She must have seen my answer in my expression.
"Well," she said, "obviously I can't just let you run off all alone after that brush with death," which sounded like the prelude to an argument with me. But instead, she swept to her feet. "Come on this way, then." She took my arm and hustled me down the front path to the sidewalk.
"Doing all right?" she asked, and—when I nodded—she led me down the street, around the corner, down another street, around another corner. Her heels made a rapid
click, click, click
on the sidewalk, a sound that brought back memories of when I'd been much younger and she'd been well and active, a sound I associated with her, because I pretty much live in sneakers and my mother wears flats—my father as well as her current husband being on the short side. Despite her heels, it was me, with my sore knee, who had trouble keeping up.
"There's a little park on the next block," Eleni said.
It was the first time I realized where we were, since the park—one of those urban, one-block affairs with a few trees, two benches, one drinking fountain, and a statue of some Civil War guy—is still there today, three blocks from where Nana used to live. Which, by the way—thank you very much, Larry—is nowhere near Westfall Nursing Home.
"Sure, I remember this place," I said, squinting as I looked around, and had the sense not to add,
You used to bring me here when I was a little kid.
Eleni sat me down on one of the benches, then tugged at the hole in my jeans to get a peek at my knee. "I think," she told me, "once you stop moving, it'll stop bleeding." She gave me an of-course-that-is-not-to-say-I-approve look. From her pocket, she got a handkerchief—not a tissue, but an embroidered cloth handkerchief—which she proclaimed as being "mostly clean," and went to moisten it at the fountain.
As soon as she was out of hearing, I whispered fiercely, "Larry!" No answer. Of course, without my glasses I wouldn't be able to see him or—as part of the weirdness of those glasses—to hear him, but that didn't mean he couldn't make his toxic little presence known. "Larry, you better get that little blue butt of yours out here immediately," I said.
Eleni cleared her throat, making me jump, since I hadn't been aware of her returning, and she sat down beside me. But maybe she hadn't heard me after all, because she didn't comment and only concentrated on my knee. "This
will
need better looking after," she told me sternly as she picked gravel out of the wound.
It stung like crazy, but I figured that was the least of my worries.
"Are you sure you didn't strike your head?" she asked me.
"Positive," I assured her. "If I'm acting a bit like a spaz, it's only because I can't see much without my glasses."
She glanced up at me, but I couldn't tell what I'd said wrong. "Uh-huh," she said, not sounding at all convinced. Then she said, "Well, so let me introduce myself: My name is Eleni."
"Eleni," I repeated. I was supposed to call my nana "Eleni"?
She grinned. "Well, actually it's Helen, but 'Eleni' is the Greek way of saying it."
"But we're not Greek," I blurted before catching myself.
Luckily, she must have assumed I meant "we" as a nation rather than "we" as a family, or maybe she
just figured I meant to say "you." She shrugged and said, "Helen is ... well, honestly, it's a grandmother's name."
I tried not to choke. The one thing it showed was that I was not the only one in my family who would have preferred a sexy name. I wondered if there was a Greek equivalent to "Wendy" and guessed probably not.
"So," she prompted. "And you are...?"
We were on dangerous ground. What if I did or said something that changed history?
Hello. I'm Wendy, and I'm your granddaughter, and I accidentally came back to the 1950s, and now I'm looking for a way back.
It might be enough to scare her out of ever having children, and then I'd never be born.
I'd already hesitated too long to just make something up, and she was looking at my T-shirt, emblazoned with the Nike name and trademark swoosh. "Nick," she misread, then corrected it to "Nike," saying it with only one syllable, to rhyme with "like." "Surely that's not your name?"
"No," I admitted.
She waited another moment. "Hit your head and can't remember, or don't want to say?"
"I'd like to tell you"—I couldn't bring myself to call Nana "Eleni"—"but I can't."
"Okay," she said agreeably. "A secret is better than not being able to remember. If you couldn't remember, I'd have to get help whether you wanted me to or not. But I can't just call you 'Hey you' or 'Nike.'"
