CHAPTER 23
A NaNoWriMo Challenge
It took three days for Whit to die.
Jaleen, naturally, was beside herself. I don’t mean to lessen the tragedy of her loss by saying it like that—so callously—but I don’t know how else to describe it. One doesn’t really say someone was beside themself when the person they love most in the world, dies. A part of me knows that saying she was beside herself belittles the whole thing—lessens it—and makes it into a cliché, if anything. But sometimes, clichés are the only thing you can use to describe something as devastating as a death. And hers was a two-fold loss remember; her brother had been swept over the falls and lost; and now Whit.
When I suffered a similar loss in my life, I found I was unable to remove myself from that loss—and not only because the emotions were overwhelming—but because I needed time to heal. And believe me when I tell you that while suffering through such heartache, any loss is overwhelming, but from what I know, losing a spouse is like being amputated. I was only able to heal because I was given the time to heal; I was sent to counselling; I was given every opportunity that was available.
Jaleen was simply overwhelmed by everything that happened. She sat with her hands on her belly, stroking it, silent tears slipping down her face. She refused to eat; slept little, and more than once said she wish she could die as well. I think the only thing holding her from throwing herself into the river and letting the current take her over the falls, was the unborn child she hugged.
She wasn’t going to have the opportunity to grieve properly. We discovered that neither Ricky, or myself, were beyond hopeless when it came to making a fire, or hunting for our dinner. Ricky had somehow managed to snag three fish, and while I attempted to scale and gut them, Ricky picked up Whit’s bow and three arrows.
“Have you ever tried hunting with one of those?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Good luck,” I said. “Try not becoming something’s dinner.”
“At least I won’t go down without a fight,” he said, brandishing the longbow.
I watched him leave. I didn’t have a lot of confidence that he’d come back with anything, but at least he was putting in an effort—it was more than I could say for a lot of other men I’ve known. I guess men are all the same no matter where you go. They all talked with that false bravado of knowing that anything they say will never be put to the test; out here, things are quite different.
I watched Jaleen sitting with her back to a tree, rubbing her naked belly. I took off the fur jacket she’d given me and that I was still wearing, and walked over to her, slipping it over her naked shoulders. She looked up at me and tried to smile, but I could see tears in her eyes. She was quick to wipe them away with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry. I should be over this,” she said softly.
“No,” I said, squatting down beside her and taking hold of her hand. “You’ll never be over this. He’ll always be a part of you, wherever you go. At least you have his child,” I said, and she smiled. “That’s more than my man left me,” I said.
“You?”
I nodded.
She was silent for a while, and then looked at me.
“I understand dying. My mother died when I was a child; my father died shortly after I took Whit to my bed. I wasn’t there when he died, but I still have a sense that he hasn’t left me. I wish I could say the same for Jarel. I feel his loss more than my father’s. Do you think being there makes it different? Whit might’ve saved him if he’d been quicker to react. Is it that? Or do you think I feel his loss all the more, because we failed him?”
“We call that survivor’s guilt,” I said.
“Is that what I am, now? A survivor?”
“We’re all survivors when you get right down to it. When you lose your mother and father, you feel that your life will never be the same, and in some respects, that’s true. But at the same time, life goes on, and you find that you can go on; that you have to go on, or life will leave you behind. It’s the same with everyone else you lose in your life. But none of them compare to what you’ve lost. You’ve lost your mate, your spouse, the love of your life.”
“Like you?”
I nodded.
“Like me.”
“But I don’t want to get over it—”
“And I’m not telling you to,” I was quick to say. “God, that’d be the last thing I’d ever ask anyone to do. I would’ve scratched the eyes out of anyone who told me to to get over it. It’s not something you get over. It’s something you accept as having happened, but you’ll always second guess yourself.”
What if I’d made him go to the doctor the first time I saw the blood, instead of accepting his excuses?
There, you see? Blaming myself all over again. That’s something else she’s going to have to learn; there’ll always be triggers. The fact that you can feel someone else’s loss shows that you have empathy, which means that you have compassion, and that you aren’t as broken as you may have thought you were. Well, that’s what my councillor told me. I wanted to believe it—I still want to—but I had no one I could share my compassion with. I’d isolated myself from my friends, even my family.
“I know nothing of you,” she said after a moment.
“I know nothing of your world,” I said.
