Remember Yesterday

35

The next morning, I wake on a thin mattress on the floor in Preston’s apartment. Another mattress, another floor. I should be used to it by now. But I miss my bed. I miss my hoverboard. I miss Ryder and even my mom.

Not that I’m uncomfortable here. The warmth from the heated floorboards seeps through the padding, and the hum of the life-support machines soothes me. Like crickets in the woods, it acts as background noise to lull me to sleep. More importantly, the hum means that there is a life to support.

I rise onto my elbow and look at the bed next to mine. A stretcher, more accurately, surrounded by a dozen blinking machines. Callie.

She’s alive, but we couldn’t leave her in the cavernous room with the other dreaming bodies, not when Chairwoman Dresden thinks she’s dead. She had ordered Preston to take away Callie’s body, and he obeyed—just not in the way she expected.

Tanner helped us move Callie to my father’s apartment, just a few doors down from his in the scientific residences. He helped us set up the life-support equipment. He would’ve stayed and helped even more—but after taking one look at my face, Preston sent him back to his apartment for the night.

“Hey, sis,” I say. “It’s fun spending the night with you again.”

The greeting simultaneously makes me laugh and tear up. When I was a kid, I used to beg her to stay with me the whole night through, to curl her body against mine on the single mattress. Because I was scared of the dark—and also because I just wanted to be close to her. Those are my favorite memories. The two of us, whispering in the night like best friends and contemporaries, not sisters who were eleven years apart.

In retrospect, I realize that Callie was probably just pretending we were equals. What counsel could a teen like her want from a kid like me?

Still, it was nice of her to pretend. I grab a tissue from the compartment set in the wall and dab at my eyes. Fate is cruel. Her reach is long, nearly all-encompassing. I thought she was mean enough when she showed Callie a vision of her future self killing her little sister. But now, she’s wielding her power even on those who skip through time, attempting to avoid her.

My poor mother. For the first time in years, my heart shifts, melting some of the frozen bars encasing it. I judged her so quickly for everything she did to me. Never once did I attempt to understand her. Her true love left for an adventure through time—and never came back. Can I fault her for clinging to the hope of his return—even at the expense of her child?

Yes, I think emphatically. The old resentment rises, but then it floats away like pollen on the breeze. I’m no longer mad at my mother. I just feel sorry for her.

I change into a TechRA uniform Preston filched from the supply closet and pad into the eating area. My father’s already there, preparing coffee in the Drinks Assembler.

“Good morning,” he says. Even those two words sound stilted, like he’s not sure how to handle our relationship now that I know about it. He hands me a mug, keeping one for himself, but they feel more like life preservers. Objects we can each hold onto while we navigate these unknown waters of father and teenage daughter. “Sleep well? Were you, um, scared sleeping next to Callie’s unconscious body?”

“Nah. Callie couldn’t scare me, even if she were a zombie or a ghost.” I wrap both hands around the coffee mug. I’d wrap my legs around it, too, if it were big enough. “Thanks. For letting me stay. You didn’t have to. I mean, we don’t really know each other.” Fates. Why is this so hard? Preston is my father. My father, even if we only just met.

“Of course. You can stay with me anytime.” He clears his throat and then clears it again. But no amount of guttural searching will uncover words that don’t exist.

We both sip our coffees. I desperately try to think of something to say. We have an entire lifetime to catch up on—and yet, my mind remains stubbornly blank.

“I talked to Mikey last night,” Preston finally says in a rush. “The riot’s dying down, but tempers are still strong. A ring of people has staked out his house, complete with collapsible tents and portable meal assemblers, barricading him in so that he can’t go to work.”

I drink the last bitter dregs of the coffee, struggling to figure out how I feel. I should feel sorry for Mikey, but he hid Callie’s existence from me. He authorized Olivia’s kidnapping. He keeps more secrets than a safe. His intentions may be good, but he’s no longer the man I used to know. Maybe he never was.

“You can stay here until it’s safe,” Preston continues. “Even beyond that, if you’d like.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to impose. I could go somewhere else—”

“Jessa, I’m your father.” We both freeze at the words. He’s said them before. I just thought them a few minutes ago. But this time, in this context, the utterance takes on a different meaning. It no longer refers to the biological relationship but to a social one. An emotional one. A relationship for which I’m not sure either of us is ready.

“I’m your father,” he says again, more firmly this time. “You’ll always have a home with me. Besides, where would you go? Next door, to Tanner’s?” His voice rises. “He’s a good scientist, I’ll give you that. As my assistant, he would be trusted with my life. But as my daughter’s suitor? You are not to spend a single minute alone in his company, you hear? I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

“First of all, he’s not my suitor,” I say tightly. “He might’ve pretended to be, but it’s not true. It was all for show. And second, are you seriously going to try and tell me what to do? You haven’t been in my life for sixteen years, Preston! You weren’t here when I had to escape to the wilderness. You weren’t here to help me negotiate my arguments with Mom. You haven’t earned that right.”

