Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 23
I glanced over to the small office, where I could hear Mimi’s father finishing up his phone call with the sign-off, “And a pleasant day to you and yours.” Before he came back out, Mimi leaned in one more time.
“You know, I’ve got a little bottle of lilac cream in the back.”
She smiled. “You just massage it in every night for a month,” she continued, demonstrating on herself how to rub the cream into her cheeks, “and it’ll lighten you right up. It’s what Rita Hayworth uses.”
Mimi’s dad came out of the office then. “Good news,” he said, beaming, “I’ve secured you one of the new units. You can move in tonight.” Father and daughter both clapped their hands in delight, and I could only offer them what I hoped looked like a genuine smile in return.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The owner of the restaurant was giving me the stink eye as I sat alone at a large table, one of every dish on the menu spread out before me. Maybe he thought I was going to dine and dash. Maybe he didn’t like my skin color. He stood with arms folded over his stout little body, twitching his moustache in my direction and tap-ping his fat foot.
I didn’t care. I was starving and annoyed, and I ripped off a huge chunk of bread and dipped it into a bowl of tomato soup, then started twirling my fork into a towering plate of spaghetti.
“What the hell did you order?” I heard Adam ask, and I looked up to see him standing with an expression of dismay over the table.
“Everything,” I answered, hovering the fork over the plate en route to my mouth. “You can get an entire steak here for only eighty-five cents.”
“These people are on rations,” Adam whispered, embarrassed, as he sat down opposite me. “You just ordered enough food for ten people.”
I hesitated before bringing the fork to my mouth. I hadn’t thought of that. Okay, so maybe the owner had good reason to be gaping at me. Whatever. Nothing to do now but eat it all.
Whatever judgment Adam had about the food dissipated as he sat down and started shoveling bites of steak into his mouth, all dripping in a thick, brown gravy.
“You sold the ring?” he noticed.
“Pawned it. The man said he’d hold it for us . . . for me. Until I could pay him back.”
Adam watched me eat for a moment, devouring forkfuls of food like they owed me a favor. “I have no idea where you put all this food.”
“It’s feeding my rage.”
He laughed, adding a large portion of chicken parmesan to his plate. “Did you learn anything today?”
“Oh, I learned lots of things today,” I answered between bites.
“I learned that the career options for a Mexican woman in 1944 range from cleaning lady to maid. Can’t be a stripper, unfortunately. Not white enough. But if I bleach my skin with the lilac tonic stuff that Rita Hay-something uses, I can pass for white, and then I can watch needles spin around a gauge at the base, so long as I don’t ask what they’re for.”
Adam chuckled into a bite of steak, washing it down with a gulp of water. But he was also looking over his shoulder, making sure no one was listening.
“And basically,” I continued, “the only way I’m ever getting into that lab now is if I wake up tomorrow morning looking like you.”
At this, Adam’s fork froze in midair for a moment, his eyes questioning.
“What?” I mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti.
“It’s not a bad idea.”
“What isn’t?”
“Go in as a cleaning lady, and you can sneak in and steal me a badge.”
I dropped my fork, which made a louder clanking sound than I had intended, catching the attention of the already suspicious owner. I offered him an apologetic wave, and he eventually went back to staring indignantly at the other diners.
“I can’t do that, Adam.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t pass as a cleaning lady.”
He simply held out his hands as if to ask, “Why not?” The anger that had been brewing inside me all day was starting to work its way up into my throat again, and I swallowed it down with a cold sip of water before continuing.
“There are no mixed people here, Adam. I’m too white to be Mexican. I’m too Mexican to be white. The other ladies would know. Also . . . my Spanish sucks.”
“You don’t speak Spanish?”
“I speak some Spanish. I’m not fluent.”
But Adam didn’t seem to understand that either. Had he never heard of assimilation?
“My abuela tried to teach me, and my mother wouldn’t let her.
There’s a stigma. You wouldn’t understand, Adam.”
“Can we skip the white privilege lecture, Marina? I’m just trying to get us in the building.”
“So am I.”
“Then what are we fighting about?”
“I’m angry, and you’re here.” Even I had to laugh at that, realizing as I said it that it wasn’t the best argument. But I was just so frustrated. “I belong in the lab.”
“I know you do, sweetheart, but we can’t change history.”
I could only laugh at the irony of that statement, and Adam laughed too.
“We can’t change all of history,” he clarified.
But it was the word sweetheart that had caught me. I stared at the pile of food in front of me. “Is that what you’re gonna call me now?”
He put down his water glass and placed his hand over mine.
“Hey.”
“Stop,” I said softly, pulling my hand away. I sliced up little bits of the rest of the chicken. “What did Jenny say?”
Her name sat between us for a moment like I had placed a gun on the table. “Nothing much after you left. She had to work.” He flinched at the final word. “And afterwards, she was meeting someone. I told her to blow it off, but she said, ‘He’d be mad.’”
“He? Who do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. She said she’d meet me in the morning to explain.”
