Page 21

Tressa Fay woke up in the pitch dark to Epinephrine jumping off her bed with a little trill and running out of her bedroom into the living room. She would’ve fallen back asleep, but then she heard him meow one of his meows with a question mark at the end, and she heard someone softly knocking on her door.

She grabbed her phone. It was after midnight. There were no notifications to tell her who might be at her door—no text from Mary, no voicemail from Linds saying there was something keeping her awake and she needed to talk.

Not one bit did Tressa Fay like this part of living alone, the noises-at-night part and the requirement to either check them out, padding on bare feet over creaking floorboards, or lie awake worried about the murderer who would fling her bedroom door open any moment, and the last thing she’d see would be the glint of moonlight on his butcher knife.

Tressa Fay got up. She pulled on her robe and walked to check the peephole in the door as silently as she could over the pounding of her heart.

It was Meryl.

Meryl had come in the middle of the night, unannounced. The newness of it made it feel special enough that Tressa Fay opened the door smiling.

“What are you doing here so late?” She reached out to grab Meryl’s hand and pull her inside. Meryl’s hair was everywhere, and she melted into Tressa Fay’s tug willingly. She was so softened, Tressa Fay wasn’t sure if Meryl was coming to her tipsy or tired or emotional, but it literally made her knees feel weak that whatever state Meryl was in, she had come to Tressa Fay, seeking her out for comfort or a snuggle or a late-night drowsy talk.

“Gayle and James and I were hanging out, and then I wanted to see you. But I couldn’t text. Well, I could, but you wouldn’t get it until a long time from now. Also, the you who exists a long time from now maybe wants to break up with me.” Meryl made her way to Tressa Fay’s sofa and collapsed onto her side. She was obviously tired and punchy.

Tressa Fay slid off Meryl’s sensible Birkenstocks, which made her tender every time she spied Meryl’s feet in them, and directed her into a comfortable position with a throw, feeling fat with caregiving warmth and indulgence. “There are so many obstacles to separate here.” She went into the kitchen and turned on her kettle. “I’m going to make you some herbal tea. Were you guys drinking?”

“No. Well, yes, but that was hours ago at dinner. We kept talking and talking, and I’m just tired now.” Meryl put her head on the back of the sofa. The way she smiled at Tressa Fay made her heart lurch, it was so tender.

She didn’t want to think about what Meryl had said about future Tressa Fay wanting to break up with her. Meryl had told her that future Tressa Fay was her so many times, it felt like an accusation, something that had the potential to start a fight.

She decided to make herself herbal tea, too. It was hard enough on her body to wake up suddenly and be scared without having to figure out what to do about the possible feelings of her future self. “That’s a lot of hours of talking.” It was hard to keep the questions out of that statement.

Meryl sighed. “So many. But it was good.”

“Yeah?” Tressa Fay fussed with tea bags. Meryl didn’t seem to have heard her.

Meryl grabbed a pillow to put on the arm of the sofa and leaned back. Epinephrine accepted the tacit invitation to jump onto her belly and make biscuits. “ Oof. He looks small, but he’s so heavy.” Meryl ringed Epinephrine’s neck with the firm scritches that he loved, and his rough purrs started up. What was it about a woman who knew how to pet your cat?

Tressa Fay came back into the room with the tea and set it on the table near Meryl, sitting down at her feet and pulling them into her lap. “You’re friend drunk.”

Meryl closed her eyes. “Hmm. It’s been a long time.”

Tressa Fay pressed her thumb into one of Meryl’s arches. Then again. She let Epinephrine’s purrs soothe her, too. She almost didn’t want to ask the question that was on the tip of her tongue, but she also didn’t want to feel this lurch-ache in her heart and stomach anymore. She cleared her throat. “Why do you think I’m breaking up with you?”

Meryl opened her eyes. “You mean future you?”

Tressa Fay ran the heel of her hand down the sole of Meryl’s foot, then back up, squeezing her toes. “Yeah. Though you keep reminding me we’re the same.”

