Yesterday (27 page)

I untangle myself from him just enough to tug Mr. Resnik’s T-shirt over my head and let it fall to the floor. Garren sweeps his fingertips across my naked shoulders, tracing my form. Then his fingers are featherlight on my back and my waist, his eyes clinging to my breasts. I reach out to help him slip off his T-shirt. He’s so perfect in the moonlight that it seems almost unfair and I touch his chest and kiss him again, my hands roaming everywhere, even the places I can’t see.

I feel for the button on his jeans and snap it open. Garren yanks off his pants and cups his hands around my breasts. The way he looks at me makes me beam brighter. He runs his perfect fingers over me until I can’t stand it anymore and wriggle out of the last thing I’m wearing. Garren pauses to take in the sight of me. Our mouths merge, his lips as hot as mine now. The bed creaks under our shifting weight.

We’re quiet and still, Garren lying between my legs, staring into my eyes like he’s waiting for something. I’m waiting too. My hands skim restlessly down his back and begin to slide off his underwear. Garren finishes the job of getting rid of them and I press one of my palms into his chest, easing him back so I can look at him the way he looked at me.

He’s a minor miracle himself—the stuff that artists dream of—and I feel my throat sting and swell, too small to contain my feelings. I lunge for him on the bed, drowning him with kisses as I sit astride him. He’s hard under me, would barely have to push up at all to disappear inside me. I could do it myself if I wanted to. Swallow him up the way the house swallowed me earlier.

I could … I could.

But then I stop to look at him and he’s giving me that steadfastly quiet look again as if to ask me the question neither of us will voice out loud. I hold his gaze but somehow I can’t say yes or no. I’m mute.

We freeze on the bed like a paused movie scene. Garren’s the first to move again. He spreads his palm gently across my
pelvis and then drops his eyes, breaking the current between us. Then he’s pulling away from me, forcing me to move too. I climb off him and sit back on the bed. Garren squeezes my thigh, like a gesture of reassurance. Then he’s sweeping his clothes into his arms and padding out of the room naked. With the door ajar, I hear him on the stairs.

I reach for my T-shirt and huddle under the covers, working my way through everything that just happened. Garren didn’t leave town after all. He’s remembered our past and we just got closer than we’ve ever been but I don’t know what it means. My mouth, and most of the rest of my body, is still tingling.

It takes me a while to cool down and get my head together. The clock radio reads 3:07 by the time I follow Garren downstairs. He’s sitting in the candlelight listening to the radio with a mug of coffee in front of him. His feet are resting on the chair across from him and when I step into the kitchen in my T-shirt, Garren’s eyes flicker. He looks sad again, confused.

I lean against the counter and ask, “Are you okay?”

“Not really.” He peers down at his coffee. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” I don’t want to start regretting what happened upstairs and I’m beginning to wish that I’d pulled on a pair of Paula’s jeans before coming to check on him.

“Sorry that I didn’t believe you,” he says, raising his head to look at me. “Sorry that I left you there outside Lou’s house. You’ve been right about everything all along.”

I wish he’d never left me too but it’s difficult for me to blame him. The truth sounds like science fiction. Not many people would believe it.

“Where did you go after you left?” I ask. “I thought you would’ve been far away from here by now.”

Garren’s frown is weighted with guilt. “There was no one else I could go to so I went to Janette and asked if she had any money she could give me. I told her that the cops were after me but that I couldn’t tell her why. She was upset that I was leaving town and convinced me to spend the night. She snuck me in after her parents went to bed.” He curves his hand around his coffee mug. “I was thinking about all the things you’d said when I fell asleep. I started to dream about them but it was so detailed. Too detailed to be a dream and when I woke up I kept on remembering. Everything. My whole life until the time the SecRos took me and my mom.”

“Did they explain what was happening? What they were going to do to you?” Knowing how we were sent back won’t change our circumstances but I can’t stop wondering about it. I’m a person out of sync with the world around me. Somehow I need to make sense of it.

“It happened fast,” he says. “I think my mom may have known more but she just said we were being evacuated.”

“And your other mother, do you think she’s still back there?” The physicist. I wonder why she wasn’t sent back with Garren too.

