Beckett
December 2nd
For the first time in over a year, I came back to an apartment that wasn’t dark and cold. The lights were on, Zelda was bustling around in the kitchen and an incredible smell wafted from the oven.
“Hey,” I called, unstrapping my helmet and setting my bike against the door.
“Hey, yourself,” she called back. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
Tugging off my thick, weather resistant gloves, I noticed the small coffee table was set for two. “Can I help?” I asked.
“Yeah, can I borrow those?” Zelda asked, indicating my gloves. “You have no potholders. How can you not have any potholders?”
“Lack of pot-holding,” I said. I put my gloves back on and moved into the kitchen. “I’ll do it. Wait, what am I doing?”
“Taking the casserole out of the oven. Careful.” She winced as I took hold of the hot dish. “Watch your fingers.”
The gloves worked fine as potholders. The heat of the oven made my cold face tingle, and the scent of the casserole made me dizzy with hunger.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Broccoli-cheddar noodle pie,” Zelda said. “You’re in charge of drinks. Beers are in the fridge.”
I popped two IPAs while she spooned out a huge portion of casserole for me, a smaller for her. We huddled around the coffee table, her on the floor and me on the couch.
“What do I owe you for groceries?” I asked after we’d eaten enough to satisfy the hunger first.
“Nothing,” she said. “And don’t ruin the celebration with tacky money talk.”
I grinned. “And what are we celebrating?”
“I got a job,” she said. “It’s not exactly what I wanted…” She glanced down at her food. “I was going for a night job to stay out of your way, but Darlene hooked me up with this place—”
“Darlene?”
“Yeah, she popped in rather unexpectedly. It’s okay,” she added quickly when I frowned. “I like her. A lot, actually. And she knew someone at a fancy brunch place on the Upper West Side, and got me a job. It looks like it’ll be good money, but like I said, it didn’t have evening hours.” She glanced at me with those incredible green eyes of hers. A gaze that radiated both beauty and a sharp intelligence. “I hope that’s okay.”
“What? Yeah, of course.” I blinked out of my mini-trance. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
She shrugged, tucked a lock of long black hair behind her ear. “I don’t want to get in your way.”
“You’re not in my way,” I said. “You live here. Stop apologizing for it.”
“I’m not apologizing,” she snapped with sudden fire. “I’m trying to be considerate. You were the one who told me you didn’t know anyone you could stand to live with in this small space.”
I shrugged. “I do now.”
She stared for a moment, the hard edges of her expression melting a little. “Okay,” she said. “Good. But don’t expect a casserole every night. This bastard took a long time to make and I’ve got a graphic novel that isn’t drawing itself.”
I bit back a smile. “It’s the best dinner I’ve had in a while, Zelda. Thank you.”
She opened her mouth, snapped it shut, then looked away. “You’re welcome.”
I cleaned up the kitchen then settled down with a movie on my laptop. Zelda sat down to work on her comic book. She bent over her sketchpad, her hair falling to form a wall between it and the rest of the world. She seemed to be having a hard time. Balls of paper littered the floor around the table by the window.
After an hour, she tore yet another sheet off the pad. I caught a glimpse of an inked sketch of a young woman with severe hair and a black body suit, before Zelda crumpled it up and added it to the pile.
“Not going well?” I ventured.
I expected—and sort of looked forward to—one of her sarcastic retorts. Zelda rested her chin on her hand, facing me. She was wearing her square, black-rimmed glasses that made her look smartly sexy as all hell.
“Not remotely well,” she said. She kicked at the snowballs of paper at her feet. “And yet this is an improvement on the absolute nothing I did all afternoon.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“The one publishing house that threw me a bone said they wanted to see revisions.” She shook her head, her fingers trailing over pages of finished drawings. “I don’t know what they want. It’s not a romance or melodrama. It’s action-adventure. Life or death, with a bit of chaos theory to boot.”
“Chaos theory?” I set my laptop on the coffee table. “Now I have to check it out. Do you mind?”
“No, go for it,” she said, vacating the chair at the desk so that I could sit. “Behold my graphic novel in all its heartless glory.”
I pulled the first page to me. The same heroine in black leveled a gun at a pudgy guy on the floor.