I let that information lie for a moment. “So, you just . . . sat there and watched her dance all afternoon?” What are you doing, Marina? Don’t torture yourself.
“No. I didn’t want to watch that, so I’ve just been walking in circles for hours . . . looking for you.”
I couldn’t help but smile as I took one last spoonful of soup. I was finally feeling full, and I was a little embarrassed that I had ordered so much. But even the owner seemed to have gotten over it at that point and had returned to his post by the front door.
“I got us a place to crash,” I said, grabbing the paper sack with all my belongings from under the table. “Let me pay for this, and we can catch the shuttle.”
Adam looked nervous suddenly, his eyes darting around.
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “It has two bedrooms.”
° ° °
About two minutes outside of town, the packed shuttle fell off a cliff. Well, maybe not an actual cliff, but that’s certainly what it felt like. Suddenly, the paved road underneath the tires fell away, and the large bus wobbled and lurched its way forward on the pockmarked dirt path that shot out like a broken arrow into the untamed sea of fields beyond the town.
All civilization—every street and business, every tree and park that I had known by heart from the time I was conscious of my surroundings—evaporated into the warm summer air. It was like someone up above had taken a great eraser and simply wiped it all away. Nothing remained but wide open fields, billowing with summer growth of wheat and corn under the soft light from the crescent moon.
The bus shot farther out into the dark, occasionally bobbling left and then right, causing Adam and me to bump into each other on our bench for another ten minutes until it reached its destination. I clung to the paper sack on my lap, holding it like a baby. The driver suddenly pulled over—although it wasn’t immediately clear why, as we hadn’t reached any landmark that I could see—and announced that we were there.
All the people aboard the bus—mostly young women in work clothes or simple dresses, and the few men who were apparently husbands judging from the way the women clung close to them—flowed off two by two into the night.
Adam and I stood, waiting our turn, and I tried to peer out the windows into the darkness to see where exactly we were being dumped.
It wasn’t until I’d made it off the final step of the bus, landing in a soft, wet patch of dirt that soiled my brand-new shoes, that I saw something that looked like a street sign. It was made of wood, jammed into the ground at a slight angle, and it held the name of a street that I actually recognized.
“Where are we?” Adam muttered as he came up behind me. The bus pulled away, its tires grinding temporarily in that wet mud before spinning themselves free and allowing the driver to leave us there, in the midst of the endless wheat.
The other couples had already started walking off towards what I could now see were a series of small cottages, each identical to the next with only a number painted on the front to tell them apart. They were lined up as far as the eye could see for the length of the dirt road.
“We’re in my neighborhood,” I answered, still not quite able to process it. These little cottages would one day occupy a paved street lined with elm trees that shaded the sidewalk where my dad taught me to ride a bike when I was seven.
We were the only two left on the road, and I pulled out the little slip of paper from the sack with the information the old man at the shop had given me—the number eighty-seven written in his small, crisp handwriting.
“Marina, look up,” Adam said.
Panicking for a moment, I looked at him, only to see his eyes trained on the sky above, a childlike look of wonder on his face. As I tilted my chin up into the night, my mouth fell open with a look that must have mirrored his. I had never seen so many stars in my life.
And not just stars, but whole galaxies. Swirling and bright, distant and alive. Billions of twinkling constellations and star clusters.
Jupiter bright and blinding, painfully white under the moon. We walked slowly side by side, occasionally looking down to sidestep a puddle or a pothole in the raw earth, only to find our eyes pried upwards again into that inviting envelope of light.
We didn’t speak; nothing I could have thought of to say seemed important suddenly. It felt like the world had hit pause for a moment, the silence as comforting as a lullaby.
By the time we reached number eighty-seven, it was all I could do to force myself to put the key in the door and walk inside.
Adam flipped the light switch, showing every detail of the tiny house I had agreed to rent for eighteen dollars a month—two bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchenette. We stood awkwardly together in that small entryway while I dug into my shopping bag again.
“I got you a toothbrush,” I said, breaking the spell of silence that had overtaken us outside.
“Thanks.”
He took it, and we continued to stand there for a moment, lost in our own thoughts.
“I don’t love her anymore,” he finally said. “But if she’s in trouble, and she needs me, then I have to help her.”
“I know that,” I answered, realizing that I would do the exact same thing if Kieren needed me.
Or if Brady did.
Adam inhaled sharply, his mouth twisting around words that couldn’t seem to find any way to escape his brain and make their way out of his mouth. Instead, he simply cleared his throat and nodded.
“Good night,” he said quickly, heading for one of the bedrooms.
“Good night,” I answered, but he was already closing the door.
I walked into the other bedroom and lay down on the bare cot by the window, looking up into that impossible night sky. How many galaxies did this universe contain? How many lives might exist in them? How many dimensions?
And if space and time were infinite, if it was all just a never-ending sea, the waves crashing ceaselessly into one another, smashing and combining, blending into one only to separate again, then where did all of this end?