“She was the one who arranged to have us taken so I
guess she must be. Like your dad. Unless you think they’re somewhere else?”

“Given my dad’s position, he probably felt he had a responsibility to stay but I don’t know, maybe he could be somewhere else.” Some other time? I know Garren’s not going to like this next part but he’s not going to change my mind either. “I’m going to talk to someone tomorrow who might know more. A woman who’s been pretending to be old friends with my mom.”

“Freya.”

I didn’t think it was possible for Garren’s frown to get any more entrenched but I’ve just seen it happen.

He swipes his feet off the seat across from him and leans forward in his chair, the candlelight dancing frantically across his face. “Don’t go. It’s too big a risk. Haven’t you taken enough of them lately?”

“We need more money. And I need answers. I need to know if the U.N.A. is still standing and whether my dad’s alive. Don’t you want to know the same about your mother?”

“Of course I do. But you can’t trust this woman. She’ll want them to
take you
, just like Henry did. Obviously they didn’t want us to remember and now they have a damage control plan that we’ve been standing in the way of.”

I pull at my T-shirt, stretching it long. “This is the last chance like that I’m going to take. If it starts to feel wrong I’ll change my mind at the last minute. You know, pay attention to that early-warning system of mine that went off at
Henry’s. And I saw something while we were at Lou’s too. I just didn’t know how to interpret it.”

“What did you see at Lou’s?” Garren asks.

“Me, upset.” I hate having to admit it to him. “And now I know it was because you’d left.”

“I’m sorry.” Garren shakes his head. “I wish I could take it back.”

There’s no taking anything back. There never is. “What about Janette? What did you say to her when you were leaving?”

“She was asleep. I didn’t have to say anything.” He stares at the table, plants both his palms on top of it. “You probably won’t believe it but I regretted leaving you like that almost right after I did it. I came back here before I went to Janette’s, in case you’d come here. I didn’t know where else to look for you.”

He must’ve come and gone before I returned this afternoon. I was lost and then fell asleep on the subway. It took me longer to get here than it normally would’ve.

Garren’s stopped talking and he tilts his head like he’s hearing something I’m not.

“What is it?” I ask.

“This song.” Garren motions to the radio. “The person I thought I was liked it. But now I don’t know if the real me knew it back where we’re from or if it’s just down to some scientist’s programming.” He props his elbow up on the table and rests his head wearily in his hands. “There are too many memories clashing inside my head.”

I move closer to the radio and listen to the music. It makes me feel strange too. Like stepping through time has done something to us that no one else will ever understand. It’s a bit like that dream feeling of falling without ever hitting bottom mixed with a nostalgia for things that haven’t happened yet.

I know this song. I know it because of Garren. We listen to it on his record player seventy-eight years from now. Will it happen that way again or will the new future be different?

“Patti Smith,” I note. “ ‘Because the Night.’ You always liked this. Maybe that’s why they put it back into your head.”

“You remember that about the song?” Garren’s skin is flushed and damp. He pushes his chair away from the table and lowers his head close to his knees. “I feel like shit. I wish I didn’t drink that coffee.”

“I got sick earlier too,” I tell him. “It must have something to do with remembering. Maybe the Bio-net can’t deal with it.”

“Maybe.” Garren bites his lip. “My head’s killing me.”

“Go to bed. Sleep it off. I was out cold for hours. But you should be fine by tomorrow.”

Garren stares up at me like even moving his head is a major challenge. “I’ll go up to bed in a minute. Just promise me you won’t meet this woman tomorrow. It’s too dangerous.”

“I have to go.” If I’m caught, it won’t be worth it and he’ll be proven right but I need the missing pieces of the puzzle and Nancy has some of them. This is my final chance.

“If you go I’m going too,” Garren says stubbornly.

I know how this works. He thinks that will make me back down and do what he wants.

“Earlier today you were fine with ditching me and now we’re in this together to the death?” I scowl and stare past him. Neither of us has gone anywhere near the topic of what happened between us upstairs but I still feel it in the air along with the eerie sensation from the song.

