The Time Traveler's Boyfriend (6 page)

“Okay,” I say.

Adam grins at me. Damn, he is young. I really feel like a cougar, even though in reality he was born two years before I was. “I’m going to put my bike in the lobby. Promise me you won’t go anywhere?”

“I promise.”

Adam hops up the steps to his building with his bike. God, he is limber. He’s one of those guys who always climbs steps two at a time—never would have thought it. How does he have so much energy? It’s almost exhausting to watch. Honestly, it’s too bad that I have less than an hour left before I go back to 2013. This situation could get pretty interesting.

When Adam returns, he’s untucked his pants from his socks, and he’s got this big eager grin on his face. He hops down the steps of his building again two at a time and lands right next to me with a resounding thump. “I’m Adam, by the way,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “I’m psychic, remember?”

“Oh, right,” he laughs. “So what’s my last name then, Psychic Girl?”

“Schaffer,” I say.

That wipes the smile off his face. He squints at me. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

Yeah, from sixteen years in the future. “No.”

“What’s your name?” he asks.

I can’t tell him my real name. I didn’t think this situation would come up, so I say the first name that pops into my head: “Tina.”

“Cute,” he says. “You look like a Tina.” I look at his face and I can’t help but wonder if this Adam is as good at eating girls out as his future counterpart. Probably not. He’s much younger and less experienced, and also he doesn’t really need to be good at it. The lower half of his body isn’t paralyzed, after all. And it never will be, thanks to me.

Of course, I can’t help but wonder if he’ll still be good at going down on me when I return to 2013. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll hate it. Maybe it’ll be one of those things he’ll only be willing to do on Valentine’s Day and my birthday.

That would be a huge loss. But I guess it’s selfish to be thinking that way.

“So where are we going?” I ask Adam, as he takes long strides toward the crosswalk.

“I thought you’re psychic,” he says, winking at me.

“Being psychic doesn’t work that way,” I explain, rather lamely.

“Got it,” Adam says. He points across the street, to a small café. “They have great coffee there. And whatever else you’d like.”

When he says “whatever else you’d like,” he’s referring to
food
. I’m assuming. Still, my heart speeds up a notch.

The light turns green, and Adam marches into the crosswalk. But before I can follow him, a yellow taxi appears out of nowhere and slams into him. I watch in horror as Adam’s body goes flying like a rag dog at least ten feet as the taxi screeches to a halt. Adam lies on the pavement, completely motionless.

I can’t freaking believe that just happened.

A crowd has already formed by the time I race over to Adam’s body. Is he
dead
? Did my saving him from being hit on his bike mean that he’d get killed as a pedestrian? I push my way through the crowd, falling to my knees beside him, barely even noticing how the gravel cuts into my skin through my jeans. There’s blood on his face, but I can’t figure out where he’s bleeding from. But then he groans and I know he’s still alive. For now.

“Adam,” I whisper, taking his hand in mine. Please don’t die. Please …

I hear sirens in the distance. And then I hear something else, a familiar whooshing noise. And I realize that I’m seconds away from disappearing. “Nobody move him!” I warn the people surrounding him, but even my voice seems to be fading.

I release Adam’s hand and back away from the crowd. There are so many people around, but nobody’s paying much attention to me when Adam is half-dead on the street. I grab onto a blue mailbox and crouch down as the world starts to spin. I feel sick, so sick … and then …

I’m gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Adam’s living room comes back into focus. I stand still as long as I possibly can because I don’t want “something bad” to happen, but as soon as everything seems steady, I collapse onto the floor. I retch somewhat unattractively, but at least I don’t throw up this time. I guess I already emptied my stomach.

I lift my head and see that Adam is next to me. He’s alive—thank God! Thank God, thank God. I was so scared that he … well, I don’t even want to think about it.

And he’s still in his wheelchair, which comes as both a relief and a deep disappointment. I look up at his face and see the same lines around his eyes, the same gray hairs, but something is different about him somehow. I can’t quite put my finger on it. “Claudia,” he says, wheeling over to me. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

I nod, getting unsteadily to my feet. I look around the room. Everything looks exactly the same as when I left, right down to the yellow mustard stain on Adam’s ratty couch. All the same. Yet I look back at Adam and I still get that sense he’s different somehow, but I still can’t say what it is. It’s driving me crazy.

