Recursion(73)
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 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.