Wednesday's Child (3 page)

“Okay, Dylan, do you want to tell me what has you so frazzled?”

I smiled at the way she’d phrased that.  Time was, we’d hidden problems from each other in the misguided belief that we were sparing each other grief.  Of course, the opposite was true, and all we accomplished was sending mixed signals.  Eventually, thanks to Ilene’s negotiating skills, we reached an agreement.  When either of us had a problem serious enough to notice and ask about, it was no longer permissible to say, “Nothing.”  “Yes, something’s bothering me, but it has nothing to do with you or us,” and “I’m not ready talk about it yet,” were allowed.  So was, “I don’t want to discuss it with you,” though that was the answer of last resort.

Instead of repeating something confrontational, like, “What’s wrong, Dylan?” she’d simply acknowledged the obvious and offered me an opportunity to discuss it if I wanted to.  I chose door number two.

“What I told you on the phone this morning was true.  I woke up feeling weird and I missed you.  I’ve been counting the hours till you got home.  But I need you to bear with me until I figure some things out.  This isn’t about you or us.  I’m not having an affair or anything like that.  I just need you to wait till I get my head straight.”

She took my hand and stared hard at me.  “Just so you know, you’re scaring me.  You can’t tell me something like that and leave me hanging indefinitely.”

“I won’t, I promise.  I just need a little time and I’ll explain everything.  I have to. I can’t deal with this without you.”

She seemed to want to say something else, but didn’t.  Instead, she raised my hand to her lips and held it there.  I’d been bouncing up and down like a yo-yo all day.  For the first time since I awakened, I felt relaxed.

5.

Ilene and I went home and spent a quiet evening.  Quiet because we were bone tired and because words weren’t needed to communicate what we felt.  Invoking our problem-sharing agreement, as we had in the restaurant, always reaffirmed our trust in each other.  The resulting intimacy was special, sometimes sexual, sometimes expressed as intense joy, and sometimes, like Thursday evening, it was sweetly physical, two people holding and nurturing each other.  

It was what I needed.  It must have been what Ilene needed too, because nothing disrupted our gentle glide into sleep.  I had no idea what to expect when I awoke Friday morning, except that both Thursday and my lost Wednesday would be behind me.  I’d call Doctor Feldstein and he’d help me make sense out this.

I awoke to find Ilene climbing out of bed, complaining, as usual, about not being able to sleep longer, and a minute later I heard her in the shower.  It didn’t get any more normal than that, and a good long sleep had so refreshed me physically and emotionally that I downgraded the threat level of yesterday’s problems from horrifying to interesting.

I knew I was feeling better because the sight of Ilene’s lithe, naked form emerging from the shower made me want to drag her back to bed, but the vibes she emitted trashed any hope of that. 

“I’m really rushed,” she said, sounding even more frenzied than on most mornings.

“I thought today would be relaxing for you.”

“Why would you think that?  Everyone’s uptight about the negotiations in Chicago.”

“Didn’t you say everyone was pleased with the outcome?”

“What are you talking about?”  That last was tossed back over her shoulder as she hurried out of the room, clearly in no mood to slow down and talk.

I got in the shower, letting the hot water loosen my neck and back, but Ilene’s words kept echoing.  Some other aspect of the negotiation might have her stressed, but there’d been no indication of it last night.  Except for worrying about what was troubling me, she’d been happy and tranquil. 

I hurriedly dried off, shaved, and dressed, my mind desperately trying to suppress a very unpleasant thought.  Walking downstairs, I heard Ilene in the kitchen and smelled her coffee brewing.  Those signs of ordinariness should have reinforced my earlier good feeling, but they only increased my agitation.

Ilene had papers spread across the kitchen table.  She was studying one stack and writing notes in the margins.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t have interrupted her, but… “What’re you so busy with, Hon?”

She threw me a quick, slightly annoyed glance.  “Are you serious?”

I glanced at the sheets she was reviewing.  They were the notes she’d prepared on Tuesday for her trip.  I sat down and forced her to look at me.  “I’m confused.  I thought you were done with this stuff.”

“Done?  Now I’m confused.  Didn’t I tell you last night how hard everyone’s working getting ready for Chicago?” 

The only reason she didn’t see me blanch was that she was already concentrating on her notes again.  I went into the family room and dropped onto the couch, my hand shaking so badly I could barely work the TV remote.  Keeping the sound off, I tuned to the same morning news show as yesterday, holding my breath until the crawl line scrolled to the date and time:
6:11 a.m. Wednesday July 16
. 

“Oh, fuck!” I said, louder than I’d intended, struggling not to panic.

