I pull the old man onto my lap. I lean very close to see his face. He’s breathing roughly, choking on blood. He neck is cut. Who knows what else.
“Prenna.”
He looks up at me, and of course it is him. Of course. I lean close and put my cheek on his. “It’s me.”
His eyes are his eyes again, full of clarity, though it’s a struggle to talk. “You know …”
I don’t want him to have to struggle. “I know.”
“I didn’t want to … put you in this …”
I put my arms around him. “It’s okay. I understand. I think I understand now.”
His eyes close and then flutter open for a second.
“I will take care of it,” I say into his ear. “I will make sure.” I know this is what comforts him. I feel his body loosen in my arms. I don’t know what I’m promising, but I know I mean it.
His eyes close again. I hear the last sounds going out of him, feel the last of his warmth mixing into the air.
I hear footsteps coming, but I can’t move. I can’t pull away and leave him. I don’t care what happens to me.
“Oh, God.”
I look up at the sound of Ethan’s voice.
I feel his hand on my back. “Oh, Prenna.”
I can’t let the old man go.
“Is he dead?”
“Just … Yes.”
“Did you see what happened?”
It takes me a little while to find my voice. I choke on words like my throat was cut too. “I came at the end. I didn’t see who it was. He ran away.”
He’s wrapped both arms around me. “You can’t stay here,” he says gently. “We have to go.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.” He lets go of me and goes over to the cart. He sifts through it and picks out an envelope and stuffs it in his jacket. He comes back to me and helps me lay the old man down carefully. He lifts me up. I’m sobbing. I hear myself sobbing. I guess that must be me.
I don’t fight him. I let him carry me along like I’m a baby. He puts me in his car and closes the door. He drives out of the lot and away from the store. He scans the long blocks and finally finds a pay phone along a deserted stretch. I understand that he calls 911.
Back in the car, he drives onto the highway for a couple of miles and then back off the highway onto smaller and smaller roads. Finally he stops the car on a remote street. He kills the engine and reaches for me. He pulls me toward him so I’m nearly in his lap and holds me with both arms. He strokes my hair and wipes away my tears. We just stay like that for a long time.
TEN
“You know, right?” he says to me after the tears are through.
I’ve sat up and retaken my own seat. He’s still holding my hands. In the midst of everything are dull alarms in my head that I could be hurting him by being close like this. And there’s the blood drying all down my front and on my arms and hands. It’s on him too. It doesn’t seem to scare him and it doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen death before. I’ve seen plenty of blood before. I’ve seen suicide and I’ve even seen murder. But it horrifies me to know whose it is. And I do know, though I can’t yet put my Poppy and this poor old man together into the same person.
I nod. I guess that means he knows too.
“I’m sorry.”
“For both of us,” I say.
“For both of us.”
“I wish I could have talked to him … you know, knowing.” It seems unfair to discover your father is alive at the same moment he is dying.
“Him too.”
I try to take it in slowly. It’s too much at once and I’m worried I’ll just shut down. Sometimes I think our minds have an immune system, just like our bodies do, but you have to give it time to work.
“How long have you known?” I ask.
“Not long. Couple of weeks.”
“You’ve been trying to tell me.”
“I guess. I’ve been wanting to tell you a lot of things, but I didn’t know how. It’s a lot to lay on a person. And I know you’re not supposed to talk to me. Not really talk.”
I nod. I can still feel my cheek against the old man’s cheek. “I think at the end we both knew everything.”
“That’s good. And that you were there.”
“I wish I’d gotten to him sooner.” I think of something. “What made you come?”
“He called me twice. The second time I just heard a lot of shouting. I knew something was wrong.”
“Do you think he knew this was going to happen?”
“He might have. He just wanted to make it another few days, but he knew somebody was watching him. I’ve been worried. I’ve been worried for both of you.”
I don’t know how to keep pretending. I didn’t tell Ethan the truth about me, but I didn’t deny it either. I don’t know how much he knows.
The strange thing is, I think I’m keeping all these secrets from him, but he seems to know more than I do. He’s full of certainty and I’m not sure of anything anymore. I can’t keep straight what is supposed to be true and what is true, they are diverging so quickly.
“They are going to come for me, you know,” I say quietly.
He nods.
“Where are my glasses?”
“I wore them at home and left them in the trunk of my father’s car before he went to play squash in Spring Valley. I am hoping that might confuse things a little.”
I consider this. I almost smile at the picture in my mind. “So you think they can’t hear us or see us now? You think the glasses are their only way?”
“Kenobi—” He breaks off and reconsiders the name.
“You can call him Kenobi,” I say. I’m too distraught, too disoriented to call him by his name.
“That’s what he thought.”
I put my hand over a spot of blood drying into the knee of my pants. “I’ve suspected it was the glasses for a long time. It makes sense. We’re all blind and defenseless without them.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said they’ve got you all taking these pills. They say it’s to build your immune system or something, but all they really do is ruin your vision and make it so nobody has kids. He thinks—he thought—if you stop taking them, your sight will come back.”
