind of shocked me,” Steven said. “Are you actually from the 27
century?”

“Not quite yet,” she said. “This is a brand new software release, just came out this year. Technically, the 27
century doesn’t begin until 2801, still a couple of years away… for me, I mean.”

Steven felt his head spinning.
That seems to have been happening a lot lately,
he thought, and then wondered why he’d thought that.
Déjà vu all over again
.

Callie tapped another button and the display resolved into what seemed to be a three dimensional PowerPoint-style presentation.

She spent the next twenty minutes or so explaining that the child Steven and Lynne were supposed to have in 2014 would grow up to be a teacher like Lynne, and give birth to three children between 2036 and 2044. Those three children produced seven grandchildren — “Actually,
great
-grandchildren to you,” she pointed out to Steven — between 2058 and 2077.

The music segued to Billy Joel’s jazzy piano flourishes that were the intro to
New York State of Mind
. Steven sat quietly, soaking in the peaceful music, his mind trying in vain to process what Callie was telling him. He thought to himself that she must have rehearsed this quite a few times, because she had it down cold. Her presentation was as smooth as the one he’d heard from an Amway exec one night when he and Lynne had been invited by a friend to see a “business opportunity” in Bozeman.

Since Steven and Lynne’s fifth child had been born, Callie explained, the descendants of that single offspring multiplied down through time to amount to — she indicated a figure displayed in the holographic display — 1,347,982 people.

Steven’s mouth fell open. “1.3 million people are descended from this one baby that Lynne and I were supposed to have had?” He was stunned. He’d never thought about how families multiplied.

“That’s right,” said Callie. “And I was selected by my family — my parents and grandparents — to come back and guide you away from choices that would cause that child
not
to be born. I am the fifth child of my family, and so they selected me to come back and ensure that the fifth child in
your
family — the ancestor of all these people I’m talking about — is born. The existence of all 1.3 million of those people depends on you listening to what I have to say and letting me help you fix this situation.”

“But… it’s too late. Lynne is gone,” Steven said. “It’s all over.” He looked at Callie with a puzzled expression. “If Lynne is dead, then that means we never have another baby, so… how come you still exist?”

Callie smiled at him with the patient expression of a teacher tutoring a slow student. “By my time, we have certain methods of holding the timeline together, at least temporarily. Think of it as temporal duct tape.” She explained. “It doesn’t mean we can change things forever, but it does mean that I didn’t just blink out of existence when Lynne was killed.” Steven flinched at the word. “I’m sorry, Steven. I know the wound is still fresh. But if you do what I ask, you may be surprised at how things come out.”

Steven gazed at her. “What do I have to do?”

Chapter 69

Lianne Denver drove her battered blue Ford Escort down one of the side streets of Three Forks. She had just picked up a baggie containing a hundred tiny purple tablets of the sort known as “Haze.” She was already beginning to feel the effects of the Haze she’d dry-swallowed when she got back into her car after coming out of her connection’s apartment. It produced a massive euphoric rush and a feeling that things were solidly under control and everything was going perfectly for her.

Lianne pulled up in front of the old house that had been her parents’ home. The paint was peeling and weatherbeaten; there was a rusting pickup truck in the yard, all four tires flat. It had belonged to her brother Samuel, before he had been sentenced to 25-to-life for the beating death of a man in a bar three years before.

She walked into the house. “Hey, baby,” she said. Her sometime boyfriend Brent Laramie was lying on the sofa, sneering at an ancient Gilligan’s Island episode on the TV. He was clad only in a pair of soiled boxers and a ragged Wolfmother tee shirt. There were empty beer cans covering the coffee table, along with empty chip bags, a crusty half-empty Ramen cup, and a half dozen crumpled adult magazines. A cheap acoustic guitar, missing its G string, leaned against the wall by the television.

“Did you get ‘em?” he growled, scratching himself. “Man… Gilligan is such a dick.”

Lianne rolled her eyes at him. “Of course I did. They’re in my purse. But Zero made me give him ten dollars more than what he told you.”

“Fucker.”

“I know, right?”

Brent took the bag from her, downed two Hazes, and lay back with his eyes closed.

Chapter 70

Dakota Denver stood on the shoreline a mile from her flat in Steinhatchee, Florida and looked out over Deadman Bay. She often came out to these bluffs, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, to think about her life. More often than not, her thoughts turned to her father, evoked by the name of this place. For seventeen years she’d mourned him, her life swallowed up by something that most people would describe as an obsession. She had been only 16 when he had given up on attempting to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. She was the one who got home from school early after one of those annoying pep assemblies and had discovered, first the note, written on yellow legal paper, tented on the kitchen table, and then, after a frantic search, her father’s body hanging from a branch of one of the apple trees outside.