“What’s wrong?” Ilene called from the kitchen.

Trying to keep the terror out of my voice, I said, “Sorry, just something on the news.”  If I thought I’d had a headache yesterday…I couldn’t think with the constant hammering between my ears.  My heart pounded so hard I wondered that Ilene couldn’t hear it in the next room. 
Deep breaths, slow and easy.  That’s it, breathe.  Again.
  I started to relax.  Damn, had all that stuff yesterday been just an incredibly vivid dream or were my delusions worse than I’d imagined?  I’d experienced crises before, but never anything like this.

I rarely remembered dreams, and when I did, it was usually in snatches that made little sense and quickly faded.  But this one!  I recalled every word, every action, a detailed memory of everything that occurred during a long, agonizing day.  Could I have dreamed an entire sixteen-hour nightmare while sleeping only seven hours? 

If today was Wednesday, I must have, but I knew what dreams felt like.  This was different.  It was more like the time at Columbia when my roommate had gotten hold of some LSD.  We’d all tried it on a lark, and I’d had what everyone agreed was a bad trip.  Was that what had happened?  Had something I ate Tuesday night been spiked?  On the other hand, if that was true, how did I know I wasn’t hallucinating right now?  Waking up today and finding out it was Wednesday was no less fantastic than waking up yesterday on Thursday.  My head was spinning, my thoughts caught in a loop.

I almost told Ilene right then, but she already had her hands full.  The hell with our agreement, I had to work this out myself first.  I considered skipping Doctor Feldstein and driving to an emergency room or calling the police or the health department.  But what would I tell them?  That even though it was Wednesday morning, I’d already lived Thursday? I’d likely wind up in a psychiatric ward.  I wasn’t prepared to deal with that.

Gradually, my heart rate slowed and the veins in my head stopping bulging. The TV weather guy was talking about record rainfalls overnight.  Right, they’d predicted something like that on Tuesday, and Jim had mentioned heavy rains contributing to Gayle’s injury.  Today’s forecast was the same.  There’d already been flooding.  Transit disruptions and all manner of water-related problems were expected.  People were being urged to work at home if possible.  Any day but today I probably would have, but I needed to get to my office, and so did Ilene.  I didn’t recall anything urgent scheduled for Wednesday morning, but Tuesday afternoon seemed like so long ago, I didn’t trust my memory. I was about to leave when I remembered the CyTech printout I’d made on Thursday.  It was still in my pocket.

I arrived at work to find a skeleton crew.  Apparently, a lot of people had heeded the admonition to work at home.  My office computer’s calendar said I was supposed to attend a walk-through by Gayle’s people on the Romanelli project, a routine event with the deadline two weeks away.  There was no mention of spec changes, but it was only Wednesday morning.

I found myself treading cautiously, like walking on black ice, staying alert, taking nothing for granted, and focusing on details, afraid I might miss some insignificant thing that could provide a clue to what was going on.  I stood in the doorway to my office studying my desk, the work table beside it, the fed-ex carton that had become my
de facto
inbox.  The report I’d been marking up Tuesday afternoon was on my desk where I’d left it.  I gathered the unstapled sheets and laid them on the top shelf of the bookcase, recalling, as I did so, that the report hadn’t been on my desk Thursday morning, but I’d had too much on my mind to notice or care, yesterday.  Or was it tomorrow?  I’d better refer to each day by its name.  Yesterday and tomorrow were too confusing.

Moving from item to item, I verified that everything jibed with my memory of Tuesday.  Then, I brewed some coffee and sat down to think.  Was I about to experience all the Wednesday events I’d gleaned on Thursday, or had they all been dreamed or hallucinated?  Did that include the call from William? 

If Thursday hadn’t been a dream, I had foreknowledge of things that hadn’t happened yet.  A hundred impulses ran through my mind, all of which felt more urgent than calling Doctor Feldstein.  Was Gayle still going to break her ankle?  Maybe I could prevent her from being injured.  She’d fallen in the early afternoon – what if I stayed by her side every minute starting at 12:01?  Jim had said she slipped on the stairs in the lobby.  I could make sure she never went near them. 

I thought about all the time travel stories I’d read and the classic conundrum about whether it was possible to go back in time and change events that had already occurred.  If that wasn’t enough, I didn’t even know whether my memories of what was going to happen today were real.  What would people think if I ran around trying to prevent things from happening that were never going to in the first place?  I was starting to feel overwhelmed when my phone rang. 

“I knew you’d be there,” Gayle said.  “I hope you didn’t go in just for our meeting.”

“No, I had a couple of other things to do.  Did you decide to stay home?”