“It’s November for her. She’s quiet. I don’t think she wants to text all the time now that we’re together, and you know what it’s like here in November. The days are so short and windy and cold and dark.”

Meryl traced her fingertips down Epinephrine’s spine and didn’t look at Tressa Fay when she said this.

Blaming the weather. Tressa Fay couldn’t help but think about Amy snapping at her and then apologizing. It’s just that it’s hot. Driving in the snow made me cranky. Maybe she was catastrophizing, but her stomach felt heavy as what Meryl was saying stretched out the distance from now to November. She gently put down Meryl’s foot. “Are you sure?”

“Am I sure of what?”

She squeezed Meryl’s ankle. “That she’s just tired. That the bad weather is getting to her. Are you really thinking she’s, I guess, breaking up with you? Maybe you can’t reach her the same way anymore, or with as much connection, because…because the link that made it possible to talk to her is losing power with the more power we put here, between us? Until what’s happening here is what’s happening.”

Please , she thought.

And then she went still, because she hadn’t really let herself notice that please before. She hadn’t let herself admit that even though the link between Meryl’s phone and her future self was the reason she’d met Meryl, the reason she had Meryl, she’d be relieved if it stopped. If she could just have Meryl and their friends, their people, and none of the rest of this.

In a small, jealous corner of her heart, Tressa Fay wished that the beginning of her first relationship since Amy could be suffused with lust and fun and fascination and limerence—all of the things she had with Meryl, but with no loss. She hated future Tressa Fay because her existence—Tressa Fay’s own existence , five months in the future—reminded her of loss and tarnish and arguments and the collapse of the world. She couldn’t believe she was meant for all of that.

But she was meant to feel this way about Meryl.

Wasn’t she?

Meryl hadn’t answered her, and then Tressa Fay heard a teeny, tiny snore. She gave up and snuggled next to Meryl, which made her stir enough to drape her arm around Tressa Fay.

“Meryl?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you think that if we didn’t know you disappeared, if we had met the regular way, we would feel different about each other?”

Meryl opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that every minute I spend with you seems so…not regular. It’s all bright. It’s all good. It makes me feel like I’ll remember forever. Even when we’re just hanging out, doing nothing special, I notice you and me and the weather and how I feel.”

“I see.” Meryl turned slowly and pushed her feet under one of Tressa Fay’s thighs. “No. It wouldn’t be the same.”

Tressa Fay picked up her mug of tea to steady herself. “No?”

“Mm. Probably not.” She ran her palm over the top of Tressa Fay’s head and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Not because of you. You’re perfect. But my own track record suggests that I hold my feelings closer to the chest than I have with you.”

Tressa Fay lifted her tea to her lips, needing to soothe the hurt with warmth, but she hadn’t waited long enough for the tea to cool, and it burned her tongue. “People change,” she tried.

The statement made her heart feel as tender as her scorched taste buds. Did people change? People wanted to change—Tressa Fay’s full appointment book was testament to that—but she heard the same kinds of stories, the same fears and complaints, day in and day out.

The skin just beneath Meryl’s eyes was dark and bruised looking. Tressa Fay set her mug down on the table and took Meryl’s hands between hers. “You know what? I don’t know if it helps to ask these kinds of questions. It’s better, I think, to assume we’re doing this the way we’re supposed to.”

Meryl reached up and touched Tressa Fay’s cheek. Her eyes were a little bloodshot, those shadows underneath, and her outfit was wrinkled, with what looked like a spot of spilled drink on the bust. “What happens to me, Tressa Fay? What happens ?” She spoke fast, the way she did when she talked about science, but Tressa Fay had never heard this thread of panic in her voice before. “Will it hurt, or will I even know, or will I wake up and it’s a workday and I’ve never had a sister, or if I do, it’s always been someone else? What if there’s no you, and I never knew you, and I don’t remember you?” She sucked in a breath and continued with barely a pause. “What if in my universe there is no you to even run into,” she continued, “to meet you all over again, and meanwhile there’s this other place where, at first, a lot of people remember me, and then fewer, and then no one? Or, worse, only one person remembers me after I’m gone and knows what happens to me, and they have to live their lives without me, knowing I’m somewhere, but they can’t even talk about me anymore.”

