“You are supposed to be with me.”
What words are these? They startle me, and at first I think I’ve heard him wrong. He’s leaning across the table while our significant others are twenty feet away, waiting in line for our food.
“You and me,” he says. “Not us and them.”
I blink at him before I realize he’s making a joke. I laugh and go back to looking at my magazine. Actually, it’s not really a magazine. It’s a math journal, because I’m super cool like that.
“Helena…” I don’t look up right away. I’m afraid to. If I look up and see that he’s not joking, everything will change.
“Helena.” He reaches out and touches my hand. I jump, pull back. My chair makes a horrid scraping sound, and Neil looks over. I pretend that I dropped something and reach under the table. Under the table are our shoes and legs. There is a blue crayon lying at my feet; I pick it up and resurface.
Neil is at the front of the line ordering our food, and my best friend’s boyfriend is waiting for my response, his eyes heavy with burden.
“Are you drunk?” I hiss. “What the fuck?”
“No,” he says. Though he doesn’t look so sure. For the first time, I notice the scruff on his face. The skin around his eyes is sallow. He’s going through something, maybe? Life is being bullshit.
“If this is a joke, you’re making me really uncomfortable,” I tell him. “Della is right there. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I only have ten minutes, Helena.” His eyes move to the blue crayon, which is resting between our hands.
“Ten minutes for what? You’re sweating,” I say. “Did you take something, are you on the crack?” What type of drugs make you sweat like that? Crack? Heroine?
I want Neil and Della to come back. I want everything to go back to normal. I spin around to see where they are.
“Helena…”
“Stop saying my name like that.” My voice shakes. I make to stand up, but he grabs the crayon, then my hand.
“I don’t have much time. Let me show you.”
He’s sitting very still, but his eyes remind me of a cornered animal: frightened, panicked, bright. I’ve never seen that look on his face, but since Della’s only been dating him for a few months, it’s a moot point. I don’t really know this guy. He could be a druggie for all I know. He turns my hand over so it’s palm up, and I let him. I don’t know why, but I do.
He places the crayon in my palm and closes my fist around it.
“You have to say it out loud,” he says. “Show me, Kit.”
“Say it, Helena. Please. I’m afraid of what will happen if you don’t.”
Because he looks so afraid, I say it.
“Show me, Kit.” And then, “Should I know what this is?”
“No one should,” he says. And then everything goes black.
Kit is there when I wake up. My head is aching, and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I must have passed out. That’s never happened to me before. I sit up, but instead of being on the floor of the Bread Company, I am spread out on someone’s sofa. It’s a nice sofa, the kind you see in a Pottery Barn catalog. Five bajillion dollars of treated suede. I scratch at it, and then sniff my finger. Suede.
“Neil?” I sit up, looking around. Did they carry me to the manager’s office? How embarrassing. Pretty fancy couch for a manager. “Kit, what happened? Where’s Neil?”
“He’s not here.”
I stand up, but it’s too fast, and I get dizzy. I slump back onto the couch and put my head between my knees.
“Get Neil, please.” My voice sounds nasally. I look up to see Kit’s jeans still in front of me. He makes no move to get Neil. With a deep sigh, he sits down next to me.
“Neil is in Barbados on his honeymoon.”
“Did he get married on the way back to our table?” I say through my teeth. I’m done with this game. Della is off her rocker if she keeps seeing this guy. He’s on drugs, or nuts, or both.
Kit clears his throat. “This is actually his second marriage. He was married to you for a while.”
My head shoots up. When he sees the look on my face, he flinches.
A child comes running into the room and flings himself on my lap. I recoil. I don’t like kids; they’re messy and noisy, and—
It asks me for a sandwich.
“Hey, buddy. I’ll get you one. Let’s give Mom a minute.”
What. The. Fuck.
I’m off the sofa and backed into a corner in five seconds. Kit and the small human are already gone from the room. I can hear their voices, high and happy. The Pottery Barn room. There is a lot of navy blue everywhere I look. Navy blue picture frames, navy blue braided rugs, navy blue planters, spilling with healthy ferns. I walk to the window, convinced I’m going to see the parking lot in front of the Bread Company. Maybe they carried me over to the Pier One. Instead, I’m looking at a pretty garden. A knotty oak stands in its center, a circle of white stones around its base.
I’m backing away from the window when I walk into something. Kit. He grips the top of my arms to steady me. I tingle where he touches me. I’m allergic to nuts.
“Where the hell am I?” I ask, shoving him away. “What’s happening?”
“You’re in your house,” he says. “214 Sycamore Circle.” There is a long pause, and then he says, “Port Townsend, Washington.”
