A boy on a bike dodged past me on the sidewalk. The wind blew around my bare ankles. Halfway to the community mailboxes, a car sped by going much too fast and I resisted the urge to throw a rock after it. At the end of the block, I felt my pockets again for the mail key. For a moment, I thought I’d lost it, that I’d come all this way for nothing, then my hand closed around the metal slug and I jammed it into one of the small doors in front of me. The mailboxes made me think of the big wooden advent calendar Dad had lugged out each December, which tipped me into another, more recent memory: a pile of gifts on the floor, a small girl at my feet, gleefully tearing paper. “No,” I said, in a firm voice, banishing the image, before looking around to see if anyone had heard me. I opened my mailbox and slid my hand into the narrow cubby, pulling out the usual stack of flyers and bills, surprised to find an envelope with actual handwriting nestled among them. Even if Meredith hadn’t identified herself as the sender, I would have recognized her writing from the countless notes she’d left around the house when we were together.
I clutched the envelope to my chest, nearly bending it in half. On the walk home, a high tone sounded in my ears. My lungs forgot when to pull, when to release. My house looked like a neglected church, like a burrow in the mud. I made it to the gate and struggled with the latch. The next-door neighbour came around the side of her house with a rake, her smile fading when she saw me. She said something I couldn’t understand, her features pinched in concern. I held up the envelope, meaning sorry no time to talk, and wrestled open the gate. Dad was up on the roof, laying shingles. Dark clouds rolled over the house. Nickel-sized hailstones pounded the grass all around me. I hurried up the stairs, protecting the envelope with my body, threw open the door, and stopped. A little girl was toddling unsteadily towards me.
“Daddy!” she cried.
The structure of the house had changed dramatically, the little foyer opening up into a living area, the upper floor merging with the lower and spreading out. The child nearly fell, wheeled her arms for balance, and kept coming. Her hair had been recently brushed. Her pajamas were clean and covered in cartoon monsters. She took a few last tripping steps and threw herself at me. I thought I wouldn’t have the strength to catch her but I did, lifting her up, marvelling at her absence of fear, her unqualified joy at seeing me.
I hugged her close. Christine. Still with me. Still here. She squirmed to be put down, wanting to show me something, but I couldn’t let go, couldn’t stop hugging her, my arms locked around her little body.
Meredith came out of the kitchen, looking alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head, unable to speak.
“Felix, what is it? What’s happened?”
Christine struggled to get away. “Mommy!”
Meredith took her from me and I staggered back against the wall, then sank to the floor and covered my face with my hands, overwhelmed by the loss of the very people in front of me. Meredith kept saying my name. Eventually, the urgency in her voice got through and I managed to slow my breath and look up.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She was hushing Christine, who looked terrified. “Talk to me,” she said. “What’s going on?”
I made a vague gesture and realized that I was holding an envelope. Not a letter from Meredith, but a bill from the power company. I held it out to her. “I brought in the mail.”
Meredith waited until Christine was down for the evening before approaching me in the TV room. She’d been scheduled to work the night shift and had changed into her scrubs, addressing me in a gentle but firm voice.
“Are you ready to tell me what happened?”
I turned off the television and set the remote aside. “I told you, I was confused.”
“Were you seeing things?”
“No.”
“Hearing voices?”
“No.”
“I need you to be sure about this, Felix.”
“I am,” I said, still traumatized by the specific way I’d experienced Christine’s loss—not as a time-traveller might feel it, with a degree of self-awareness, but as my actual future self, knowing no other reality but that one. I couldn’t say exactly how I’d lost her (or why I was back in my old house for that matter), but her absence had been an unchangeable fact of my existence, like an amputated limb.
“This confusion,” Meredith said. “Is it still with you now?”
“No.” I rubbed my face “I’m fine now, really. I think I might have just forgotten to take my meds.”
“What?” she said. “When?”
“Today. And yesterday, maybe.”
“Did you check the pill caddy?”
“No.”
Meredith hurried out of the room and came back with a long plastic container, looking slightly panicked. “Five days,” she said. “You’ve missed five days, Felix.”
“Really?”
She showed me Thursday through Monday, three pills nestled in each little cube. For the second time that evening, I found myself thinking about Dad’s old advent calendar: cubbies, compartments, holes…
Meredith shook out Monday’s pills and gave them to me. “Here. Take them now.”
I hesitated, frowning at the pills in my hand.
“Felix.”
“No, you’re right. I was just thinking that it’s a little late in the day. They might keep me up.”
“I’ll get you some water.”
She went into the kitchen and I stared at the dark television, thinking about Chad Temple’s murder, and the oak tree by my old apartment. In both cases, my premonitions had come true. I scoured my mind for specific details from this latest vision, but as my future self, I’d been consciously avoiding any thought of Christine. Meredith came back into the room and handed me a glass of water. It was not a gentle recommendation, but a requirement. I put the pills in my mouth and washed them down.