Adam looks up at me, shifting in his wheelchair. “So, um, what happened? I thought you were going to stop me from walking in front of that taxi?”

“No,” I say. “I was supposed to keep
your bike
from getting hit by a taxi. And I did.”

Adam stares at me. “What are you talking about? My bike? I wasn’t on a bike.”

“You
were
,” I insist. “That’s what you told me. Keep you from getting on a bike so you wouldn’t get hit by a car. And I did!”

“What?” Adam blinks at me. “You … I never …”

We stare at each other for a minute, then Adam looks down at his legs. “Maybe,” he says, heaving a sigh, “you can’t change the outcome. Maybe the future is unchangeable.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I mean, I did what he wanted me to do. I risked my life going through a goddamn wormhole so he’d be able to walk again, and now he’s saying that it didn’t matter? That there was no way I could change anything?

“But I
did
change things,” I point out. “You were supposed to get hit on your bike and … I changed that part.”

“Fantastic,” Adam snorts. “I’m still fucking paralyzed.” He rubs his face, as if trying to push out the reality of what’s happening right now. All his hopes were apparently pinned on this time machine and fixing what happened to him all those years ago.

And that’s when I realize what’s different about Adam. He’s always been a bit lackadaisical about shaving, to the point where I’ve rarely seen him without some degree of beard growth on his chin. Now he’s got about a day’s worth of stubble, but even through the mix of gray and brown hairs on his face, I can see a two-inch scar running along his jawline.

Without thinking, I reach out to graze the scar with my fingertips. Adam jerks away from me, frowning. “What are you doing?”

“That scar …” I murmur. “How did you get it?”

He furrows his brow. “What are you talking about? I broke my jaw when the taxi hit me. I told you that.” Adam blanches as the realization dawns on him. “Are you saying that before you went back, that scar wasn’t there?”

I nod.

Adam’s eyes turn glassy. “My jaw was shattered, Claudia. It was wired shut for
two months
. I couldn’t eat. I had to drink my meals through a freaking straw. It took almost a year before I could even eat without it hurting when I tried to chew. It
still
hurts sometimes when the weather is bad.” He shakes his head. “And you’re saying that didn’t happen until you went back and tried to fix things?

I swallow. “Uh. I guess so.”

Now he’s the one who looks like he’s going to throw up. “Jesus Christ,” he finally says.

My sentiments exactly.

***

For the rest of the day, I can tell Adam is trying to pretend like what happened doesn’t matter, like he doesn’t care that no matter what I do in that time machine, he’ll never walk again. But it’s clear he does care. We eat a quiet dinner in his house, which I cooked.
It’s mac and cheese from a box, which is pretty much the only dish I can manage to not screw up. But I still manage to overcook the noodles, which are all soggy. It’s barely edible, which isn’t such a bad thing considering it’s obvious neither of us feels very hungry.

“I hear all this great stuff about stem cells,” I say, trying to perk Adam up. “I mean, it’s not like there’s no hope. All this stem cell research …”

“Not in my lifetime,” Adam mumbles, not lifting his eyes from his cheesy dinner. He makes circles in the pile of noodles with his fork.

“You’re not
that
old,” I say, trying to tease him, but he doesn’t smile. Okay, new tactic: “Listen do you want me to try again? I mean, maybe I should tell you to just not even leave your house that day? You can’t get hit by a taxi if you don’t go outside, right?” I really don’t want to, but I’ll do it. For him. If he needs me to.

Adam shakes his head emphatically. “No way. I spent months with my jaw wired shut, which apparently wouldn’t have even happened if you hadn’t tried to help me. If you go back again, I’ll probably end up blind and deaf or something. No thanks. A disfiguring scar is bad enough.”

Admittedly, it doesn’t sound so great having a jaw wired shut, but I have to take exception to his use of the term “disfiguring scar.” The scar on Adam’s jaw is, in fact, incredibly sexy. He’s always been a bit of a dork and this scar gives him a new, somewhat rugged edge. I want to tell him that, but I have a feeling he’ll just think I’m patronizing him.

“Well, look on the bright side,” I say in an overly chipper voice. “If you weren’t in a wheelchair, you’d have to re-modify your whole house. I don’t know if you realize how back-breaking it is to use your sink if you’re standing up. And you’re much taller than I am.”

Adam lifts his eyes from his plate to stare at me. “Claudia, seriously. This isn’t helping.”