“The streets are flooded near the twins’ soccer camp.  Storm drain’s backed up.  I asked Rod if he could keep an eye on them since he was working at home anyway.  You can guess how far that got me.  ‘How do you expect me to get anything done with those two bothering me all day?’  I just gave up, it wasn’t worth it.” 

I told you he was a jerk.

Suppressing the thoughts swirling through my head, I said, “Don’t worry about our meeting, we’ll do it tomorrow.  You always complain that you don’t spend enough time with your kids.  Stay home and forget the office.”  That was easier said than done for Gayle.  She didn’t shift out of work mode easily, and she hated letting things slip.

“I guess you’re right.  I’ll just play mommy today.”

We said good-bye and I sat back, relieved that I didn’t have to worry about her falling on the stairs.  Could it really be that easy or had the version of Wednesday I “remembered” been a dream, after all?  One thing was sure: this Wednesday already wasn’t the same as the one I’d skipped.  Perhaps that should have convinced me Thursday had been nothing but a vivid dream, but I still felt like my life was spiraling out of control.  I wandered over to Jim’s office.  He wasn’t in, but his intern greeted me. 

“Jim’ll try to get in by eleven.  When I told him you were here he said to ask you to handle things this morning and to wait for him to have lunch.”

“Thanks, Harald.  Is there anything that needs immediate attention?”

“There’s a message from Mr. Romanelli in Jim’s voice mail, asking him to call when he arrives.  Doesn’t sound urgent.  Nothing else, really.”

“I’ll be in my office if you need me,” I said. 

I assumed Romanelli had called to give Jim a heads-up about the changes he spelled out in the package he’d sent, which raised even more questions.  I’d gotten the impression on Thursday that Jim had been surprised by the package, so either Romanelli hadn’t called on my lost Wednesday, or Jim hadn’t listened to his voice mail. 

And another thing.  Jim must not have invited me to lunch on my missing Wednesday.  If he had, it probably would have occurred to him to call me when Romanelli’s package arrived.

6.

I considered calling Romanelli myself, but part of my effectiveness was staying in the background, and Jim would be in later.  Besides, it was 9:40, and there was something I needed to do.  I logged on to my brokerage account and loaded a real-time streaming chart for CyTech.  As if to assure me that it had no part in the craziness I was experiencing, the streamer brightly displayed,
Wednesday, July 16
at the top of the screen. 

It was 9:47.  The graph on the screen was identical to the first seventeen minutes of the chart I’d printed on Thursday.  Nothing short of a nuclear explosion, not even the centipedes crawling up my back could have dragged me away from that screen. I stared, dumbfounded, as the real-time chart followed precisely the same path as the printed one, just like when I used to walk in my brother’s footsteps in fresh-fallen snow.

My disbelief changed to amazement when the spike in volume occurred at 10:13, exactly as my chart predicted.  I’d marked 10:46 as the moment I’d have bought the stock.  If the stock moved as it had on the Wednesday I skipped, I had a half hour to decide.  I even considered the ethics of buying CyTech this way.  Yesterday, I’d complained that the universe had cheated me. Buying it this morning, would only be righting yesterday’s wrong, wouldn’t it?

Of course, this might all be a coincidence.  If the universe were as perverse as I sometimes thought it was, the stock might plummet the moment I bought it.

At 10:46, I placed an order for five hundred shares at twenty-one dollars a share, two dollars less than my target price, and just as I remembered from Thursday, the award of a billion dollar contract to CyTech came over the wire fifty-eight minutes later.  By the end of the day, I was up $1,995.  It could have been more, but I didn’t sell when the stock peaked at 1:52 as my chart said it would.  That would have felt like cheating, and I wasn’t prepared to piss off whoever was manipulating my life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Jim popped in just before noon, his wet hair and black raincoat making him look like a drowned walrus.  I hid the printed chart in my desk; the live one was still on my screen. 

When Jim saw it, he grinned. “Nice goin’ on CyTech.  You really nailed that one.” 

The surge of
deja vu
that shot through me felt like an icicle.  Those were the exact words he’d used Thursday afternoon.  Yesterday.  I mean, tomorrow.  Not trusting myself to respond I just grinned.

“Ready for lunch?” he asked. 

Rather than mention how odd it was to be going to lunch right after he arrived, I grabbed my umbrella and followed him out, also deciding not to mention Romanelli’s message.  I wanted to see how things played out without my interference, though on any other day, I’d have made sure Jim heard it. 

