“About yesterday … the Hourglass … I wish I could explain.”
“Why can’t you?”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I just can’t.”
I gave him an irritated growl and turned to continue up the stairs. He grabbed for my hand, but I yanked it away as I spun around. “Why? I ‘don’t know what I’m dealing with,’ so I should just ‘mind my own business’—isn’t that what you said?” I could feel the sneer curling my upper lip.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
The desire to kick him in the shins at the answer that was beginning to become his standard was overwhelming. “No.”
“What?”
“No.” My impulses moved from kicking to punching, spurred on by my own anger and the fact that, before yesterday’s incident in my bedroom, I had trusted Michael. “I won’t mind my own business. You show up, tell me you understand me and that I should trust you. And then you won’t tell me the truth.”
“Emerson, I’m being as honest with you as I can be, believe me,” he said, his palms up.
“Not being completely honest is the same as being a liar.”
“I am not a liar,” he said. A vein pulsed in his forehead.
“I think you are,” I pushed with my words.
“I’m not. What I am is extremely frustrated.”
Michael reached out, cupped his hands under my elbows, spun me around, and dropped me to my feet.
“Whose fault is that?” I shouted as he walked up the stairs to the back door, his spine stiff. “Not mine. Maybe you should go ahead and tell me whatever it is you think I can’t handle—have you ever thought of that?”
But the door slammed, and I was talking to thin air.
Chapter 12
The next morning I stopped by Murphy’s Law for a little liquid energy and a chat with Lily. Lack of sleep was becoming an unfortunate occurrence in my life. I briefly considered ordering chamomile tea. Supposedly, it helped with anxiety, and I had plenty.
Lily stood behind the counter. She saw me coming and called out my usual order. “Double Cubano and the biggest empanada we have.”
Chamomile?
Right.
When Lily wouldn’t let me pay, I shoved my money in the tip jar and walked to the front of the shop to sink into an overstuffed pumpkin-colored chair. Outside, a man wearing khaki pants and a T-shirt bearing the logo of a landscaping service pulled summer annuals from the intermittently spaced planters lining the street. He replaced them with delicate pansies in dusky crimson and two shades of purple. A Davy Crockett look-alike stood beside him, his calves disappearing into the middle of the planter. Rips and solid objects didn’t really mix. I was glad Davy was out of his century and not just fashion challenged.
The coonskin cap really would’ve been over the top.
As I watched them both I noticed a sign taped up on the outside of the plate-glass window of the coffee shop. The sun shone at the perfect angle to make the thick black words stand out clearly: HELP WANTED. The heavens broke open. I wanted a job so I wouldn’t have to ask Thomas for extra spending money, and my favorite coffee shop in the world was hiring. Could I get a job smelling and selling the elixir of life?
Lily brought over a tiny espresso cup and my empanada and then lowered herself gracefully onto the edge of the chair across from me.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were hiring?” I asked.
She frowned, and I gestured toward the sign. I watched her read it through the glass, backward letters and all. “I didn’t know Abi decided to hire anyone. I thought she was going to keep working me to death to save money.”
“Your powers of observation astound me. One of your many superpowers.” She frowned at me. Needing to be on her good side, I changed the subject. “You think your abuela would hire me?”
“I don’t know why not. Coffee runs through your veins instead of blood. I think it stunted your growth.” I looked for something to throw at her, but the empanada was the only thing I could see, and I wasn’t willing to give it up.
“Is she here?” I struggled to get out of the chair. It seemed to have eaten half of my body. “Can I talk to her?”
“She ran over to the bank for some change. And why are you even asking? You know if you want the job, it’s yours.” Lily twisted her long dark hair up on top of her head, fanning herself with her order pad, looking more like Cleopatra on her barge than a barista at a coffee shop. She carried glamour as casually as some women carry a purse. “You think you can start tomorrow? I need a break.”
“Only if you can free me from this beast of a chair,” I said, wiggling as I tried to get some leverage. “What do you feed this thing? Customers?”
“Relax.” Lily let her hair fall around her shoulders and grinned at me. “I kind of like having a captive audience. How’s it going with Thomas and Dru?”
Since I wasn’t going anywhere without help, I took a sip of my espresso, sighing with pleasure. Rumor had it Murphy’s Law was the best place in the States besides Miami to get a Cubano, an espresso shot sweetened with sugar while brewed. “Better than I expected. They’re pregnant.”
“Pregnant? That’s great,” she said before tilting her head and narrowing her eyes at me. “Or is it?”
“It is. Dru threatened to put me under house arrest if I tried to move out. She said she knows somebody at the police department who can get her one of those ankle bracelets.”
Lily’s voice turned wistful as she leaned back in her chair. She’d never get stuck. “Family is important.”
The two of us shared the no-parent thing. Her parents were alive, but her father’s involvement with the government hadn’t allowed him or her mother to escape Cuba with Lily and her grandmother. Except for some extremely distant cousins in South Florida, she had fewer family members than I did.
“Any news from your parents?” I asked.
