Unhappenings (57 page)

He nodded, and I thought there was a real chance he might start crying.

“I do understand,” he said. Then he reached forward and placed his fingertips on the screen. I could not see if she reciprocated. I did not ever want to know. “Please be happy. You will always mean the world to me.”

After a second, I heard her say, “Thank you.”

And that was it. He sighed heavily, leaned back in his seat, and said, “Bitch.”

“Watch how you talk about my mother,” snarled Athena. Whatever pseudo-invisibility we enjoyed was shattered with that utterance. Carlton jumped, then leapt from his chair and rushed us, a menacing look on his face.

“Who—” was all he had a chance to say before Athena produced a handgun, pressed it against his chest and pulled the trigger. I don’t know how long he stood there with that look of surprise on his face, and most of his torso splashed across the desk behind him, but it couldn’t have been as long as it felt.

“Aaaaaand, we’re done,” said Athena. She took my hand, and we jumped.

e reappeared in my workroom. “Were you authorized to do that?” I asked, self-consciously inspecting myself for signs of blood.

“Nope.” She was still holding the gun, and she holstered it inside her jacket.

In five years of hell, repairing the damage Carlton did to the world, over and over and over again, I had repeatedly asked her if killing him was the solution. She had always said no. The thought that she would have done this without permission was more than disturbing; it smacked of an irresponsibility not much more easily justified than Carlton’s horrors.

“So, what happens now?” I asked.

“Anyone’s guess. I need to get back to my home time, so the Project can condemn me for this. I’ll probably be back soon if they’re not happy. And we’ll probably have to fix what I did.” She laughed quietly. “That will be a first. Meanwhile, enjoy the breather. Helen is probably upstairs.”

That shook me out of my fear of whatever consequences came next.

“What? How?”

“From her perspective, her ex-boyfriend was murdered the day she broke up with him. I’m sure she took it hard at the time, but she had already fallen for you at that point, so she would have had plenty of support. For her, these last three years had nothing to do with your crazy missions, so she had no reason to leave you. Um…”

“Yes?” I asked nervously.

“She may or may not notice how much you’ve aged. Good luck with that.”

Without further advice, Athena flashed out.

I did some math. The day Helen broke up with Carlton was well before the day he came to my home and pirated my time travel technology. It was always difficult to predict what a change in the past would do to the present, especially if a traveler was involved, but it might actually be possible that with Carlton eliminated that early, none of his unhappenings would have come to pass at all. Could it really be that easy? Experience told me no, but I had to believe it was possible. The alternative was living my life in fear.

Cautiously, I made my way upstairs. Helen was working at the dining room table, apparently a print works curator once more.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” She did not look up right away, but when she did, her eyes bugged. “Whoa. You’ve been out, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said neutrally.

“Looks like weeks,” she said. “Everything okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah, weeks. How long have we known each other?”

She got up, came across the room, and hugged me.

“Stingrays,” she said. “Did something unhappen?”

“Probably not,” I lied. “Just checking in.” Everything was all right, at least on the surface. But she knew that word. Unhappen.

This was not over.

spent weeks waiting for the axe to fall. It didn’t. No sudden dystopias, no apocalypses, no zombies. I had gone longer stretches than this without crisis before, but something about this period of calm gave me a glimmer of hope.

Helen and I set a wedding date of May 2149. Her mother came to visit twice immediately after we announced that. I knew her, of course, but in this revised timeline, we were apparently a lot closer than in my own memories. This boded extremely well for me. For all of us.

Mary Sue got out and came back pregnant. I was a little bit alarmed to learn that we had never gotten her spayed, but Helen made a fuss about “unnecessary surgery,” and it was too late to worry about it anyway, so we started lining up homes for the little runts in advance of their arrival.

My work with the jump field standing wave gained some ground. I was able to generate the wave without engaging more than one device, and I could generate both a backward and forward version of it. This was extraordinarily exciting to me, despite my repeated inability to answer any of the times Helen asked, “What does it do?” It was, which was enough. Someday it would do.

In January, I made an offhand comment to Helen about wedding invitations, wondering if it was getting close enough to start sending them out. “I think ten months in advance is a little bit enthusiastic, even for me,” she quipped. I laughed. When I checked my calendar, our date had been moved to November, or more likely had always been.

Mary Sue stopped being pregnant two weeks before she was due. Out of curiosity, I floated a joke about her getting knocked up.

Helen responded with, “You mean the cat who had the elective hysterectomy? That cat? Oh wait, it wasn’t elective, I forgot. It was
medically necessary
.” Again, I laughed.

Thankfully, my relationship with my future mother-in-law seemed to remain stable and positive. It was difficult to see any of the obvious unhappenings as attacks against me or Helen, so I did not bring them to her attention. And even if I had, I very much doubt things would have turned out differently.

here do you want take our honeymoon?” I asked, apparently spontaneously, one February morning.