He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Promise me you’ll live your life to its fullest until Neurovida?”
“I will,” I say, pressing my lips to his. He cups my face in his hands and kisses me tenderly, as if his touch might shatter me into one hundred tiny pieces. When he lets me go, his brows are drawn, a sudden coldness about him. “Rose will kill me for telling you, but you need to know. We were betrayed by a man named Matthews. He was one of us. Or at least, we thought he was. He turned Neurovida against us. When you meet him in the future, don’t trust him.”
I nod. “I’ll see you in two years.”
He presses a kiss to my forehead, his warm gaze filled with an emotion I can’t place. “Goodbye, Ella. I love you.”
Hands balled into fists at his side, he lowers his head, and his body blurs. Then he lifts his head—and there’s that roguish smile that still makes me weak at the knees. “Hey,Ella? Before I forget, when you meet me at Neurovida, go easy on me, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said, I was an idiot,” he confesses, and before I have the chance to blink, he’s gone.
31Mariella
I reread the current page of my book, the words trickling from my brain like water through a sieve. Eventually I toss the book on my nightstand, switch off my lamp, and lie back on my pillow. After Anna and I turn in each night, my evenings are spent like this, lying in bed, daydreaming about Parker and my first day at Neurovida. Meeting his younger self. Falling in love.
The light from my phone cuts through the darkness, Silas’s name appearing on the screen. We haven’t spoken since the day he showed me the picture of Parker and Rose. He’s sent an attachment, with a message underneath:
I’m sorry.
I jerk upright, flick the light back on, and click on the attachment. My mother’s black-and-white death certificate fills my screen. It’s only one page, the typed contents bearing the speckled markings of a photocopy. UnderStandard Certificate of Deathis my mother’s name.
The date and place of her birth.
Our home address.
My deceased grandparents’ names.
I read on. The certificate namesMassachusetts General Hospitalas the place of death, with an inpatient box checked and the name of the cemetery where her body was taken. Beneath are the signatures of the funeral service licensee and the attending doctor. I continue reading.
The report lists December twenty-fourth as the day my mother died. Suicide is stated as the immediate cause of death and, below this,bilateral vertical incision to ventral surface of wrist. The report lists the underlying causes as schizophrenia, psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“What?” I whisper at the screen and reread the report.It must be wrong.My mother didn’t kill herself. She wouldn’t leave me. At this point, I’m not even sure she was sick. Maybe she was in danger and had to flee, like Parker and Rose?
I blank my screen and lie back in bed. Neurovida will have answers, I know it. At the minimum, I’ll learn to time travel, and I’ll visit my mother.
I’ll uncover the truth if it kills me.
Brilliant white light dances around me, easing backward with every step.
“Mari, come here.” My mother’s voice drifts through the waning light, and I rush forward until she’s within my circle of clarity.
I suck in a stilted breath.
She’s standing at the end of the hospital corridor, her frail arms reaching for my younger self, like two bony twigs lined with scars. Her sack-like hospital gown engulfs her malnourished body, the lilac color a cruel complement to the purple rings under her eyes.
Recollections of this day inundate my brain. Memories suppressed and faded by time.
“No,” I whisper.
My younger self runs toward my mother, the green linoleum squeaking beneath her feet. “Mommy,” she squeals, and she catapults into my mother’s arms.
My mother almost tips from the impact. Clutching her daughter against her chest, her head whips back and forth along the empty corridor before she lowers the girl to the ground and drops into a crouch. They huddle together in the tiny space between the hospital corner and a mobile laundry unit overflowing with bleached-white sheets and well-used cotton blankets.
“I need you to listen to me, Mari,” she whispers into the ear of my younger self. “Are you listening, darling?”
“Yes,” she replies in a small voice.
