Page 6 of Time for You
Daphne stood outside Henry’s room, chewing on her fingernail and pacing.
Ellie was on shift now, but Vibol and Brittany were off today, and if Michelle was working, she would be way up in Obstetrics with her patients, so Daphne would have to deal with this on her own.
The psychologist on call was in there with him—and had been for nearly a half an hour.
Please just let him be admitted to the psych ward, please let him be admitted to the psych ward, she prayed, although she wasn’t sure who exactly she was praying to.
Whatever deity was in charge of handsome men with pleasant accents and very strong delusions, maybe.
She wanted to be able to wash her hands clean of Henry and get on with things.
Daphne had a very full life, and she didn’t have time to waste on some man who didn’t know not to stand in the bike lane.
She had to water the plants in their neighbor Helen’s apartment while she was down in Florida and, well, other stuff.
Like bingeing Parks and Rec for the fiftieth time.
Finally, the door opened, and the psychologist on call, Dean, came out. “What’s the verdict?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you what I told him: His thoughts are perfectly logical and coherent, and there’s none of the usual disordered thinking that we would see with a delusion or hallucination.
No ID on him, or phone, but he knows everything we’d want him to know about himself.
He knows who he is, what his job is, and he’s capable of making informed decisions. ”
“Except he thinks he’s a time traveler.”
“Except he thinks he’s a time traveler,” Dean agreed. “Which is a pretty big except .”
“So you’ll admit him?”
Dean looked sad and shook his head. “I could, if you want to do an involuntary hold, I guess, but we don’t have any free beds, so he’d have to stay down here indefinitely until one opens up. And, well, he’s otherwise perfectly sane. You said you didn’t see evidence of a TBI? Or tumor?”
“Nothing. Still waiting on Radiology to confirm, but—maybe he’s just very committed to the bit?”
“Possibly?” Dean agreed. “It’s as good a guess as any, although I’d put my money on TBI. But I don’t think Psych is the place for him. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” he added, waving as he walked away.
Daphne swallowed hard and marched into Henry’s room.
“The doctor said I’m perfectly sane,” he announced. “Which is a relief, as I hadn’t realized you thought I was mad.”
“You think you’re from”—Daphne screwed up her face and did some quick mental math—“about a century and a half ago. So yes, I thought you were ‘mad.’ And you still might be, honestly.”
“Are mental hospitals as terrifying here as they are in my time?”
“I’m gonna go out on a limb and say no, although I can’t say I know much about your time,” Daphne said. “History was never my thing, you know?”
“Ah,” he said quietly. “So, what shall you do with me?”
“Honestly, no idea. We’re still waiting on some labs.”
“And what will these ‘labs’ tell us?”
“They’re the blood tests. They’ll tell me if you have any markers for encephalitis, for example. Or any other diseases that could be causing this delu—belief.”
“The other option could be I’m telling the truth,” he countered.
“Yeah, well, I’m a woman of science. I’d rather it be a disease, quite frankly.”
“Comforting,” he muttered.
“Shut up and let me clean out that scrape on your jaw,” Daphne sniped.
That sort of thing usually fell to nurses, but they were already overloaded as usual, and it wasn’t like Daphne was doing anything.
And his scrape was minor enough that it probably didn’t even really need attention.
Which meant she was doing it for no apparent reason, but she’d already committed to it.
Daphne opened the drawer with the bandages and pulled out a bottle of disinfectant. “This will sting a little,” she warned him.
Henry tipped his head to the side, giving her a good look at his admittedly nice profile. “Does it always sting, or are you just using that because I’m bothering you?”
“It’s because you’re annoying,” she said. “Good patients get the non-hurty stuff.”
“Pity I’m not a good patient, then.”
“Stop talking so I can do this,” she said, deciding that getting into banter mode with him was not a great plan. He fell silent, and she gently (but maybe not that gently) cleaned his cut and placed a bandage over it. “There. Should heal in a few days.”
“Thank you,” he said sincerely, and then frowned at her. “Your elbow—you haven’t seen to it yet?”
“Oh, right,” she said, flexing her arm. The skin felt tight, and she did need to see to it , as he put it. “Yeah, I probably should.”
“Do you need assistance?”
“I can manage a bandage,” she snapped, and then felt absurdly guilty when his face fell. “Sorry, it’s been a long, weird day.”
“I could say the same myself.”
Daphne huffed out a laugh and pulled out another couple of bandages while Henry watched from the side of the bed.
“Are you quite sure you don’t need help?”
“Quite,” she replied. Daphne shrugged out of her hoodie—she would have to buy another, given how shredded the elbow was—and Henry turned away abruptly.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” he said stiffly.