While I tried to think of something, she suggested, "How about 'Jeannette'?"
My mother's name. I remembered how that had been the first serious sign of her Alzheimer's—when she couldn't keep me and my mother straight. I tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked, "Why 'Jeannette'?"
Eleni shrugged. "I've always liked the name. Kind of French, but not too much. I have a stuffed bear named Jeannette. Actually, if I ever get married, I plan to name my first child Jeannette, so I'm really hoping it'll be a daughter and not a son."
I had to laugh.
"There, then. It's settled. So, I'm assuming, Jeannette, that you don't want me to contact the police and tell them about the man who almost ran you down?"
"I'm the dork who fell off the curb," I said.
I guessed by the long look she gave me that there weren't dorks in the 1950s. Or, more likely, there were, but they were called something else. "Well," she countered, "but he should have stopped."
"Besides," I said, "all I could say was that it was a big gray car. That's not much to go on, but I don't know cars. I can't even keep straight which is a van and which is an SUV."
From her somewhat dazed expression, I gathered at least one or the other of those had not yet been invented.
"Oldsmobile," Eleni finally said. "The hood ornament is quite distinctive. License number M13487."
To fill in the silence, I said, "I can't see much without my glasses."
She nodded as if saying,
Okay, well, I'll buy that for now.
"How can you remember the number?"
"
M
for Monroe County, then
1
because he was so self-centered and was only thinking of himself;
3
—that's you, me, and Betsy; add all those numbers together to get
4;
add all the numbers so far together to get
8;
but the driver took off, so you subtract the first number from the last number to get
7:
M13487."
This game with numbers from the grandmother who could no longer remember her own name.
"You know," I said, "I don't even know what you just said."
She shrugged.
"Anyway," I repeated, "it was my own fault."
"And you don't want to involve the police," she guessed.
I didn't say anything because there was nothing to say.
"Are you in trouble," she asked, "or is it your friend, Larry?"
Being of quick mind and sharp wit, I said, "Huh?"
"Because I will tell you something," Eleni said, "Betsy was taking a picture of me"—she gave a dismissive wave of her hand, and blushed as she explained all in a rush—"because she wants to send a picture of me to her cousin so that he'll come here for August and stay with her parents rather than going to his other aunt and uncle in Sodus before he enlists in the army..." She hesitated, obviously embarrassed at the thought of using her picture to tempt a young man into summering in Rochester—and meanwhile I tried not to wonder if the young man in question was Papa: What I did
not
need to do was to influence
anything
that had already happened. "Anyway," she continued, "so Betsy was facing me, and I was facing the spot where you..." She hesitated again, this time groping for the right words. "The spot where one second you weren't. And then you were."
I used that time-honored tradition of taking a moment to scratch my head while I tried to come up with some believable explanation. "You must have blinked," I said.
Eleni laughed. "No," she said firmly. "Try again."
"Maybe the flash blinded you?"
Ignoring my babbling, she told me suddenly, "You look very much like my sister, who died."
"I am not a ghost," I informed her.
For a moment she looked annoyed. "I didn't say I thought you were her. Besides,
if
Mathilda came back to Earth, which I don't for a moment think she might, I can't believe the first thing she would do would be to step into the path of an oncoming car. I just meant: There's a strong resemblance." She tipped her head and looked closely at me. "You look like me, too."
Don't I wish,
I thought.
She finished, "Almost as though, maybe, we're related..."
I was willing to go so far as to admit, "I suppose I could be from some very distant branch of your family."
"Except none of us can pop into existence like something out of a Flash Gordon movie."
"I don't know Flash Gordon," I said.
"Don't try to change the subject."