“Breathe, okay?” Tressa Fay slowly smoothed her hands over Meryl’s shoulder. Her heart was beating so fast. “I didn’t know you were feeling all that.”

“I can’t avoid it. I’ve been thinking so hard, trying to figure everything out. Doing my ‘experiments.’?” She made air quotes around the word with her fingers. “But these aren’t experiments! You can’t experiment with time . There’s no control. There’s no way to observe results.”

“We don’t have to observe them.” Tressa Fay couldn’t keep the impatience out of her voice. “We’re living, right now. We’re—”

Meryl shook her head hard, squeezing her eyes shut. Her glasses were smudged. “You’re right, we shouldn’t talk about this.” She tossed her phone on the sofa. “I can tell you right now that you’re done talking about this.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t say that.” Tressa Fay looked at Meryl’s phone, almost expecting it to light up with a text, but the screen stayed dark. She hated that phone. “ We’ve never really talked about this.”

Meryl didn’t acknowledge Tressa Fay’s distinction between the person she was now and the one Meryl texted. “You know I keep having dreams that I’m driving a school bus? Everybody’s in it, you and me and Gayle and James and Linds and Mary and Guy and Michael and even Brooklynn, Epinephrine, and that tuxedo cat at the shelter I liked so much, and Gayle is feeding the cats pieces of her chicken burrito the way she did at the picnic when Epinephrine fell in love with her, and Michael and Guy have a guitar and are writing a song. You’re sitting right behind me, looking out the window, commenting on the scenery. Everyone is happy. I’m happy. I have such wonderful friends. I have my sister in a way I never got to. I have you.” She crossed her hands over her heart. There were tears in her eyes now. “I have you . My Tressa Fay. And then I remember to look at the road, so I turn back to the windshield, and I’m about to drive the bus off a cliff into the ocean.”

Tressa Fay laughed, horrified but unable to stop herself. No one was driving a bus off a cliff. They were all together. They were happy. She looked at the phone and desperately, viciously wished they would go away, the ones who weren’t happy. The ones who were messing this up and making it so hard for Meryl.

“It’s not funny,” Meryl said.

“No, of course it’s not. I’m sorry.” Now the tears were welling up in Tressa Fay’s eyes, too. She’d hurt Meryl. Tressa Fay’s faith in Meryl, her hope that Meryl could think her way out of disappearing, had put her under the kind of pressure that gave her nightmares.

“I keep thinking, isn’t that what we’re doing, though?” Meryl asked. “Isn’t that what everyone’s always doing, being propelled forward until, inevitably, we get to the end? The only thing that’s different is that I know when the end is. For me.” She sniffed and pressed her fingers against her eyes.

Tressa Fay rolled her body away from Meryl’s then and stared at the ceiling with her hand against her throat. She didn’t want to panic, and she didn’t want to argue, but she understood that Meryl had started saying goodbye.

Her night out with Gayle and James. The way she was throwing herself into projects at work. Her waffling about adopting a cat. How she touched Tressa Fay like no one had ever touched her before.

Meryl had all but said that she wouldn’t touch Tressa Fay like she did, or feel like she did, if they’d only met that sunny day in May and there was nothing else. No time-bending. No horrible, cold, dark future.

They hadn’t said I love you . Meryl had called her my Tressa Fay more than once, smiling her good smile, her eyes full of the tenderness that sometimes made Tressa Fay think they were right on the brink of saying words like mine , like love , like forever , and Tressa Fay had looked forward to those words. She’d liked imagining the ways they might say what was in their hearts and how that would feel.

“Everything we’ve done,” she said, “ever since you showed up at my salon, and especially since you and Linds came here and told me what was happening, we’ve done so that we can be together. You said we have energy, you and me, and it’s pushing back on the universe—”

“That was what I hoped was true.”

