Unhappenings (35 page)

Stunned, I asked, “Where did this come from?” Despite everything I had just explained to her, and despite my delirious joy at hearing those words, my concern for her safety rushed to the surface of all my thinking.

She smiled softly. “It was always there. I’m just done kidding myself about it.” I stared, dumbfounded. She stared back. “So…,” she prompted, rolling her hand.

“Oh! Right!” I cleared my throat. “In the event that it has not been self evident for some time… I love you, Helen.”

She closed her eyes. A visible load of tension drained out of her body. “Thank you. Hearing that really does make this easier. You still worried about how awkward you sound?”

“In no way,” I said.

“Good,” she said, taking another bite of cake. Then pointing her fork at me again, added, “Although we definitely need to work on your delivery. ‘In the event that it has not been self evident’? What the hell was that?”

“Ha! Sorry. Scientist. Don’t get out much.”

“Hmm,” she said with a little laugh. “Fair enough.”

And then, apparently, we ran out of things to say. I broke the silence.

“What do we do now?”

“Now,” she said carefully, “we put our last two secrets on the table. You’re going to hear all about Carlton.”

“His name is Carlton?” I said quietly, mostly to myself.

“His name is Carlton,” she confirmed. “And after that, you’re going to tell me the one thing you’re still holding back.” She meant Athena, although it was unclear whether she understood it that specifically.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because that’s what we do,” she said. “We hide things from each other. Except not anymore. Drop the other shoe, Nigel.”

“Okay,” I said. “There’s another time traveler. Her name is Athena. I see her once or twice a month. We are just friends,” I hastened to add.

Helen’s eyes opened wider, and that childlike grin of discovery I had come to adore spread across her face.

“Oh my,” she said. “That is so much better than I expected.”

hat conversation lasted two hours. I learned a great deal more about Carlton than I have the heart to reproduce here, but the most salient points went as follows:

Helen and Carlton met while she was still an undergrad, studying abroad. He was an expatriate American living in France, and heir to one of the most wealthy and powerful families in the world.

“Yes, but can he travel through time?” I inquired.

“Quiet, you,” she clarified.

This alone would have been more than enough to intimidate me beyond measure. Unfortunately, at one point in her description of him she somehow felt compelled to show me a photo of him on her tablet. As I feared, he was basically a god. Chiseled features, lithe build, lush blond hair to his shoulders. Their children would be characters straight out of Norse mythology.

This was all essentially my worst nightmare, and I couldn’t help but think my curse had simply found new and creative ways to deprive me of happiness.

It turned out there were two reasons why she had never told me about him. The first was that their relationship, for the entirety of its three year run so far, was a secret to everyone, not just me. The elaborate web of power to which his family constituted several strands made marriage—and anything that could potentially lead to marriage—a topic enmeshed in politics far more than romance. His parents were well aware of Helen’s presence in his life, but were unaware of the extent to which she held his heart. This revelation made me extremely uncomfortable and resentful. How dare he hide her like some shameful and scandalous affair? I managed to withhold saying that out loud right up to the moment she told me he had asked her to marry him.

“What did you say?” I asked, not really want to hear the answer.

“I’m not supposed to say,” she said. When I buried my face in my hands, she explained, “No, I mean I’m not supposed to say to him. He asked me not to give him an answer right away. He wanted to spend some time warming his family up to the idea. Failing that, he wanted time to create a fallback plan, so that we could have a life away from that yoke. He’s in Paris right now, and has been since he proposed. We see each other about once every two months, whenever he can get away.”

“Oh,” I said, mentally filling in a gap in her story. “You weren’t really visiting your mother.”

She shook her head sadly. “No. Sorry.”

“How much time have you given him?”

She poked her half eaten cake with her fork, avoiding my eyes.

“He asked me to marry him only a few days before I met you. We never set a time limit for how long to drag this out, but I think we are both getting to a place where we need to make a decision.”

“Do you know what you’re going to do?”

Still not looking at me, she shook her head.

Carefully, I asked, “He has no idea I exist, does he?”

This time she looked up. “No.”

“What’s the second reason you never told me?’

She sighed. “I didn’t tell you because I was afraid if you knew, I would lose you. Which almost happened, I might add.” She then crumpled up a napkin and threw it at my forehead. “Jerk.”

Taking all this in was not easy. Part of me wanted to consider it a solution to the ongoing concern about her safety in my presence. A very, very tiny part.

“Helen, I am not going to try to nudge you one way or the other on this. You know what a life with me might mean for you, and I’m not even sure I want you to risk it. You mean too much to me. If I’m going to lose you, I would much rather it be to a life with someone else than to oblivion.”

She absorbed that in silence. What could she say, really? Finally, she said, “I want to meet her.”

Her talent for non sequitur was nearly unsurpassed.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Desperately,” she confirmed.

I nodded. “That’s fair. You mean Athena, I assume?”

“Yes.”

I thought about that. The first thing she said to me when she discovered I was the younger analog of an old man currently alive was she wanted to meet him. I refused her that, on reasonable grounds. It was unclear to me whether those grounds applied to Athena.

“I’ll ask her.”

“Thanks,” she said, and scarfed down the rest of her cake. Unlike her revelations that day, I offered nothing else. Because I knew Helen, I was sure she wanted to hear nothing about Athena in words. She wanted to experience Athena for herself.

It remained to be seen if Athena would want to share that experience.

s had now become predictable, shortly after Helen told me all about Carlton and asked to meet Athena, my life was peppered with unhappenings of a noticeable but inconsequential nature. The most interesting of these was a construction project to expand the lab building, which had apparently been underway for several months before it appeared one day. It meant meeting Helen at a different entrance for our afternoon coffee dates. Her memories were of meeting me there this whole time, but none of her memories of the meetings themselves had changed.

Helen and I established a code phrase for testing the theory that unhappenings weren’t affecting her, relative to me. If I had cause for concern, I would ask her how long we had known each other, and she would simply respond, “Stingrays.” The code word was her choice. She wanted to evoke a happy memory whenever this came up. If she ever gave me any other answer, I would need to ask her questions beyond that. So far, it had been unnecessary.

We tabled any discussion of Carlton, or the decision ahead of her. The lone exception was a three day period in which he was going to be in the country. On previous such occasions, she had simply avoided me, sometimes with a plausible excuse for needing to have a few days to herself. This time she was forthright about it. Curiously, I felt no jealousy over losing my time with her to him. Perhaps it was simply honoring the fact that I was not truly entitled to be jealous. Perhaps it was something else.

Nor during that time did we explore taking our relationship any further than friendship. We had made our confessions and had chosen for the time being to live with the knowledge of our feelings without acting on them. It was enough.

For now.