“Mother, May I?” I said, reading the title header. “So what’s it about?”
Zelda stood behind me and I could smell her perfume as she leaned in.
“It’s set in the future, about one hundred years from now. It’s a dystopian earth, but not because of nuclear holocaust, or pollution—although the planet’s been pretty fucked up by that too. But what makes it dystopian isn’t one cataclysmic event, but thousands and thousands of small ones. Murders, rapes, shootings…” She cleared her throat. “Child abductions, human trafficking. It all compounds and brings humanity to a collective low. No empathy, no consideration anymore for the planet or others. Everyone is out for themselves, like this terrible, gray cloud of anger and fear that hangs over everything.”
“Sounds cheery,” I said, “but kind of plausible too. So what’s the cure?”
“Time travel. There’s an agency called the Butterfly Project that culls news articles from the past about terrible crimes. They store the information in a database, then send special agents back in time to stop the crimes before they happen. The science isn’t exact; there are a lot of bugs, but still they try. They hope the lessening of the misery in the past will lead to a brighter future.”
My fingers clutched the edge of the table as those words dragged me back in time too. To the misery of my own past. The shitty, roach-infested apartment I’d grown up in with Gramps. The ratty furniture, the stained carpet. Gramps sitting in his favorite chair with the torn green vinyl. I smelled the smoke from the pipe he always clenched in his teeth. The way his narrow chest rose and fell in spasms when he coughed. His watery eyes and the smoky rasp of his voice.
“You deserve better than this, Beck.”
I swallowed the jagged lump in my throat, pushing the memory down with it.
Lessening the misery of the past will lead to a brighter future.
Zelda had nailed the exact reason I agreed to the stupid fucking robbery in the first place. To lessen not only my misery, but Gramps’, too. He deserved better. Except that it went horribly wrong…
I cleared my throat. “And so this chick in black is one of those agents who goes back in time?”
“Right. This is Kira. Her codename at the Butterfly Project is Mother.”
Zelda’s long black hair fell over my shoulder as she bent to tap on the drawing of her heroine. I glanced up at her.
Goddamn, she’s beautiful.
Against the memory of my desperate life with Gramps, and the squalor we lived in, Zelda was a balm for my eyes. A beautiful sunrise after a week of gray skies. Just the touch of her clean, silky hair brushing my skin was a luxury.
“Okay,” I blinked and tore my eyes from the pale, delicate curve of Zelda’s neck. “What’s…uh, so what’s Mother’s story?”
“Her child was murdered,” Zelda said. “Now she’s driven by vengeance. She goes back in time specifically to stop child murderers and pedophiles. She doesn’t apprehend them. She kills them. Always. Without mercy.”
Her finger pointed toward the drawing of a pudgy guy—a pedophile—begging Mother for his life.
“You ever hear that child’s rhyme, Mother, May I?” Zelda asked.
“Sounds familiar.”
“It’s what Kira demands of all her pervs. She makes them ask, ‘Mother, may I live?’” Zelda’s jaw clenched. “And the answer is always no.”
All at once, I felt like I was too close to her work. She wanted it back. I rose to give her the chair.
“Sounds intense,” I said. “So what didn’t the publishers like about it?”
“No heart,” Zelda said with a snort, plopping back down. “I mean, I get that it’s dark but it’s supposed to be.”
I moved to the kitchen to grab another beer. “Well, what else is the story about?”
“What do you mean?”
“What does she do? Who does she talk to?”
Zelda frowned. “Other agents. The scientists at the Butterfly Project.”
“How come the Butterfly Project doesn’t send someone back in time to get the guy who killed her daughter?”
“Not much of a story then.” Zelda said with a small smile. “The science is buggy, like I said. Random. The database chooses the time and place, and the jumper jumps. Kira hopes to one day jump to her daughter’s killer but the odds are astronomically low.”
“Is she married? Does she have some poor schlub of a husband at home waiting for her while she goes back in time to kick pervert ass?”
Zelda smirked. “No, she’s a loner. And do not tell me the heart this story needs is a love interest. Kira does not need to be saved by a man.” Her voice grew low. “She’s saving herself the only way she knows how.”
