Yesterday (34 page)

I’m still sitting on the side of my bed, listening to his voice in the moonlight and fi ghting the pull I feel towards him because he already matters too much. But it’s like fi ghting the impulse to breathe. A person can only hold her breath for so long.

“Can we turn the radio on low?” I ask. “I don’t want to go back to sleep with all these dark thoughts in my head.” The clock radio’s perched on the slim nightstand between our beds and Garren reaches for it and switches it on. Howard Jones is singing “Things Can Only Get Better” and I chuckle drily. It should be our theme song.

Garren echoes my laughter and I tell myself to lie back, pull the covers over me and wait for tomorrow but what if there is no tomorrow, only tonight? Our luck could run out at any time. The director and his men almost had us at the Eaton Centre. If the bullet had hit Garren in the head instead of the arm, we wouldn’t be here together now. A second can change everything, sending life down a different path.

There’s a lump in my throat and my voice is hushed as I say, “Garren?”

“Yeah?” His voice is quiet too, like there’s a third person in the room who we don’t want to hear us.

“Can I get in there with you?” I can’t imagine him telling me no but my heart’s beating fast, as though it fears that possibility.

“Come here.” He sounds so warm that I almost forget all the bad things in my head. They shrink as I walk towards him and feel him wrap his arms around me.

He feels warm too, warmer than me, and when I sink down onto the bed with him and tell him that, he presses his lips into my forehead and says, “You feel warm to me. Just as warm as I do.”

“No, you’re warmer,” I argue. Then I drop my lips to his, open my mouth and kiss him like this is just the beginning.

His kiss is sweet and hungry at the same time. He pulls me on top of him and slips his fi ngers into my hair. “I keep forgetting you cut it,” he murmurs. “Every time I look at you, it’s new.”

I run my hand softly over his short brown hair. “For me too.”

He slides his mouth down my neck, one of his hands on the hip of my jogging pants. “Mine’s not that different, is it?”

Not to someone who hasn’t spent as much time staring at him as I have, maybe.

Our mouths collide again and again. We’re on fi re. Saying each other’s names in tones we’ve never used before.

Drinking each other in with our hands. “I can’t stop thinking about you like this,” I whisper, my fi ngers on his T-shirt, riding up under it to feel the heat from his skin.

“Don’t,”
he advises, his hands in my hair again. “I can’t stop thinking about you either. Even in my sleep.”

We already have so many things to worry about, like staying alive, and when I pull away a bit to look at him, I see Garren absorb the confusion in my face.

“Hey.” He reaches for my hand, lacing his fi ngers through mine so that our two hands feel like a single entity.

“Shouldn’t we get to have something good in all this? Why can’t we have this?”

Because it will make me even more scared to lose him.

But I don’t say that either. I tug his hand to my lips and kiss it.
We
will
have
this.
I’m done fi ghting myself. What’s the point of being here if I’m too afraid to have the things I want because it means I might lose them someday?

We lie in Garren’s bed exchanging wet kisses and touch-ing each other until he has to stop and swallow more aspirin for his arm. We both know things can’t go any further, that without the Bio-net it’s not safe, but for now just being together is enough. We can fi gure out the rest later.

When Garren comes back to bed I hook both my legs around one of his and nestle into his shoulder. He kisses my hair and says, “You asked me what I was dreaming before. I was dreaming they were taking you and that I couldn’t stop them. I never want to feel like that again.”

“I can’t handle the thought of them taking you either.” I drape my hand across the dip of Garren’s waist. “I’m not letting them get near you. We won’t let them take us.”

“We’ll be each other’s own best defense system,” Garren says, like it’s a promise.

We will. We’ll have this and protect it. No one will be allowed to stand in our way. We’ll make it out to Vancouver and live our lives on our own terms. See the whales and, from a distance, watch the people who would try to hurt us attempt to save the planet. I hope they can do it and that the world will become a different place than I knew. I hope that more for the people who come after me than for myself. Garren and I can have a lot of good years here either way. We have time.