I grit my teeth. “Well, what do you want me to say? Is the only way you can ever be happy is if you’re able to walk?”

“No!” Adam says, dropping his fork onto his plate with an echoing clatter. “That’s not it at all. I’ve been in this wheelchair for sixteen years and … well, I guess I’m used to it by now. It’s not even that. It’s everything that happened between then and now. All that pain. I was hoping that when you went back, it would just be … erased.”

He’s talking, of course, about The Bitch. That girl who ripped his heart to shreds. Who made it so that every subsequent girl would always be The Other
Girl. Even me, apparently.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says quietly. “You’re so great, Claudia. You deserve a guy who’s totally amazing, not some messed up cripple who can’t even commit to you.”

I wish I could fix this for him. I see the pain on his face, etched into the lines on his skin, and I want desperately to change the past for him. I look across the room at my step, lying abandoned on the floor, still hooked up to the laptop computer, and I wonder if maybe it’s not too late. Maybe there really is a way to change the past.

A few years after his injury, Adam met a beautiful girl named Jessica who messed him up big time, and he hasn’t ever recovered from it. You can pay for all the therapy you want, but the best thing would be if he never met The Bitch to begin with. As my mother always said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And that’s how I get the idea.

CHAPTER NINE

My plan is pretty brilliant if I do say so myself.

Adam’s life got wrecked when he met The Bitch. She found him when he was vulnerable, never having had a relationship since his injury. If he never meets The Bitch, then maybe he won’t be so bitter about relationships now.

But how do I stop him from meeting The Bitch?

And this is the brilliant part:

Really, what young Adam needed was a
nice
girl to counteract her influence. And fortunately, there was a very nice girl running around New York in the late nineties. Her name was Claudia.

This is my plan:

Go back in time again while Adam is asleep. Luckily, the machine seems pretty user-friendly and I’ve watched him work it twice now. I need to find young Adam and young me, introduce them, and watch them fall madly in love. The Bitch will never have a chance. Then I come back to the present, and Adam and I will probably already be married. We’ll probably be living in suburbia and have three beautiful children: two girls and a little boy. And a dog named Spot.

Brilliant, right?

There are a few details here and there that I need to work out. First of all, I can’t just go for a few hours, because it’ll take time to even find Adam and my younger self, and then even more time to ensure that they fall in love. I’m thinking … two weeks. How long does it take two people to fall in love anyway? I know the first time Adam laid eyes on me, he was smitten, and when I met him, I felt the same way. So I’d imagine it will be pretty quick. Maybe I’ll even have time to take in a movie or two. Too bad I’ve seen them all.

If I’m going to the past, when my money and credit cards will be no good, I need a place to crash. Fortunately, my parents have been vacationing in Florida every Christmas holiday for about two or three weeks since I was eighteen, my father’s only vacation the whole year. And they haven’t changed the locks to their Manhattan apartment in over twenty years. So If I plan for December 26 or thereabouts, I can stay at my parents’ apartment without anyone being the wiser.

Then there’s the question of what year to return to. I know Adam met The Bitch a few years after his injury, so I don’t want to wait too long. Then again, I don’t want to catch him when he’s still recovering. I finally settle on 1999, just over two years after he got hit by the car. The only negative is that it means I’ll probably have to hear that “Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1999” song again. I thought I’d never have to hear that song ever again.

With my plan about as settled as it can be, I wait until Adam is asleep in bed to put it into place. Adam is naturally a very restless sleeper, but I can tell he took a sleeping pill tonight, because he’s sleeping like the dead. I can hear his deep breathing, an almost-snore, as his chest moves up and down. Adam looks very peaceful when he’s in a drugged sleep. Almost like the young Adam I met in 1997. Watching him sleep makes me even more determined to fix his life.

I grab a tote bag from Adam’s closet and pack all the clean clothes from the drawer Adam gave me in his dresser. I also grab one of his coats because December in New York is pretty nippy. I’m not going to be the height of fashion on this trip, but that’s okay. I’m going to help foster young love, not to hook up with some dude from 1999.

I take a handful of change that’s scattered on top of Adam’s dresser (his official place for change). I’ll want to take a bus across town to my parents’ apartment in east midtown. Luckily, they don’t have a doorman, so my keys will open the door to the building, and I don’t have to worry about some nosy guy wondering why the Williams’s daughter has suddenly aged fourteen years.

