Collide Read online

  “You feeling better? Sure you don’t want to stay home?”

  “No.” I shook my head and took my seat at the table. The toast smelled good, and suddenly I was ravenous. “I’m okay. Really.”

  I forced a bright smile for him as I shoved toast in my mouth and washed it down with tea. The crumbs scattered on the table. I wiped them with my fingertips.

  Johnny leaned across the table, surprising me with a kiss. “Love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I managed to keep up a conversation with him as he drove me to work, and if he noticed I was quieter than normal, he didn’t remark on it. At work I sat at my desk, a zombie, filling in forms and answering the phone without really paying much attention.

  The worst part of all this was not actually that I thought I might be insane. That part seemed almost…expected, giving my history of brain damage. The worst part wasn’t trying to get my brain to wrap around the concept I hadn’t just dreamed about 1978. I’d gone there. This time I wasn’t Alice, slipping through the looking glass. I was the White Queen, believing impossible things.

  The worst part was the fact that after spending a lifetime guarding against unwanted pregnancy, about being careful, making sure I was responsible for my body, after all that, I’d still ended up pregnant by accident.

  I buried my face in my hands at my desk and let out a low, almost-silent moan. Pregnant. A baby. How could I have a baby?

  I’d long ago given up the idea of having children. After all, how could I expect to make it through nine months with another life growing inside me when I couldn’t always be counted on to know where I was or what I was doing? How could I be a mother, be responsible for another life, when at any moment I could slip sideways into darkness?

  Or backward, I thought. I had a sour taste on my tongue. Rotten orange. But I didn’t smell it. Just taste it.

  When I opened my eyes, I expected to find summer heat, a swimming pool. A young Johnny looking at me with that gleam in his eyes. Instead, I saw my computer, my face reflected in it like a ghost.

  I put my hands on my belly, rounder always than I’d like. What small life swam inside me? Daughter? Son? Would he have his father’s eyes, would she have my smile?

  I clicked on my web browser and looked up time travel. I didn’t learn a lot. I found a lot of sites with a lot of fancy words and descriptions of tachyons and particles and physics, which I’d never understood. I found many book and movie reviews, some even from books or movies I’d read. I read a lot and learned very little beyond what I already knew.

  Time travel didn’t happen.

  It most certainly didn’t happen from falling off a jungle gym. It didn’t make sense, and yet it was the only answer I had. I went dark; I went back. I’d been having fugues for years, but none had been like the ones that started after seeing Johnny that first time in the Mocha.

  Again, I rested my head in my hands. None of this made sense, yet it made perfect sense. All I had to do was suspend my disbelief.

  At lunch I went out to the pharmacy and bought a quadruple pack of pregnancy tests. I didn’t wait until the morning, the way the instructions advised. I went into the bathroom at work and peed on the stick and waited for the lines to show up. One, or two.

  Two.

  I did it again.

  Two.

  I went back to my desk and drank a bottle of water even though I really wanted a Diet Dr Pepper. I forced myself to eat a salad instead of the bacon double cheeseburger I was suddenly craving, though I allowed myself the cookie for dessert. I might be eating for two now, and I wanted to make healthy choices.

  I broke into tears at three o’clock, sitting at my desk with my face muffled in most of a box of tissues. The tears became laughter, semihysterical, but genuine. I laughed. Cried. I went to the bathroom, certain I was going to barf up my lunch, but I didn’t.

  At three forty-five, Johnny pulled into the parking lot. I could see him from my window. I was leaving early today so I could go to the gallery show tonight. I pressed my face against the cool glass and for the first time in a very, very long while I prayed.

  It seemed about as useless as wishing on a star, but if I could believe I’d somehow managed to travel back and forth in time I could also believe some higher consciousness was listening and might be moved to help me.

  I had never wanted a child. I’d never thought I’d be a mother. I’d never held a friend’s baby and yearned for my own. I wasn’t cut out for it. Liked kids from a distance, enough to coo at a baby in a stroller but always happy to give them back to their beaming parents. Babies smelled, they cried, they were tiny, expensive, consistent pains in the ass.

  Looking down at Johnny’s car idling in the lot, I slipped my hands once more over my belly. It was too soon to feel a difference, but I imagined how it would be in just a few months from now, my belly out in front of me like a basketball, if I were lucky. A watermelon, if I weren’t.

  It would grow inside me like a parasite, sucking out every nutrient I consumed and making me crave stuff like paste or pasta or Jolly Ranchers candy. My feet would swell. I’d get stretch marks. I’d puke for months, then gain so much weight my body would never be the same, and at the end of it I’d spend hours in agony pushing a human being the size of a bowling ball out an orifice much smaller. I’d bleed. I’d be unable to have sex for weeks. And then I’d have milk squirting out of my nipples at inopportune times.

  After that would come the diapers, the screaming, the child-proofing. Car seats, cribs, bibs, spit-up. I couldn’t have a pet because I couldn’t deal with poop, how was I going to deal with a baby?

  This was pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood. This was what I had to look forward to, the rest of my life spent putting someone else first, making sure this life I had been so foolish as to create was safe and happy and loved.

  “Please,” I murmured, my forehead still pressed to the glass. I watched Johnny get out of the car and pace a little. I knew he craved a cigarette, though he’d given them up. I knew he was wondering why I was late.

  “Please,” I said again.

  Please. Please. Whoever is listening, whatever can hear me, please, oh, please, oh, please.

  My hands pressed lightly on my belly, and my fingers linked.

  “Please,” I said. “Please let this be real.”

  Chapter 31

  The gallery had been transformed. It was always beautiful, of course, no matter what was hanging on the walls, but Johnny’s staff had hung even more strands of fairy lights from the roof’s old beams and soft mosquito netting from the pillars with lights nestled inside. The uneven wood floors were waxed and polished, and I clung to Johnny’s arm, certain that in my high heels I’d slip and fall. Make a fool of myself.

  Or worse, hurt myself.

  I’d taken the other two pregnancy tests an hour or so apart, at home, hiding them carefully under a wad of paper towels in my bathroom garbage can even though I had no reason to suspect Johnny had or ever would bother to dig through it. Both had come up without a doubt, two blue lines that said I was pregnant. While a false negative could be likely, there wasn’t much of a chance for a false positive.

  I kept my secret drawn close to me like a cloak. A shield. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It made me distracted and clumsier than I could blame on the slick, polished floor. Johnny caught me before I could wipe out the refreshment table.

  “Careful, Emm.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shook his head, his arm around my waist, fingers resting lightly on my hip. “Nah. Don’t worry about it. You want a drink?”

  “Just water, thanks.”

  He looked at me carefully. “You don’t want a glass of wine? A beer? I made sure we got that dark stuff you like.”

  “Maybe later. Oh, cheese!” I was starving, my intermittent nausea in hiding for the moment.

  “I gotta go check on some things. You go getcha cheese, I’ll be back.” Johnny’s accent was a little deeper tonight,