Page 19

“My legs are excellent, actually.”

“I’m aware. You’ve been admiring them for days.”

“I have not.”

“You have walked past every reflective surface in this house like a show pony.”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.

Her mouth softened. “Paul will give you a good life.”

“I know he will.”

“And that’s not a small thing.”

No, it wasn’t. That was the problem.

Later, in my father’s study, I sat behind his desk with a yellow legal pad and tried to make myself rich. It wasn’t my finest hour.

The Macintosh my sister Meg and I had bought him for his birthday sat unopened on the corner of the desk, still wrapped in plastic. My father had accepted the future with gratitude and then left it in the box, which was very Walter. He believed machinery should prove itself for several years before being invited into the family.

I touched the top of the box. “You’re going to be important someday,” I whispered.

Then I pulled the legal pad closer and wrote APPLE.

Under it, I wrote MICROSOFT.

Then I sat there, pencil hovering, waiting for fortune to arrive.

Nothing did.

Was Microsoft public yet? Apple was already public, wasn’t it? I could see broad things, computers getting smaller, phones getting smarter, people eventually paying four dollars for coffee and acting as if civilization had improved. Useful details, however, hid from me the second I reached for them.

I tried the stock market crash. October 1987 stayed in my mind, but the exact date slid away. Sports were no better. The Bears. The Super Bowl. Refrigerator Perry. I remembered a song, a commercial, and a vague image of men in shoulder pads moving through snow that might have belonged to an entirely different game.

The pencil point broke.

“Well,” I said to the empty room. “That was humiliating.”

I stared at the page. Apple. Microsoft. October. Bears.

The future wasn’t currency. Whatever had brought me here had no interest in making me rich and powerful. It had given me my younger body, my parents, and thirteen days before a question everyone thought I would answer correctly. Again.

It hadn’t given me cheat codes. I tore off the page and dropped it into the wastebasket.

I took another sheet and another pencil, and wrote two names.

Claire Elizabeth Ellsworth.

Benjamin Walter Ellsworth.

The names were clear in my mind. Their birthdays came too, clear and ordinary, two dates from a life that hadn’t happened yet in this world and still lived inside me with unbearable force. Claire pressing her lips together when she concentrated. Ben’s dark curls bent over a plate of birthday cake. The weight of their bodies against my shoulder when they were babies.

I pressed the pencil so hard it tore through the paper.

By two o’clock, I was beside the pool in a red bikini, coated in Hawaiian Tropic oil and trying to pretend I wasn’t lying there while my entire life split itself into two impossible directions.

The coconut scent rose off my skin in warm waves. A glass of iced tea sweated onto the brick patio beside a stack of magazines, and my sunglasses were oversized and black as sin. In 1984, sun protection was for old people. My friend Kim used to mix baby oil and iodine and lie on a reflective blanket, swearing it was how she got so dark.