No Other Story (18 page)

As he sped along the gravel surface, he thought nothing of the dark blue sports car parked at the end of the alley. He thought of one thing only: the time. Finally, he arrived at his former house, and from a full run he jumped and took hold of the top of the fence. He pulled himself up and was aghast to see, projected by the kitchen light onto the curtains, a very familiar silhouette of a very familiar person. And in that silhouette's hand was what appeared to be a silhouette cup of coffee.

As the silhouette cup of coffee moved closer to the silhouette person's mouth, Jason stood on top of the fence, trying to maintain his balance while retrieving from his pocket the baseball Sullivan had given him. From his wobbly position atop the fence, he gripped the baseball, reared back, and … slipped.

His chin caught the fence on the way to the ground,
snapping his neck back and knocking him nearly senseless. He tasted blood, and realized a large gash had been opened across his bottom lip by his very own teeth. He opened his eyes to see the baseball rolling slowly down the alley toward his sister as she rumbled his way, pumping her arms and legs like a locomotive at full steam.

“The ball,” Jason managed to garble with his swollen lower lip. “Throw it!”

Catherine spotted the autographed baseball lying at her feet. She picked it up and, with all her might, heaved it over the fence toward the house as Jason watched with blurred vision and listened with ringing ears. Long and painful seconds passed before finally the wonderful sound of breaking glass filled the air. Catherine had smashed the kitchen window, but had she done it in time? Jason pushed his belly from the ground and rose to his hands and knees. “Go,” he said.

Without hesitation, Catherine took a running start, planted her foot in the middle of her injured brother's spine, and launched herself to the top of the fence. She pulled up, swung her legs over, and dropped into her own backyard next to the swing set on which she had experienced her very first under-duck.

Seconds later, Ethan ran up to find his elder son lying in the alley, his chin covered in blood. “I'm okay,” Jason mumbled. “Go on.” As Ethan pulled himself over the fence, he saw Catherine racing toward the back patio.

By now lights had started to come on inside the house. Still half-asleep, Ethan's younger double ran from
the bedroom to find his wife with the kitchen phone to her ear. Right on his heels was Pinky, a full two years (or fourteen dog years) younger, and sporting a full coat of fur.

“What happened?” asked Ethan breathlessly. “What's going on?”

He looked down to see that the floor at Olivia's feet was littered with broken glass, a baseball, a shattered mug, and approximately six ounces of coffee, or, roughly, one full cup. Because Pinky had not yet developed psychic powers, the incident had come completely without warning.

“Someone threw something through the window,” Olivia said in an unsteady voice. “I'm calling the police.”

Before she could dial those three familiar numbers, there came a pounding on the kitchen door, accompanied by a voice that was awfully, but not quite entirely, familiar.

“Mom,” said the voice. “It's me. Open the door!”

Olivia looked at Ethan. Was it a trick? After all, wasn't Catherine fast asleep in her room down the hall? “Careful,” said Ethan as Olivia moved to the kitchen door and pulled back the curtain, only to be greeted by a most unusual sight. It was Catherine. Or was it? Though the resemblance was remarkable, this Catherine was taller, more mature-looking, and had much shorter hair. The young girl's eyes were filled with tears.

But was the girl real? Had the evil geniuses of Plexiwave somehow managed to manufacture a robotic version of her daughter in an effort to trick her into opening the door? “Mom, please,” she cried. At that moment Olivia's maternal instincts overpowered her fears and suspicions, and she
flung the door open. The short-haired girl on the back porch rushed in and immediately wrapped her arms tightly around Olivia's waist. The force of Catherine's hug caused Olivia to stumble back into the kitchen before finally regaining her balance. She looked to Ethan, but found no comfort in his equally confused face. She reached up and ran her hand gently across the girl's soft auburn hair.

Catherine sobbed at the long-awaited touch of the mother she hadn't seen since her death two years ago. “You're alive,” she said, pulling away just far enough to get a look at Olivia's face. “You're alive again.” Catherine's sobs turned to laughter, pure joy escaping from her body. For Olivia, there was no mistaking. That was definitely Catherine's laugh.