“Okay.” I sipped my beer and leaned on the counter. “Who tries to stop her?”
“Sometimes the pervs give her a hard time. Sometimes, she gets in trouble with local law enforcement, but she always outsmarts them.”
I nodded. “But who stops her? Not physically, I mean. Mentally. Or, morally, rather.”
“Morally?”
I shrugged, trying mightily to keep this conversation casual. “Is there a moral conflict about putting a bullet in some guy’s head before he’s actually done anything?”
“Not some guy,” Zelda snapped. “A pervert. A disgusting, child-molesting animal.”
“Yeah, but has she ever tried locking them up instead of murdering them? I can’t imagine killing people is good for her soul, no matter how badly the guy deserves it.”
Zelda stared at me as if I had grown a second head. “But that’s just it. The guy deserves to die. Badly.”
I held up my hands. “Hey, no argument from me there. I’m just saying, for the sake of your story, where’s the conflict?”
Zelda’s brows came together and I knew I was treading on thin ice. Criticism of anyone’s art, no matter how good the intentions, could be risky business. Given the way her voice hardened over her next words, I guessed I was right.
“She has tons of conflict,” Zelda said. “Her entire life is conflict. The guilt of letting her child…” She shook her head, her small hands clenching into fists. “Her daughter is gone. And she couldn’t stop it. She lives with that every day, and the only relief she ever has is killing those who try to spread that endless pain to other mothers. Other families. Other sisters…” Her voice cracked on the word.
Holy shit, what is happening here?
I set my beer carefully on the counter. “Zelda…”
“So there’s your conflict,” she said, her voice trembling. She snapped her portfolio shut and I didn’t miss the tears she blinked away behind her glasses. “You need the bathroom? I’m going to take a shower so I don’t have to… So in the morning we don’t…get in each other’s way.”
“Hey, I’m sorry if I—”
“You weren’t. It’s fine.”
She slammed the bathroom door, cutting me off before I could tell her I was sorry for butting in when her graphic novel was clearly more than the ‘action-adventure’ she described it. Her reaction wasn’t defensiveness against criticism. Not even close.
The water started up, and I was too late.
There is heart in this, I thought, my fingers trailing over the pages of her work. It’s just buried under so much pain.
Later that night, I turned off the lights. Zelda was on the damn air mattress that I already hated, and I climbed into bed. We exchanged stiff ‘goodnights’ and then a heavy silence fell. Time slipped by and sleep eluded me. I felt as if things between us were off-kilter; that if I didn’t say something, we’d spend the next few days feeling as if she were walking around naked and vulnerable while I was fully dressed.
A restless rustle came from the air mattress and I took a chance.
“Hey,” I said into the dark. “You awake?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Can’t sleep.”
“That’s my fault.”
“No, it’s not. I’m sorry I got a little crazy before. I appreciate you trying to help, but the graphic novel…” She sighed. “I don’t know how to fix it because it’s exactly what I need it to be, just as it is.”
“I get that. I like your story, Zelda.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, and I liked what you said about lessening the misery of the past to lead to a brighter future. That’s kind of my story too. It’s why I got in on the robbery that got me thrown in prison for two years.”
“What do you mean?” Her large eyes glittered across the dim space between our beds.
“My grandfather took me in when I was eight years old. My junkie mom and alcoholic dad took off and Gramps took care of me. He did his best, made sure I got to school. He had no money, no great job, but he had integrity. It’s all he had to pass down to me, and I failed him.”
I rolled to my back, laced my fingers behind my head.
“Robbing that house went against everything he stood for, but by then I was twenty-one, working two jobs and he was in hospice. Liver cirrhosis. I knew he was running out of time and I wanted to give him a better life too. To take him somewhere nice before he died. A warm beach, maybe, where he could sit on the sand, turn his face into the sun and smoke his pipe.”
“But that didn’t happen,” Zelda said softly.
“Nope. I got caught. Gramps died three days after I began my sentence. The hospice nurses said he wasn’t mentally there. He didn’t know what I’d done. Didn’t know I tried to take what wasn’t mine and that a man had died. He never knew any of it.” I turned my head to look at her. “That’s the only reason I can still get out of bed in the morning.”