Adam has left the time machine turned on. Or at least, the laptop is on. I approach slowly, clutching the tote bag in my hand. Am I seriously going to do this? Now that I’m actually standing here, it seems incredibly risky and very unlike me. But on the other hand, it’s very romantic. I’m traveling through time to get the young versions of ourselves to fall in love.

Screw it, I’ve already gone this far. I may as well do it.

I stand in front of the laptop to adjust the settings. I’m going back to December 26, 1999, so I’ll miss the Christmas holidays. Two o’clock in the afternoon sounds about right. And I’ll stay for two weeks. My finger hovers over the button that says
enter wormhole
. Once I click on that, there’s no turning back. I’ll be stuck in 1999 for two weeks.

But like I said, screw it.

I click on the button and quickly stand up as straight as I can, doing my best to stand perfectly still so “something bad” doesn’t happen. The whooshing noise starts up and I’m suddenly seized by the fear that I’ve done something wrong. Like, maybe there’s some other button I was supposed to click on, or else I’ll get sent back to the time of dinosaurs. I don’t want to get smooshed by a T. rex. Also, I’ve heard bad things about velociraptors. What if I get hunted by a pack of ’raptors?

Nah, that doesn’t seem too likely.

The spinning starts and that horrible vertigo overtakes me. Thank God I had the presence of mind to bring my mints with me this time, because I will definitely need them.

A minute later, I come to a shaky halt outside Adam’s house and I immediately throw up. Talk about déjà vu. I wonder if the person who cleans it up will remember there was vomit in this exact spot two years previously. Unlikely.

I stare up at the brownstone, wondering if Adam lives here yet. Obviously, he can’t manage the steps to the front door, so he always goes in through the side entrance, which has no steps. I creep around the side, looking for signs of his wheelchair tracks, but I don’t see any. Maybe he still lives in Murray Hill. God, I hope it doesn’t take like two weeks to even find him. That would be disappointing. Why didn’t I ask Adam where he lived in 1999?

Young Claudia, at least, will be easy to find. She’s got an apartment in the East Village and works as a waitress in a restaurant that specializes in chicken dishes. It’s called
Plucky’s. It closed about ten years ago, due to the high rates of salmonella poisoning in customers. (If you live in 1999, don’t eat at Plucky’s.)

I reach my parents’ apartment in record time and see how little it’s changed in the last fourteen years. The main difference is how painfully out of date their old television and computer look. The screen on their desktop is laughably small. It’s sort of like when you’re watching a movie from two decades ago and you’re like, “Wow, did computers really used to look like that?”

I creep into my parents’ bedroom, where my anal-retentive mother has made the bed prior to leaving for Florida. I open the second drawer in their antique dresser and let out a sigh of relief that my parents haven’t changed the hiding place for their extra cash. This stash got me through my tough times in high school and college, and now in my thirties, it’s saving my hide.

In the past, I’ve been careful not to take too much, but this time I help myself to two-hundred dollars. After all, by the time they realize it’s missing, I’ll be long gone. They’re pretty wealthy, so it’s not like they’ll really care anyway. You have to be wealthy to own a three-bedroom apartment in East Midtown.

The other part of my plan is that I go to the pharmacy downstairs and buy a bottle of chestnut brown hair dye. I know I’ve aged fourteen years since 1999, but I’m still worried about young Claudia recognizing me and going into shock or something at seeing her older self. Plus now I get to see if brunettes have more fun than blondes. I’m guessing no.

As I spread the brown dye through my hair using my gloved fingers, my eyes watering from the fumes, I wonder if Adam is missing me back in 2013. But no, that doesn’t make any sense. Even though it’s been a couple of hours here, when I transport back to 2013, it will be only a minute later. He won’t even know I’ve been gone, aside from the fact that if my plan works, his whole life will be different. My life too, maybe.

Once the brown dye is in my hair, I study my reflection in the mirror. It’s amazing how much of a difference hair color makes—I look nearly unrecognizable. Moreover, I know I’ll look vastly different than I did at age twenty-two. Aside from the extra ten pounds (okay, twenty), my face just looks older. More mature. I don’t have many wrinkles, aside from a little groove between my eyebrows and laugh lines that don’t fade completely when I stop laughing, but I know I don’t look twenty-two. I just don’t.