“No. Not since last Christmas.” Her eyes filled with sorrow I recognized. She changed the subject quickly, the way she always did whenever her family came up. “You never gave me details about the restaurant opening. Spill it—any developments on the social front?”
“Nope.”
She gave me a look that clearly indicated she didn’t believe me. “That was an awfully quick answer.”
“When did y’all start selling your own brand?” I hedged, squinting up at the sign announcing the price for freshly roasted coffee beans.
“Last spring. Dish. Now.” She perched on the edge of her seat, eager for the details. “You did meet someone.”
“It’s true.” Lily knew me too well. She wouldn’t stop until she got it out of me. “But there’s no point talking about it. He’s off-limits.”
“Why?” She pulled her head back in dismay. “Don’t tell me there’s a girlfriend?”
“It’s one of Thomas’s rules—the guy sort of works for us. Plus he’s older than me, but only by a couple of years. Thomas thinks a high school diploma puts the guy in the speed-pass line for the nursing home. The thing is, every time we’re together there’s all this crazy …” Unable to come up with a solid description, I made wordless circles with my hands. I guess I could’ve told her we almost made the circuits blow at the Phone Company, but figured I should probably keep that to myself. “I feel this … pull toward him.”
And it scares the bejeezus out of me.
“Em, that’s a big deal for you,” Lily said softly. She knew how hard it was for me to relate to people sometimes. “If there’s really a connection there, don’t you think Thomas would understand, make an exception?”
“I don’t know if it’s mutual. Besides, I think Michael agrees with Thomas. He’s the one who told me about the no-mixing business-with-pleasure rule.”
“Michael,” Lily said in a sultry voice before she giggled. “Nice name. You could always go all Romeo and Juliet if you had to. Keep your love a secret.”
“Yeah, because that worked out so well. There’s no love there, Lily.” And f
or me there probably never would be. No matter how much Dru protested, I didn’t think I had anything to offer.
“Abi’s back. Let’s go talk to her. I bet you won’t even have to fill out an app.”
“I don’t see her.” I craned my neck to look toward the kitchen door. She walked in two seconds later. I looked back at Lily. “Okay.”
She laughed uncomfortably and pushed herself out of her chair, but stopped in her tracks when I called out to her.
“Lily?” She turned back to face me. I gestured to the chair. “Help?”
Chapter 13
Thomas wanted to watch The Godfather. Again. I refused to surrender.
“But The Philadelphia Story is my favorite.” When he started to protest, I switched tactics. “Your wife is with child; you’re supposed to be catering to her every need.”
“She’s right, Thomas.” Dru nodded wisely. “And violence isn’t good for the baby.”
“The baby hasn’t even grown fingernails yet—how is he going to know we’re watching a mafia movie?”
“She is going to be sensitive just like her mother.” Dru looked up at him with wide eyes. “Surely you don’t want to take the risk?”
As the music that accompanied the title credits to The Philadelphia Story started, the doorbell rang. On my way back from the kitchen, snack bowl in hand, I called, “I’ve got it,” into the living room, and shuffled to answer the front door. Probably the pizza.
I opened the door to Michael, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, a look of misery on his face.
“Hey.” I hadn’t heard a peep from him in two days, and I felt supremely awkward. I pulled my robe closed over my purple striped sleep pants and tank top, putting the bowl of popcorn between us. “Did you need something?”
He eyed my bunny slippers. “Just you. Can we talk? Please, Emerson?”
“Give me a few minutes,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
The small lobby was deserted except for Michael when I found him there ten minutes later. I’d exchanged my robe for a sweat jacket, brushed my teeth, and at the last second sprayed on some perfume.
I left my bunny slippers on. Just to be cheeky.
I led Michael to the patio on the side of the building. It shared the same street view as the restaurant patio, as well as the same type of wrought-iron fence. Sitting down across from him at a glass-topped table, I waited for him to speak.
“I was wrong.”
Not exactly what I expected.
“Noble of you to apologize,” I said, inwardly cringing at the sarcasm in my voice, even though in my experience it was always best to run the defensive.
Michael leaned back heavily in the chair. “Listen, if you don’t want to work with me, I can try to find someone else to help—”
“No. No, I want you.” The words were out before I could stop myself. Michael’s smile was so wide, it exposed a dimple in his left cheek that I hadn’t noticed before. “To work with me.”
“Good. I promise from now on to keep any feelings I might have to myself.”
Feelings? What kind of feelings?
“There was another reason I wanted to talk to you.” He hesitated, drawing a deep breath. “You said you wanted the truth, and I want to tell you everything I can. Seeing time ripples from the past is only part of your gift.”
Gift was a really subjective term.
“There’s more?” I asked.
“This is going to sound impossible. Just hang with me. You’ve seen people from the past. Have you ever seen anyone … from the future?”
“I only see people who are dead. Dead people from the past. People from the future aren’t dead. How can a rip from the future show up in the present? Which would be their past, I guess.”
Wrinkles appeared on Michael’s forehead, I assumed from attempting to follow my logic. Understandable. I couldn’t follow it either.
