Unhappenings (61 page)

People were finally starting to notice us. We might have had a minute before we were arrested or shot. Athena chose that moment to point her gun at the screaming infant.

“Desmond West. Five months old. He will now grow up an orphan, cared for by an extended family of means. He will, in fact, become a champion for preventing violent crimes, as the poster child of a horrendously brutal mugging. Or so the Project’s models predict. There is a forty percent chance that this will set in motion a series of events that has very unhappy results.”

In the distance, I heard a woman scream. There was no way for me know how many people were now giving us their attention without turning around, but I could not take my eyes off of Athena.

“Carlton West would have been born in 2120. Now he never will. The world is now safe, probably. All it cost us was the lives of two truly good people, and one baby the loss of his parents. Stephen and Leticia West never knew me, but I have known them for twenty years. They were good people. Wonderful people, whose only fault was bringing a child into the world with mental health problems they could never hope to fix. And for twenty years, I have begged for this day not to come.”

As I pondered the reality of knowing exactly how it felt to be a parent confronted with a child’s mental health problems I could never hope to fix, she pointed her gun at me.

“You did this,” she said. “You made this happen. You did it by cheating the rules of the universe to get yourself a girlfriend, and you did it by pushing back when the universe didn’t like that.” She bent down and trailed her fingers through the grass beside what was left of Leticia Kincaid-West. When she brought them back up, they were coated in red, and she held them out to me. “You did this, Daddy.”

There was nothing I could say. I wanted her to be wrong about me, but even in the face of her madness, I had no idea how to make myself believe that, let alone her. I could hear a siren.

“It’s time to go,” I said, holding out my hand to her, desperate to find a way to make any of this right, desperate to have my daughter back. “Please.”

“So go.”

I couldn’t leave her there. “Don’t do this to your mother,” I said. It was a guess. A good guess.

“You bastard.” She flashed out. Eight years from then, for her, a healed and remorseful Athena and I would make peace. I had already been there. This was the last time I would ever see my daughter.

I flashed out too.

went home. The house was still there. Carlton’s absence across history should have, in theory, wiped out everything I knew. Pathetic Future Me would never meet Helen, and I would never be brought here in his crazed attempt to win her. And yet, my home accepted my key.

I found Helen in the living room, staring at the fireplace. By all rights, she should not be here. Athena should have unhappened everything about our connection. But even through this, we were together. Somehow, the fact of our impossible baby superseded every other concern. God only knew what contortions to history had been necessary to preserve that without Carlton. The marks my actions had left on the universe were apparently permanent.

“Hello,” she said, her eyes still on the fire.

“Hey,” I said. At that, she did look at me. She looked different, though not in any physically describable way. She was every bit as beautiful as she had always been. But her eyes held some ineffable quality I had never seen there before.

“How long have we known each other?” I asked.

She thought for a moment. “Five years,” she said. “More, I think, for you. Eight? Ten? Do you even know?”

“No,” I admitted.

“We made a baby.”

I sat with her on the couch. “I know.”

“She’s changing me, you know,” said Helen. “I can feel it already.”

“Changing you?” I almost asked how she felt different, but at that moment, I really didn’t want to know. She told me anyway.

“Into something like you,” she said. She looked away for a moment, then turned back and stared into my eyes. “I think I am finally beginning to understand you. I… remember things. Things that never happened. Or that happened, and then didn’t happen.”

“Unhappened,” I prompted.

“Yes.” She nodded. “
That’s
it. Unhappened. I never really understood that idea before. Not like this, anyway.” She stopped there. Somehow Athena had given her the one thing I had spent so much of my life keeping from her: the memories of a traveler. I could only imagine how she felt. I had spent my life constantly adjusting to newly revised histories, but no matter how rapidly, I had only ever needed to contend with one change at a time. Helen was now confronted with dozens—perhaps countless—alternative pasts at once, all real, all remembered, and none valid.

“There was a man,” she said suddenly.

“A man?” I said. Silently, I begged her not to pursue that thought. Carlton no longer existed. Would never exist. Even after the scale of damage our war had wrought, my thoughts fell back to the petty fear that he would continue to compete with me for Helen’s attention, even from oblivion.

“Wasn’t there? A man named West. Westley. That’s not right. Something Something West. Let’s just say West. Wasn’t there?”

“Yes.” I offered nothing else, and for a moment it seemed she wouldn’t ask.

“He did things. Terrible things. And I loved him? Can that be right?”

I sighed. “Those are both true.” I wanted to tell her that she stopped loving him when he went mad. That her love for me overtook her love for him, and from that point she saw him only as a villain. But I couldn’t. I want to say I held back out of some noble desire to honor a vanquished foe. The reality is I didn’t want to make her remember anything else about him.