I laugh. Whoever did this got me good. I step around Kit and run through the house. A dining room opens into a large, airy kitchen. I can see water beyond the windows, its surface prickled by rain. I am staring at the rain when a small, lispy voice says, “What are you wooking at?”
The kid. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, stuffing his face with bread.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Thomas.” When he says his name, wet bread flies out of his mouth and sprays the table.
“Thomas who? What’s your last name?”
“Same as Dad’s, but not the same as yours,” he says, matter-of-factly.
My skin prickles.
“Thomas Finn Browster. And you are Helena Marie Conway.” He fist pumps the air. Browster! Neil’s last name.
I hear Kit behind me, and when I turn to look at him he’s leaning against the fridge, frowning.
He lifts a finger to his lips when he sees me watching him, and then glances at the boy.
“You have another one,” he says.
“Another what?”
“Child.” He pushes away from the fridge and walks toward me. All of a sudden I’m noticing the gray at his temples and the fine lines around his eyes. He doesn’t look like the Kit from the Bread Company.
He steers me toward a bedroom and opens the door. A nursery. A tiny head with fluffy black hair. I peer into the crib, my heart racing.
“You said Neil was on his honeymoon, but she’s just a bab—”
“She’s ours.”
I swallow. “Yours and mine?”
“Yes.”
My heart is freaking out. I can feel it pumping all the blood to my brain.
“Are you a time traveler?”
Kit smiles for the first time. Deep smile lines cut into his cheeks like he does a lot of it. Funny, I can’t remember seeing Kit smile. He always seems so serious, which is what Della likes about him. Della.
“Where’s Della?” Oh God. I had a baby with her boyfriend. I look down at my hand, but there’s no wedding ring.
He walks out of the room. I glance back at the baby before I follow him out.
When we’re in the hallway, he closes the nursery door.
“We’re not exactly on speaking terms with Della,” he says.
I feel such grief. Della and I had been a thing for over ten years. Kit sees the look on my face and quickly averts his eyes.
“This is a dream,” I say. Kit shakes his head no. I catch a glimpse of myself in the heavy, gilded mirror behind his head. My hair is short. Highlighted. “No, a nightmare,” I say, reaching up to touch it. “I look like a mom.”
“You are a mom.”
In this alternate universe, or time travel, or dream, I am a mom. But I am just Helena in my mind. Child-free and flat-bellied. And before me is Kit. The guy my best friend thinks is “the one.” It is not possible that I would ever look at him that way. I look at him now, trying to see him in a different light. He is so different from Neil. Stocky, a little scruffy. Neil shaved his arms; Kit’s arms are covered in black hair. Neil has dark eyes; Kit has light eyes. Neil wears contacts; Kit wears glasses. Della and I have never shared the same taste in men, which suited us just fine. Made chicks before dicks easier to live by.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“She’s still in Florida. We moved here two years ago.”
Kit takes my hand. “Let me show you something,” he says.
It feels all wrong. Our fingers don’t fit well together. His hands are large, his fingers broad. My hand feels stretched and awkward in his. Della always said that hands should fit together like puzzle pieces. Hers and Kit’s fit. She told me that!
The little boy suddenly appears from the kitchen. Kit lets go of my hand to swing him into his arms.
They seem very comfortable together, considering he’s not the boy’s father. Neil is his father. So where is Neil? And what happened between us?
“What happened to Neil? Why aren’t we together?”
He glances at the little boy … what was his name? Tim? Tom? And sets him on his feet.
“Go put in a movie, little man, and I’ll be in there in a minute to watch it with you.”
He’s a good kid, I guess, because he nods without arguing and runs off, his bare feet slapping the hardwood.
“Neil cheated on you,” he says. “But it’s not as simple as it sounds. You aren’t mad at him. You understood.”
Heat rises to my face. Neil cheated on me? Neil wasn’t the type, not to mention he worshipped the ground I walked on. “He would never,” I say. Kit shrugs. “People are people. Things change.”
“No,” I say. “This is a Pottery Barn life. I don’t want it.”
“Like I said, it’s not that simple. He had his … reasons.”
Before I can ask what those reasons are, the baby starts to cry. Kit glances at her door and then back at me.
“She only wants you. She’s teething. If I go in there and get her, she’ll freak out.”
“I don’t even like babies.”
He grabs my arms and spins me around ‘til I’m facing the nursery door.
“You like this one,” he says, giving me a little shove.
“What’s her name?” I hiss, before opening the door.
He grins. For whatever reason, my stomach does a little flip.
“Brandi.”
I give him a disgusted look. “Like the liquor?” I hiss.
He tries not to smile, but all of a sudden I see where those deep lines on either side of his mouth come from.
