Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,81
half down the road.
Buzzing with energy, she shifts the truck into drive and accelerates slowly down the long driveway, hanging her left arm out the window to wave at her parents.
The country road that runs in front of her home is empty.
She pulls out into the road and turns on the radio. The new song, “Faith,” by George Michael is playing on the college radio station out of Boulder, and she sings at the top of her voice as the open fields race past, the future feeling closer than ever. Like it might have actually arrived.
The lights of the gas station glow in the distance, and as she takes her foot off the brake pedal, she registers a piercing pain behind her eyes.
Her vision blurs, her head pounds, and she just avoids crashing the truck into the pumps.
In a parking space beside the store, she kills the engine and pushes her thumbs into her temples against the searing pain, but it keeps building and building—so intense she’s afraid she’s going to be sick.
And then the strangest thing happens.
Her right arm moves toward the steering column and grasps the keys.
She says, “What the hell?”
Because she didn’t move her arm.
Next, she watches as her wrist turns the key and restarts the engine, and now her hand is moving over to the gear shift and sliding the lever into reverse.
Against her own will, she looks over her shoulder, out the rear window, backing the truck through the parking lot, and then shifting into drive.
She keeps thinking, I’m not driving, I’m not doing any of this, as the truck speeds down the highway, back toward home.
A darkness is creeping in at the edges of her vision, the Front Range and the lights of Boulder dimming away and getting smaller, as if she’s falling slowly into a deep well. She wants to scream, to stop this from happening, but she’s just a passenger in her own body now, unable to speak or smell or feel a thing.
The sound of the radio is little more than a dying whisper, and all at once, the pinprick of light that was her awareness of the world winks out.
HELENA
October 15, 1986
Helena turns off the country road into the driveway of the two-story farmhouse where she grew up, feeling more at home with each passing moment in this younger version of herself.
The farmhouse looks smaller, so much more insignificant than how she remembered it in her mind’s eye, and undeniably fragile standing against the blue wall of mountains that sweep up from the plains, ten miles away.
She parks and turns off the engine and looks in the rearview mirror at her sixteen-year-old face.
No lines.
Many freckles.
Eyes clear and green and bright.
Still a child.
The door creaks as she shoulders it open and steps down into the grass. The sweet, dank richness of a nearby dairy farm is on the breeze, and it is unquestionably the smell she most associates with home.
She feels so light on her feet walking up the weathered steps of the porch.
The low din of the television is the first thing she hears as she pulls the front door open and steps inside. Down the hallway, which runs past the stairs, she hears movement in the kitchen—stirring, mixing, pots clanging, water running. The whole house smells of a chicken roasting in the oven.
Helena peers into the living room.
Her father is sitting in his recliner with his feet up, doing what he did every weekday evening of her youth—watching World News Tonight.
Peter Jennings is reporting that Elie Wiesel has won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“How was your drive?” her father asks.
She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives. But she sees her father in this moment like she never has before.
He’s so young and handsome.
Not even forty.
She can’t take her eyes off him.
“It was a lot of fun.” Her voice sounds odd to her—high and delicate.
He looks back at the television set and misses seeing her wipe tears from her eyes.
“I don’t need the truck tomorrow, so check with Mom, and if she doesn’t either, you can take it to school.”
This reality is feeling sturdier by the second.
She approaches the recliner, leans down, and wraps her arms around his neck.
“What’s this for?” he asks.
The scent of Old Spice and the faint sandpaper scratchiness of his beard just beginning to come in nearly breaks her.
“For being my dad,” she whispers.
She walks through the dining room and into