How can I believe that? I pull my hands back from him. My mother is part of the medical clinic that issues the pills. She wouldn’t let them do that. Another version of my life is shifting and reshaping behind me.
“What about your phone?”
“I threw it out the window.” I shake my head, trying to think. “But, Ethan, what if he’s wrong about the pills?”
“Do you have any of them with you?”
“No.”
“Then let’s hope he’s right.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because we can’t go back for them. We’ve only got three days. We’ve got to get moving.”
I stare at him. I feel more tears seeping into my eyes. “Do you really think it’s that easy? That I can just get away from them and off we go?”
“For a few days we can. That’s what Kenobi thought. He said they would kill you if they had no other choice, but I won’t let them. He says their power has limits. They are omnipotent in your world, but not in mine. And all we need are a few days. Then everything will be different. After that I’ll talk to them if you want.”
I stare at him in stupefaction. I can hear Ms. Cynthia telling me to shut my mouth and to try not to look like an idiot. “That shows you really don’t know anything.”
“Maybe not. We’ll see.”
“You literally believe everything he said?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve seen some strange things in my life.” I can feel his eyes fixed on mine. “They never made sense, but I couldn’t ignore them. What he said fits with what I’ve seen.”
“Maybe you’re both crazy.”
He
shrugs. He doesn’t look particularly concerned by that idea. “Maybe so. I’ll consider that next week. For the moment I’m going with what he said. For the next few days, anyway.”
“Because of May seventeenth.”
For the first time some relief creeps into his eyes. He lets out a breath. “Yes, because of May seventeenth.”
We are quiet for a moment.
“I can’t tell you how long I’ve been trying to figure out the meaning of that number,” he says.
The way he looks at me is making me dizzy. “Because he told it to you?”
“Way before that. Because I saw it on your arm.”
I close my eyes. “How?”
He moves closer to me. He takes my hands again. He unbends my left arm and pushes up my sleeve and runs his fingers over the place where it was.
I shiver. My skin holds the memory of the rawness from all the scrubbing.
“I saw you four years ago. I think it was when you first got here. You were like the girl in the Robert Burns poem: wet and draggled, coming through the rye. I was thirteen, and I was fishing by myself for the first time at Haverstraw Creek. There had been this crazy disturbance in the air over the stream. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. Ben Kenobi says that it was one end of the time path. That’s where you all came through.”
I can’t stop shaking. “I don’t remember.”
“I know. I realize that. You were in bad shape. You were cold and alone and you had the number scrawled on your arm. I wanted to help you. I gave you my sweatshirt—”
I spin. I float. I try to breathe. “That was you.” Of course. Now I think, Of course.
“The air around you was quivering in the strangest way. You were scared and you didn’t want to talk to me. I pointed the way to a bridge over the river, where you thought you needed to go.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” I say faintly. Again I feel the world shifting and reshaping behind me. “Did you see other people besides me?”
“No. They were probably coming into the woods in other places. I only saw you.” I can’t see his expression well enough to read it, but I sense he is weighing his words. “But I can recognize them—the people who came. Some easier than others.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can recognize travelers. It’s hard to describe. It’s like the air moves around you in a slightly different way. Not like on the day you came, but a very, very subtle version of it.”
“You can see that right now?”
“On you, barely. Almost not at all anymore. But on others more, particularly the older ones. I could see it pretty strongly on Kenobi.”
“Can other people see it?”
“Nobody I’ve ever met. Not that I talk to people about it a lot. Kenobi says it’s rare, but some people have an acute sensitivity to the time stream. Maybe because I was there that day when the path opened. Some effects of the stream are always there, but most people don’t see it. He says it’s like that psychological experiment everybody watches on YouTube. With the people throwing the basketball? You’ve probably seen it.”
I shake my head.
“Okay, so there are two basketball teams, one wearing black shorts, the other white. You are supposed to count the number of times the white team throws the basketball to the black team and vice versa. At the end they tell you the answer, and then they ask: Did you see the gorilla?”
“The gorilla?”
“Yeah. The majority of people are so occupied by counting the throws, they don’t see that a guy in a gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the court while the players are throwing the ball, stands there, and then walks away. Most people have no idea the gorilla was there.”
I edge closer to him. I hold his hand. “You see the gorilla.”
His voice sounds tired, and for the first time I can tell that he is sad. “I guess I do.”
Ethan fumbles in his jacket and presents me with the envelope he took from the old man’s shopping cart.
“Is this what he wanted to give me?”
“He said that he had something for you—a key—but that if for any reason he couldn’t give it to you himself, I should find this and make sure to put it in your hands. I think it’s lucky you didn’t give his murderer more time to look around.”
I realize that is true.
