Unhappenings (34 page)

I considered the truth for a fraction of a second, then bailed.

“I’m only like that when I’m around you,” I tried.

“Okay, sure,” she said. “Even if I buy that—which, by the way, I do not—you
were
around me. Pretty much every time we were together. The question stands.”

I grappled with the truth one more time, and conceded.

“Come, sit,” I said. She gave me a bewildered look. “You’re going to want to be sitting for this.”

She moved toward the chair with obvious apprehension. My best guess is that she had been expecting to hear something extremely personal, like a phobia, or severe shyness. If so, she was about to be surprised, and looked none too excited about that. She sat.

“You’re sure you want to know?” I said. One last chance for us both to walk away. She passed.

“Yes.”

After a moment to collect my thoughts, I took a deep breath and dove in.

“When I was fourteen years old, I had my first kiss. The next day, that girl was gone, and no one had ever heard of her. I had three girlfriends in high school. The first one suddenly stopped knowing me one day. The second one was suddenly dating my best friend. The third one…” I hesitated. “The third one died. When she was twelve. Five years before we started dating.”

And there it was. The last piece of the mystery that was Nigel-Graham Walden. Helen had gone pale by this point.

“Oh my God,” she said softly. “Nigel, I’m so sorry.”

“So, you understand what I’m telling you?” Hesitantly, she nodded. “Yes, I have feelings for you that go far beyond friendship, and yes, that has been true for a very long time. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid you would be receptive, and that being with me would end up destroying you.”

“You can’t possibly believe you caused that girl’s death.” Her tone was pleading. She wiped away a tear.

“How can I possibly dare believe anything else?”

We sat there mute, both looking at the floor, for what must have been several minutes.

Finally, still not looking at me, she said, “Please don’t push me away, Nigel. We can fix this. You are my best friend. The best friend I have ever had.” Then she did look up. “And I can’t bear how much weight you have to carry with no one to share it. Please, let’s fix this.”

I looked up, her words suddenly reminding me that there was still one piece of my story I had yet to reveal.

“Okay,” was all I said, and for that instant, she accepted it as good news. But it was her comment about no one to share my weight that still rang in my ears. At some point, she was going to have to learn about Athena.

elen didn’t stay. With the rest of the day ahead of me to sort out my thoughts as well as I could, I fell back on tinkering with the wrist modules. They worked now, thanks to Athena, but no better than they had before I showed up. My charge was to perfect them, whatever that meant. Maybe they held some potential that was so far unexplored.

Maybe there was some way they could be used to stabilize the timeline.

A new excitement drove my work. This was absolutely a guess, and a pretty obviously desperate one at that, but there was a very appealing plausibility to the idea that my secret assignment had been that angle all along. If Future Me experienced the same unhappenings, it would explain not only why he wanted me to work on this project alone, but also why he was such a broken shell of a man to begin with. He had fifty-two years on me. The prospect of fifty-two more years of these random revisions did not bode well, and it was easy enough to believe how badly it would eventually wear me down.

The new premise behind my work was more than enough to propel me through the day, although predictably, I had no encouraging results. Still, I found myself with an enthusiasm that was a welcome change. The fact that Helen had confronted me had also bled away some of my tension. There was a tricky road ahead of us, but having everything on the table was at long last a relief.

At the end of the day, I returned to an apartment with completely different furniture than any I had ever owned. Some of it was nicer, others not so much. The next morning I found my license plate on a completely different car. My key card and thumbprint still started it.

Neither of these transformations caused me any particular trouble. I went to work fairly certain that I would see Helen afterward for coffee, and that none of our experiences would be lost. This was based on intuition more than evidence. Apart from our divergent memories surrounding the cat, I knew of no examples of a revised timeline that included a loss of history for the two of us. I was now convinced that my curse had been trying to hit Helen for months, but that it missed the target every single time.

s I half-expected, Helen met me at the entrance to my building at the end of that day. Her smile was obviously nervous. We had agreed to find some new equilibrium, but neither of us had any idea what that would be, or how it would work.

“Coffee?” she said in as timid a voice as I had ever heard from her.

“Please,” I said in a voice that sounded no more courageous in my head.

She got a piece of cake that day. Atypical for her, and my first instinct was to read too much into it. Not to be outdone, I ordered a blueberry scone, for which I immediately realized I had no appetite.

“I thought you didn’t like scones,” Helen pointed out.

“Maybe now I do,” I said. It was the weakest of jokes, and she left it alone. “On that topic, what’s with the cake?”

“It’s a cake kind of day,” she said around a mouthful of it. Fair enough.

“I have a theory,” I said, not exactly intending to.

She swallowed. “About cake?”

“About my curse.”

“Oh,” she said, putting her fork down. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

I hesitated. “This is going to be super awkward, no matter how I say it, right?”

“Probably,” she admitted. “Why don’t we just stipulate to that, and then not worry about it? I’ll have a fair number of awkward things to add, I’m sure. No score keeping, okay?”

Despite everything, I laughed.

“Agreed. If you want to go first…” I held out my hands in a gesture of deference.

“Not on your life,” she said, pointing at me with her fork.

“Quick check: how long have we known each other?”

Her worry was immediately evident. “Did something unhappen?”

“No. I mean, yes. New furniture, different car. Nothing of consequence, but I think you just answered my question. Things continue to unhappen to me, but the one constant is you. I’ve thought about this a lot, and over the last year, the only example I can name of the two of us having different memories is finding Mary Sue. Still working on why that is, and I hope I can determine it without having to dissect her.” I paused for laughter. Got none. “Joke,” I said.

“Good.”

“Anyway,” I continued with mild embarrassment, “you are the only person in my life for whom that has ever been true. Everyone else close to me has diverged at some point from my experiences with them. The other thing is that every time I felt like you and I have gotten closer over the last year, a lot of minor things unhappened immediately afterward. But not you. It’s like whatever force does this is trying to pull us apart, but it can’t figure out how. Like it keeps trying to get to you, but it hits everything around you instead.”

She frowned. “I’m not sure I understand what that means.”

I took the leap. “I think it means you have some kind of immunity. I think you can’t unhappen to me. I have no idea why, but I think you are the only person who can’t be affected by my curse.”

She stared at me for a few seconds after that, and finally whispered, “Wow.” Her expression was unreadable.

“Please know I’m not saying this from any ulterior motives. I know where we stand, and I’m not trying to maneuver for something else. It just seemed important to me, and real, and I thought you would want to know.”

“I hope it’s true,” she said. “Because I think…” She shook her head. “No. Strike that. I’m sure. I love you.” She looked over her head, presumably waiting for comedically timed lightning. Seeing none, she declared, “Still here!”

My internal reactions to this were too copious to describe. On top of it all, I blurted, “So far!”

“Listen to you, mister glass-half-empty.”