Somewhere in this universe, there was a dimension where Robbie was killed at fourteen. Somewhere, a dimension where Kieren and I were in love. Somewhere, another where I loved Brady and he loved me back.
And somewhere, in the multitudes of time and space, my mother and I, two planets orbiting the same sun, were what mothers and daughters were meant to be: faithful to our bond, proud to belong to each other, innocent and true.
But this was not that dimension.
I waited ten minutes before I went to his bed.
He was awake and waiting for me.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“How did you choose 2001 anyway?” I asked, my head resting on Adam’s broad chest, his fingers stroking up and down my back like the strings of a violin. “The first time you went?”
“Oh, the Kubrick film,” he answered. “A Space Odyssey. It’s a really awesome movie.”
Clouds had shrouded part of the night sky, leaving just enough of a glow to feel like God had turned on a night light. It was weirdly silent outside until a distant owl began to hoot, somewhere far off beyond the wheat fields.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“No, I’m messing with you.”
I laughed, picking up my head and slapping his arm just to have the pleasure of replacing my face on his warm skin after.
“No, I’d had this—this epically, and I mean really, colossally, bad wrestling match. I’d gotten my ass creamed . . .” He laughed at the memory, and I couldn’t help but laugh too, trying to picture what teenager could ever beat Adam. “And there was this trophy in the display case at the front of the school. You know which one—”
“Yeah. I’ve got a trophy in there.”
He looked down at me, impressed. “For what?”
“Robotics. I was on a team that went to regionals last year.”
He chuckled to himself, shaking his head and twirling his index finger around a loop of my hair.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” He laughed. “I love how smart you are.”
I couldn’t tell if he was messing with me again, but I decided not to push it. “So, there was a wrestling trophy?”
“Yeah, the school had had a really good wrestler that year, and I decided, what the hell. I’ve been everywhere else I can think of. I’ll go back to the year this kid won this trophy, and maybe I’ll learn a couple things.”
“Right.”
“And I go back, and I sit myself down in the bleachers, and I look up across the gym. And there’s this face of an angel staring back at me. And that was it. I just kept going back.”
He must have felt me hold my breath for a moment because his fingers stopped twirling my hair.
“Yeah, she’s really pretty,” I offered, a beat too late and dripping with way too much hostility.
He laughed, holding my chin up to look me in the eyes.
“What?”
“Is that jealousy?”
“No, I want to hear more about how pretty your ex-girlfriend is. Seriously, don’t skip any details.” I started to pull away, but he pulled me back by my left arm and held it up to his own.
“Look at this,” he said, and though I wanted to stay angry with him, I couldn’t do it. I looked at our arms together, our two different skin tones, his almond-colored and mine caramel, pressed up against each other. “That’s beautiful to me, Marina,” he whispered, kissing my shoulder. I flipped my arm over to show my scars, and he did the same, pressing his to mine and letting our hands fall into each other.
I smiled at him, realizing something.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You’ve stopped calling me M.”
He smiled back, shaking his head and holding my hand tighter.
“That’s someone else’s name for you. Marina is mine.”
I put my head back on his chest.
“Why robotics?” he asked.
“It’s the future.”
“Humans make the future.”
“Hate to break it to you, but it’s actually gonna be robots.” I swirled my finger in slow circles on his chest while I talked, and his hand went back to stroking me idly and working its way into my hair. “Which is a good thing,” I continued, “because, as you know, human history is just people destroying everything in sight over and over again.”
“That’s what you think history is?”
“It’s white people killing brown people, Adam.”
“If you don’t study history, you’re doomed to repeat it.”
“We are repeating it. Literally.”
A silence came over the room, and even the owl seemed to have drifted off to sleep. The light was changing outside the window, growing darker and more ominous with the late hour, telling us that time was passing.
“Imagine an airplane,” I continued, letting my mind drift and the images become vivid and real, “flying through the sky, running on the power of its own wind resistance. No gas. No engine. It’s basically a huge wind-powered drone, adjusting for height, temperature, turbulence. Landing perfectly on time. You go from point A to point B, and you don’t destroy the world in the process.”
“Something would go wrong. It always does.”
“And we would fix it. With robots!”
I could feel his chest shake a bit, laughing at me, and I knew I should be falling asleep, but the moment was too perfect to let go.
“And this is why I teach history,” he said, laughing.
“You’re a great teacher.”
“Don’t say that when you’ve got your leg draped over my stomach.”
“You are. This doesn’t count.”
“Everything counts.”
He finished twirling my hair then, letting it slip out of his fingers like water.
“We’re only five and a half years apart,” I said, and somehow it came out sounding like a prayer.
“And in a couple years, that won’t matter at all,” he agreed. “But right now, it does.”
“So go meet me in a couple years then.”
A chill passed through the room, so real and cold that I swear I could almost hear it. I shivered despite Adam’s heat, and I could feel his breath catch and then release beneath my ear. Because it was too real. With the portals, anything was possible. Any timeline could be altered. We could spend the rest of our lives this way, shaving off a year here, a minute there, trying to achieve a perfection that would never come.