“Catherine?” she said. “Is it really you?”

“It's me, Mom,” she said. “I came here from the future.”

“From the future?” said Olivia. “What are you saying?”

“Oh my goodness,” said Ethan, rising to his feet. His jaw went slack. “I think what she's saying is that the LVR works.”

“It sure does,” came a familiar voice from the doorway. The voice belonged to Ethan Cheeseman—the other Ethan Cheeseman, older by two years and several tons of stress, which seemed to vanish the minute he laid eyes on his wife. Unshowered and without makeup, her hair a tangled mess, she was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“I'm confused,” said Olivia. “What's going on?”

“It's true,” said Catherine. “The LVR works. That's how we got here from two years into the future.”

Something suddenly occurred to Olivia. She looked at the younger Ethan, then at the older. “Wait a minute. That really was you on the phone last night.”

“It was,” said Ethan. “I'm sorry if I startled you. I don't blame you for hanging up on me.”

“This is unbelievable,” said Ethan the younger.

“Believe it,” replied the senior Ethan. “Now if you'll excuse me, I've been waiting for two years to do this.” He walked across the kitchen floor, took Olivia in his arms, and kissed her with a passion she hadn't experienced in far too long a time. The younger Ethan looked on with bemusement and, if he were to be completely honest, a good deal of jealousy. After all, another man was kissing his wife, even if that other man did happen to be himself.

“I've missed you so much,” said Ethan to his flabbergasted but very much alive wife.

“I … I don't know what to say,” Olivia stammered. She looked apologetically at her husband, who breathed a visible sigh of relief when his other self finally broke the embrace with his wife. The older Ethan walked over to the younger and extended his hand.

“Ethan Cheeseman,” said Ethan.

“Yes, I know,” said Ethan. “Nice to meet you.” The two men shook hands and chuckled at the absurdity of the situation.

Gasping for breath, eight-year-old Simon ran up the
stairs to the back porch and into the kitchen. The boy practically flew into the room and jumped into his mother's arms. Between heaving sobs of jubilation he blubbered the same words Catherine had. “You're alive,” he said. “You're really alive.”

“Of course I'm alive,” said Olivia. “I don't understand. What's going on?”

“Plexiwave,” said Catherine. “They poisoned your coffee.”

“And you died,” added Simon, wiping his teary eyes and his runny nose on his mother's robe.

Olivia looked at the shattered coffee mug scattered about on the wet tile floor, suddenly realizing how close she had come to death. “So then, you came here from the future to save me?”

“That's right,” said Ethan.

“But what about Jason? Where's Jason?”

“I'm right here,” came the garbled reply as Jason walked into the kitchen with Big's help and with Digs and Pinky following right behind.

“You're hurt,” said Olivia. She hugged and kissed her son, then helped him shuffle over to the kitchen table.

“I slipped off the fence,” said Jason, dabbing at his bloody lip with his shirtsleeve. “But I'm okay.” Olivia pulled a chair back, and with Big's assistance, Jason lowered himself onto it.

“Could you get some ice, Ethan?” Olivia instructed while examining Jason's badly split lip.

For a moment, the two Ethans just looked at each other before the younger of them said, “Sure,” and hurried over to the fridge.

“You're so tall,” Olivia said to Jason, pushing the long black curls away from his eyes. “And you have a mustache. And you have …” She looked at Big for the first time. “A girlfriend?”

“This is Big,” said Jason. “She's from 1668.”

“Hi,” said Big with a shy smile.

“It's lovely to meet you,” said Olivia, returning the smile. “Welcome to the twenty-first century.” She laughed to herself at the idea of one of her offspring being old enough to have a girlfriend. Adults are fond of saying children grow up so fast, but rarely does a mother witness them age by two full years overnight.

Ethan brought over a small bundle of ice cubes wrapped in a wet washcloth and handed them to Jason. Jason pressed the cloth to his swollen lip and winced at the sting of it.

“Will you knit me a sock puppet named Steve?” asked Simon, refusing to let go of his mother's robe. “Please?”

