Chapter 41: How to stop warping the time-space continuum.
Back to the future: Eight and a half years ago. Marcine, Ohio.
“Can we talk? Please, Ani,” Jenny says. Her face is puffy, her eyes are bloodshot from days of crying. “We can still work this out.”
“We can’t.”
“We can,” she insists. “I know we can. We’re meant to be together.”
I shake my head, swallow past my own tears. “Just because we’ve been together since we were kids doesn’t mean we were meant to be together forever.”
“That’s not why,” she says. Her eyes are welling with tears again. She’s cried so much in the past forty-eight hours that I’m surprised she still has any water left in her body to cry. “Or at least — it’s not the only reason why. You… you’re my everything.”
“I’m your everything?” I echo, shaking my head again.
This is fucking sad and it fucking sucks and I want to let myself fall apart and scoop her up into my arms and tell her everything’s going to be okay, but I know better. And I know better because we’ve been like this for too long. For years.
“When was the last time you were happy, Jen? Tell me the truth.” She doesn’t answer, so I try to help her out. “You were miserable in Phoenix.”
Her gaze falls to the floor.
“You spent the last four years angry with me. You spent the four years before that crying almost every time we Skyped. You’ve tried to break up with me three different times. We’re a mess, Jenny. We’ve been a mess. For way too fucking long.”
“But at least we’re a mess together,” she whispers, still staring at the floor.
I take my hand off the door knob, reach under her chin, tilt her head up and wait for her to look at me. I don’t speak again until she does.
“We were unhappy with each other all the way through college. We thought it would be better after college. It wasn’t. Then we thought it would be better after we got married. It wasn’t. We thought it would be better during the off-season. It still wasn’t. We thought we could patch things up by coming back to Ohio. Instead, you fucking…” I let go of her chin, and without meaning to do it, my eyes flit to her stomach. To the place where she has a child growing inside her. Mason’s child. “Coming to Ohio didn’t make it better, either. We have to stop. We have to stop hurting each other.”
She brushes tear-damp blonde hair out of her face. “We’ve just been… we have growing pains. We’ve been growing up. Changing.”
“We’re not growing up. We’re growing apart. It’s been happening slowly, ever since high school.” My voice cracks when I say it, and I don’t fight the sting of tears that come with the words high school. “What have we been hanging onto all these years, Jen? Tell me what you’re hanging onto, because I sure as fuck don’t know what I’m hanging onto anymore. Not you. You’ve been out of reach for almost as long as I can remember.”
“I can’t lose you,” she says. Fresh tears spill from her eyes, down her cheeks. “I don’t even know who I am without you.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s exactly why I have to leave. You said it yourself in Phoenix. You can’t build your whole life around me. You have to build your life around you.” I sniff, wipe tears from my face. “You know what I think we’ve been holding onto all this time? An idea. Just an idea of who we’re supposed to be. An idea we came up with at seventeen. But we’re not seventeen anymore. It’s time we both let go.”
She shakes her head; the tears come harder, faster.
It’s almost impossible to get the next words out. They hitch and tangle around my half-swallowed sob. “I’m not going to be one of those people who spends the rest of my life fucking trudging through something I don’t want to be in anymore. And I don’t want you to do that, either. I don’t want us to stay together just because we said we would a long time ago. Not when both of us are unhappy. I don’t know who I am without you, either, but I’ve got the rest of my life to figure it out. And you’ve got to do that, too.”
She cries so hard she can’t speak, cries so hard that she probably can’t even fucking see me through her tears. And I may not be in love with Jennifer Pearson anymore, but I still love her, and I still hate seeing her in agony. I reach out a hand, stroke blonde hair one last time without a word, and then, because there’s nothing else to do, nothing else to say, I walk out the door.
Marty McFly waits for me inside the DeLorean in the parking lot outside our apartment. I open a batwing door, throw my duffle into the backseat, and climb inside. I glance in the rearview mirror, skeptically eyeing the trailer attached to the back of the car.