“—and you said the phones might be interference, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the connection is going to break when you disappear. I get that it wasn’t fair to make you be the one who knows everything about everything, I do.” Tressa Fay ran her fingers through her hair, searching for what she needed to say. “But, look, Meryl, do you understand what you’re doing right now? If you start thinking this other way, this fatalist way, you’re making that happen. You’re making that future. You told me that. I saw it happen with the headlines and your phone!”

“But what do I know?” Meryl’s voice was loud in the quiet room, as loud as Tressa Fay’s had been. Because they were fighting. Crying and fighting about a future neither one of them could control. “I’m not special . I don’t even know as much as Linds does, and what she knows is mostly from science fiction and fantasy stories. None of that is real.”

But what is fucking real? Tressa Fay wanted to shout.

Instead, she made herself breathe.

When she’d been with Amy, they’d argued like this. A lot. So many times, Tressa Fay had wished she could just stay in one place and be quiet and breathe until she could think again, but Amy would accuse her of withholding or of avoiding an important conversation, so Tressa Fay had to cry and stumble through an explanation of what she thought she might feel.

Meryl wasn’t doing that. She was sharing her feelings and letting Tressa Fay share hers. There were no accusations. It was only that the feelings they were both sharing were too desperate and hard to be the kind that led to a solution or to new, better feelings. At least not tonight.

So Tressa Fay took one deep breath after another, exhaling through her mouth until she’d slowed her heart down. She picked up her tea and sipped it, careful this time not to burn herself. Meryl picked up her own tea and held it between her palms.

Eventually, Tressa Fay felt calm enough to understand what was happening.

Meryl was afraid. That was all. Meryl was frightened, because she didn’t know what would happen to her.

She was allowed to be afraid. It wasn’t fair to ask her not to be. It wasn’t fair to ask her to drive this bus with all of them on it, to be the ringleader of their hope, and all the while to give her more to miss, more to lose. Tressa Fay had been coasting on infatuation, sex fumes, and faith in Meryl’s scientist brain. Faith that someone else, someone who wasn’t her, would tell her what to do. But she was afraid, too.

Tressa Fay was afraid she wasn’t enough.

She wanted to be the anchor that held Meryl still in the waterways of time. She wanted to be a woman so beguiling that Meryl couldn’t leave her. She wanted the way she felt about Meryl and the way Meryl felt about her to break time and put it back together again in a different way.

But she was only Tressa Fay Robeson. She didn’t know what to do.

Tressa Fay turned back to face Meryl. She touched Meryl in the dark room, hesitant at first, because she couldn’t be sure if Meryl was angry with her or sad, if she wanted comfort or to be left alone. But Meryl let her stroke her arm, and she relaxed under Tressa Fay’s touch, so Tressa Fay stayed with her. She kept touching her, knowing after a while that she was starting to fall asleep and that Meryl probably was, too.

“You know what I want to do?” Meryl asked, startling Tressa Fay out of a doze.

“Hmm. What?”

“I want us to go to Bay Beach. Today.”

Bay Beach was a Green Bay amusement park situated on the shore of Lake Michigan, with twenty-five-cent-ticket rides, concession stands next to a picnic area, and a strip of rocky beach. “Yeah?”

“I want us all to play hooky and go there.”

It was the first time Meryl had asked for something that was obviously just for her. Tressa Fay knew it would be another goodbye.

But Meryl was allowed to say goodbye.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s do that.”

She started planning as soon as she could, beginning with her dad, who got up in the morning at four thirty. He said yes right away. He said he would bring Jen.

It was more than Tressa Fay had asked of her father in years, and he’d said yes.

She caught Mary early, too, so she could reschedule the appointments at the salon, and Gayle was more than willing to meet up anywhere Meryl was. Linds was, of course, over the moon, James had PTO he needed to use, and although Michael and Guy were trickier because of their important lawyer jobs, they told her they would find a way to manage it.

The hours rushed along, so fast, and then they were at the ticket booth at Bay Beach on another warm day, windy enough that clouds raced across the sun over and over, making long minutes of cool weather that brushed the hot sun off their shoulders.

“Meryl,” James said, looking over the grassy park starting to fill with kids and families, “we are hitting the Zippin Pippin now .”

