TIme After Time

and he gives me a disgusted shake of his head before he follows them.

I push a few gawkers out the door, and the little bundle of bells rings hard as I slam it closed. I snap the deadbolt into place.

As the sirens blare away and the spinning red lights disappear from view, I grab Anna’s hand and lead her to the other side of the bookstore. We walk by the front desk, and I spot the flowers I bought her this morning. They’re in a vase. In water. Exactly as promised. I take a deep breath.

“We’re going back to this morning.” Justin’s in the back room but I keep my voice low anyway. “Listen to me, okay? We have to go all the way back to this morning—back to the hotel. That’s the only time we weren’t moving or in plain sight today. I can’t time it right otherwise.”

Anna doesn’t move or say a word.

“We’re going back to ten fifteen, right before you left your dad at the hotel. You’re going to ride home with him instead and that’ll give you three hours to watch him for…whatever…some kind of sign that something’s wrong.”

She blinks a few times. “What if we get all the way back and nothing’s happened?”

“I don’t know, then tell him something’s wrong with you. Tell him you’re having trouble breathing, or come up with an excuse to stop by the hospital and see your mom. Do whatever you have to do to be sure he goes straight to a hospital.”

Anna nods.

“Do you remember where he parked the car?” She thinks about it for a minute. “Yeah,” she whispers.

She’s ghost-white and trembling. “You have to pull yourself together now, okay? Don’t worry. We’ll fix it.” A vision of my battered self, lying in a puddle of blood, stuck who knows where or when, flashes in my mind. I push it away. The side effects don’t matter. All that matters is getting Anna back to this morning.

I rest my forehead against hers. I don’t even have to tell her to close her eyes. Before I close mine, I think back to this morning and try to lock in a mental image of the hotel and a precise moment I can let the other “me” disappear without disruption. I picture the circular driveway leading up to the hotel where Brooke and I picked Anna up this morning and—

“Brooke.” I didn’t mean to say it aloud, but I must have, because I open my eyes to find Anna staring at me. I drop her hands and rub my temples with my fingertips. “What will happen to Brooke?” I hear myself say.

She was with me the entire time. If Anna and I go back without her, what happens? Does Brooke disappear too? If she’s in the car when I get back, what do I do with her? If she’s not in the car, where has she gone?

I have to go back even earlier. I have to go back to this morning, before I picked Brooke up. I take Anna’s hands again, but this time, it’s not because we have a destination. Without thinking, I start voicing everything that’s going through my head aloud. “I’m not sure how to do this. It’s not clean, like the others were. It just…messes with so many things.” I barely have time to get the words out when Justin peeks around the corner and flies down the aisle toward us.

“There you are. I found your mom,” he says to Anna. “She’s still at the hospital. I’m supposed to take you.” Anna untangles her fingers from mine and follows Justin out the door. As he puts his arm over her shoulders, she stops and turns around. I’m still standing exactly where she left me.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I stuff my hands in my pockets and follow them, still thinking through the morning in my mind, desperately looking for a loophole.

Justin’s car is parked across the street, around the corner from the record store. He opens the door for Anna and she climbs in while I slump down in back. I’ve never felt so powerless.

When we pull up to a stoplight, Anna points out the window as she looks at Justin. “Would you pull over, please?” Justin drives through the intersection and stops on the next block, and Anna gets out of the car, pulls the bucket seat forward, and climbs in back next to me. She rests her head on my shoulder and whispers in my ear, “I can’t let you go back.”

I look up at the rearview mirror and my eyes meet Justin’s. He stares at me for a moment, and then hits the gas.

29

Mrs. Greene spots us the second we round the corner and step into the ICU waiting room, and all three of us freeze in place as she bolts from her chair and speeds across the room toward us. She’s still wearing her uniform.

She hugs Anna hard and then leads her away from us, returning to the chairs in the corner, where she fires questions at her. Anna sounds calm as she fills her mom in on everything that happened, from the moment she and her dad left the house the night before to the series of events that led to her finding him on the bookstore floor.

Justin gives me a look and I give him one back, silently confirming that neither one of us knows what to do with ourselves. He glances awkwardly around the room and I point at a couple of chairs a polite distance away. We spend the next twenty minutes in silence.

Then Justin’s parents burst through the door, and that sends the energy level soaring again. “Where is she?” Mrs. Reilly asks as she heads straight for us. Justin hugs her and then points over toward the corner. I wish I didn’t have to overhear Anna’s mom repeat the same horrible details, but I’m close enough to pick up every word she says and every gasp that leaves Mrs. Reilly’s mouth.

I lean over, resting my elbows on my knees so I can cover my ears and at least muffle the sound. I’m just about to go outside and get some fresh air when I hear Anna’s voice.

“Do you have a quarter?” she asks as she collapses into the chair next to me. She kicks her legs out straight and lets her head fall back against the wall while Justin and I dig around in our pockets.

“Here,” Justin says.

Anna reaches across me to take it and stands up. “I’m going to find a pay phone and call Emma. I’ll be right back.”

Anna’s gone for a full ten minutes, and Justin and I return to our silent state. But then the doctor enters the waiting room and calls out, looking for Mrs. Greene. She stands up and crosses the room. The two of them speak in hushed tones for a moment.

Her mom’s head spins in my direction. “Bennett, would you go find Anna?”

I move quickly, out of the waiting room and into the sterile halls, but I don’t have the slightest idea where she is. I turn down corridors and double back when they look like dead ends, and I finally spot her at the far end of a hallway, leaning against the wall and playing with the steel phone cord as she fills her best friend in on what happened.

She sees me coming.

Doctor, I mouth, and Anna says something I can’t hear before she slams the phone down hard. The two of us speed back to the waiting room.

As soon as she’s within arm’s reach, Anna’s mom takes her by the shoulders and pulls her closer, then waves the rest of us over to her. “Go ahead.”

The six of us stand in a semicircle while the doctor explains far too matter-of-factly that Mr. Greene has had a stroke. She goes into detail about the battery of tests they’re running to determine exactly what time it occurred and the extent of the damage.

She looks right at Anna’s mom, addressing her more like a peer than the wife of a patient. “Strokes are tricky at first, as you probably know. Everything hinges on how long he was out before your daughter found him. When the medical team arrived on the scene, they administered medication that dissolved the clot, but…” The doctor trails off and Anna starts twirling her hair around her finger. “Until we can pinpoint exactly where in the brain the stroke occurred and how long ago it happened, we won’t know about his chances for recovery.”

Anna takes a few steps back, as if that’s too much for her to take, and I ask her mom if I can take her outside to get some air.