I'll Stop the World (78)

“Did you ever wonder why I lied for you? And why I believed you so fast?”

“I just figured you were nuts.”

Rose smiled nervously, wondering if she was about to confirm that theory. “Something inside me just knew, right away, that you were telling the truth. Even if it didn’t make any sense, or even seem possible. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew I was supposed to help you.”

“So what you’re saying is you were nuts.”

“It was like the way you know to hold your breath when you go underwater,” Rose said. “No one has to explain it to you. You just know. And that feeling hasn’t gone away. I still think you’re here for a reason. We just . . . haven’t found it yet.”

“We’re kind of running out of time to find it.”

“We’ll know it when we see it.” She didn’t know how she was still so sure. She just was.

They rode in silence the rest of the way back. At some point, Justin dropped his hands, but his eyes stayed closed. Rose wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

She pulled into Mrs. Hanley’s driveway and turned off the engine, her lips pursed in thought. Yellow police tape still crisscrossed the burned-out husk of the garage, which gaped in front of them like a yawning black mouth. “Let’s go check for clues again.”

Justin finally opened his eyes. His leg jiggled up and down, causing the whole front seat to vibrate. “Rose, we’ve been over every inch of that place. We’ve read the police file and talked to Noah and Mrs. Hanley. And you were there, and didn’t even notice anything. We’re not going to find anything. This is impossible. It was stupid to think we could change anything.”

“No, it’s not. There has to be something we missed.”

“Why?” He looked at her with narrowed eyes, his voice edged in anger.

“Because people don’t just fall back through time, Justin,” she said, repeating the same argument she kept having with herself, over and over. “There’s got to be a reason for it, and if you’re here for a reason, then finding that reason can’t be impossible.”

“Why, though? Why does there have to be a reason? Why could it not just be, I don’t know, like a random fold in space-time or something?”

“Because that’s not real! That’s science fiction!”

“Time travel is science fiction! It’s not supposed to be real either!” He balled his hands in his hair, pulling at the ends, making it stick out wildly in all directions. “Maybe I was right that very first night, and I’m dead or in a coma. That’s the most real explanation of any of them.”

“Stop saying that. You’re not dead.”

“Why not? I drove off a bridge. I should be dead. And this is my own personal hell.”

A knife twisted deep inside Rose’s chest, but she gave him a small shrug, trying to hide how much it hurt. “If you’re dead, then I’m not real, and I am real.”

“How do you know? Maybe my subconscious made you up.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Says the girl helping a time traveler solve murders that haven’t happened yet.” He sighed, staring toward the garage. “You think I like the possibility that I’m dead? That I get some sort of kick out of the idea that I will never get back to my life? That I might never see Aly—the people I care about ever again?” He crossed his arms tightly over his chest, his eyes darting uneasily to Rose, then back out the window.

“That’s why it’s important to focus on what you can do right now. So you don’t get stuck thinking about stuff like that.”

“But I might already be stuck. That’s my point. I may not be able to do anything at all, and pretending that I can—believing that there’s some sort of higher purpose to all this—that’s the sort of thinking that will really mess me up. Maybe all this time we’ve been spending trying to fix things, I should’ve been working on accepting things the way they are instead.”

Rose shook her head, a sense of defiant urgency building inside her. “No, don’t you see? If you give up now, they’ll die—”

“They’re already dead, Rose! They’ve been dead my whole life.” Justin’s irritation seemed to be rising to meet her own, his voice growing harsher with each retort.

“They’re not dead now. Weren’t you telling me like two hours ago that not saving them is the same as killing them yourself? How can you suddenly just be okay with letting the fire happen when—”

“I’m not suddenly anything. I’m just saying maybe we’ve been wrong all along, and none of this has anything to do with me. Maybe our biggest mistake was thinking we have any control over any of it.”

“Unless—”

“No, not ‘unless’ anything. If I’m dead—”

“You’re not dead!”

“—or dying or whatever, then all of this—you, the time travel, everything—is just some sort of construct that my brain created for some reason, maybe to help me accept the inevitable or maybe just randomly based on miscellaneous pieces of my subconscious.”

“I am not a piece of your subconscious.”

“Maybe you are the unhealthy part, keeping me in denial instead of accepting the reality that things are the way they are, and nothing I do is going to change that.”