“It’s what you were drinking the night you got pregnant.”
“Oh God,” I say, pushing open the door. “I grew up to be a goddamn cliché.”
Brandi is sitting in her crib, screaming. Her arms go up the minute she sees me. I’ve never had a baby reach for me before; they like me less than I like them.
I pick her up, and she immediately stops wailing. She’s little. Petite. And she has so much hair she looks like a little lion. I guess if I liked babies, this one would be considered cute. I carry her out to her … father. “Here,” I say, offering her to him. He shakes his head. “You hold her.”
I do so stiffly as we walk toward what looks like another living room. This one less Pottery Barn adult, and more Pottery Barn kids. God. If this was all real, what happened to me? I didn’t like shit like this. My apartment looked like a garage sale gone wrong.
“Why does everything look like this?” I ask him.
“Look like what?”
“Like I have no personality.”
Kit looks surprised. “I don’t know. This is what you like. I’ve never thought about it before.”
“How long have we been together?”
The corners of his mouth twitch, and before he says anything, I know he’s going to lie.
“Few years.”
“And we love each other?”
He stops rifling through a drawer to look at me.
“Do you know that feeling you have right now? The bewilderment, the fear, the fascination?”
I nod.
“That’s what I feel every day. Because I’ve never loved someone like I love you.”
My stomach does this involuntary flutter thingy. I feel guilty that my best friend’s boyfriend made my stomach flutter. Luckily, Brandi yanks on my hair so it looks more like pain than a reaction to his words.
He goes back to his drawer and pulls out a coloring book. At first I think he’s getting it for the little boy, but then he hands it to me.
“Do you want me to give it to Tim?” I ask, confused.
“Tom,” he says. “And no. That’s what I wanted to show you.”
I flip to the first page and find what I’m not expecting. Beautiful pictures of castles made of candy, fairy houses perched in fruit trees, and princesses fighting dragons. The type of coloring book I would have wanted as a child.
“What’s this?” I ask, not looking up. I want to see more.
“It’s yours,” he says, taking the baby from me.
I laugh. “I can’t draw. I’m not artistic at all.” I slam it shut and hand it back to him. This is such a strange dream. I pinch myself, but I don’t wake up, and it hurts.
“That’s how you bought this house, moved to Washington. You have a line of them, and they’re very popular. There are even posters and notebooks. You can buy them in Target.”
“Target?” I repeat. “I’m in school to be an accountant,” I say. “This is silly. I want to wake up.”
Why am I getting upset? If this is a dream, I should just go with it, right?
Tom comes running in just then and announces that he spilled grape juice on the floor. Kit leaves in a hurry, and I am left alone to tend to the little girl. I sit her on my lap and touch her mane of silky hair. She sighs contentedly, and I figure she likes it. “I like it too,” I tell her. “One time I fell asleep at a funeral because my dad was playing with my hair.” I keep doing it so she doesn’t cry and alert Kit to the fact that I know nothing about babies. When he comes back, we are sitting on the couch, her half-drugged against my chest. I’m still trying to wake myself from this strange dream. He leans against the doorframe, smiling that half-smile he does. “She’s just like you.”
“You don’t know what I’m like,” I say.
“Really, Helena? Don’t I?”
I hesitate. I don’t know anything.
I keep expecting the dream to end, but it doesn’t. I spend what seems like hours with Kit, Tom, and Brandi as they move through their day. I try to be a good sport, pretending to fit in with his life, even taking a walk with them through the greenest woods I have ever seen. Do dreams really go on this long? Why when you wake up, do dreams seem so hazy and distorted? We stop at a lake, and Kit and Tom skip rocks while I hold Brandi, who really, to my horror, doesn’t want anyone but me. I scoop some of the rich, wet dirt onto a fingertip and taste it. Dirt shouldn’t have a taste in a dream. Or it should taste like Oreos. It definitely shouldn’t taste like dirt. After the walk, Kit cooks us all dinner. Fish he caught himself. He grills it outside on the patio he says that I designed. Again, I remind him that I’m not creative enough to have designed something as majestic as the patio. It reminds me a little of the coloring books, with their carved wood tree houses, and lanterns hanging from trees. The fish is delicious. By the time Kit carries Brandi and Tom inside to give them their baths, I am in full panic mode. I reference the movies I’ve seen to help me: Inception, BIG, The Wizard of Oz. When Kit comes back carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses, I’m crying and ripping the paper napkins into confetti.
He doesn’t say anything about my tears. He opens the bottle and fills a glass, setting it in front of me.
I throw it back like a college girl. Because I am a college girl—not a mom.
“This isn’t real,” I say. “Where are all of my memories if it’s real?”