The sight of a familiar-looking red Z-car double-parked in front of our building, as we exited the elevator, hit me like cold water being splashed in my face, or was that the driving rain?  A spike of rage brought me up short as a young man decked in cargo fatigues, several pounds of jewelry, and gel-spiked hair got in and spun his wheels peeling out into traffic.  I had just enough time to note the vanity license plate, “RED ZEEE.” 

“Did you see that?” I said to Jim.

“Just some crazy kid.  Don’t let it upset you.”

“Shit, Jim, that’s…”  I was going to have to be more careful.

“What, Dylan?’

“Nothing.  Kids like that just infuriate me.”

Jim let it drop and lunch was uneventful after that, except that the rain finally stopped. Water had pooled everywhere.  Traffic and transit were a mess.  By the time we got back to the office I’d forgotten about the phone message from Romanelli.

Early afternoon was as routine as lunch had been, so I let the thoughts I’d been avoiding surface.  I didn’t believe Thursday had been a hallucination. I didn’t think my head was about to burst, either, but I knew I might be one misstep from a meltdown. 

Part of being a life-long agnostic, someone for whom blind faith was a non-starter, was trusting the evidence of my senses, which in this case, was too compelling to ignore.  CyTech aside, every detail of my out-of-sequence Thursday remained crystal clear well into Wednesday afternoon.  It couldn’t have been a dream. 

I’d been gunnysacking questions for two days; now, I needed answers.  I’d wondered, on Thursday, why no one mentioned that I’d been missing on Wednesday.  That mystery, at least, was solved.  Hardly any of them had been here to notice.

The real puzzle was why some things were occurring exactly as they had on the Wednesday I’d skipped, but not others.  Could my absence or presence be what made the difference?  If Gayle had called me on the Wednesday morning I’d skipped, not reaching me might have caused her to make a different decision about going to work.  In a way, her accident might have been a consequence of my living these two days out of order.

Would Jim have gotten in earlier if Harald told him I wasn’t here on the Wednesday I missed? Would that have affected what I experienced on Thursday?  Maybe not. He might have spent the morning playing solitaire or doing something equally insignificant.

A light went on.  Significance must be the key.  My existence on Wednesday was insignificant with respect to the stock market, and not being able to reach me hadn’t significantly affected Ilene’s plans.  But answering my phone when Gayle called had made a very significant difference to her.  I felt like I was on to something, but it was too complex to penetrate at that moment.  I decided to let it sit for a while.

Off in my own space again, I glanced at the time: 1:55.  CyTech had peaked, and I was bored and restless, wishing something would happen, anything to snap me out of the doldrums.  I should have been more careful about what I wished for. 

I heard someone yell, “Shit!” from the direction of Jim’s office.  It sounded like Harald.  Then a door banged against its stop. A second later, Jim shouted, “Come with me, hurry,” and he was off for the elevators, with me close on his heels.  Jim couldn’t run and talk at the same time.  Actually, he could barely run even when he wasn’t trying to talk.

In the elevator, I said, “What?” just before we heard a faint sound like a siren dopplering to a stop.  It must have been right outside the building, and the sound must have traveled up the elevator shaft.  For the tenth time in less than two days my heart raced wildly.  I knew even before Jim spoke.

“It’s Gayle.  She’s injured, downstairs.  Security called for an ambulance.”

It wasn’t unreasonable for me to look upset, though I’m sure I looked greener than I should have. Jim didn’t notice. 

As I learned later, the storm drains had cleared when the rain let up, the twins’ camp re-opened, and Gayle decided a half day of mommying was enough.  She’d hurried into town and typically, was in too much of a hurry to queue up behind the people who were climbing the marble stairs on the no-slip runners that had been laid.  If only she’d called to let me know she was coming.  If only the gods hadn’t chosen my life to toy with.

Gayle was in terrible pain and clearly in shock.  It seemed like an hour passed before the ambulance had her on her way to surgery. For most of that time I knelt by her side, and she gripped my hand.  She had the helpless puppy look that I remembered from Thursday, but this time her eyes were pleading with me to make her leg stop hurting.

Later, I sat at my desk, bewildered and more than a little frightened.  I tested what had just happened against my budding theory,
The Persistence of Significant Events
.  My presence on the scene changed things, but not enough to prevent Gayle from being injured.  Thus, her injury must be significant enough that more than my mere presence was required to change it.

There were other things, too.  Thursday morning, under the influence of painkillers, she’d behaved with very un-Gayle-like seductiveness.  Her reaction to me this afternoon was completely different but equally intense.  What hadn’t changed was the depth of trust she placed in me, so it was the trust that mattered, not the seductiveness. 

