Remember Yesterday

34

My long-lost father. Preston. One and the same? No way. What kind of game is he playing?

I tug away my hand, and a sound escapes my lips, so short it doesn’t even qualify as a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not my father. You’re barely older than me.”

“I’m thirty-one,” he says gently. “That makes me fifteen years older than you.”

“That makes you Mikey’s age. Four years older than Logan. Four years older than my sister. So let’s not discuss this any further.” I back up a few careful steps. I don’t know who he is, but based on what he’s saying, he might be unstable. “Mom never talks about my father, but Callie used to. She told me all sorts of stories because she wanted me to know him, too. He wasn’t some kid. He was this great scientist who time-traveled to the future and got stuck there—”

I cut off and look at him. Really look at him. Before I left civilization, my mother used to wear a hologram of my father around her neck. I haven’t seen the locket since I’ve been back. Maybe the reminder was too painful after her entire family was wrenched away. I don’t know. I do have a fuzzy recollection of my father’s picture. The jet-black hair, the smooth brown skin, eyes that come to a crease at the corners. Could it be? Oh. Dear. Fates…

“You time-traveled here? To this future?”

He nods. “Just a few months ago, I said good-bye to your mother and four-year-old Callie.” He rubs his forehead with long, slender fingers that might’ve held a yellow stub of a pencil, once upon a time. “She was such an angel. That soft curve of her cheek, that button nose. I could watch her sleep for hours. In fact, I did, because she got in the habit of sleeping in our bed. I would wake every morning with a foot in my face.” He looks at me. “You didn’t exist yet, but, uh, I bet you were a cute baby, too.” There’s a pause, as awkward as it is long. “I, um…. I’m sorry I missed it.”

I can’t believe this. I wouldn’t believe it, except he’s right here, right in front of me. With the hands I’ve heard so much about. With the eyes that peer back at me when I look in a mirror.

“So it actually worked,” I say wonderingly. “Everyone assumed that bits and pieces of you were stuck in different times. Your head in the pre-Boom era, and your heart in the next millennium. But that’s not the case. You’re here, and you’re whole and intact. Who knows about this? Tanner? Mikey?”

“You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“But why?” I ask. “This is huge! Whatever experiment you did in the past, it worked. TechRA would go crazy over this technology.”

“That’s precisely why I haven’t said anything,” he says slowly. “This discovery is so big, we have to be careful who we tell—and how. If the information gets into the wrong hands, there could be complete chaos. We could mess up the space-time continuum. It’s not a decision I want to make alone, so I was going to wait until I returned to my present.”

“Except you never came back.” My voice is stiff. I can’t help it. If he’s telling the truth, then not only is he my father, but he is also the man who deserted us. “Mom’s been pining for you for twenty-three years.”

“I always planned to return.” His Adam’s apple moves, and he walks back to the stretcher, back to Callie. Maybe he feels safer with someone who’s not awake. Or maybe he just feels more comfortable with the girl he considers his true daughter. “From your mother’s perspective, it would’ve seemed like minutes after I left. She was never supposed to have time to miss me.”

“Well, she did. And so did Callie,” I say, my anger building. “I was only six back then, and I wasn’t supposed to know any better. But I was old enough to notice when the conversation stopped, when the air felt so heavy it pressed down on my shoulders. I noticed when I woke up in the middle of the night and I heard sobbing. I didn’t know if it was Mom or Callie, but does it matter? You broke both their hearts.”

He drops his face into his hands, and his shoulders vibrate in a strange, seizure-like way.

Oh Fates. He’s crying. This man—the father I’ve never met—is crying. Is his heart broken, too?

My anger shivers and then pauses, like someone’s frozen a frame of a hologram. “Just go back to them,” I plead. “There’s still time. There’s always time. Maybe Callie will still end up here, like this, but at least she would’ve had you for a few years.” I lower my voice. “You could’ve helped Mom get through the loss of her firstborn.”

“I can’t,” he says helplessly.

“Why not? You could just tell a couple of the other scientists. Whoever you trust the most. I’m sure they’ll help you figure out a way to go back. If you love Mom and Callie, you would try.”

“You don’t understand. It’s not the mechanics that’s the problem. I know exactly how to go back. But it’s precisely because I love them that I can’t.” He picks up Callie’s hand, but he doesn’t need the physical touch to prove their connection. Behind him, on the holo-monitor, the string of lights joins their bodies. Unarguably. Irrevocably. “Shortly after I arrived in this time, I learned that my precious Callie was lying in a coma. I learned about the existence of another daughter: you. Most importantly, I heard about your absentee father, the one who had gotten himself stuck in another time.”

Behind him, the string of light glows brighter. Its circumference grows thicker. “You can imagine how shocked I was. I had every intention of going back to my time, and I couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. Still, I was determined to return. I didn’t want to leave Callie like this, however, drifting endlessly through time. My plan was to stay a few months, anchor her firmly to the present, and then go back.”

He holds out a hand to me. As if called by a magnet, I go to him, so that the three of us are connected, hand to hand. But I don’t look behind me. I can’t bear to see what’s not there—the absence of any psychic thread binding me to either of them.

“You showed up and entwined yourself with Callie, and she was stable, more stable than she’d been in the last decade,” he continues. “I thought this was my cue to return. I’d been gone six months, and I missed your mother. I missed little Callie. I wanted to go back and be with you from the beginning, from the day you were born. But then, you didn’t come to rejuvenate your bond, and Callie was fading, fast. I had no choice.” His face crumples, and lines of grief spread around his eyes and mouth.

That’s when I get it. I get why he looks so sad; I get why he’s aged beyond his years. “Callie. She’s the reason you have to stay. She’s the reason you can never go back.”

“Yes,” he says softly. “Now that she’s transferred her bond to me, she and I are inextricably wound together. If I leave this realm, if I go back to my time, our bond will be severed. And she’ll die.”