She frowned. “But he isn’t anymore?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“And that’s good. Because, you know, terrible things?”

I laughed. “Right.”

She scrutinized me. “I love you,” she said. It was more a question than a declaration.

“Yes,” I said.

“You did terrible things. Is that what I do? Do I love men who do terrible things?”

I thought back on the last few years of my life. I had indeed done terrible things. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever died directly at my hand, but I conspired with Athena to cause the deaths of thousands. Maybe more, directly or indirectly.

“I did necessary things,” I said.

She looked more deeply into my eyes, and frowned in confusion. “You think I mean the wars,” she said. “People died. Countries fell.” She shook her head. “Or something. Yes?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“I don’t mean that. You broke time. Didn’t you?”

This was my opportunity to lay blame at the feet of my older, wretched self. I did not take it.

“To be with you,” I admitted. “That doesn’t mean you love men who do terrible things.”

“No,” she agreed. “It means I inspire them to do terrible things.” Her words were angry, but her eyes softened then. “But I do love you.”

“I love you, too. Very much.”

“You do. And that makes me happy.” She tucked her arm through my elbow and rested her head on my shoulder. “Very happy.”

We sat there for a minute or two, which I spent hoping would never, ever end. I fought back the knowledge that Athena had grown up without a father. If nothing else, by now, I knew the past could be changed. We could unhappen that childhood. We could raise her as loving parents, and save her from the madness I had seen in her adult self. For that brief, silent moment, I allowed myself the fantasy of optimism.

“But you have to go now,” she whispered.

I thought back on all the times I had marched off to war with Athena, leaving Helen behind to worry, and then remember nothing. At that moment, this was what I heard in Helen’s voice, and it gave me great joy to reassure her.

“I don’t. I won’t ever have to go again.”

She sat up, away from me.

“Nigel, I’m asking you to leave.”

Even with every reason to foresee this, I still managed to let it surprise me. Perhaps it was the fact that this was the first purely coherent thing I heard Helen say in her fractured state of mind. Or perhaps I was simply a fool.

“Please don’t ask me to do that.”

She took my hand. “You don’t belong here. You never did. I always knew it. I knew, and it didn’t bother me, because I love you more than I ever believed I could love a person. But now I
feel
it. I
feel
it, Nigel, and it’s so wrong. Time is broken. The universe is slippery.”

“We can get past this,” I said. “Remember? Face it together?”

“Because that’s how we roll?” she asked. The familiar phrase appeared to shatter her moment of clarity, and I could see the chaos reasserting itself in her eyes. A tear formed and rolled down her cheek.

“Right.”

She shook her head, wiped away the tear.

“Not this time. I understand now. I remember things. Things I knew, and then didn’t know, and now I know them all at once. Some of them don’t make any sense. And some of them I can only remember in pieces. But I remember enough.” A note of bitterness crept into that last word. She stood then, and faced away from me. “How many times did the world end, Nigel? How many people died? How many times did they die? I remember plagues, and war machines, and nuclear bombs. I remember a cloud of ash blocking out the sun. So many people died, Nigel. And they died over and over and over again. And for what?”

I stood, and put my hand on her shoulder.

“They’re not dead anymore,” I said.

At that, she turned to face me, pulling away at the same time.

“But they are!” she shouted. “I know it! I remember it! I feel it! Just because they all got second chances, and third chances, and more, doesn’t mean I can forget. They died so that we could be together. How is that fair? How is that right? We did that to them. Both of us. We killed the world over and over to buy ourselves more time. I want to blame it on this man West, or a version of you that doesn’t even exist yet. But I can’t. We did this! You and I!”

“That’s all over,” I said. “We have a chance to start over now.”

“And have what kind of life, exactly?” she demanded. “I’ll always know how we got here! I will never be able to look at you without seeing the stain of what we did! What I caused!” As she said it, I could see that stain in her eyes as well. She looked away. “You can’t stay.”

I considered begging. I considered refusing. I considered pointing out that this was my house. I went with direct.

“I don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want you to go either,” she said. “But you have to.” Her lip began to tremble. “I look at you and all I can see is death. And I love you. And it’s killing me.” She put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she might actually vomit.

“I have nowhere to go.”

“You have everywhere and everywhen to go,” she told me. And she was right. The module in my arm would outlive me, and never fail. I had learned that much about it over the years.

I made one last attempt.

“Helen, we can overcome this.”

Still looking away from me, she shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said. “You threw the universe to the wolves just to have me, and I can’t…” She broke down there, and through her weeping, was barely able to say, “I can’t.”