A World Without You(5)

“Hey,” I said as gently as I could. “What’s wrong?” I moved her shoes so I could scoot closer, but she stood up abruptly, stepping back from the edge of the pool.

“Nothing,” she said, and I knew it wasn’t true, but she started walking away, barefoot on the cold, sandy soil. I figured if it meant that much to her not to talk about it, then she could keep her secrets.

Still, I followed her. I knew she wanted to be alone, but there was something about the way she walked, something about the little hiccup sound she made as she wiped away her tears and pretended like they never existed . . . it didn’t feel right to abandon her.

Maybe I should have left her alone. Maybe then she wouldn’t have gone away.

As she passed by one of the old camp buildings, she whirled around. “You can go back in time, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I watched her closely. She wasn’t acting like herself, but I didn’t know how to make it better.

“Can you take other people back?”

I nodded. “Do you want to go back here?” I asked, waving my hand toward the abandoned buildings of the polio camp. “It’s just a bunch of sick kids.”

She shook her head. “No, not here. But, you know, I think maybe . . . maybe this place wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Sick. Kids. Just, like, buckets of sick kids all around being sick. Not my idea of a fun place.”

“You don’t understand,” Sofía said. “When you’re sick with, like, a terminal illness, something you live with forever, there are very few moments you can forget about it. It’s like a lead weight inside your chest, cracking your ribs. Every time you move, you can feel that weight shifting inside of you. But then there are moments when, for whatever reason, the weight goes away. You forget you’re sick. I bet this camp was full of those moments. That’s what I’d want to see. That’s what I want to feel.”

She was right. I didn’t understand.

“So where do you want to go?” I asked, still unsure of this wild mood of hers.

Sofía looked off into the distance, toward the ocean and the sun and forever, but she couldn’t see any of that. “I want to go somewhere far away.”

She didn’t bother explaining any further. She just kept walking. I don’t think she was going anywhere in particular, but we headed toward the state park. I thought about running back to get her abandoned red shoes so she wouldn’t have to walk on the splintery wood of the boardwalk, but she veered left, where the ground was soft.

I look around me now. Any minute, past-me and past-Sofía will come around the bend and be standing right in front of me, at the chimney. It’s where Sofía took me that day, right before she whirled around, her eyes blazing, her long, dark hair whipping back, and said: “Here.”

“Here?”

“Can you take me back to this place? Back when there was just one family on the island, the ones who built this house?”

“It wasn’t built here,” I said. “It was built in Salem.”

“Fine, then when the house was moved here. To . . .” She turned around, her eyes scanning the plaque. “Let’s go back to 1692.”

“I . . . um . . .”

“You can do it, right?”

“Yeah,” I said immediately, wanting to impress her, to erase the doubt in her voice. “I’ve been back further than that. It’s just . . . why?”

“I want to go away. I want to be as far away from this world as possible. Take me back further than 1692, I don’t care. Let’s go to the days when Native Americans were here. Let’s go further. Let’s go to the dinosaurs.”

All my muscles were tense, and I moved very carefully, like I would if there were a wild animal in front of me. “I’ve never been that far back before,” I said. I regretted telling her that I could take her back. I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and hold her tight, not fling her through time and space. I didn’t realize it then, but a part of me sensed that she was running away, and I didn’t want to let her go, even if I was going with her.

“I don’t care, I just—” Her voice cracked. “I need to escape.”

I took a deep breath and grabbed both her hands in mine. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I knew I would do anything to make her happy. As I was holding her, I called up the timestream. I saw it expanding out from the two of us, strings erupting in every direction, each one linked to a different time and place. She couldn’t feel it; she didn’t react at all as I focused on the date engraved on the chimney, on the house that once contained it, on the island of the past.

And then we were there.

We had been standing among ruins; we were now standing in front of a chimney with bright red bricks streaked with soot. A roaring fire blazed at the bottom, casting Sofía in an orange-yellow glow and flickering shadows across the wood floor. There were herbs drying in one corner, an iron cauldron bubbling in another. The house smelled . . . warm. It wrapped around us, peaceful and beautiful.

Sofía sighed. In that moment, I think, she was happy.

Then the door behind me flung open, and I could hear a man’s deep, accented voice: “Oh my God.”

I started to turn.

Sofía’s hands slipped from mine.