“It’s not so much past, present, and future.” The creases grew deeper as he tried to explain. “It’s more fluid than that, almost parallel.”
“Then it’s inevitable?” I asked, defeated. “I’m going to have to deal with people from the future?”
He nodded. I felt like I’d been slapped across the face.
“Have you seen people from the future?” I asked.
“I started out seeing rips from the future, but now I see them from the past, too.”
Great. A whole other group of people to look out for at parties.
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, my voice edging closer to hysteria. “How did you know they were from the future? Did they show up in a hovercraft? With a trusty robot sidekick?”
“No.” He shook his head. His face grew more worried by the second. “At dinner you asked me about the first time I saw a rip from the past. I told you. But the very first rip I saw was from the future. We’d gone to Turner Field to watch the Braves play the Red Sox in an interleague game. The guy in line in front of me had on a World Series shirt. Something about the year—and the team that won—was off.”
Michael had been staring off in the distance as he relayed his experience. Now he focused on me.
“Two thousand four or two thousand seven?” I asked.
“Two thousand four.” He grinned. “When I reached up to touch his sleeve, my hand connected with his arm and he dissolved. I freaked, and my mom took me to the hospital. That’s how the Hourglass found me. They pay people to research that kind of thing.”
“People from the future. How strange. My rips show up in pilgrim bonnets or powdered wigs. But … people from the future. How strange,” I repeated. “Have you ever seen anyone you know?”
“Not exactly.” He looked away. His avoidance put my already overloaded senses on full alert.
“Michael?”
He said nothing but refocused his eyes on mine.
“Michael, who have you seen? Tell me.”
“I think this is a mistake,” he said, leaning forward to stand up. “Just forget it. You don’t really want to know.”
“No, I think I do.” I reached out to stop him, putting my hand on his shoulder then jerking away when the tremor started traveling up my arm. I repeated the question softly. “Who did you see from the future?”
He exhaled and leaned back in his chair before he answered.
“You.”
Chapter 14
Staring at Michael, I wondered which one of us was the nut job. I practiced my deep breathing, although I don’t actually know how to do deep breathing that is in any way official. But the chances were good I would pass out cold within seconds if I didn’t try.
Michael’s voice was cautious. “Em, it’s okay.”
“Don’t call me Em.” The nickname suggested way too much familiarity, which made sense, considering he knew me before I met him. Placing my forehead on the glass tabletop, I banged it a couple of times, mumbling under my breath.
I convinced myself not to run from the patio screaming, mostly because I would have to come back eventually. I did live upstairs. I was also pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to run in my bunny slippers. The fact that he saw the jazz trio at the party gave him some validity. Just a little. But now he was talking about people from the future, specifically me. I raised my head, trying not to whimper.
“I should’ve broken that more gently,” Michael said. “It’s just that when you found me you told me to—”
“Stop! Please don’t talk about anything I’ve said to you unless the words have been uttered in the past twenty-four hours. By me.” I pointed to myself for emphasis. “This me. If this is true”—I emitted a hysterical giggle—“how did you know who I was? Why did you believe me?”
“You were very convincing. You knew things about me, kind of like I know things about you now.”
“Like what?” The thought was intriguing enough for me to forget we were talking about the impossible.
“Let’s see. You’re a baseball junkie, an ou
t-of-place Red Sox fan like me, but you think designated hitters are a joke,” he explained, watching my face for my reaction, clearly enjoying the upper hand even in the midst of my breakdown. “You listen to bluegrass when you’re alone because you don’t want anyone to know you like it. You had a belly ring, but you took it out before you came home and Thomas found out.” He grinned and cut his eyes to my middle. I forced myself not to squirm. “And …”
He was dead on so far. I wondered why he stopped.
“What?”
“I’m not ready to give up all my secrets. Have I been wrong about anything?”
“No.” I sniffed. “Although the designated-hitter opinion is still in development.”
“You don’t have to think about it anymore. Now you know what you decided.”
“Whatever. So, when me from the future found you”—that just sounded insane—“what did I know about you?”
“Why should I tell you?” He was having a little too much fun.
“What if this is the only chance you get?” I pointed out. “What if the information you give me right now, in this conversation, is the only time you ever tell me what it is I eventually tell you to get you to believe me?” I hoped he would answer without making me explain that again because I was having a hard time keeping up with myself.
Michael’s grin grew wider, and I had the feeling he was on to me. “You told me that my favorite ice cream is spumoni, that I got stitches when I was seven and my scar is in a really interesting place—you knew where—that I had a teddy bear named Rupert I wouldn’t part with when I was little, and that the first time I saw you, now, in the present, you would … take my breath away.”
“Well.” Heat crept up my chest to my face.
He looked up at the night sky, speaking his next words so softly I almost couldn’t hear them. “You were right.”
Deep, slow breathing, Em. Deep, slow breathing.
“When I found you … was I a time ripple?” I asked after a quiet moment.
“That’s a little complicated,” he said, drumming his fingertips on the glass tabletop again.