Expiration Date (23 page)

“
MEGHAN!
”

Another moan—down on the second floor.

But now I knew where she’d be. She’d be in Erna and Billy’s old apartment—2-C.

Because Billy would have dragged her there.

She was on the floor of the empty apartment, trembling. She was covered in too much blood for me to see her wounds. Some of the blood had dried on the floor. She’d been here for a long time.

“Meghan stay with me, it’s going to be okay, the hospital’s just a few blocks away, I’m calling now, Meghan come on, look at me, I’m here, it’ll be okay.”

She mumbled.

I could barely make out the words.

Waiting for me.

Hallway.

He’d been waiting for her in the hallway, just before sunrise.

I fumbled with the phone. I don’t remember what I said to the 911 dispatcher, other than a woman’s been stabbed, please hurry, get here right now, please, God, PLEASE, followed by the address and the apartment number. I gave them Willie Shahid’s name downstairs.

I didn’t know first aid, other than to try to apply direct pressure and try to stop the flow of blood. But where was I supposed to start? Horrible gashes and scars covered Meghan’s face and arms, her pretty, elegant hands. The knife had slashed through her blouse, too, a number of times.

All I could do was watch her neck as it still trembled slightly—faint proof of life. All I could do was lie to her.

“Meghan you’re going to be okay,” I said. “The ambulance is on its way. The hospital is only a few blocks away. You’re going to be fine. Just a few scratches.”

It was all I could do.

No.

That
wasn’t
all I could do.

I reached into my pocket. I still had one half of a pill from last night—when I was parked outside the Adams Institute and tried to wake up Billy Derace.

I swallowed it, closed my eyes, feeling the burn in my blood.

Billy was playing with a G.I. Joe doll when I kicked in his front door. I held a steak knife with the three fingers of my good hand. All I had to do was stick it in his chest to the hilt and hold it there with my left hand until he stopped moving. Then I would leave. I wouldn’t have to worry about wiping the blade clean, or removing fingerprints from the handle. No forensics team was going to track me down. I wouldn’t have to burn my clothes.

I would just have to kill Billy.

Kill little Billy Derace, and life resets itself.

Meghan lives.

It was daylight, but I was being smart about it—wearing Grandpop’s overcoat, shoes and gloves. I also pulled a wool ski cap over my face. It was hard to breathe, and it partially blinded me, but I could still see through the loose gaps in the weave. I put the fedora on my head for extra protection. I didn’t care if the sun found me and nuked me to pieces. I just needed to kill Billy first.

Billy knew it, too.

“Mom!”

He screamed, and I couldn’t blame him. I would be terrified out of my mind, too, if a ghost wearing a face mask and a fedora kicked in my front door. But I didn’t give a shit. I whipped my three-fingered fist across his face. His little head snapped back, banging against the doors of a small hutch. Is this what it felt like to hit a kid, Erna? Was it a thrill to know that you were older, stronger and more vicious, and no matter what, this little boy had to take it?

The hutch doors popped loose from their magnetic locks and swung open slightly. Billy recovered quickly, though—kids often do—and scrambled across the dirty carpet, heading for the apartment door.

But I was older. Smarter. And I had the advantage of not being terrified. I made three quick leaps across the room and beat him there, kicking the door shut with my knee. The slam was like a rifle shot echoing throughout the stairwell.

“Mom!” he screamed again.

I placed my foot against his small chest and pushed hard. Not hard enough to break ribs, but enough to knock the air out of him. It’s funny, you calling for your mother now, little Billy. Think she’s going to come and save you, or join in? Maybe I’m doing her a favor. Maybe you did ruin her life.

You’ve ruined mine.

Now I had him where I wanted him. All I had to do was stick the knife in his chest to the hilt and hold it there until he stopped moving.

I had the knife out now, my three good fingers grasping the black plastic handle. Then I straddled Billy, my legs on either side of his chest. He was crying and screaming, hot fat tears running down the sides of his face. His skin was bright red.

“You didn’t give me a choice,” I said.

But he wasn’t listening. He was too insane with fear, not knowing where to turn or how to protect himself or call for help. Because now he’d realized that help was
not
coming. He shook his head back and forth as if he could shake himself out of this nightmare.

The knifepoint was just a few inches above his heaving chest.

All I had to do was stick in the knife and hold it there until he stopped moving.

Think about it as a dream, I told myself.

A nightmare.

A nightmare you
can
wake from.

It was as if Billy could read my mind; he knew what I was planning. This was not a normal beating. There would be no wiping the blood away, putting a Band-Aid over the wound. There would be no bruises that slowly fade until you’re no longer embarrassed to wear shorts outside. This would be the ultimate hurt, the final punishment for being a bad boy.

So he started slamming me with his small fists, desperately pounding at my chest and stomach. His body squirmed beneath my legs. I was focused on the knife in my hand and tried to will myself to plunge it down. Billy got lucky. He reached up and grabbed a fistful of my ski mask and yanked down, exposing my face.

“YOU!”

He saw me. He recognized me.

“I KNEW IT WAS YOU! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?”

Why
was
I doing this to him?

And then I finally put the last piece together.

Billy Derace didn’t have a grudge against my father. They hadn’t met one day in 1972. Billy Derace grew up wanting to kill my father because of what I was doing right now, right this very instant. He’d been scared to death as a twelve-year-old by a man wearing a mask and he’d ripped away the mask and grew up terrified of that face and then later, after years of abuse and drugs and time-traveling pills, he’d gone looking for the face that terrified him.

