Back Again (The Short Story)

  Inside she was churning and fighting and willing her mouth to obey, but the words came out exactly as they had before.

  “G-g-get. Get. Your hopes up.”

  Go was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t say it.

  Tommy didn’t even look up to answer. “I know mom. Nan might be too busy.”

  Dawn’s heart shrank. A gnawing began in her stomach. She’d been so close. It hit her then that she probably couldn’t change anything. The chance she’d just had might be the best she would get. Three words were all she had needed, and she couldn’t even get those from her mind to her mouth.

  She’d never felt so alone or so helpless.

  Dawn finished breakfast with Tommy, walked him to the bus stop, and kissed him goodbye. No other opportunity had presented itself during breakfast.

  Throughout the day, she chided herself when doubts entered her mind. After all, she’d stopped the word get for a few seconds. There were so many opportunities ahead where she could stop a movement or pause an action long enough to create a flow on effect. She’d done it before, so she had to believe that somewhere, somehow there was a way she could do it again and prevent Tommy’s death.

  All Dawn had to do was find the way.

  Movement 8

  As she had before, Dawn spent the day trying to alter events.

  Once, during a phone call with her mother, she attempted to insert today into the sentence instead of Sunday. This time she couldn’t even pause the word.

  While writing a grocery list, she tried to scrawl out a message of warning she could hand to Tommy, but her hand continued on without a single word changed.

  As she cleaned the house, she focused on her body’s movements. In picking up clothing or washing dishes, she repeatedly attempted to stop or alter the action.

  Over and over, she failed.

  Mentally and emotionally, she grew exhausted, as if she’d spent the entire day carrying a heavy weight around—for all she knew that’s what she was doing. The entire universe felt as if it were pulling at her, engaging her in a cosmic game of tug-of-war.

  By the time she’d picked up Tommy, she was shattered in every sense. She’d resigned herself to take comfort in the few minutes she would share with Tommy before dropping him off at his lesson. If it turned out that she never came back again, she wanted to appreciate each treasured moment as if it were their last. Even as a repeat, these were technically still Tommy’s and her last minutes together, and she still felt them in all their heartbreaking poignancy.

  Tommy climbed in the car, smiling. Immediately, he launched into a monologue of his day, a nondescript day that meant nothing to him, believing like she had the first time around that there were thousands more days to come, a whole life ahead of him. Dawn listened intently, cherishing every word, every inflection, and memorizing every nuance of his face.

  When he walked from the car to the studio, she watched him just as she had done before. She wondered if she’d somehow known the first time that she was about to lose him. She hadn’t realized how much she’d watched his movements.

  A subconscious clock in her mind began the countdown—she had thirty minutes.

  Thirty minutes of attempts at stopping the clock.

  Thirty minutes before the nightmare began.

  Thirty minutes until his death.

  After fifteen minutes of waiting and playing on her phone—same Facebook status updates, same news—she left the car. She tried to not reach for her purse, tried to not open the door.

  Failure on both attempts.

  By the time she’d run the supermarket routine to arrive at the checkout, her heart was racing. There were only five to seven minutes left before the accident would play out again.

  Kylie and she repeated their banter.

  This time she really studied the young girl. She’d surprised herself the last time. She’d come away hating her. Dawn couldn’t share the magnanimous feelings toward her son’s killer that other people felt for those responsible for the loss of a loved one. She couldn’t forgive. Tommy’s accident was preventable, caused by this thoughtless human being who now stood before her not caring a crap about anything except herself.

  The girl reeked of self-absorption.

  On the outside, Dawn knew she appeared calm and cheerful—she was a mother on her way home to cook the evening meal. Life was normal and pleasant, her attitude complacent and confident. Inside, Dawn felt her anger growing, a wild, hot, blind fury, a volcano of emotion with nowhere to explode.

  She focused on Kylie as the girl pushed the groceries across the scanner. This time she noted the way her gaze darted about, her mind clearly elsewhere. Her pouting top lip a signal that something in her life was not how she wished it to be. Dawn had missed that the other times.

  Then her son’s killer reached out to her, handing Dawn her change. She unfurled her fingers to accept it.

  Behind her lips were the words Dawn thought every time, “Don’t get in your car. Don’t look at your phone. Don’t ruin my life, you selfish bitch.”

  Dawn pushed at her mind, shoving with the pent-up anger that had nowhere to go. She struggled to calm her emotions; taking control of her body seemed to work better when she was focused.

  Click.

  The gentle sound of a coin dropping and bouncing on the black travelling belt registered in her brain. It took another few seconds for the significance to sink in.

  She still looked at Kylie, still accepted the notes and other coins. What had just happened was swirling and swimming in her mind, as she tried to comprehend it.

  Instinctively, she took the next action. It was a movement she’d never made before. Her hand swooped down to pick up the coin and then dropped it into her wallet. When she looked back up at Kylie, with her metal adornments piercing her face and her bright pink makeup and hair, she saw a twitch in her mouth and a look in her eyes that she hadn’t recalled seeing before.