Her sister Nikki had insisted that they use some of the remaining money from their mother’s insurance to send her to art school in Tallahassee, but she quit after three semesters, claiming that she lacked both the motivation to finish school and the inspiration to draw. Instead, she found the Steinhatchee flat for a pittance per month and supported herself by drawing caricatures of tourists wherever she could set up her chair and easel, often hitchhiking to places like Daytona Beach and Key West.

She’d wrestled for years with the idea of submitting ideas for a comic strip to some of the companies that published the kind of stuff she really enjoyed drawing. She kept coming back to the idea of someone traveling through a rip in the fabric of space-time, in a title that she called
Dimejanpā,
short for Dimension Jumper in Japanese. She had a sketchbook with pages of drawings that detailed her concepts — swirling green vortexes that led to a strange void, the mysterious disappearance of one of the lead characters… and she had no idea where the idea had come from.

She stood in the fading purple light of dusk and threw fist-sized stones out into the bay. She imagined that she was throwing them at her father, each stone striking him and causing him pain as penance for abandoning her and her siblings.

Suddenly she flinched, a shudder running through her. She shook her head as if trying to clear it. She had the most amazing feeling that her father was standing beside her, the way he used to do decades ago when he was watching her draw. She could almost hear his voice saying
Dakota, my girl, you are one amazing artist.
It wasn’t like a memory; it was like a voice, whispering inside her head.

She shivered and got back in her car. Night was falling and it was time to head home, where leftover pizza, late night TV and loneliness were waiting for her.

Chapter 71

Nicolette Denver sat on the examination table in one of the exam rooms at the free clinic in Bozeman, wearing a paper exam robe which did little to conceal her rounded belly and swollen breasts. She was waiting for the doctor to come in. As usual, she’d been waiting a while.

Nikki didn’t mind, however; she didn’t have anywhere else to be. She counted the revolutions of the second hand on the wall clock.

There was a knock and Dr. Laura Robbins came in. A tall, dark haired woman with a slightly drawn mouth and stoic demeanor, Nicolette always felt slightly intimidated by her presence. This was her third visit in as many months and it hadn’t gotten any better since the first time.

“Hi, Nikki,” she said, flipping through the paperwork in Nicolette’s chart. “Everything is looking good. You’re thirty-six weeks along, so your baby is almost ready to be born. You’ve gained just under thirty pounds, which is not too bad at all. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good,” Nikki replied. “I’m not throwing up too much any more.”

“And you’re keeping the baby, you said?”

“Yeah. I really thought about it and I can’t give it up.”

“Have you thought about names?”

Nikki stared at her for a moment and said, “Yeah… if it’s a girl, it’ll be Lynne, after my mom. If it’s a boy,” she paused, suddenly missing her father more than she ever had in all the seventeen years he’d been gone. Wiping a tear from her eye, she said, “I’m going to name him Steven.”

Chapter 72

Steven had made an excuse to go for a walk and met Callie out in the hills out of sight of the house. He was walking in the darkness, hoping he wouldn’t stumble into a prairie dog burrow or encounter some nocturnal predator such as a mountain lion, when he saw the shimmering light that he knew was Callie’s aura. He made a beeline for her, and she greeted him with a smile.

“Hi, Grandpa Steve,” she said, laughing. “I like that. I think I’m gonna call you that from now on.”

Steven rolled his eyes at her, but smiled. He was really beginning to like his great-granddaughter —
My multiple times great granddaughter,
he thought.

“So what do we need to do to fix this mess?” he asked.

“Did you bring something to write with like I told you?” Callie said. Steven held up a pen and legal pad. “A writer is never without his tools.”

“You write on a
computer,
” she smirked.

“Yeah, but still,” he grinned.

“Okay,” she continued, “write yourself a note. Try to be anonymous, because when you get it you won’t know anything about this. Maybe try to write it in different handwriting than usual or something…”

“And tell me again why you couldn’t just do this yourself?”

“There are ramifications to someone going back and directly interfering with a timeline that involves their own origins. You can do this because we’re only talking about a few weeks’ time, but if I were to do it, it could severely screw things up.”

He looked at her, still a little dazed at the entire turn of events. “So what do I write to myself?”

“Something like, “
Do not let Lynne take the car tomorrow. Drive her and
— what was her friend’s name again, the one that was with her in the car?”