My
face.

But in 1980, the closest thing he could find was my father.

I was my father’s killer.

I let Billy go. I dropped the knife. I climbed to my feet. I left through the front door. I climbed the stairs. I heard a door slam down on the ground floor. Billy cried out for his mother. His mother cried back, an awful shriek that echoed through the stairwell. There was the urgent clacking of high heels up the stairs but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back into the office and collapse and close my eyes.

The daylight in the hallway scorched the skin on my face. It felt like the worst sunburn I’ve ever had.

I kicked in the door, just like I’d kicked in all the others in this building. There was a complete set now.

I collapsed to the ground, then got up on all fours. The half pill I’d swallowed was already wearing off. I felt dizzy.

Then Erna stepped through the open doorway, holding the gun.

“You hateful son of a bitch,” she said, then squeezed the trigger.

The slug sliced through my astral body and buried itself in the floor beneath me. I felt a searing pain in my abdomen, even though there was no entry wound, no blood.

I didn’t say anything.

She fired again, twice, and both shots were like hot needles in my chest, each stabbing me through my pectoral muscles. The pain made my eyes water. I dropped to my knees and lifted my left hand—the one with only three fingers.

“I’m going to kill you.”

I shook my head.

“It’s no use. You can’t, because I’m not actually here.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

Erna squatted next to me and lifted me up by the lapels of my borrowed overcoat. Her knuckles were raw, fingers bony. I’d never noticed how thin her hands were. It must hurt to be slapped by those hands.

I looked up at her.

“You think I’m dead but I’m not. I’m alive in the future. I just visit the past. So believe me when I tell you that unless you help your son, he’s going to grow up to hurt a lot of people. A lot of innocent people. He’s going to be a killer, Erna, unless you pull your head out of your ass and be a mother to him.”

“You’re from the devil! You’re here to torment me and my boy!”

“Today is June 18, 2009. My real body is laying in this apartment in the future. Billy’s in a mental hospital. You’re living on the streets, and you’re a goddamned mess.”

She repeated the date to herself.

“June 18, 2009.”

It couldn’t make sense to her. It must sound like the title of a science fiction movie.

I tried to make her understand.

“So you can’t kill me. It’s not even worth trying. But you can try to save your son.”

She dropped me. My head hit the floor with a thump. She didn’t quite react at first. My words had to be picked apart, analyzed.

Then she looked down at me, deranged smile on her face, and said:

“No…I know how to kill you.”

And then she began to rip the brown paper from the office windows.

Sunshine smashed through the windows, washing over my entire body. My overcoat began to sizzle and then fade away. My eyes burned as if I’d looked directly into the sun through a twin pair of high-powered telescopes. The skin of my face was beyond fevered; it was ablaze.

My ears functioned long enough to hear Erna ripping the rest of the brown paper from the windows. The nerves under my skin sensed the additional heat and light, and they curled up and withered inside my body.

And then I was gone.

I woke up in the same position on the floor. Belly down. Head turned to one side. Drool coming out of my mouth.

I don’t know how long I’d been there, or how long I would be there, because I was completely paralyzed, top of my head to my feet. Just like my fingers, just like my right arm, I knew my body was still there, every piece of it. But I had zero control over any of it.

I could die here.

I could die here and no one would know.

Many hours, I think, passed before the door creaked open behind me. I heard heavy footsteps.

“Hello, you bastard. It’s June 18, 2009.”

Oh God. No.

She showed herself to me first. She wanted to make sure I knew it was her, so I knew who’d be doing this to me. It was Erna, the bag lady from Frankford Avenue. Which was where she’d ended up after watching her son institutionalized, and her lover knifed to death under the El. She’d been crazy back in 1972, and the intervening years hadn’t done much to improve the situation.

But what made her real crazy, I realized now, were all the dead people she saw walking through her apartment and the empty apartments she cleaned. They’d make faces at her, because they were just goofing around, having fun. Dr. DeMeo’s patients, in their past and some even propelled forward into the future a few years. And she thought she was losing her mind, but was afraid to tell the doctor, because then she’d lose her place and her job and then what would they do? So she said nothing and she drank wine and tried to forget about all the dead people.

Except the one dead person who’d told her the truth. That he was actually alive, in another year altogether. He’d even helpfully supplied the date.

So Erna Derace had waited.

And on June 18, 2009, she went back to that apartment building.

And she used the last three bullets in the gun she’d been saving for thirty-seven years.

“Do you understand now?”

She shot me in the back three times, right between the shoulder blades.

Willie Shahid, owner of the bodega downstairs, heard sharp cracks, three in a row, then heard someone rumbling down the steps and out the front door. He made it out in time to see an old woman go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. What was that about, he must have wondered. Then he locked the front doors of his shop and walked upstairs to check it out, cell phone in hand.

Willie stood outside my apartment door—3-A. He knocked and waited. Something wasn’t right. He sniffed the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper filled his nostrils.
Gunpowder.
It  wasn’t an unfamiliar scent to Willie Shahid. Not in this neighborhood.

So Willie flipped open his cell and dialed 911, giving the address and even the floor.

A short while later the EMTs arrived, and then three squad cars from the Philly PD, 15th District.

The EMTs moved me to a stretcher and carried me out the front door of the building, under the rumbling El train.

But by that time, I was already dead.