When she met my eyes, it was the same expression she’d worn at the railroad tracks. Hours ago. Decades ago. I raised my hand to smack her but made a fist instead, bringing it down hard against my own thigh. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I’m sorry, Beth, I’m so sorry.” When she started to half cry as she talked, I couldn’t believe I’d ever mistaken her for anyone but Lizzy. She swallowed hard and composed herself. “I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. I was a bad person. Maybe evil. You taught me that. I wanted to get you away from me, before… before…”
“Before what?” It was louder than I’d ever yelled.
She whipped her head around, looking at the darkened houses. “Let’s talk somewhere private. I can drive you home.”
“You just literally tried to drive me home and I said no.”
Tess put a hand to her forehead and winced. “Yeah. I know. I mean, I am starting to remember. Fuck, it hurts. Please let me drive you.”
Something about her tone was suddenly so unlike Lizzy’s that I was jolted. She’d traveled through time to find me, more than once. This really might be more serious than murder. “Okay,” I conceded. “Where’s your car?”
When we slid into the seats, Tess gulped some aspirin and took a winding route to the freeway. She didn’t say anything until we were on the I-5, heading south. I vacillated between rage and numbness, rewinding our previous conversations in my mind with different players in the roles. So it was Lizzy who had become the traveler, not me. I still didn’t know what I would become. It was a relief to know my future was uncharted, and I didn’t have to wonder anymore what would turn me into the kind of person who liked the name Tess.
Finally Tess glanced over, then back at the road. “I can’t talk to you about your future, but there aren’t any rules against telling people about their alternate present.” She sighed. “Look—I came back here because I remember a timeline where you killed yourself, Beth. Right before we went to college. You jumped off that bridge in Pasadena where we used to hang out. You know the Colorado Street bridge? We were standing there smoking and then you were gone. I couldn’t stop you, and it… it destroyed me.” She looked over again and I could see tears on her face. “I don’t know if you can understand because you’re not that person anymore. But I never killed anyone else after you… after that. My whole career has been about changing history without violence. It’s been hard. I still have the same urges. You’re one of the only people on Earth who knows what I’m struggling with.”
I wasn’t sure that was true, but it was my chance to ask something I’d been wanting to know for months. “Lizzy, why did you keep killing those guys? I mean, I understood when it was with Scott, but after that… what happened to you?”
I could see more tears making reflective tracks down her face, but she kept her eyes on the scatterplot of taillights ahead. “That first time was so easy. It felt—I don’t know. Like we’d really fixed something. Made a difference. But also it felt good. Natural.” She paused, thinking. “Remember that documentary we watched—jeez, I guess it was last summer for you. It was about how female lions hunt their prey, and we kept joking about how great our faces would look bathed in blood like that one lion who had fucking dipped her whole head inside an antelope’s guts? It was like that. Magnificent and honorable. But also… natural? Because we were doing it to protect all the baby lions and the big fluffy male lions who just wanted to sit under trees and look pretty. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
I shook my head. “I remember the documentary, yeah. But we aren’t lions, Lizzy. We’re people. We don’t need to eat rapists and creeps to survive.”
She snorted a soft laugh, sounding exactly like the pre-murder Lizzy I had lost. “Beth, I’m so glad to talk to you again. I am so glad you are alive and in the world.”
Lizzy’s lion story had momentarily diverted my attention from that alternate self, the one who committed suicide. Had Lizzy and I become best friends because we shared the urge to kill? Maybe we’d turned that urge in different directions, but it was still there, a fucked-up substrate to our love. Then the murders heightened everything. Each death took her closer to some kind of predatory ecstasy. But they took me deeper into the place my father wanted to lead me, where the solution to everything was a pure, self-destructive rage.
Still, my agony had eased after that day when Tess and I talked about what my dad had done when I was younger. That pulled me up short. How did she know that? Had my other self told Lizzy my secret?
“How did you know what happened with my dad? You said you knew what he did that one night.”
“Beth, your dad was mentally ill. He did a million terrible things to you. I knew that.” She touched my shoulder in the gentlest way possible and my eyes felt hot. “Yes, I was a shitty friend, but I wasn’t shitty in that way. I care a lot about you. I knew you didn’t want to talk about it, but I also knew it was… bad.”
“So… you know the thing that happened?”
“Which thing are you talking about? The time he made you shower twice before dinner because he thought you were too sweaty to be inside the house? The time he freaked out because we had our shoes on? The time he put you on restriction for three months because you got an A-minus in typing class? All the times he pretended he wasn’t your dad when he took us to the movies?”
My face hurt. “No. Not those times.”
“Okay. I guess I don’t know, then.”
“Do you think you really changed the timeline forever? What if I kill myself next year?” I was fearful in a way I had never been before. It was mixed with self-consciousness and melancholy and something else I couldn’t name.
Tess was silent for a long time. “It’s true you could do that. I always thought that if you didn’t have to see the murders…”
“I saw the murders.”
“No. You saw some of them. Not the worst ones.”
My body was thrumming with the uncanniness of everything. “You didn’t have to lie to me, you know. You could have said who you are. I would have believed you. Why are you always lying?”
“That wasn’t—I’m not. No. I had to say I was you because then you would know for sure you were going to survive. I wanted you to think suicide was not an option. I wanted to give you hope.”
“You always thought lying was easier than telling the truth.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Now you’re lying again.”
I stared at her profile, illuminated by a chaos of freeway lights, and willed her to say something else. But she wouldn’t. That’s one way she’d changed. Lizzy would have argued with me for weeks about her innocence, and how she was totally not lying and never would lie to me. Tess knew when to shut up.
TWENTY-FIVE
TESS
Raqmu, Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.)… Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)
I couldn’t stay away from Beth, despite all my failures. After everyone settled down for bed in 13 B.C.E., I snuck out at midnight to bribe some tappers who could send me forward. With the Machine right here at Raqmu, and airline travel on the other side, I thought I could pull a move from The Geologists. I’d save Beth on the night of her suicide, then travel back to the Nabataean Kingdom for Soph’s sacrifice. This might be my last chance to travel upstream to 1993 from a time with spotty record-keeping. Getting back down might be dicey, but I could talk my way into it. The techs in the early nineties knew me now.
I’d psyched myself up for failure, or something more ambiguous. But I had no way to prepare for the mental onslaught of a merging conflict. When I slithered back out of the wormhole into the chamber at ancient Raqmu, it felt like I’d been vomited up by an ancient ocean. The saline smell was horrible, and I had the crunchy remains of a graptolite colony in my soaking-wet hair. Which meant I’d been dragged through the Ordovician again—graptolites were common plankton in that period, known for nesting together in tiny chitinous tubes made from their own secretions.