“Is my world that different?”
I looked around. I could see the distant, snow-capped mountains—the Vandals according to the map Jarel had in his pouch—and the greenery, which made little, or no sense, at all. If this was Colorado, the terrain certainly shouldn’t look like it did. It should be hard scrubland. But this, this was all green grass and tall reaching trees. There were fir trees, willows, aspen and birch. There were predators, and it seemed to me that the Natural Order was more than just a little fucked up.
How? How did all of this happen? Did we go too far with our global warming and destroy the planet? Is this really Earth? Is this what they meant when they warned us about a hole in the ozone layer?
“Is it?” she smiled.
“Is your world so different?” I said, looking around again.
I nodded.
“Very.”
Ricky showed up at our little makeshift camp just as the sun was setting over the Vandals; the clouds were pink and gold, the shadows lengthening. He was carrying a rabbit, and looking proud of himself.
He stopped when he saw me.
“Please,” I said, trying not to feel uncomfortable. “You never looked through National Geographic when you were a kid? Or Playboy?”
“I don’t know what to say,” he said, “or what I’m supposed to do with this,” he added, dropping the rabbit beside the fire pit we’d made. “I guess I should give you my shirt. Don’t want you getting cold later.”
“What about you? Aren’t you going to be cold?”
“I’ll stay by the fire.”
Jaleen pushed herself up from the tree awkwardly, leaning against it for a moment before perking herself up and forcing a smile. She walked to the fire and picked up the rabbit. She also picked up the knife we’d taken from Whit earlier; she hesitated a moment as she held the weapon, then taking a deep breath, set about skinning the rabbit. I watched her closely, thinking it was probably something I should learn to do myself.
It didn’t take long for her to cut the rabbit up and put it into a pot to stew. She went into the woods and came back out a short while later with a handful of herbs and some tubers I didn’t recognize; I thought it might be better not to ask her what they were. But I told myself later, when we were eating the stew, the next time she went off into the woods to get whatever it was she dropped into the pot, I’d be going with her.
The sun was locked behind the mountains by the time the stew was ready. We ate in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I looked at Jaleen, and seeing tears in her eyes as she picked at her food, thought if she didn’t eat for the sake of her unborn child, she wouldn’t be eating at all.
“I guess it’s time I came out and told you what’s going on,” Ricky said, dropping the small battered bowl he was eating out of on the ground beside him. He looked at his hands for moment, then bit the end off a fingernail, spitting it out and giving me a lame smile.
“No time like the present,” I said, feeling stupid even saying it.
“I just wanna say right from the get-go, I don’t know much more than you. What I do know, is more than confusing and hard to believe, so bear with me, okay?”
I nodded, said Okay, and waited.
“I was supposed to go there to see my brother—”
“Bobby,” I said. “The one they killed.”
“Yeah, him,” he said, hesitating before starting in again. “Well, him and Jimmy—”
“He’s the one that left?” I said to Jaleen. “With that girl—the one with the red hair?”
“I think she knows who you mean,” Ricky said. “But I’ll get back to her in a minute. All of this is supposed to be because of my dad, actually. He says that he got that wristband—the bracelet—from his dad. I never believed him, but now, I’m thinking…what? Maybe? Anyway, neither here nor there. When we were kids, he told us he could travel through time with it. As I got older, I told myself—like my brothers—that I didn’t really believe him—and then I left home and went off to college. And that was the end of it. Then my mom died and he just drifted away.
“He had—has—whatever…dementia. So I guess a lot of what he said to us later in his life didn’t make a lot of sense to us. But…he used to tell us these stories when we were kids, see? We all remembered them. He was always the hero of the story, of course, otherwise why tell them, right? He even had a name for this place. He called it Amaroosa. He had a wife, and three children.”
He looked at Jaleen.
“From what I can remember—and this is the part that gets confusing for me—and will for as long as I’m here…or until I figure it out—which will probably be never, but you’re his daughter? We were supposed to come here—this is the future by the way—and contact him because he was supposed to have all the answers.”
“All the answers to what? What were you supposed to ask him?”
“Not me. That was Jen. She’s some sort of Time Guardian, or something like that.”
“A Time Lord? Like that English show?”
“What English show?”
“Dr. Who?”
