Yesterday (25 page)

“Yeah, a few minutes and another fucking forty-five dollars that we can’t spare.” Garren’s eyes shoot over to Lou. “Sorry, no offense to you.”

“None taken.” Lou allows his head to roll back on his shoulders as he stares at the wall behind Garren and then shifts his focus to the collection of beat-up bags resting on his hardwood floor. Lou’s eyes flicker and he sighs again, this time resignedly. “Look, if you do want to do it I’ll give you a few minutes for free but it really should be what
you
want to do and not what your friend here wants.”

Garren glares at me like he regrets ever walking through Lou’s front door and logically I know Garren’s the same person I used to stare at in the hallways, the one who rescued me that day at his sister’s party when I couldn’t tolerate another minute with my mom, but I can’t push the two separate versions of him together in my head and make them one.

“If it’s really for free …,” Garren qualifies at last.

Lou nods. “Just this once. And I don’t have long. Let’s go.”

I take Garren’s place in the waiting room, sitting among our things. My brain’s overheating with sixteen years’ worth of memories. Real ones. My father isn’t dead—he hasn’t even been born yet. He’s the same man from my false memories but he’s alive back in 2063 … unless they couldn’t find a cure for the plague in time. It’s possible that the U.N.A. could’ve fallen by now if the scientists couldn’t stop the Toxo.

Elennede. My father. All the teachers and students from school. Are they dead and gone like Latham?

I used to think the emptiness inside me was for my father but now I know it was for my brother and I know, too, that I was wrong to hate my mother. The stress that came with my father’s position warped her. The last five weeks have shown me what she would’ve been like under different circumstances. Kinder and warmer with only a hint of the anger she was capable of appearing on the surface.

Latham saw her more objectively than I did; she wasn’t entirely blameless but everything wasn’t solely her fault. My father was wrong too but it’s not his fault that Latham’s dead either. The entire world was wrong and I’m glad my mom doesn’t remember the way we used to fight back then and that she doesn’t have to remember losing Latham.

By now, maybe Henry’s convinced her that I have a drug problem and have run away to live on the street. I’m sorry that my absence will cause her pain but it’s better this way. She’ll have a chance for happiness in 1985.

Seventy-eight years
. How did they do it? Countless things people couldn’t imagine in 1985 are possible seventy-eight years from now, but time travel isn’t one of them.

I’m so lost in thought that I have no idea how long Garren’s been gone when he trudges towards me and snaps up two of the bags from my feet without a word. He’s out the front door in a flash, leaving me to run after him.

Outside I spread my fingers gently across his back as we walk on together. He must be devastated about Kinnari.
From so many years away I still feel that I failed her and my brother. I should’ve seen the threat before it was too late. The little ability that I have is practically useless.

Garren whips around to look at me. “I don’t know what you expected but that was a complete waste of time. He didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know.”

“
What?”
How can that be?

Garren thumps his carry-on bag. “He gave me your tape. You want to tell me what’s on it?”

It’s begun to snow and it makes it difficult to look at him head-on; I can’t stop blinking for long enough to focus.

“You said I needed to see it,” he reminds me. “We
stayed
for this.”

He needs to know, of course, and I stare at the flecks of white gathering on the sidewalk, wishing there was someone else to tell him. There’s no good or easy way to explain any of the things I remember and I begin blurting them out in between gulps of air. Garren doesn’t stop walking and doesn’t look at me. He waits until I’ve come to the very end of the story and then he draws one of his hands across his forehead and says, “You need
help
.” He adjusts the carry-on bag so that the strap sits higher on his shoulder. “I know everything’s fucked up and there’s this crazy thing with our dads and Henry. I don’t know what that’s about—what the story is behind it—but it’s sure as hell not
this
.” He points at the sidewalk under our feet.

“You just let this guy trick you into some kind of false memory,” he continues, “but it’s … it’s off-the-charts crazy,
what you’re saying. You need to snap out of it and get real in a hurry.”

