the kitchen, finds her mother leaning back against the counter, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback romance.
Last time Helena saw her she was in an adult care center near Boulder, twenty-four years from now, her body frail, her mind destroyed.
All of that will still happen, but in this moment, she’s wearing a pair of blue jeans and a button-down blouse. She has an ’80s perm and bangs, and she is in the absolute peak of her life.
Helena crosses the small kitchen and pulls her mother into a hard embrace.
She’s crying again, and she can’t stop.
“What’s wrong, Helena?”
“Nothing.”
“Did something happen on your drive?”
Helena shakes her head. “I’m just emotional.”
“About what?”
“I don’t even know.”
She feels her mother’s hands running through her hair and smells the perfume she always wore—Estée Lauder’s White Linen—against the bite of cigarette smoke.
“Getting older can be scary,” her mom says.
It feels impossible that she is here. Moments ago, she was suffocating in a deprivation tank, fifteen hundred miles away and thirty-three years in the future.
“Do you need help with dinner?” Helena asks, finally pulling away.
“No, the chicken still has a little ways to go. You’re sure you’re OK?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call up when it’s ready.”
Helena heads through the kitchen and down the hall to the foot of the stairs. They’re steeper than she remembers, and much creakier.
Her room is a wreck.
Like it always was.
Like all of her future apartments and offices will be.
She sees articles of clothing she had forgotten about.
A one-armed teddy bear she will lose in college.
A Walkman, which she opens to see the clear cassette of INXS’s Listen Like Thieves.
She sits down at the small desk and stares through the charmingly distorted glass of the old windowpane. The view is of the lights of Denver, twenty miles away, and the purple plains to the east, the big, wild world looming unseen beyond. She would often sit here, daydreaming of what her life might become.
She could never have fathomed.
A science textbook lies open beside a take-home test on cellular biology that she will have to finish tonight.
In the middle drawer, she finds a black-and-white composition book with “Helena” written on the front.
This, she remembers.
She opens the book to page after page of her cursive, teenage scrawl.
While she never lost her memories of previous timelines after prior uses of the chair, she harbors a fear that it could happen now. These are uncharted waters—she’s never traveled back so far, or into herself at so young an age. There’s a chance she could forget what she came from, why she’s here.
She takes a pen and turns to a blank page in the diary, writes down the date, and begins a note to herself to explain everything that has happened in her previous lives:
Dear Helena—On April 16, 2019, the world will remember a memory chair you created. You have 33 years to find some way to stop this from happening. You are the only one who can stop this from happening…
When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
—KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
BARRY
April 16, 2019
Barry is sitting in a chair in the shade, looking out across a forest of saguaro at a desert catching morning light.
The sharp pain behind his eyes is mercifully retreating.
He was lying on the seventeenth floor of a building in Manhattan, bullets whizzing past and riddling his body and the blood rushing out of him as he pictured his daughter’s face.
Then a bullet struck his head and now he’s here.
“Barry.” He turns to look at the woman sitting beside him—short red hair, green eyes, Celtic paleness. Helena. “You’re bleeding.”
She hands him a napkin, which he holds to his nose to catch the blood.
“Talk to me, honey, she says. “This is new territory. Thirty-three years’ worth of dead memories coming at you. What’s going through your mind right now?”
“I don’t know. I was…it feels like I was just in that hotel.”
“Marcus Slade’s?”
“Yeah, I was shot. I was dying. I still feel the bullets hitting me. I was yelling at you to run. Then I was suddenly here. Like no time had passed at all. But my memories of that hotel feel dead now. Black and gray.”
“Do you feel more like the Barry from that timeline