I fall asleep with my hand resting on his chest and as far as I know, I don’t dream, but I remember thinking, just before I slip away from consciousness, that Latham and Kinnari would be happy for us. If they can’t be together like they should’ve been, it might as well be us.

t w e n t y -

We’re happy when we wake up in his bed together, happy when Garren checks out of the hotel for us and meets me at the traffi c lights. We’ve stuffed the gun inside the pair of socks Garren had around his arm yesterday and slide the socks into a plastic Woolco bag, which we tie at the top before dipping down a side street and tossing the bag into a large Dumpster behind a tall apartment building.

Then we go into a cheap deli, buy sandwiches and sit at a red Formica table staring at each other with infi nite grins as we swallow bits of white bread. I wish I could tell Christine how the part of my story involving the déjà vu guy I’d never met turned out. Nobody but Garren will ever know the entire story. We’re the ultimate secret.

“We should go get the bus tickets,” Garren says, his hand on my knee.

I lean in close and kiss him. I love his mouth. I love that he’s the kind of person who has always wanted to help make the world a better place.

Garren holds my face in his hands and peers into my eyes. I never want to stop looking at him, never want him to stop looking at me. If we let ourselves, we could get trapped in this moment and miss the bus to Parry Sound.

I whisper in Garren’s ear and make him smile. We get up from the table and sling our backpacks onto our spines.

I can hear the radio spilling music out from behind the deli counter. Everywhere in 1985 there’s music. Like a party that never stops.

“Ninety-nine dreams I have had. In every one a red balloon.”

Garren impulsively grabs my hand and twirls me around.

I laugh as I spin and as I swivel back towards him something outside catches my eye. Across the street a guy with a buzz cut and sunglasses is stepping into a black car. He’s wearing a nondescript gray coat and could be anyone but I know better— I know it’s one of the men who came to Henry’s house to take us away. I’d recognize him anywhere.

“Sit down,” I say urgently. “One of them is out there right now. I don’t think he saw us.”

Garren deposits himself in the nearest chair, every ounce of joy draining from his face.

I sit too and watch the black car merge into traffi c. It’s heading east and I glance at Garren across the table and say, “He’s going— he’s driving off.”

“Fuck.” Garren plunks his good arm down on the table.

“They’ve trailed us from Toronto. There’s no way we can risk going to the bus station now. We’ll have to steal a car.”

I turn away from the window and clear my mind. How many of them are out there searching for us? Where’s our path to safety?

A series of confl icting images fl icker inside my head. Us walking to the bus station. Almost there. But so are they. We run. Garren crumples to the ground, his head bleeding.

Us in front of the deli, only steps away from where we sit right now. A black car veers into the parking lot. Garren charges at the man with the buzz cut. Garren crumples. I struggle with the man, grab his gun. It goes off against his chest.

Us inside a car, peeling off down the road. A stranger’s body lying lifeless in the street behind us.

I’ve never had concurrent visions before. I don’t know which images to trust. My arms grip my sides as I press my eyelids together and concentrate harder. It doesn’t help. The same images play over and over, as if on a loop.

“Tell me what’s in your head,” Garren says.

Him
dead.
Him
alive.
I can’t lose him. I can’t make the wrong choice.

“What?” Garren’s face creases in alarm. “What do you see?”

“A lot of different things at the same time. Most of them bad.” I’m crippled by fear but keep my voice strong. “Just, don’t do anything yet. Give me some time.”

For the future to untangle itself. Maybe we can outwait the director’s security forces.

We sit hunched in our chairs, staring out the window, for at least fi fteen minutes. We’re not the only ones inside the deli. A trio of balding men are nursing coffees and a washed-out- looking blond woman and her burly, mustached boyfriend have begun to argue in the corner. “That’s fucking unfair and you know it,” the boyfriend bellows to the blond woman across the table. “Do you think you’re the only one who has given up things to try to make this work?”

“Oh, I
know
I am,” she retorts. “I gave up everything for you and look what it got me. You don’t give a shit about making this work. You just don’t want me to be with anyone else.

That’s all this is about for you. Keeping me to yourself so that we both go down together.”

The visions start up again as I listen to the couple argue.