  Then, before she could do or say anything more, Dawn’s legs carried her away with Kylie’s “Have a nice day” following her out of the door.

  Her anger dissipated, washed away by a churning river of possibilities. The action of the coin, dropping so innocuously from her hand, was different and new. She’d never before picked it up, never looked down to place it in her wallet at that moment. The movement, the actions, and her reactions were not part of the original timeline.

  She must have been so angry, so out of control, that she’d moved her hand slightly, all without thinking about it. The exciting hope that now filled her was that if this past had been changed, then the future could be changed, not by grand movements but by small degrees.

  To anyone watching she looked like a woman going about her errands, involved in nothing out of the ordinary. Inside, though, her excitement was so wild that, if she could, she would skip across the road, screaming to the world that now she understood. Now she knew she had a chance.

  As she climbed into the car, she said a silent prayer.

  Please let me come back again.

  Movement 9

  Over and over Dawn came back to relive the ten days. Returning was now a given. She’d lost count of how many times she’d jumped. Two dozen. Seventy. Maybe more. What did it matter?

  She accepted that she was trapped in a crazy time-loop like a mouse running on a wheel. Perhaps she’d died and this was a keener hell than any she could have imagined.

  It never grew easier to live through Tommy's death and, at every opportunity, she never stopped trying to change the timeline. She pushed and prodded at almost every phrase, action, and interaction with others as if she were testing for a weak point in a wall of glass.

  Sometimes she felt a little give in the fabric of time, which she now imagined as one great looping ribbon, with her fallen on to some sidetrack. Nothing, though, ever amounted to the same variation of events as the coin dropping.

  After the first coin-dropping instant, each time she came back to the
moment at the checkout it was changed permanently, incorporated forever into the interaction, as if it had always been there. Now when she concluded her transaction with Kylie, the coin dropped. She couldn’t get it to do anything else, even though she surmised that there must be a crack in the timeline at that point.

  Dawn often wondered if her chance to change the future had been squandered on that coin, and the trunk release, and the few times she’d paused words. She wondered if the opportunities were somehow limited, and that now she’d failed Tommy.

  Movement 10

  This time around was a carbon copy of every other time since the coin: Dawn attempting to push at the immovable and changing nothing. The one difference was that she was trying less and less.

  Here she was again, face-to-face with Kylie, standing at the checkout, the bustling sounds of the supermarket no longer registering with her. She studied the girl as if she’d never seen her before. Each time she stood at the checkout, she looked for clues why this moment had worked when all the others had not.

  What a piece of work Kylie was.

  The anger never failed to rise within Dawn, no matter how many times she was here. This time, she thought she detected something different in Kylie’s eyes. The look must have been there before, but she was always so caught up in her anger and frustration, she’d missed it.

  Kylie’s face seemed softer, even as her lips seemed more tightly pursed together. Though her gaze still travelled about the checkout area just as it had done before, what Dawn had mistaken for disinterest in her job now seemed more akin to… to… desperation. Desperation and a veil of sadness. She would almost say the girl looked lost.

  When Kylie turned to pack the bags, Dawn noticed how tightly she clutched the packet of pasta, as if she was afraid of dropping it. Even after so many times back again, she still found things she hadn’t previously noticed. She no longer trusted her memory.

  The thought of this girl’s future crossed Dawn’s mind.

  With that, she imagined how it must feel to be Kylie after the accident, to return home that day to live with what she’d done. In Dawn’s mind, this girl had become a harbinger of death, a minion of the devil.

  She saw now she’d been wrong. This was just a girl living her life, just as Tommy and she were living their lives. Her heart swelled with compassion for Kylie and sorrow for everything that, in the next few minutes, would happen to change the world into a desolate place for both of them. She suddenly understood that it wasn’t her versus this girl. They were simply two human beings caught up in life’s ironic intertwining.

  If only she could reach out and touch Kylie’s hand, let her know it was okay. Let her know that she was truly forgiven. Instead, Dawn could do nothing more than reach out to take the coin—and drop the coin—because that was all that this life now allowed.

  Dawn held out her hand and waited for the sound of it dropping. She anticipated this moment every single time.

  But there came no sound.

  Instead, she felt the coin drop into her palm, the feeling of the small piece of metal like a mini-shock of static electricity on a dry day.

  Dawn hadn’t been willing anything, wasn’t trying for a moment of change. She wanted to look down to be sure what she felt was real, but couldn’t. Instead, she continued to stare at Kylie as she counted out the rest of the change.

  There was something different about the girl. The side of her mouth was quivering. Dawn racked her brain. Had Kylie made that movement before? Her eyes seemed different, too—moving more erratically—though that could be due to the coin. In not dropping it, this interaction had been minutely altered.

  When she saw the next difference, her mind began to spin. A glistening in Kylie’s right eye appeared, a welling up, despite the girl’s face remaining impassive.

  This was new. There was no mistaking it. She didn’t want the moment to move on, didn’t want to fold up her hand or put away the change. She felt as if she was standing over a precipice. What came next might change everything, if she could only work out what was actually happening.