If significant events tended to persist, my own persistence might be the key to changing them.  What if I had decided that my only priority, today, was preventing Gayle from coming to work?  Would she have injured herself some other way?  What if I had gone to her house and stayed with her all day, taking her arm whenever she walked up or down a step?

If I was right, every significant event I observed on my Thursday would occur again tomorrow.  Roger would still be struck by the red sports car, and the surgeon would still be injured, unless…could I prevent them from happening?  I didn’t know either the doctor’s name or that of his assailant.  I could hardly call hospital security and report that an unnamed surgeon was going to be attacked in the cafeteria about 12:30 tomorrow by an unidentified, disgruntled woman.  Maybe I could get to the cafeteria a little earlier tomorrow and keep an eye peeled, though I didn’t relish the idea of tackling an angry, murderous woman by myself.  On the other hand, maybe I could intercept Roger before RED ZEEE showed up. 

The day grew late, and as on Thursday, the ebb and flow of adrenaline left me exhausted.  I leaned back and closed my eyes.  Drifting, half asleep, I became ensnared in one of my favorite nightmares, the one in which I lose Ilene or one of the kids in a crowded airport or railroad station.  I run frantically from place to place, searching, catching sight of them briefly but they disappear into the crowd before I can reach them.  And all the time my panic and hopelessness grow, until I jerk myself awake in a cold sweat.

Again, my disorientation was interrupted by the phone.  It was Ilene calling to say she was catching an earlier flight to Chicago and I wouldn’t have to take her to the airport when I got home.  I restrained myself from saying, “I know.”  I said goodbye to her, remembering her words on our voicemail and again on the phone Thursday morning.  Neither would happen now.

The analytical side of my brain assigned Ilene’s call to the growing pile of events relative to which my presence was insignificant.  Likewise, the arrival, an hour later, of an express package addressed to Gayle from Romanelli.

Of course, it was different this time.  Because I existed in this version of Wednesday, Jim’s first reaction when the package arrived was to yell for me.  So instead of waiting to read Romanelli’s letter during Thursday morning’s tempest, I took it home Wednesday night, and wrote a proposal for Gayle that was virtually identical to the one I’d written Thursday morning.  Too bad I hadn’t kept a copy of that one.

Had any of that made a significant difference?  No.  I’d still deliver the proposal to Gayle in the morning.  Jim would be less stressed, and Gayle would be spared an hour of thinking I wasn’t there for her when she woke up, but the outcome would be the same.

I climbed into bed Wednesday night in an eye-of-the-hurricane sort of calm, even with Ilene gone.  I didn’t understand what was happening, and terror still lurked in the wings, but the universe didn’t feel completely out of control, and I no longer felt like a helpless victim of circumstance.  I was convinced that I could make Thursday turn out better than the one I’d already lived through.

I don’t remember another thing until I awoke with the sun in my eyes.

***

Actually, that’s not quite true.  Even now, I can recall bits of my dream: it was morning and I didn’t know what day it was.  Since dreams have their own rules, there was no way for me to be sure, and I had to figure it out.  That made me angry, because I’d gone to sleep with such high hopes for making the world better on my second chance at Thursday.  The problem was that I wasn’t sure it
was
Thursday – there were two other possibilities, and my dream kept cycling among all three. 

Projecting from two data points, never a very smart idea, might lead one to conclude that I was now living my days backwards, which would mean today was Tuesday.  Another possibility was that I was trapped in a kind of Groundhog Day reality, in which I had to relive Wednesday until I got it right.  In my dream, I shuddered whenever that came up.  Round and round I went, as often happens in nightmares, with nothing resolved until either the sun or the worsening chaos in my head woke me. But this time, I knew I’d been dreaming.  I knew because the dream felt like a dream was supposed to, and I only vaguely recalled the details. 

I took two lessons from the dream: don’t take anything for granted and don’t waste time thinking about it, but my hopes for a better Thursday were quickly dashed by the sight of Ilene sleeping beside me.  I’d just ruled out taking anything for granted, but it seemed safe to assume that if she was in bed beside me, either she hadn’t left for Chicago yet or she was already back. 

Resisting the temptation to wake her and ask what day it was, I flipped on the TV with the sound muted. Whoever was narrating my life must have howled with laughter when I realized how wrong my three-pronged dream analysis had been.  I’d forgotten that we live in a universe that loves conservation laws: Conservation of Energy, Conservation of Angular Momentum…you know.  There was apparently also a Conservation of Weekdays law that prevented me from living the same day twice.  Today was incontrovertibly Friday, July eighteenth, a day late to help either Roger or the doctor, and to see how Gayle reacted when I brought her the proposal I’d written on Wednesday.