I imagined my story hanging in the air above us, like printed words for Zelda to read that I couldn’t take back.
“Your grandfather did a really good job raising you, Beckett.”
“He did his best and I fucked it up. I made a huge fucking mistake. It’s not easy to come back from that.”
“And you wish you could do anything to go back and change it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Anything. I could use an agency like the Butterfly Project.”
“Me too,” Zelda said. “More than anything.”
I rolled to face her, listening if she wanted to talk, silent if she wanted to sleep. She talked. From the nest of the comforter, her voice rose up laden with a deep, swampy pain. The words coming from some lonely place deep inside her. Rusty with disuse, buried so long in that dark well, even this dim light of the apartment suddenly seemed to bright.
“My sister was abducted,” Zelda said. “She was nine. I was fourteen. I saw it happen.”
Every muscle in my body constricted. “You saw…?
“Yeah. I saw and I couldn’t stop it. I tried. I ran as fast as I could but the van was faster. I screamed so loud…”
Her voice failed and I squeezed my eyes shut in the dark as if I could block out the image of a young girl, black hair streaming behind her, chasing after something precious she would never catch.
“Jesus, Zelda…”
“But I… I failed. I failed my sister. My mom and dad.” She inhaled raggedly. “So that’s why I have panic attacks in burger joints when someone talks about my family. I can’t visit them without falling apart and I don’t want to anyway. The guilt is like a firestorm, burning me up inside.”
“They don’t blame you, do they?”
“No,” she said. “But they don’t need to. I know what happened. I was there.”
I realized I’d unconsciously balled my hands into tight fists.
“Did they ever catch the guy? I mean…?”
“Yeah, they caught him,” Zelda said, her voice calm with only a faint tremor at the edges. “Gordon James confessed to kidnapping and murder. He’s been rotting on death row for ten years in Pennsylvania, and we—my family and I—have been waiting all that time for the call. And when it comes, I’m going to sit in a small room and watch that bastard die. For closure, I guess. Some relief. I can’t pull the trigger like Mother can, but I can witness it, you know?”
You don’t want to see a man die, Zelda… I thought automatically, but kept it to myself. It wasn’t my place to tell her what would bring her relief or peace, or spare her from the mountain of guilt she was carrying on her small shoulders.
Zelda heaved a steady sigh. “So that’s what Mother, May I? is about. I can’t go back in time to stop that asshole from taking my sister, but Kira can. Mother can, and I… I need that.”
Go to her, I thought. Go over there. You don’t tell a story like that without someone at least giving you a fucking hug after. Some tiny piece of comfort…
I couldn’t move. The enormity of her story pinned me down. “I’m sorry, Zelda. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry I told you,” she said. “I don’t mean I regret it, I mean that it’s an ugly story. I’m sorry you had to hear it, but do you want to hear something strange? I’ve never told that story out loud. Ever. Just thinking about it too hard without filtering it through Mother, May I? can bring on a panic attack of epic proportions.”
“Yeah?”
“But I told you and I feel…relieved almost, which seems impossible.” She smiled at me in the dark, beautiful and soft, and far away from terrible memories. “You missed your calling, Copeland. You should have been a therapist. Mine never got more than ‘I’m okay’ out of me.”
“I’m glad if I could help.”
“It’s your voice,” she said sleepily. “You have a nice voice.”
I felt sleep settle over us both, as if we’d exorcised some of the ghosts that haunted us and now could get a little bit of rest.
A thought crossed my mind before I fell too deep.
“Zelda? Why did you call the time travel agency the Butterfly Project?”
“It’s a little bit of chaos theory. A butterfly flutters its wings in Malaysia and the changes in air currents cause a hurricane in Florida. I love that idea. That even one tiny action can create an enormous effect. The agents who work for the Butterfly Project want to erase the tragedies that spread misery and pain in the hopes that better things will ripple out instead. Goodness, kindness, happiness.” She smiled tiredly. “All the ’nesses.”
“I like that,” I said. “I like that a lot.”
“Me too,” she said. “Goodnight, Beckett.”
“Goodnight, Zelda.”
In the dark, I waited for her to fall asleep. I watched the shape of her in the dark, listened to the sound of her breath. When she was deep under, I fell too.