  Then a small tear fell from Kylie’s right eye, even though the girl’s eyes weren’t red and her face hadn’t moved. It was as if it were a spontaneous action, the tear a physical creation not borne from an emotion.

  Dawn’s mind raced. How could the girl behave differently when Dawn had done nothing? The few changes that had been made had always been hers alone.

  She suddenly realized that her own hand wanted to move. The pressure of the future was pulling her away, forcing her to continue travelling the timeline, to put away her change, to walk out the door, and watch her son die in the next few minutes.

  Fighting the pull, she continued to stare at Kylie. For the first time, she didn’t know what would come next.

  As the tear slowly rolled down Kylie’s face, Dawn felt drawn to drop the money, reach out to the girl, and save her. She wanted to do that just as much as she wanted to save Tommy. The desire was so overwhelming, it felt as if her insides were being torn apart, with as much pressure as her body was being torn away. Still she held on, pushing at her hand, pushing at her muscles with every ounce of energy and will that remained within her.

  It felt as if her soul was lifted from her and, afraid, she desperately tried to drag it, or the feeling, or whatever it was, back. If she died, then Tommy would die permanently, too.

  Dawn panicked. She couldn’t hold on to it; it was too powerful.

  Then, as if the energy had stretched beyond its capacity, it popped like an over-expanded balloon, and she felt the power fizzle and dissipate within her.

  If she could have cried, screamed, or both she would have, but the only action she could take was to look down at her change and then fold it into her purse.

  Something extraordinary had occurred, but now she was left only with the deflated feeling that her chance for change had gone, this time forever. She couldn’t keep living this crazy circle of ten days or she would lose her mind. Quietly, with nobody watching, she would disintegrate from within.

  When she heard the words, her first thought was that the shock and distress of what had just happened had created an illusion, a mirage of reality. They were quiet words, strained, as if whispered through a keyhole by a frightened child too nervous to come out from a hiding place.

  “Don’t wait.”

  She must have misheard, too busy contemplating her sanity. These weren’t the right words, the words that Kylie always said after she handed over the change.

  This was the moment when Dawn would look up and say, “Thank you.”

  Kylie would then reply with disinterest, “Have a nice day,” before turning to the next waiting customer.

  This time, instead, when she looked back at Kylie, after putting away her change, there were more tears rolling down the girl’s face. One tear clung precariously from a metal circle embedded in her lip.

  “Don’t wait,” Kylie repeated, with a tremor in her voice and a little louder.

  Dawn felt a sudden freeing inside, as if a hot wind had blown threw her, melting the bindings that held her mind imprisoned within her body. She went to reply with her usual next line of “thank you.”

  Her mouth opened but, instead, she heard herself say, “I beg your pardon?”

  Kylie’s eyes reflected the emotion in Dawn’s own voice. She saw a lightness, where before there had been only contempt, Dawn’s words clearly holding as much meaning for Kylie as they did for her. There was a relief, a recognition of the determination and time taken by both of them to change those few simple words.

  More tears now flowed down Kylie’s face, but she didn’t reach up to wipe them. Her brow creased in concentration. She stared at Dawn, as she had done so many times before, but this time she continued to speak, her mouth forming words as if she was reading from a script, every syllable a struggle to enunciate.

  “Don’t wait. In. The car… for him—”

  Then Kylie paused, fo
r what seemed longer than a decade and shorter than a heartbeat, sucked in a long, deep breath that echoed around them, and added, “Stop him.”

  Now it was Dawn’s turn to cry.

  Reaching across, she wiped her palm gently across Kylie’s wet cheek and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Note from the Author

  The Time Machine by H.G. Wells was the first time travel story I read as a child, and I reread it many times as an adult. The social themes explored through Well’s future inhabitants of earth, the innocent, downtrodden, working-class Eloi and the cruel, industrial, overlord Morlocks are as contemporary today as they were over a hundred years ago.

  What captivated me more than the adventure was the poignancy of time travel. Once he’d travelled, the time traveler’s perspectives on life and himself were forever altered. I believe our cultural fascination with time travel stems from its seeming ability to solve everything; in being granted a second chance, we always find we create even greater dilemmas.

  Writing a time travel story is quite difficult. There are so many established memes in the genre that you plug one plot hole, only to find you’ve sprung a leak somewhere else. I guess that’s the fun of writing time travel: finding new ways to tell a story without breaking the known rules.

  The idea for Back Again came to me several years ago while watching my son—via the rear vision mirror—place his guitar in my car’s trunk. Even though the concept haunted me constantly, I couldn’t work out what would happen once the mother returned to the day of the accident.

  Finally I thought, Maybe if I put myself in the driver’s seat, so to speak, and just write the story, perhaps the solution might be revealed to me. Just like a reader, I didn’t know how it would end when I began the opening scene. However the minute Dawn went back again to discover she had no control, and was merely a passenger in her body, I knew that I had a wonderful, impossible dilemma to explore.