“Yes! Let’s try for the front car.” She grabbed Tressa Fay’s hand and pulled her in to kiss her on the cheek before she ran off laughing with James, who crouched in front of her so Meryl could jump on his back and ride piggyback to the line. Guy, Michael, Mary, Gayle, and Linds set off for the bumper cars, already talking trash about who they were going to corner and surround with the scorching hot smell of sparks. Tressa Fay hated the bumper cars. She didn’t like to slam into anyone. She leaned on a tree with her dad and Jen, watching the crowd trickling in.

“When’s the last time we came?” he asked, crossing his arms over a short-sleeve plaid button-down. It was new. It was not blue, tan, or gray, but green , of all possible miracles, and it made it easy for Tressa Fay to see the young man her dad had been in the photos with her mom—cool, with a sharp jawline and a knowing smile.

Her dad in love.

“I think maybe I was in seventh grade. After that, I went with friends or on those end-of-year school trips.”

He nodded and looked at Jen, adorable in a ponytail and a tidy denim skort.

“You know what?” Jen patted her dad on the shoulder. “I raced around so much this morning, I never got my coffee in, and I’m starting to feel the drag. You two don’t mind if I head over to concessions and get a cup?” She smiled at Tressa Fay.

“Not at all,” her dad said. “I’ll catch up to you.” He kissed Jen on the temple, and Tressa Fay had to look away. Who knew her dad was such a good boyfriend?

She wondered if he would be as happy if he had waited until October to tell her about Jen.

Jen squeezed Tressa Fay’s upper arm and winked at her before meandering toward the concessions booth, her leather slides slapping against her heels.

“So, Tressa Fay.” Her dad pushed off from the tree. “Should we do the Ferris wheel?”

Tressa Fay laughed. “Yeah? Because you know we’ve never done any of these rides together. In fact, I don’t think you’ve ever done any of these rides.”

“Sure I have,” he said as they took off toward the wheel, making tracks in the dewy grass. “I grew up here, just like you.”

Tressa Fay knew that, of course. She remembered her grandparents’ small house, filled with cigarette smoke, scrupulously clean, with a crucifix in every room. Her grandfather had died when Tressa Fay was in high school, and her grandma immediately moved to the Mustard Seed Catholic Assisted Living Community near Luxemburg, where Tressa Fay volunteered, cutting and setting hair once a month. Like Tressa Fay, her dad had been an only child at a time when his peers had multiple siblings and families were big. He’d been raised with a lot of structure and rules.

“When’s the last time, then?”

“Oh, I must have been about twenty. Took your mom. She wanted to go.” Her dad smiled at his shoes, the black Converse high-tops he wore when he wasn’t wearing steel-toed work boots or waders. For the first time in their relationship, Tressa Fay felt like she was starting to see him . To see where she was like him and where she must be like her mom.

The Ferris wheel was new since Tressa Fay had last been here, much bigger than the old one. After the operator accepted their tickets, they sat on the swinging seat, lowering the bar and then moving up for the car below them to fill. “Did you have fun? When you came here with Mom?” she asked.

“There wasn’t ever a time I didn’t have fun when I was with Shelly.” He smiled. “Everyone had fun when they were with her. So did you. She could make you laugh until you got the hiccups.”

Once the Ferris wheel was loaded, it started moving faster, carrying them around and right up to the top, over and over, where the view was across the wide-open bay where the Fox River spilled into Lake Michigan. They talked about what Meryl had told them both about water. He said he’d been lucky fishing at a spot she’d recommended.

He put his arm across the back of the seat. “She’s a nice woman.”

Tressa Fay was caught off guard. It was the kind of comment from her dad that signaled his certainty. If he’d ever said the same about Amy, she would’ve been ridiculously happy. She hated that what she felt instead was frustrated.

For all her life, she’d wanted a love as utter and uncomplicated as the love her dad had for her mom. She understood Meryl’s preoccupation, her exhaustion, her fear and doubt, but why wasn’t having Tressa Fay, being with her, enough to give Meryl faith?