“You saved my life,” said Olivia, taking the opportunity to reach down and scruff up Simon's spiky hair. “I'll knit you a sock puppet named anything you like. Then you can get rid of that dirty old thing.”

“It's not dirt,” said Gravy-Face Roy. “It's gravy.” Just then, Olivia noticed the presence in her kitchen of a small brown fox and what appeared to be a dog without hair.

“Why is there a fox in my kitchen?” she asked.

“That's Digs,” said Jason. “He's Big's traveling companion.”

“Okay,” she said. “But what the heck is that thing?”

“That's Pinky,” said Simon. “Don't you recognize her?”

“She lost all her hair when she drank your medicine out of the toilet,” Jason explained.

“And she developed psychic powers too,” added Catherine. “She's saved our lives many times over the last two years.”

“It
is
Pinky, isn't it?” said Olivia upon a closer look. She gave the dog a good scratch behind the ears, and the younger Pinky scurried beneath the kitchen table with a yip and a whimper.

“It's okay, Pinky,” said Simon reassuringly. “It's just you in the future, that's all.”

The Cheeseman children were generally quite heavy sleepers, but all the commotion was bound to wake them eventually. The first to wander down the hall to see what all the fuss was about was Catherine. To Ethan and Olivia, the sudden appearance of slightly older versions of their entire family made sense, to a certain degree. After all, they had been working on a machine designed to transport people through time. But for Catherine, who knew only that her parents had been working on another one of their crazy inventions, the sight of herself standing in her very own kitchen was nothing less than mind-boggling, which was saying a lot, considering she possessed a mind that was not easily boggled.

“What's going on?”

For a moment, the two Catherines sized each other up. The older Catherine smiled and looked at her younger self with envy. The long-haired ten-year-old had lived a fairly idyllic life, having never known the heartache and stress that her older self had endured over the past two years on the run. “Hi,” said the older Catherine to the younger with a warm smile. She felt protective of her, as if she were a younger sister; and in a strange way, that's exactly what she was.

“Who are all these people?” Catherine asked no one in particular. “They look just like …”

“That's because they are,” her father said, draping his arm across her shoulders. “They're us. They've come here from the future.”

“Okay,” said Catherine flatly. “Apparently I'm still asleep, because this is one crazy dream. I'll be going back to bed now.” She turned and started back down the hall when Jason stumbled out of his bedroom and nearly ran into her.

“What's all the noise out here?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Oh, it's just a dream,” said Catherine. “Go back to bed.”

“Oh, okay,” said Jason. He turned and took a step back, then stopped and turned again. It often happens in dreams that people you know will make a guest appearance, but will look slightly different from their actual selves. When relating the details of a dream to someone, it is not uncommon to say, “I had this dream last night. You were in it, but
you were nine feet tall with two heads, four sideburns, and an Irish accent.”

Never before had this seemed more true to Jason as he scanned the faces in the room looking back at him. In addition to a pretty girl dressed all in buckskin and a fox sniffing around the kitchen looking for crumbs, there were also slightly less than exact doubles of everyone but his mother. He thought the boy with the patchy teenage mustache bore a striking resemblance to himself, but this boy was older, taller, his eyes filled with a wisdom that Jason himself lacked. “This isn't a dream, is it?” asked Jason.

“It's not a dream,” said Olivia. “Now, I know this might be hard for you kids to understand, but, you know that device your father and I have been working on for the past couple of years?”

“The one that was so secret you wouldn't tell us what it was?” said Catherine.

“Right,” said Ethan the younger. “Well, we can tell you now. It's a time machine.”

“A time machine?” said Catherine skeptically.

“Yes,” said Olivia. “And, apparently, it works.”

“But if they're here from the future,” said Jason, “then where's our future mom?”

Ethan looked at his wife, then back at the younger Jason. His voice cracked as he spoke. “She … she died, I'm afraid.”

“Died?” gasped Catherine.

“Yes,” Ethan confirmed. “Poisoned, to be exact. That's why we had to come back. To save her. But she's still not
out of danger. None of us are. Because of this time machine, we're all at risk from those who would do anything to get their hands on it.”