I knew that’s exactly what he’d think but I can’t let him brush our pasts aside. They’re who we are. “It sounds crazy but it’s the truth. This is why I recognized you—I knew you back there. My brother and your sister were—”

“I don’t have a
sister
, Freya.
You’re
the one with the sister.” He cocks his head, his face flushed with frustration. “If this psycho explanation of yours makes any sense how come it doesn’t explain who
she
really is?”

It does. I just didn’t mention it because everything else was more important. Olivia is President Ortega’s daughter. Her father was killed in a terrorist explosion in Calgary six years ago, when he was secretary of state. I’ve only met Caroline Ortega twice in my life, both times before she was elected president, but she must have needed someone to send Olivia back with, someone who would look after her. I explain this to Garren knowing it’ll sound as mental as everything else.

“You’re completely delusional,” he says, his right sneaker losing traction slightly on the icy sidewalk. Regaining his balance, he slams his left foot down like he means to kill something underneath it. “We can’t keep going like this. With you thinking you’re someone from the future. I don’t want to hear that from you again, understand? If you have to say it, I can’t be around you.”

“I can’t stop saying it, Garren. It’s the truth. I’m not going to pretend for you. The past doesn’t disappear just because you don’t want to hear it. Think about it—this is why so many
of the facts surrounding our lives are duplicates. The scientists put them into our heads. They must have been in too big a rush with the evacuation to come up with entirely distinct cover stories.” I brush stray snowflakes from my eyes. “Henry’s not our grandfather—he’s no one, a stranger wrapped up in the cover story. You were sent back because of the Toxo outbreak, same as I was. I don’t know why things didn’t come back to you the way they came back to me. Maybe we need to try again with someone else when we get to Vancouver. You have everything locked away in there, just like I did. There has to be something that will make you remember.”

Once he sees it, the truth will be undeniable. His heart will know it at a glance. How could it not? It’s the difference between breathable sky that stretches out in all directions and a ceiling coated in blue paint from a hardware store.

“Shit.” Garren stops in his tracks. He hurls one of the bags to the ground, shrugs the other off his shoulders and stares at me, breathing hard. “This is never going to stop, is it?” He folds his hands on top of his head, his thumbs sifting through his dark hair. “I can’t do this, Freya. You’re going to make me crazy. Is that what you want? The two of us losing our fucking minds on the West Coast? It sounds like a good way to get caught to me. If this is the way you want to do it … I’m sorry, I just
can’t
.” Garren lowers his hands, his left at his side and his right digging into his pocket. He pulls a fifty-dollar bill out and hands it to me.

“No,” I protest, knowing exactly what the gesture means. “Don’t do that. We’re in this together.”

“I thought we were.” He bends to loop his fingers around his bags. “And I hope you’re going to be okay, I really do. But I need to give myself half a chance and you’re … you’re out there in your own universe.”

He’s the one in denial, but saying that won’t change anything. I can’t believe we’re right back where we were last Wednesday when I showed up on his doorstep.

I slip his fifty into my pocket as he turns and walks away. I don’t know how I’ll do this on my own but I have no choice. After all I’ve been through—all I’ve already lost—I can’t fall to pieces now. I have to keep running. Alone, if that’s the way it has to be. I pull my bag close to me and head in the opposite direction.

For about thirty feet, I feel brave and resolved, like every last one of those Winston Churchill quotes they used to drill into our brains on the Dailies. I don’t let myself turn back to watch Garren recede into the distance. At first my sadness for Latham is so overpowering that I can barely feel Garren’s absence.

It hits soon enough.

I’m seventy-eight years from home with no one to help me. My parents must’ve thought they were saving me. I wasn’t supposed to remember. Something went wrong.

I need more answers. I need to know what happened to the U.N.A. If time travel is possible after all, can the future be saved by returning to a moment before the outbreak? Is there ongoing communication between the past and the future? Can we leap forward the same way we came back?
My head starts to ache like it used to as questions pummel my mind.

Doctor Byrne was adamant that Garren and I had to get far away and never contact our families. He wouldn’t offer us any answers last time and the odds of him talking now aren’t any better. I’d get caught if I went near him or Henry anyway. There’s just one other person who might know something and even if I’m right about her she probably won’t help. If Garren were with me I wouldn’t risk contacting her, but now I don’t have much to lose and I trudge to the nearest phone booth and dial my mother’s work number. When the receptionist answers I ask to speak to Nancy Bolton.