“Never heard of it. But Jen—the real Jen—was my sister-in-law in the past. As a Time Guardian, the other Jen was somehow able to slip into the real Jen’s mind—the Jen I’ve known all my life—and take over her body, as well as her mind. She was Bobby’s wife. Hell, they had kids together. I don’t know if it was her, or the real Jen that had the kids, but I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“But you said your sister-in-law was a big girl,” I reminded him.
“No. She wasn’t just a big girl, she was fat. Fat with a capital eff. But this Jen, the one you know, or met, she was sort of looking out for us. Apparently, in the future, someone wants to change things.”
“What exactly do you mean by change things?” I asked.
“Again, it goes back to my grandfather. According to Jen, he’s the one who started it all. He invented time travel. Don’t even ask how,” he said, when he saw I was going to interrupt him again. “The grandfather I remember was comatose for the last ten years of his life. I think, and don’t quote me on this, but I think when they time travelled, it looked like they were sleeping. Comatose. I think when my grandfather was lying in bed all that time, he was here.”
“You know you’ve already lost me, right?”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“So your father…you said he was always telling you stories about what it was like over here? That he had children. That means a wife? Was your mother in the past the same woman?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. All I know from what Jen told me, is that he had a daughter. You,” he said, looking at Jaleen again.
“My father’s dead,” she said.
“He’s what?”
I could see that it came to him as a shock.
“You didn’t know that?” I asked.
“When we came through that hole—or portal, I guess you’d call it—the first time, something went wrong. I ended up in Whit’s head much the same way Jen was in my sister-in-law’s head. Only I couldn’t take over his body the way Jen did with my sister-in-law. You were in her head,” and he nodded at Jaleen.
“Then how come I don’t remember any of it?”
“Can’t say. But the three of them were attacked almost as soon as all of that happened—and believe me, everything happened all at once. Jarel was killed. That’s why I yelled at him to stay where he was when he went to look over the cliff. Jaleen was taken captive. We prevented all of that from happening when we arrived. But then, later, Jarel died. I don’t know if this is how it works, but I’m thinking maybe he was supposed to die, because he died that first time? Maybe that’s why he fell in the water and went over the waterfall? It keeps the timeline running.”
“But Whit didn’t die,” I pointed out.
“Whit didn’t make it through the portal,” he said. “But what if he died coming through? What if it was some quantum time thing we don’t understand because it’s some future shit we haven’t discovered yet? Maybe that’s why he died here? It keeps the timeline running. Don’t you see? Isn’t that what my brother said—God, I don’t even know when he said it! But if Whit didn’t die back there, he wouldn’t have died here. It’s the only thing that makes sense right now. Because I was in his head, I know what he was thinking. And there’s no way he wasn’t going to not come through that portal with us.”
“And you say I was in Jaleen’s head? Are you saying this is a different timeline than the one we were in before? Because when we came through the portal, we were able to prevent them from being killed and taken by the Slavers.”
“I don’t know. Don’t you remember anything about being in her head?”
“I know it’s nothing I want to remember,” I said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
“It might be important. As far as I knew, she was being held with her father. They were both picked up by the Slavers.”
“He might have been with her. I don’t know,” I said. “If they were, they were separated soon after.”
“Separated? Why?”
“Was she pregnant then?” I asked, changing the line of questioning he was following. “In the other timeline? Was she pregnant?”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“I didn’t get the feeling that she was pregnant when I was in her head.”
“So you do remember?”
“I told you: I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“As far as I know, she wasn’t. I mean, Whit never said anything about it, so, no, I don’t think she was.”
“So you were surprised to see that she was, when you saw her?”
“Yes…”
“Just like you were surprised when she told you her father died years ago.”
“She never said how long ago it was,” he pointed out, and I looked at her.
“He died when I first got together with Whit,” Jaleen said.
Ricky rubbed his hands on his face, shaking his head slowly.
“This is more confusing than I thought it would be,” he said.
“Does it matter?” I asked after a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re stuck here. Both of us. I lost the bracelet going over the falls, and Whit was wearing the other one. No. Two. He was wearing two. We have no way of getting back to our own time. We’re stuck in this time.”
“Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five.”
“No,” I said. “He was unstuck in time—not that I ever knew what that meant. I didn’t read it. I tried, but I didn’t like it; so I put it down.”
Like a lot of things in life, I thought. I just put them down.