He watches me a second before starting the car. “Hey, I’ve got a joke for you.”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes, McFly.”
“You’ll like this one.”
“I said I’m not in the moo — ”
“What does a lesbian bring to the second date?”
“A U-Haul,” I say irritably. “You need some new material. That’s like, thirty fucking years old.”
“No, no, that’s not the end of the joke,” he says with a grin. He leans forward, sets the digital clock on the dashboard for eight and a half years into the future. “What does a lesbian bring to an apartment complex thirteen years after the second date?”
I give him a you-can’t-be-fucking-serious look.
“Another U-Haul!” He cackles with delight, waiting for me to laugh with him. When I don’t so much as crack a grin, his laughter dies off awkwardly. He points at the seat belt. “You should buckle up. Sometimes time travel gets crazy.”
I wipe drying tears from my cheeks. “Tell me about it.” I fasten the buckle. When he puts the DeLorean in reverse, I reach across, put my hand on his shoulder. “McFly.”
“Hmm?”
“I’m tired of time traveling, okay? I don’t want to come back anymore. There’s nothing I can do here that’s going to make a difference.”
He looks disappointed. “You only say that because you’ve never tried to change anything.”
“The fuck, McFly? They call the past ‘past’ because you can’t fucking change anything. It is what it is — or was what it was, or whatever — and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do except live with it. Mistakes and all.”
“Not true!” he says. He pats the flux capacitor on the dash. “I used this baby to go all the way back to 1955. I saved my parents’ marriage.”
“That was a movie.”
“The hell it was! It was my life!”
“It was your life in a movie,” I correct. “A classic fucking movie. But still a movie. In real life, there’s no going back. Except in your head. And after a while, all that going back makes your head crazy. So I’m serious, okay? Don’t show up with your goddamned DeLorean again. I’m not going back anymore. Only forward.”
Marty McFly heaves out a mighty sigh, but he nods his acceptance. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we’ve got all your stuff with us in the U-Haul, then.” His face brightens. “Hey, speaking of which. I’ve got another joke for you.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“When the zombie apocalypse comes — ”
“I told you. I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“No, listen. This is a good one. When the zombie apocalypse comes, how come the gay guys are going to be the first ones to get out of town?”
I give him a stare of death.
“Because their shit’s already packed!” He cackles again.
I groan. “That was… really politically fucking incorrect.”
“I know! But it’s funny, right?!”
“No. It’s tasteless and borderline homophobic. And you’re a straight figment of my imagination. So… not fucking cool, okay?”
“Oh, lighten up, Anika. It was only a joke.”
I scowl at him. “I’ve got a restaurant to open, McFly. Let’s go.”
#
Back to the present
I make it from the hospital one town over to Soul Mountain just after ten-fifteen AM. Becker and Emir are there already, preparing for the day, and when I push the door open into the main body of the restaurant, the first thing that hits me is the smell of rice and dal.
Rice and dal are… how do I even explain it?
Rice and dal aren’t just rice and dal. It’s not just food to me. Encoded within those smells is every memory I have of home and family. Dal is standing on a step stool next to my father at eight while he explains to me in accented English how and when to add the tamarind, onion, garlic. Rice is high school on the weekends, fighting in Soul Mountain’s kitchen with Dutch as I lay out all the reasons why I should get the car instead of her.
Rice and dal are my past. Rice and dal are my present. And if my parents agree to my plan, rice and dal are my future.
I greet Becker and Emir in the kitchen. I roll silverware. I power up our aging computer system, making a mental note to update it as soon as I can afford to. I scoop ice into plastic pitchers, fill them with water, leave them at the wait station.
Kiersten comes in at ten forty-five, grumpy-assed as ever, and at eleven, I unlock the main door and switch on the neon OPEN sign in the front window.
Jenny arrives right on time at eleven fifteen, a white to-go cup of coffee in her hand.
She smiles weakly. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say. I point to a table near the back, as far away from prying ears as we can get. “Let’s sit down.”