There are more details now. I see the light go out of Garren’s eyes for good as he falls. I hear myself howl in my mind, my soul rebelling against the loss.

It can’t come to that.
There
has
to
be
a
way
out
of
this.

“Follow me,” I tell Garren. “We’ll go by the back door.”

I don’t know what else to do. We have to leave sometime and in my vision we were in front of the deli, not behind it.

Garren nods. He trusts that I know what I’m doing.

We get up and shamble towards the counter. I crane my head over it and focus on the twenty-something- year-old guy behind the counter. He has a mop of overgrown red hair and a ruddy complexion to match. “Excuse me,” I say, “is there a back door we can use?”

“The back door is for employees only.”

“Right, I know. But my dad is out there looking for us. I just saw him across the street a few minutes ago, and if he sees me with him”— I point my thumb at Garren behind me— “he’ll kill him.”

The redheaded guy smirks at us like he’s in on a dirty little secret. “Someone’s been a
baaad
boy.”

Garren’s lips form a crooked grin. “I could take her old man no problem but she doesn’t want us to get into it.”

The redheaded guy chuckles. “Okay, I’ll be the good guy here and save your asses.” He saunters down to the end of the counter and lifts the latch on the waist-high door to allow us entrance. Then we follow him into the kitchen where a woman in a hairnet is stirring an enormous pot of chili. She glances at us sideways but says nothing.

“Right there,” the guy drawls, his fi nger aiming at the exit sign. As we’re leaving he says to our backs, “Be good, kids!” and wheezes with laughter.

We hustle up a side street, past brick houses, green spaces and apartment buildings, our eyes constantly scanning the surrounding area. My heart’s racing but my mind is empty of visions— a single wish pounding behind my eyes, that our stealthy departure was enough to magically shuffl e the variables and alter our future. We’ve already beaten the scenario in one of my visions. And we won’t set foot near the bus station. Does that mean we’re in the clear or does it just mean the director’s men will get us some other way?

“Let’s cut back towards the lake,” I say breathlessly. “We shouldn’t get too close to the station.”

“We need to go back for the gun,” Garren declares as we turn sharply. “It’s not safe out here on the street. We have to get our hands on a car.”

There were no bullets left in the gun we dropped into the Dumpster but I see what Garren means. I don’t know how to hot-wire a car and I guess he doesn’t either. Pointing a gun at someone is the fastest way to get their car keys.

Damn.
We should’ve held on to it.

We continue down the street, beginning to work our way back to the apartment building where we dumped the gun.

My eyes keep catching on passing black cars. I gasp a little at each one.

“We’re good,” Garren tells me. “
We’re good.
We’re good.”

It’s like a chant almost. “We’ll get the gun and get out of here.”

I adjust my hair under my hat, having forgotten that since it’s shorter and lighter now I have no need to hide it.

Without warning a silver car jumps onto the sidewalk ahead of us, partially blocking our path. In a fl ash we turn and bolt in the opposite direction. Garren’s legs are longer and he’s ahead of me in no time, slowing to wait for me.

“Freya!” a female voice calls. It sounds both familiar and a little frail. I immediately think of my mother. What am I going to do if they’ve dragged her into this?

I glance back to check, slowing to a jog. The woman’s not chasing me. I don’t think she could if she tried. She’s ancient.

Not my mother but familiar all the same. Thin and graceful with long white hair. This must be a trick dreamt up by the director. Someone who looks harmless to reel us in.

“I’m here to help you both,” the woman says from her place next to the car. “The director didn’t send me but he’s looking for you. Please, get in the car. It’s for you. You can take it wherever you want to go.”

I’ve stopped and am gawking at her, Garren trying to pull me along with him. “Don’t listen to her,” he warns. “She has to be with them.”

“I know what you saw in your visions back at the deli,”

the white-haired woman yells. “You saw them kill him. In two different places. I’m trying to stop that.”

Garren lets go of my arm. He stares wide-eyed at the old woman. It’s then that I recognize her. She was in our hotel lobby last night when I left for the restaurant. The woman who smelled like satsuma and smiled back at me.