“I wasn’t fine with it.” Garren raises his voice. “I thought you were losing it. Having some kind of break with reality. I thought you’d get us taken, ranting like that, looking for confirmation of something that sounded impossible.” He mops his brow, drives his hands into his hair. “And the worst part was that for a couple of seconds I wondered if it
could
be true, not because I remembered anything about it but because you were so convincing. I thought if I didn’t get away from you I’d end up as delusional as you were.”

Suddenly Garren covers his mouth and leaps up from his chair. He stomps off in the direction of the main floor bathroom and leaves me alone in the kitchen listening to “Because the Night.”

Before I was sent back here I’d never been sick in my life. In the future people don’t really get ill. Not in the U.N.A. anyway. The flu my mom, Olivia and I had shortly after we reached Canada must not have been a flu at all but a physical reaction to traveling through time or an aftereffect of the wipe and cover. Remembering the truth about my past this afternoon made me feel horrible all over again. Garren’s in
that same state now and I feel sorry for him, almost maternal, on top of all the other weird things I’m feeling.

Two minutes later he shuffles back into the kitchen and stands in front of me like a shadow of his regular self. “You win,” he says. “I have to sleep. At least tell me you won’t go anywhere while I’m sleeping.”

“I won’t. Why don’t you take the master bedroom? It’s probably the most comfortable.” Neither of us has slept in it yet. I guess it felt like a bigger intrusion into the Resniks’ lives than sleeping in any of the other rooms but I think we’re both well past worrying about that now.

A very fragile-looking Garren nods at me and goes off to sleep in the master bedroom like I suggested. I return to the spare room, feeling wide awake. Despite that, soon I’m asleep, dreaming about Latham, Garren and Kinnari. We’re sitting in a semicircle in Garren’s old bedroom, the four of us in lounge chairs like the one I sat in at Lou Bianchi’s.

A Hendris song is playing and I look over at Latham and say, “I never really forgot you, you know. You were always there … this feeling in my head that I couldn’t explain.”

“I know,” Latham says. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore, Freya. I’m fine.”

“What about Dad?” I ask.

Latham smiles. “I thought you were going to hate him forever.”

I thought so too. I meant it at the time. “I thought he was killing you. That it was his fault.”

“And now you know better—that it wasn’t anyone’s
fault,” Latham surmises. “But anyway, don’t worry about him either. He’d just want you to focus on yourself now, focus on getting where you want to go.”

“Does that mean you think that I shouldn’t go tomorrow?” To meet Nancy, I mean, but I can see that Latham already understands that. It’s so good to see him, even though I know it’s only a dream. It’s like there’s a part of him that still exists, a part that I dragged back with me seventy-eight years in time.

“You’d know the answer to that better than I do,” Latham says. “You’re the one who can see things. It’s not like you’d listen to me anyway, is it?”

“Maybe,” I answer.

Garren’s sighing from his chair, making a sour face. “No, you wouldn’t.”

With that I wake up in the sunlight to the sound of a door closing down the hall.
Garren
. I should check on him, make sure he’s okay. I get out of bed and head for the master bedroom. The door’s closed and I hesitate before grabbing the knob and twisting.

Garren’s sitting up in the queen-size bed, shirtless, swigging from a tall glass of water. I stand blinking in the doorway, memories from last night in the spare room streaming through my mind.

“Hey,” I say, moving slowly towards him. “How’re you feeling?”

“Better,” he tells me. “Thirsty.”

“I was too afterwards. Let me get you another glass of water.”

“Thanks.” Garren holds out his freshly emptied glass.

I take it and then motion to the walk-in closet, which I disappear inside without further explanation. Paula’s entire wardrobe is draped neatly on hangers and it only takes me a couple of seconds to locate a pair of her jeans to throw on. I pick out one of her sweaters too. Everything’s slightly too tight, too short and overall too small on me but it’s better than continuing to walk around in front of Garren in Mr. Resnik’s T-shirt.

I don’t take another look at Garren before leaving the room in my new clothes. Because I keenly remember the unquenchable thirst I felt yesterday, I not only refill his glass but bring him a second, both of them full to the brim with ice water.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Garren says when I put down both glasses on the bedside table next to him.