Why couldn’t it be simple?

“I think she’s a nice woman, too,” she finally said. Because it was true. Because if all she had left was a handful of months with Meryl, she would take them and not be sorry.

“Good.”

Tressa Fay leaned back until she was resting in the crook of her dad’s arm, and she didn’t fight the swoops the Ferris wheel sent through her stomach. When the wheel came to a stop, they were near the bottom. She could see Jen waiting for them, waving.

“I like Jen.”

“Good,” her dad said again, but he grinned, an easy grin he gave her rarely, and they stepped out and started toward Jen. “Go on and find your friends,” he told her. “Maybe Jen and I will ride the kiddie train.”

Jen laughed. “I got a great picture of you and your dad up there,” she said. “I sent it to your phone.”

“Thanks.” Impulsively, Tressa Fay hugged her, and Jen hugged her right back. Tressa Fay had to remind herself that the Ferris wheel ride with her dad and hugging Jen were real things that nothing could take away from her. She would always have them.

She was walking in the direction of the roller coaster when she ran into James and Meryl.

Meryl threw her arms over her head. “We’re going to do the Viking swing! We have to hurry so we can sit together on it. The bumper car gang is holding a place in line.” Meryl reached her palm out for Tressa Fay’s, and they swung their arms as they walked along the gravel path. The concession stand had started making popcorn and cotton candy. The sugar and butter smells wafted over the crowd and through the trees and steel structures of the rides, dissolving in the lake breeze.

It was perfect.

Meryl wore her hair in two braids today. She was sensible as ever in khaki walking shorts, a soft pink polo shirt, and all-terrain sandals. She’d made everyone put on sunscreen at the ticket booth, where she’d paid for enough tickets for the whole group. Her glasses for the day were the kind that transitioned from regular lenses to sunglasses. Tressa Fay could hardly stand it, how much care Meryl gave to others and herself. She guessed that was what was so appealing about smart women. How they so earnestly cared. How they believed there was always a way to make things nicer and safer and more thoughtful, and they went at love and intimacy like it was an important project, worthy of attention and study and experimentation.

“Thank you,” Meryl said into Tressa Fay’s ear, kissing her cheek. “I’m so happy we could do this together. This is going to be the best day.”

Tressa Fay knew then that she was in love with Meryl Whit.

This nice woman, this smart woman, this woman she should never have met and actually, technically, hadn’t even met yet , who was sensible but talked about the memory of water, and who was scared but let herself feel and make new friends and be with Tressa Fay. This woman who kissed so hot when they made it to the line for the Viking swing that Tressa Fay couldn’t stand it—she gripped the side of her face and kissed her back.

Meryl pulled away, her upper lip a little swollen, and put her finger on the tip of Tressa Fay’s nose. “You,” she said.

Tressa Fay knew—she really knew , because Meryl had told her, and because the version of herself who occupied a different-but-the-same world five months from now had said so—that there was a future where none of this happened.

But it wasn’t her future.

She’d changed too much. She was someone different than she’d been and someone different from who she was going to be. Her life had its own trajectory, and every step she took in a new direction sent her somewhere farther and farther away from where she’d started.

Tressa Fay didn’t have to be resigned to anything . Not one fucking thing.

“We’re all riding together,” James said to the ride operator, who was lifting the cord for people to get on the swing now that the riders from the previous go-around were off. James had his arm around Mary, and Mary had her finger hooked in one of his belt loops.

“Whatever,” the operator said. “Pull down your bar until it clicks.”

They raced onto the ride, scoping out the best seats in the stern of the ship so they would be as high as possible on the upswing and fall the farthest.

“I’m starting to worry about how I’ll take this at my age,” Guy said. “I don’t have the stomach I had when I was seventeen.” They leaned over and kissed Michael. “Don’t laugh at me when I scream.”

“Oh, we’re all going to scream,” Mary said. “Absolutely. We’re going to scream it alllll out.”

They were laughing when the swing lifted up to its very highest point, and then they put their hands in the air and screamed their way down, and the sky was the same color as the water.