She vaguely remembered a romance novel she’d swiped from Ellie, where a man went into a complete meltdown over the sight of some lady’s ankles.
That would explain his freak-out over her scrubs too, and Daphne decided to cut him a tiny break and not tease him about it.
She stood over the sink, hissing occasionally at the sting, and ripped the bandage open with her teeth.
Not the most sanitary option, but fuck it.
She was tired . She sank onto the stool in front of the computer station with a sigh, shrugging back into her ruined hoodie.
Her calf was a little easier to reach, and she didn’t fail to notice that Henry glanced back at her and then immediately averted his eyes again when she hiked her scrubs up to her knee. She smothered a grin. “When exactly are you from?”
Henry looked at the floor. “1885,” he murmured.
“Yeah, I know that. You’ve said that like, half a dozen times. I meant like, what’s happening? Whenever you think you’re from? Is it like ... Shakespeare times?”
“Education in the modern world must be sorely lacking, if you think Shakespeare lived in 1885.”
“Don’t blame my teachers—I just never paid attention because it wouldn’t ever be relevant for me. So I take it ... no?”
“No,” he sighed. “I am not from Shakespearean times, which would be approximately two hundred years ago. For me. Quite a bit further back for you,” he added. “The queen is Victoria? Is there still a queen?”
“No, you guys have a king now. Definitely not Victoria, but that’s also not that helpful for me. What sort of technology do you have?”
“Technology? The, uh ... telephone is recently in vogue? Did that stand the test of time?”
“It did, and it’s gonna end us all,” Daphne said darkly, but a notification on the computer that his results were in from the lab saved her from having to explain social media to a man who already probably thought she was a witch or something. She would have to look up when witch-burning ended.
She skimmed through the results, chewing on the inside of her cheek. No encephalitis—all the counts were where they were supposed to be. Just like the CT: He was perfectly healthy, except for the big, glaring thing that said he wasn’t.
Daphne scrolled down to the tests she’d ordered as a way of proving to him he couldn’t be from 1885 and frowned to herself. “Did you grow up ... in a cult? Or on a commune?”
“I was raised in my mother’s home in Edinburgh, in the Church of Scotland. No cults.”
“Okay, but like—you have the weirdest set of antibodies I’ve ever seen?”
“My . . . body is odd?”
“No, your—oh god, I can’t explain it. You’ve been exposed to some weird shit, I mean.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I mean, you haven’t been exposed to stuff you should have been if you were vaccinated, like rubella and polio. We usually see that in people who grew up off the grid, or with parents who hate vaccines.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I didn’t think you would,” Daphne admitted. “But you have measles antibodies, so you’ve had that?”
“When I was eight. Four children in my neighborhood died that winter.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Daphne said again, and Henry motioned for her to continue.
“No chicken pox immunity either, and—” She stopped and read the final line of the report to herself four times.
“Shit,” she swore, and lurched off the rolling stool near the computer.
She crossed the room in two strides and grabbed his arm, a stupid, irrelevant voice in her brain noting that it was a very nice forearm, all things considered , and scanned for any telltale bumps.
The skin was smooth and unmarred, but she grabbed his face and tilted it toward the light, looking behind his ear, under his jaw, anywhere it might be hiding.
She’d seen it only in pictures, but it wasn’t exactly a subtle disease.
“Is there a reason you’re mauling me?” he asked, and Daphne let him go, her heart still racing.
“You’ve been exposed to goddamn smallpox ?
” That had been her ace in the hole, the test that she was going to use to definitively prove to him he wasn’t from the past. They’d stopped vaccinating for smallpox in the US sometime around when her parents had been born, and it was declared completely eradicated shortly after that.
No one born in the last few decades of the twentieth century, or the entirety of the twenty-first, had ever been exposed.
It was next to impossible for anyone under the age of fifty from anywhere in the world to have smallpox antibodies.
But Henry did.
“I don’t have it, if that’s what you mean.” He straightened the collar of the hospital gown with as much dignity as someone in one of those could.
“But you’ve been exposed. Which is literally impossible, unless you’ve been vaccinated.”
“You mean inoculated?” Henry asked conversationally. “Of course I have. You haven’t? You have multiple machines that see inside our bodies, but you just let people die of smallpox? How cruel is this century?”
“No, we don’t—we don’t have smallpox anymore. No one does. It’s gone. We eradicated it a long time ago. Wait, they had vaccines back then? In 1885?”
“Again, I’m assuming you mean inoculations, and yes, we have those. For smallpox, at least, although I gather from your tone you have others.” Daphne pulled out her phone and did a quick search, and—holy shit, Britain had had mandatory smallpox vaccines starting in the 1840s.
Henry Frederick MacDonald was telling the truth.
He was actually, literally, truly, from the past.