His jaw firms. “You’re still my daughter.”

“Only in name. Only through blood.” I stop, my breath coming in large puffs. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. None of us were to blame.”

He looks at me, his eyes pulling down at the corners. My heart aches. I wish he’d been the first one to hold me after I was born, his tears wetting the receiving blanket. I wish he’d made sand turtles with me at the beach. I wish he’d placed me high on his shoulders, so that I could feel like I was taller than the world. But he didn’t. He won’t. And we both have to live with that.

“Don’t worry,” I say, my voice softening. “I don’t even want to talk to Tanner, much less touch him. My virtue is perfectly safe as far as he’s concerned.”

The coffee mug stops halfway to Preston’s lips. “What did he do?”

“What didn’t he do?” I retort. “He invented future memory. He endangered Callie’s life. He betrayed me.” Now that I’ve had a full night’s rest, now that I’m no longer shattered by the thought of Callie’s death, the anger rushes to the surface again. “I trusted him, and this entire time, all he cared about was using me to advance his career.”

“I don’t know.” He plunks down the mug. “I’m not a fan of those looks he gives you, but I think he truly cares about you.”

Maybe he does, the voice inside me says. Think how gentle he was when you fell apart. Think how he looked into your eyes and told you his feelings overwhelmed him.

I push away the voice, confused. I’m pulled in so many directions, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to feel.

I do know this: I’d rather put my energies into the man who is inextricably twined in my life. “I don’t want to talk about Tanner. I want to talk about you.” I take a few tentative steps toward Preston.

I may not know him, but I want to. I want to understand him, his thoughts, his feelings. I want our relationship to be real, not just in name but also in meaning. Time, as we both well know, might be even more fleeting than the scant number of minutes we do have.

“I’m sorry you’ve been handed this fate,” I say. “It can’t be easy.”

His eyes widen, and all of a sudden, his cheeks are wet, as though the tears have sprouted from his skin. “Don’t misunderstand me, Jessa. I would do anything to keep Callie alive, and I’m happy to be here now, with you. But I can never have my family back. I don’t get to grow old with the woman I love. I don’t get to see my little girl—I mean, both my little girls—grow up. My future is your past. You’ve both been through incredibly tough times, and I wasn’t there to help you.”

I swallow hard, even though I know his tears are not for me. Have never been for me. He’s including me in his regrets to be polite, but I heard his slip-up. His concern is for his little girl. His Callie. The one who existed when he left home.

“She didn’t blame you,” I whisper. “Did you know she used to tell me stories about you? Over and over again, so that she wouldn’t forget. So that I would know you, too.” I smile, but the tears I won’t shed coalesce in a lump in my throat. I knew him, but he didn’t have a clue that I was alive. “She loved you so much.”

“I love her. And it helps to have both of you here, in the present, even if Callie’s not awake.” He sits and studies his hands, those long, beautiful fingers that figured so prominently in Callie’s stories. “But it kills me to leave your mother behind. The thought of never seeing her again is like a machete to my heart.”

“Why can’t you see her?” I sit down, too. Not across from him but next to him. As though we can make up for our emotional distance with physical proximity. “She’s right here, a few miles away. Once the riot settles, we can both go over there.”

He coughs. Must be choking on saliva, since he hasn’t drunk any coffee in the last few minutes. “I can’t do that,” he rasps. “She wouldn’t want me, and it would just be painful for both of us.”

“Why wouldn’t she want you? She never remarried. She said she’d already married her soul mate. Any other relationship, by definition, would be less. I mean, I know it’s weird, ’cause she’s so much older than you…”

“You think I care about that?” he says fiercely. “I fell in love with Phoebe. She will always be beautiful to me, no matter what her age is. She will always be the love of my life.”

“Don’t you think she feels the same way?”

He moves his shoulders, so lost, so lonely. A single traveler, bobbing helplessly in the sea of time. “To me, only a few months have passed. I’m just as in love with her as I’ve always been. But for her, twenty-three years have gone by. Twenty-three years where she thinks I abandoned her. Where she believes I prioritized another time, another place, over her.” He shakes his head slowly. “I just don’t know how she’ll feel.”

“You’ll never know until you try.” Awkwardly, I place my hand on his arm. “Will you at least think about what I said?”

He covers my hand with his. No longer uncertain. No longer hesitant. “Now that you’ve brought it up, I won’t be able to think about anything else.”