He sits down next to me and throws an ankle over his knee.
“The day I fell in love with you was the first day you found yourself. You weren’t even mine yet.”
He looks all blurry and distorted through my tears; I let them slip down my face as I listen to him.
“You always insisted you were left-brained, but I didn’t believe you. An artist can always recognize another artist. We sniff each other out. One night we were all drunk and hanging out at Della’s place. She said she wanted to color, so she carries out all these coloring books, crayons, and markers. And we all lay on our stomachs on the floor and colored like five year olds. It was one of those nights you don’t forget, because it was so bizarre,” he pauses, “but also because I fell in love.”
I want him to keep going. The story he’s telling has never happened, but it sounds so real.
“I was lying next to you on the carpet, and Neil was on your other side. Your picture was the best. It wasn’t just good; it was surprisingly good. Everyone freaked out, but I felt smug like I already knew it. We started joking about you being an artist, and it was then that you said you wanted to be great at drawing so you could have your own coloring book line. So I told you to do it.”
I find that my lips part, and my eyes become glassy when he speaks to me like he knows me. It’s intimate. I’ve always wanted to know myself and have never known where to begin.
“I can’t—”
“Draw,” he finishes. “Yes, so you’ve said. You took classes. Didn’t tell anyone but me.”
I want to pick up a pen and see if it’s true, if I have some hidden talent I never knew I had. And I want to know, of all people, why I told Kit. If this isn’t a dream…
It’s a dream.
“Wh-what sorts of things do we do together?” I ask him.
Kit licks his lips. “You and I are the same,” he says. “Don’t look at me like that.”
I snort when I laugh, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.
“We are very different.” He smiles. “I’m an optimist, you’re a pessimist. I avoid confrontation, you charge into it.”
“So how are we the same?”
“We were both on the search for something true at the same time. Sometimes a person’s truth is another person’s love.”
I don’t know what he means, and I’m ashamed to admit it.
“Do we like to do the same things?”
“Yes.” His face is in shadow, but I can hear his fingertips as they rub at the scruff on his chin. “We like art. Food. Small moments that last forever. We like to have sex. We like our babies—” I get goosebumps at that last bit. “We traveled a bit before we had Brandi. We hope to do more of that. We have a list of all the places we want to make love—”
“What’s on the list?” I cut him off. My mouth feels dry.
His voice is low when he speaks. “The Blue Train.”
“What’s that?” I lean forward.
He smiles at me. “It’s a train in South Africa that runs from Pretoria to Cape Town.”
I sit back. “A train? Oh.”
Kit raises his eyebrow at me. “It’s chartered. It takes you through some of the most breathtaking views in the world. Private cabin, private chef.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“What else?”
“A graveyard during a full moon. A treehouse.”
He leans forward and pours himself another glass of wine.
“What do I … what do I like about being with you?”
“You want to be you,” he says. “And that doesn’t offend me.”
Again, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I was supremely inoffensive. Boring. Being me took minimal effort.
We drink the bottle of wine in silence, listening to the toads, and the water, and the trees. A cacophony of God’s things. When I stand up my head spins. I sway and have to catch myself on the back of my chair. Kit stands up, too, and I don’t know if it’s because of the wine, or the fact that I’ve convinced myself this is a dream, but I walk boldly to him. It’s been done before. That’s the feeling I get when his hands and arms find me. Everything about him is familiar—the solidness, his smell, the callouses on his fingertips. This is not the awkward embrace of two people touching for the first time. He’s unclasped my bra and pulled off my shirt before I’ve reached his mouth. I kiss him for the first time, naked from the waist up as his thumbs trace the line under her breasts. The air feels erotic when it blows across my skin. Hands so different from Neil’s long, slender ones touch me. Heavy, warm hands with broad fingers. He tastes of wine. When I kiss his cheek, the stubble scratches at my lips. It’s not entirely unpleasant. I tug at his shirt, and he takes it off. I like how solid he is, and then I really like how solid he is when he picks me up and sets me on the table, and my legs strain to reach around him.
This isn’t real. You aren’t cheating. I close my eyes. He pulls off my pants, kisses me through my panties, and slides on top of me. Our wine bottle goes crashing to the floor, and I turn my head to look at the shards even as he’s kissing his way down my neck and his fingers are in my underwear. My skin is tingling, my hips angled up in demand. Demand of … Kit. His head is bent. I can see him, as he gets ready to push himself inside of me. Then I can feel him, right there. I grab at his arms, frantic. And in that moment I don’t care who he is, and whom he’s supposed to belong to. This feels natural, Kit and I acting on something that was already there. My eyes roll back in my head as he slides inside of me.
And then I wake up.