“Good afternoon,” Nancy declares seconds later. “How can I help you?”

“Nancy, it’s Freya.” The pay phone’s cold and grimy in my hand. I try not to imagine who was holding it last and what they did to it. “Don’t get my mother. I don’t have much time. I need to know if you can help me.”

“Help you how?” she asks, sounding bewildered. “Where are you? Are you all right? The police have been looking everywhere for you.”

“I don’t have time for this, Nancy. I’ve
remembered
, okay? And I know you’re not an old friend of my mother’s—that you didn’t meet her until just over a month ago, which means you must be working for
them
. So if you actually care whether I live or die and you know anything that can help me, I need you to tell me now.”

“I do care.” Nancy lowers her voice. “But there’s nothing I can do for you, honey. Nothing I can tell you. I’m sorry.”

My nose is running. I feel so helpless that it makes me want to destroy something. How can she call me honey and still refuse me? Rage burns through my veins.

“Unless … I do have some money and I’m sure that’s something you need too,” Nancy says.

I find my voice. “You know this isn’t what my father would want. Them killing me. You know who he is, don’t you?”

“I do,” she says softly.

“Then you know he must’ve sent me back to try to save me and there’s …”
No one for me to turn to
. I’m like any other street kid.

“This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be,” Nancy interrupts. “I really am sorry. Tell me when and where I can meet you so I can help you out in the only way I can. Are you still in the Toronto area?”

“Why should I trust you?” I ask.

“You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust anyone now.”

Except that I need more money to get to Vancouver. I don’t even know where I’ll sleep tonight. Garren’s gone and I have no plan B of my own. My head’s throbbing so hard that I want to throw up. I’m exhausted too. I could curl up in this phone booth right now, pass out cold and not wake up until morning.

“I’m not … feeling well,” I stammer. “I have to go.” Back
to the house on Cranbrooke Avenue, just for a while. Just until I can sleep off this feeling.

“
Freya.”
Nancy’s tone is loud and piercing. “You give me a time and a place and I swear I’ll be there. Alone.”

“The Eaton Centre. Tomorrow at noon.” The Yonge Street shopping center’s the first public place that pops into my mind. If I’m going to meet her anywhere it should be somewhere crawling with people. And if I decide against meeting her it’ll be the easiest thing in the world not to show up.

“Where in the Eaton Centre?” Nancy asks. “It’s a big place.”

I’ve never actually been there. My face is drenched with sweat and a wave of nausea grips me and shakes me. I have to get back to the house. Now.

“Is … is there a bookstore?” I sputter.

Nancy says there is and she’ll meet me there. I hang up and hobble into the street, feverish and weak. The sickness must have something to do with remembering. Maybe the Bio-net (is it still operational inside me?) can’t handle the shock to the system. I’ve never heard of anyone recovering their memory after a wipe, never knew it was possible.

I’m shivering and I’ve lost track of where I am. I need a bus or streetcar stop. Better still, a subway station. A black woman bundled up against the cold so that only her eyes and nose show between her hat and scarf scrutinizes me as I pass her on the sidewalk.

I spin to trail after her. “Excuse me. Where’s the subway from here? A bus. Anything. I’m lost.”

“You’re
high
,” the woman scolds. “Higher than a kite. No wonder you’re lost, honey.”

There’s that word again.
Honey
. Sick as I am, I laugh bitterly.

“If you keep messing with the drugs you’ll throw your life away,” she continues. “You’re young. You get yourself right back on that straight and narrow path and stay there.”

I nod soberly, like she’s reaching me, whatever it’ll take for her to give me directions because I don’t know how much longer I can stay on my feet.

“I know you know what I’m talking about,” she says. “You can laugh about it if you want to but inside you know.” The woman takes a tentative step closer to me and points down the road. “The next left at the lights will get you to the subway. About five minutes down the street. You can’t miss it.”