“Are you going to open it now?” he asks as I knead the envelope in my hands. I find myself feeling it, shaking it like it is a Christmas present, wanting to even out the shocks if I can. There’s a letter inside. A key jiggles at the bottom. That’s the thing he wanted to make sure I got one way or another.
Ethan turns the car key halfway in the ignition to put the interior lights on. “You ready?”
“You’ll have to read it to me,” I say.
Along with the key and the letter is a small piece of paper with an address wrapped around a magnetized plastic card. Ethan reads the writing on the card:
Secure Storage
200 East 139th Street
Bronx, NY 10451
That’s what the key is for.
I open the letter and squint down hard over the writing. The shape of it. The shape of the signature at the bottom. Blind though I am, the writing stirs more feelings in me. I close my eyes. “Okay. Read,” I say.
My dear Prenna,
If you are reading this letter, then my fears have been realized. I’ve been being followed for some time now, and I know my life is in danger. I wouldn’t have reached out to you at all if I could have avoided it. I hate the thought of putting you in harm’s way. But, again, if you are reading this, I need your help.
I am your father; you are my daughter. Maybe you know it already.
I am hideously changed. I have aged almost twenty-four years while you and the other travelers have aged only four. I stayed much longer in an inhospitable world before I could get back here.
I know they told you I abandoned the immigration, but I didn’t. I never by choice would have let you and your mother go without me. I disagreed with some of the other leaders about the goal of our undertaking. I know the rules as well as anybody, and the danger of uncontainable changes, but some changes—even if it’s just one critical change—must be made. Otherwise, we know how it ends. I wasn’t the only one who believed this, but I suppose I was the most strident. I was the only one left behind. The rest of them, including your mother, made the trip but were stripped of any power, any say, in how the community operates.
You must wonder as you read this why I’ve lived the way I’ve lived, and I don’t know if I can explain myself adequately. I’ve been on the streets and in the park not because I lacked access to money or shelter, but because my shopping cart and sleeping bag and peacock feathers are a protection of sorts. Until recently, I’ve been able to live beneath the radar of ordinary society. I’ve been able to stay in proximity to you and your mother, to keep watch over you without fear of being recognized or taken seriously by anyone. I’ve had the freedom to pursue my objective: to find the fork and intercede.
And I suppose it goes beyond that too. The first two years here I lived in an apartment a few blocks from your house. It was hot in the winter and cold in the summer, with clever appliances and a TV set with an astonishing array of channels. And I came to despise it. I existed in the bleakest of conditions for too long a time to be properly civilized ever again. I could see how, if I let my guard down, I’d become as comfortable and selfish and corrupt as everybody else who made the journey. Sleeping under the stars at night reminds me where I come from and what needs to be done.
By making changes we open the future, but we lose our special knowledge and the power that goes with it. The leaders of your immigration aren’t willing to give it up. They take advantage of this unnatural loophole. They hide here, making themselves comfortable for as long as possible. They’ll lose it all unless they keep this dying world intact. And they preach passivity in the name of caution. But it’s nothing more than cowardice. Thei
r knowledge, our knowledge, is dangerous and undeserved. Let’s at least try to use it for good.
Your loving father,
Jonathan Santander (Poppy)
ELEVEN
Ethan wants to go straight to the storage place in the Bronx and get to work, but I need to stop at home first.
“Just for a few minutes,” I tell him. “Just to shower off and get clothes. I can’t go around like this. And I have to talk to my mother before we disappear. I can’t do that to her.”
“I think it’s a bad idea.”
“I won’t stay long enough for them to find me. Really. Hopefully, they’re roaming around the squash courts in Spring Valley.”
The most pressing thing for me is my mom. I feel desperate to tell her what happened to Poppy and what I’ve learned. I can’t go on without her knowing. And the pills. I have to tell her about them.
Ethan finally agrees to wait around the corner for me. I promise to be back in ten minutes or less. He hugs me. I feel his lips briefly graze the top of my ear.
“I’ll see you in a minute,” I say.
“Right.”
“It’s okay.” I say it to myself. It’s hard to let go of him.
The house is mostly dark when I let myself in. I’m afraid my mom won’t be there, but she is. I can’t see her face well, but I see the worry in her posture as she walks toward me the moment I open the door.
“Prenna!” Her voice is a shriek. Even in the darkness she takes in the stains on my clothes. “Are you all right? What is going on?”
I throw myself at her. It’s a strange thing for me to do. But she doesn’t retreat. She puts her arms around me. I’m worried she’s been crying.
“Molly, he’s been here the whole time,” I say with a sob. “Poppy has been here. He came later than us, so he was old, but he arrived at the same place. Tonight somebody killed him. I was there. I held him when he died.”
I am sorry to put her through the same one-two I suffered: Poppy’s alive and Poppy’s dead.
She’s still holding me, but her body is stiff. She’s crying too. “That’s impossible.”