“I was twelve when they, sort of, found out by accident.”
Now Maggie’s hands are trembling. She looks at me. “Do they know you’re here right now?”
I shake my head. “They knew I was here last spring, but they don’t know I came back. Brooke does, but my parents…” I trail off, but Maggie looks at me like she’s waiting for me to continue. I shake my head again. “They wouldn’t understand this.”
Maggie leans forward. The color seems to have returned to her cheeks. “Where do they think you are right now?”
“Rock climbing and camping with my friend Sam.”
“Sam?”
“Yeah, Sam.”
“So you’re not…in…two thousand twelve San Francisco right now?”
“No, when I leave I’m gone. I disappear from there and come here. This time, I’ve been gone since Friday night.” I rest my arms on the table, and tell her how it works. She listens intently but doesn’t ask any more questions. “If I wanted to, I could return to San Francisco right now and arrive back on Friday, just five minutes after I left. And even though I’d been gone for two days, my parents would never even know it. But then they’d be doing those two days all over again and that seems like a pretty horrible thing to do to them. So I just, you know…say I’m camping.”
Maggie looks confused. “Yeah, I guess that’s probably best then.” She takes another sip of her water. “Or you could…tell them you’re coming here?”
I laugh. “I don’t think that would go over so well.” I push my plate to the middle of the table. “Mom wants a normal seventeen-year-old kid who skateboards and takes tests and applies to college, and doesn’t rock climb in Thailand or travel to see his grandmother back in nineteen ninety-five whenever he wants to.”
That finally gets a smile. “And your dad?”
“Dad wants me to do more with my ‘gift,’ as he calls it. He thinks I’m special and that I should be righting wrongs, fixing things, being heroic or something.” I pick up my glass and swirl the water inside, thinking about the fire back in San Francisco and what Anna and I did in Paris and how, over the last few days, I’ve been starting to think he could be right. “I don’t know. Until recently, I’ve pretty much used this thing I can do for my own benefit.” I don’t tell her that it’s also been for hers. She doesn’t need to know what Brooke and I will do for her years from now, when the Alzheimer’s sets in and starts taking control of her mind and her life.
Maggie looks more relaxed now. She shifts in her chair and reaches for the glass of water. “That sounds like your dad.”
“Really?”
She nods. “He’s always been a bit intense. Far more so than your mom is.” Maggie looks past me, over my shoulder, and when I turn my head to follow her gaze, I see that she’s staring at the stained glass image that hangs in her kitchen window above the sink—the one my mom made when she was a kid. “But he’s a good man, I think. She definitely loves him.” She looks back at me again, and leans in closer. “And you…my goodness. I was only there for a short time, but from what I could tell, their whole world revolves around you and your sister.”
“That might be true now, but everything will change once she discovers that she doesn’t have a normal kid who keeps her busy with Little League games or school plays.” I stop short of telling Maggie what I’m really thinking. Her daughter’s stuck with me, a freak show who sneaks around behind her back and lies to her, all to keep doing the one thing she so desperately wants him to stop.
Maggie lets out a sigh and shakes her head. “I bet she thinks you’re pretty remarkable.” I have no idea how to respond to that, and it’s quiet for a long time. Finally, she looks at me wearing a huge smile as she reaches across the table. She covers my hand with hers. “I’ll go back after all. I’ll see what I can do. Now that I know who you are, maybe I can use my trips to San Francisco to help your mom understand you a little bit better.”
My stomach sinks as I think about the photo of the three of us at the zoo, and how Maggie would never have come that weekend if Anna hadn’t told her to. I don’t know what happened before that visit, but I know what happened afterward—Maggie never came back.
“I’m afraid you can’t do that,” I say. She doesn’t seem to grasp Anna’s involvement in the whole thing and I don’t want to ruin the one memory she has by telling her that it never should have happened. “You came to visit us once, and that was it.”
“Once?” She pulls her hand away from mine, and I watch her face fall as the information sinks in. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t need to. Her expression says everything. That can’t be possible.
I feel compelled to tell her everything, but I can’t. And now I have to choose my words wisely and use them sparingly, because the more she knows about the future, the greater the risk of her inadvertently changing it. Who knows what could happen if she does.
“The two of you didn’t speak for a long time. I don’t know why, my mom never talks about it, but Brooke and I never knew you.” I trip on the last two words and immediately wish I could pull them back in, but it’s too late. Maggie heard me. Knew. Past tense.
She stares at me like she wants to ask the question but doesn’t know how to voice it or if she should. I answer it silently. You died without knowing us.
I remember those weeks far too vividly. I’d never seen Mom cry before, but the day she found out that her mother had passed away—all alone in this great big house—she became hysterical. Brooke and I didn’t know what to do, so we hid in her room, wrapped in each other’s arms and crying together without really understanding why. The next day, Mom and Dad got on a plane, but they couldn’t afford to bring Brooke and me along. Besides, they’d said, we were too young for funerals. I was eight. I didn’t know what I could do back then; if I had, things might have been different.
Maggie looks away from me and her gaze wanders around the room before it settles on the table. “Are we both that hardheaded?” she asks herself, and I hear the disbelief in her voice. She slowly raises her head and looks at me. “But now that I know, I can change it. I can be the one who makes the effort, makes it better. Right?”
I press my lips tightly together and shake my head. “You can’t change it, Maggie. You weren’t part of our lives the first time, so you can’t be part of them now. Who knows what might happen if you were?”
She gives me a stubborn stare, like she’s considering doing it anyway.
“You have to promise me you won’t go back there again.”
She takes a deep breath and her eyes lock on mine. “I don’t know if I can make that promise, Bennett.”
I don’t have a choice but to give her an ultimatum. “Then I’ll go back in time, right after you came into my room tonight. That Bennett—the one who’s thirty minutes younger than me—will disapper the instant I come back, and I’ll take his place. I’ll come downstairs, and you and I will have a nice chat and eat this delicious dinner. And then I’ll get up from the table, help you with the dishes, and this whole conversation we’re having right now,” I gesture back and forth between the two of us, “will never happen.”
She rests her elbows on the table and buries her face in her hands. The two of us sit like that for a long time, Maggie thinking about the future and me feeling horrible and helpless because we’re all stuck with it.
“Fine,” she says, her voice cracking. “I won’t go back.” Suddenly she sits back in her chair and crosses her arms. “You said earlier that it hurt when you traveled. What did you mean by that?” I’m surprised by the question but grateful for the subject change.