Once again she tipped her head and scrutinized me. "You dress oddly...," she said, which I guess I did in a world of pastel shirtwaist dresses and white gloves and hats, "and you speak rather oddly, too..."—and here I'd been congratulating myself on avoiding such dated references as manned space flights, Snoop Dogg, or SPAM as anything besides lunch meat. My grandmother asked, "So are you a crazy person who by coincidence just happens to look like a family member...?" Her eyes grew wide as a new thought came to her. "You're not from this time!" she gasped. "You're a time traveler from the future." She gave another gasp. "Are you the daughter I'm going to have?"
"No," I said, wondering how—in minutes—she had come to the conclusion that I had most needed to keep her from.
"Granddaughter?" she pressed.
"No," I said, but perhaps not so passionately as before, for she leaned back with a self-satisfied look on her face.
"So what have you come back from the future to warn me about?"
"Nothing," I protested.
She was sitting there, considering—I could tell—
analyzing her life, trying to second-guess herself, attempting to figure out what she had done that she shouldn't have, or what she hadn't done that she should have, which had caused disastrous enough results that a messenger had been sent through time to intervene. I'd seen enough
Star Trek
reruns to know how the slightest change I caused here could escalate to dangerous proportions by my time—if my time ever arrived now that I'd blundered into my own family history.
"Eleni, please," I begged. "Pretend I'm not here. You haven't done anything wrong or caused anything bad to happen."
"Then why did you come here?" she asked.
It seemed safest to tell her the truth. "By accident," I said.
She gave me that skeptical look I was coming to recognize. So, without exactly admitting I was her granddaughter, I told her everything about the glasses, how I'd found them, the strange things they let me see. The one part I didn't tell her was about Westfall Nursing Home. What could I say?
One day, you will be old, and your mind will fail?
But I explained how Julian had followed me, and how, by running away from him, I'd found myself in a new world. I told about the elves who had captured him, and
about that little blue blot on the universe, Larry, and how he'd led me to believe that all I needed to get home was to click my heels three times and say, "There's no place like home."
"Gee whiz," Eleni said slowly when I'd finally finished, which sounded like one of those cute, mild fifties expressions. I didn't have the heart to tell her what
whiz
means today. She said, "Okay, explain again about this elf fellow Julian."
"What?" I said. "Specifically?"
"Why are you assuming the worst about him?"
"Excuse me?" I said.
"It just seems like you abandoned him in a very bad situation."
"Maybe," I admitted.
She gave me a look that I recognized from when I'd been five years old and claimed an intruder must have broken into the house and stolen the cookies Nana had told me were for
after
dinner.
"All right," I conceded. "Probably. But I'm not sure what that has to do with anything."
"I'm just trying to understand. So he began going to your school in September, was always kind of quiet, never caused any trouble. Showed concern when he thought you were shaken up from the bus accident."
"He was after my glasses," I interrupted.
"Could you have stopped him from grabbing them away from you when you were outside the nurse's office?" Eleni asked. "All alone? Just the two of you?"
"Hmmm," I said.
"Sounds to me like he didn't know about them till after this Tiffanie girl told him. How long have you known her? Did she go to grammar school with you?"
Grammar
school? I didn't know if that meant elementary, middle, junior high, or high, but rather than admit that, I just explained, "I met her in ninth grade."
"And so she's made your life miserable since then?"
What
was
she getting at? Slowly, hesitantly, I said, "No."
"Generally a mean-spirited girl, is she?"
"Not really," I had to say. "She's, you know, a cheerleader type." Did they have cheerleaders in the 1950s? "You know, pretty, popular, never really pays attention to anybody not in her crowd. Not the worst of the type," I had to admit.
Eleni said, "So it wasn't until you saw her looking ugly that you came to distrust her?"
That was making me sound like the kind of girl who makes friends only with attractive people, and pokes fun at the rest. Was that what I was like? Not only a coward, but a small-minded coward? "She was
old
and ugly," I told Eleni. "She looked like a witch."
Eleni raised her eyebrows at me. "So you distrust Julian for being too good-looking, and Tiffanie for not being good-looking enough."
"They're not human," I said, "and they're trying to pass themselves off as though they are."
"Which is a bad thing," Eleni said in a tone somewhere in between statement and question.