Propped up in his bed, Travis looked out the window. The blinds were raised—Kayla had done that for him before she’d stepped out—and, if he needed any further proof that significant time had passed, the summery landscape of green grass and leaf-covered trees provided it; for him, it had been a snowy winter just a few hours ago.
Of course, that January and this June were separated not by just five months but by nineteen years. His sister and mother were elated: his return was a miracle they’d stopped hoping for. But Travis was furious at the loss of all the intervening time, and he was devastated by how his body had wasted away. For Christ’s sake, he was suddenly in his forties! By this point, he’d planned on being a corporate vice president with a half-million-dollar home—or whatever amount a fancy place went for these days. He should’ve had the trophy wife, the 2.1 kids, the red Jaguar. Instead, he had just $347 in his Scotiabank account, plus, he supposed, whatever interest had accrued on it, if monthly service fees hadn’t whittled the damn thing down to nothing.
He’d heard Kayla and his mom talking—funny how candid they were, as if a part of them still felt he couldn’t possibly hear what they were saying. It had been decided that, when the doctors discharged him, he’d move in with his mom—yup, that was his life now, the quintessential loser, in his forties, living in his parent’s basement. But how the fuck had he ended up like this? What the hell had happened?
He clearly remembered everything from the last few days—the last few days nineteen years ago: going to see Dude, Where’s My Car? at the Polo Park Cineplex on New Year’s Eve; picking up a girl at the bar afterward; watching a new show called CSI and thinking that its gimmick would wear thin quickly, only to have Kayla tell him today that the damn thing had stayed in production until 2017. But what had caused him to become Rip Van Winkle? Oh, right! He had been—
“Great news!” His sister came back into the room; he was still startled by how she looked now. “I spoke to the dietitian. He’s going to work out a plan to get you back onto solid food. We’ll have you eating cheeseburgers and nachos before you know it.”
“Thanks,” he replied, but he didn’t feel much enthusiasm. He didn’t want to eat; he wanted to walk—he wanted to run!
Perhaps she’d read something in his face because she added at once, “And the physiotherapist will be here tomorrow to do an assessment.”
Just then, a nurse came in, pretty, Asian, maybe twenty-five. Travis turned to look at her as she checked his IV drip, and—
And it should have been obvious. It should have been clear at a glance. He should have been able to see it.
But he couldn’t.
This nurse might be vulnerable, she might be afraid, she might be the perfect means to an end—any end—for him.
But he couldn’t tell. The sense he used to have, the ability that had been there his whole life, the perception that had guided his interactions with others for so long, was gone.
The nurse, noting his gaze, smiled at him, but it wasn’t the interested smile he was used to getting from women; it was a comforting “there, there” smile, sympathy for the old man.
The nurse left, and Travis turned back to face Kayla. He used to be able to read her easily, too, but not anymore. And yet he did sense… something. As he looked at her, he… he felt… “pain,” he supposed was the right word for seeing her this way, although that didn’t… it… he couldn’t, but…
He narrowed his eyes, detecting the skin on his forehead, which had clearly loosened over the years, wrinkling as he did so. That was a strange sensation, but not as strange, not as unprecedented, not as fucking weird as…
…as this… this sadness—that was it!—this ineffable sorrow not for himself, not for the two decades he’d lost, but for his sister, for the toll the passage of time had taken on her, the decay she’d undergone.
Still, unlike him, she hadn’t missed out on the last nineteen years. She’d lived them, every moment, doubtless dozens of triumphs and dozens of tragedies. So why did he feel so melancholy when he looked at her? Why did he feel…
Why did he feel anything for her?
What the fuck was going on?
“You okay, Trav?” Kayla said, sitting down on a chair near his bed.
“I guess.” He paused for a beat. “So, Mom said you’re a big-time rocket scientist now, huh?”
“Quantum physicist,” Kayla replied.
“A professor?”
She shook her head. “I don’t teach. I’m a researcher.”
A question popped into his head, one that it had never occurred to him to ask before. “You happy?”
“With my work? Sure. The synchrotron is an amazing place, and it pays well enough.”
“And other than work?”
“Honestly? My ex is a pain in the ass.”
“Your ex? You’re married?”
“And divorced.”
A huge chapter of her life he’d completely missed. And—my God—he wasn’t even sure he knew his own sister’s name now. “Did you take his name?”
“Nope. Still a Huron. As we say in the physics world: inertia.”
“And this guy was an a-hole?”
“So it turned out. Only good thing that came out of that relationship was Ryan.”
“Who?”
“My daughter.” A pause. “Your niece.”
Incredible.
“Six, going on thirty,” Kayla said. “I’ll bring her by to meet you soon.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. And yeah, to answer your question, basically, overall, life is good. I’m making amazing breakthroughs at work, and you’ve met my boyfriend Jim; he’s really good to me and Ryan.”
He thought about this—and, oddly, about how he felt about it all. It was very, very strange, but he replied, saying words that he’d said countless times before but meant—really meant—for the first time: “I’m happy for you.”
25
When he’d been fifteen—which was seven subjective and twenty-six objective years ago—Travis’s hand had gotten sliced open. He’d walked into a plate-glass window at a shopping mall that he’d thought was an open door. It should have been made out of safety glass but wasn’t, and the damn thing broke into giant slabs. As he lifted his arm to shield his face, one of the huge sections dropped from the top of the frame and smashed into the back of his right hand, cutting it down to the bone. The tendons were severed, the wound gaped, and he was rushed to the emergency department.
All of the surgical beds were in use, and so they put him in something like a dentist’s chair, with his hand supported on a little tray, and the reconstructive surgeon, called in from a concert he’d been at, sat on a stool next to him and carefully sutured up the tendons, which looked like gray fettuccine noodles. They’d only used a local anesthetic, and Travis had watched, fascinated, examining the inner workings of his hand.
The scar, Travis was pleased to see, had faded greatly over the last two decades, doubtless the only part of him that had improved with age. Still, this was a bit like that: for the first time, he realized, he was reflecting on the inner workings of his own mind. And, like that—like seeing the tendons, the bone, the whole mechanical infrastructure of his metacarpus—it was interesting for a time, and something he was glad to have experienced, but not anything he needed to do again, and certainly not something he wanted to be subjected to all the time.
Kayla had been sitting with him for the last couple of hours, presenting a compressed version of twenty-first-century history to date: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a second space shuttle blowing up, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the election of the first black American president, Canada being dragged far to the right and then snapping back to the left with—holy crap!—the recent election of a Muslim prime minister, same-sex marriage being legalized across Canada and a decade later across the US, the polar ice caps shrinking, and so much more. It was overwhelming.