In any case, I’m absolutely certain young Claudia won’t recognize me. And I’m sort of hoping Adam won’t recognize me either as the person who warned him not to ride his bike and then let him get hit by a taxi anyway.

As I blow-dry my hair, it occurs to me that it would be about two a.m. now if I had stayed in 2013, and I’m completely exhausted. I know I’ve got a ton of stuff to do, but I’m going to be pretty useless if I don’t get some sleep. So I hit up the guest bedroom, and the second my head hits the pillow, I’m down for the count.

***

I dream restlessly. Mostly snippets that I don’t remember about the last year of my life with Adam. It’s funny how we’ve only been together a year, yet somehow I feel like I’ve known him forever.

I met Adam over a year ago, at a dinner party thrown by mutual friends of ours. I had recently broken up with my boyfriend Sam, and I was still smarting from it. Sam was an investment banker, and in retrospect, far too handsome. Everyone warned me that he wasn’t the kind of guy who was interested in settling down, and sure enough, he started hinting around at the nine-month mark that he wanted to see other people. When I told him in no uncertain terms that I did
not
want to see other people, he called it quits. Just like that, like the relationship hadn’t mattered at all to him.

So I wasn’t excited about going to a dinner party with three couples, two of whom were married. I was beginning to feel like that last loser friend who was going to be single forever. Even my friends who were perpetually single in our early thirties were now in long-term relationships. I predicted being at this party was going to make me feel awkward and seventh
wheely and ultimately depressed. I nearly canceled a hundred times but finally ended up going because it was better than sitting at home on a Saturday night. Slightly better.

I definitely wasn’t expecting to meet anyone at the party, although when you’re single, you’re always sort of thinking you might meet someone. Like I’d go out to the grocery store to buy a carton of low fat milk and I’d put on some lipstick, thinking maybe I’d meet someone. (For the record, I never met a guy at the grocery store in my life.) That’s the one thing that I enjoyed about being single—the possibilities.

Of course, as soon as I got to the party, I smelled set-up. Mostly because everyone was just a little too excited to see me. I’m sure I’m great company and all, but my friend Nancy hadn’t given me that wide a smile in years.

Another time, I might have been irritated. But I was ready to move on from Sam and I was sick of being single. I just hoped for two things: that he was taller than I was and that he had a decent job.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t super thrilled when I saw Adam for the first time. When you imagine your dream guy, you probably aren’t picturing a wheelchair. I’d never been out with a guy who was disabled before. Actually, scratch that—when I was in my twenties, some busybody set me up on a blind date with a guy in a wheelchair who was developmentally disabled (or whatever the correct term for that is), and I had to sneak out before the appetizers arrived—not my finest moment, that’s for sure. But Adam wasn’t like that other guy. He was nice-looking, well dressed, and Nancy nudged me and told me he was wealthy, even though I’d told her a million times that I couldn’t care less about things like that.

As Nancy whispered Adam’s attributes in my ear, he detached himself from the conversation he
was having to look in my direction. It was just a glance initially, but then he did a double-take, and a slow smile spread across his lips. He was very sexy when he smiled. It was at that moment that I knew that if he asked me for my number, I’d say yes.

We were seated together quite conspicuously during the dinner. As I settled into the seat next to where Adam’s wheelchair was parked, he held out his hand to me. I shook it and was surprised by how rough and calloused his palm was. “I’m Adam,” he said. He smiled, and I had to admit, he was incredibly cute. “I don’t think we’ve officially met yet.”

I didn’t admit that his name had already been murmured in my ear a dozen times since I arrived. “Nice to meet you. I’m Claudia.”

“Claudia,” he said, letting my name roll over his tongue. “Claudia, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I’m pretty sure we’re being set up.”

“I’m getting that sense as well,” I giggled.

“We should get revenge,” he said, his brown eyes wide behind his glasses. I tried to pin down his age and my best guess was early forties, but at the same time, there was something youthful about his eyes.

“Any suggestions?”

“We should go out on a date,” he said thoughtfully. “That will show them.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Wouldn’t it show them more if we
didn’t
go out on a date?”

Adam shook his head. “No, that would only show
me
.”

Later, in the kitchen, Nancy gave me the vital stats: Adam was thirty-seven, never married, owned his own house, worked as a computer programmer but was independently wealthy on top of that. “He’s such a nice guy, Claudia,” Nancy assured me. A nice guy. I needed one of those. Really, really badly.