A World Without You(33)
That’s the biggest difference between my sister and me. I may be able to travel through time, but she knows more about the future than I do.
I sit in the center of my bed, staring at my curtain door.
I could know the future, I realize. The timestream hides the future in thin, almost invisible filaments, but I found them before. I could do it again.
When I bring up the timestream around me, the first thing I notice is that some of the strings I’d seen before—the disastrous fates brought on by the officials if they’d found the USB drive—are gone. They’re just . . . gone. Because I hid the drive, I made it impossible for the government officials to use it against us, and any future where they did no longer exists. The Berk’s not safe yet—some of the futures show it being taken over by the government, some show the school closing, one even shows the school on fire—but I push aside those worries, at least for now.
The strings that tie me to my home—brown and green and blue—are more prevalent now, rising to the surface. I pick up the pale blue string, and images of Phoebe flash through my mind. I follow the string back to its beginning, sixteen years ago, to her birth, and I see the way her life is woven into time. Going into the future, the string frays, splitting off into floss-like, micro-thin threads, each a possible future for my sister.
Some things feel fairly certain—there are a few offshoots of loose strings floating away, but Phoebe’s graduation is close and clear. I wrap my finger around the moment, and images of her on that day fill my mind, a movie of memories that haven’t happened yet.
She’s far tanner in the future than she is now, and she looks thinner, almost gaunt. She’s traded her pink lip gloss for something darker, and she’s swapped her contacts for winged cat-eye glasses. Even though Mom and Dad hover near her, Phoebe pretty much ignores them, chatting with her two best friends. Mom insists on taking pictures of the three girls near the fountain at the front of the school, but she doesn’t notice the way Phoebe’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
Once my parents are gone, Phoebe and her friends start goofing off. She pulls them closer for a selfie, but as soon as she takes the picture, she loses her footing and falls into the fountain. Her laughter rings out as she grabs her friends and drags them in with her, completely ignoring the frowning teachers nearby. I take a moment to marvel at this Phoebe. It’s only a year into the future, but I can see changes within her that I never really thought I’d see. A spontaneous Phoebe who lets her life get a little messy? One who doesn’t care about what teachers think? Who would have thought.
At first, everyone’s laughing and splashing, but then Phoebe pulls her wet hair back, and her hand brushes her ear.
“Hey. Hey!” Phoebe says, her voice rising when her friends don’t stop playing. “I lost my earring.”
Normally, Pheebs wouldn’t care. She’s not really much of a jewelry girl. But those earrings were our grandmother’s. The three girls spend the next several minutes searching the fountain, but they don’t find anything. Eventually, Phoebe has to admit defeat. She walks away from the fountain, shoulders slouched, cradling the other earring in her palm, and I know she’s going to remember this day not as the day she finally achieved her dreams and graduated, but the day she lost our grandmother’s earring.
The string slips from my fingers, and the image fades to nothing. These strands only show possibilities, not certainties, but I want to know more. The further into the future I go, the more potential futures I see for my family. In one, my mom gets a new job as a hotel manager, and eventually she starts an affair with the concierge and leaves Dad. In another, she starts writing a blog that gets super popular, uses it to fund a trip for her and Dad around the world, and they briefly consider adopting a baby from some third world country before they come home and resume their lives just as they were before they left.
Dad doesn’t change much, not in any of the futures, even the ones where Mom leaves him. He just plods along, never adjusting his job or routine. But then, about fifteen or twenty years out, Phoebe has a baby, and she brings it to Dad, and his whole world starts to shine. It’s like a lightbulb, right there in the timestream. And even though his future still doesn’t seem to change much after that, all of the strings sort of glow with happiness.
Phoebe is the one with the wildly different possibilities for her future. In most of them, she goes to college, but in a few she takes time off to travel—an internship in New York, a backpacking trip in South America, a study-abroad experience in Europe. She gets different jobs too. Magazine writer, art teacher, forensic scientist for the FBI. Maybe Phoebe’s futures are so varied because she’s so young, or maybe it’s just because Pheebs is Pheebs, and she’s always been able to land on her feet, like a cat. But she’s really smart, and these strings prove that she can do anything.
Including, I realize, make mistakes. Some of Phoebe’s futures are . . . not good. In one path, she goes to Boston University, but then drops out for a year to travel around America. She’s usually pretty safe, but at one point, near Wyoming, she hitchhikes and . . .
I don’t want to think about what happens to her there. The abuse she suffers at his hands. No. I force myself to properly name it. The rape. It’s terrifying. My fingers want to pull back from this thread, to find a way to cut it and make sure it never happens, but there’s more to this future than that one horrific moment. There’s another man, a kind one who loves her and never raises his voice at her because he can’t bear to see her flinch. There’s a daughter, a thin girl with dark hair like mine and clear green eyes that are all her own. There’s a dog and a house and a career and friends and travel and happiness. And it’s all wrapped up together, woven into Phoebe’s past and future, irrevocably and literally tied to that moment in Wyoming. I let go of this future’s string, wondering if that family and that life are worth the path it takes to get them. I think, from the way Phoebe held her daughter, they are.