The Here and Now (15 page)

It is still early Friday. We are driving along the Meadowbrook Parkway as though in a dream. The sun is shining and I’ve got one bare foot out the window, feeling the wind through my toes.

We stop at Target to buy a prepaid phone.

“Go ahead, splurge,” Ethan says to me jokingly when I hold up two. I guess it’s not every day we come upon thousands of dollars.

I use one of the phones to call my mother. I’ve been wondering what she knows, whether they told her I got away. I know how they hate to admit mistakes or ever let on that they are not in control.

“Molly, I can only talk for a second,” I tell her breathlessly when she picks up. I have a lurking fear they will somehow trace the call if I stay on too long.

“Prenna! Where are you?”

“I’m fine. I got away from Mr. Robert, and no one is hurt.
I need to try to fix something Poppy told me about, but I’ll be home by Sunday at the latest.” I hear voices in the background. I realize she’s not alone. “Mom?”

“Prenna?” Now it’s a different voice. I think it’s Ms. Cynthia on the phone. It’s a voice that curdles my blood. “Can you hear me, Prenna? You’ll make life very unpleasant for your mother if you persist in this. And for Katherine.”

She is grotesque. I should hang up. “They didn’t do anything.”

“All the more reason you should bear them in mind.”

“I’m not the one wanting to hurt them!” It’s the twelve-year-old me, rising to defend us against the insidious Ms. Cynthia. I need to calm down. She starts to talk but I talk over her. “I’ll be back in two days. You leave them alone, and I will go straight to Mr. Robert’s door and turn myself in. You can do whatever you want to me then. But if you hurt them, I swear I will bring EVERYTHING down.” I hang up. I crack the phone in two at the joint and throw it across the parking lot.

I walk a few yards away from the car, crouch down and put my face in my hands. A minute or so later I feel Ethan’s hand on my back.

“That didn’t go so well.”

“Not so well.” I stand up. I wipe my eyes. “It’s going to be okay, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” And somehow I know it’s true, because for the first time in the history of Ms. Cynthia it wasn’t me who sounded scared. It was her.

This may be the first hour of freedom I’ve had in my life here, so we decide we ought to go see the ocean in person. “We’ve got to be somewhere,” Ethan says philosophically, and that does appear to be true.

My vision is really clearing, and it feels miraculous. It is different and better than it ever was through those piece-of-crap glasses. Driving along the shore under a blue sky and a washy yellow sun with the dunes of the Atlantic Ocean just beyond my window, the planet feels scrubbed new and so beautiful.

Ethan glances at me and smiles.

We drive out to Jones Beach, to Field Two, and park near the snack bar. It is already filling up. Why not? It’s a beautiful and very warm Friday in May.

“This is perfect,” Ethan says as we watch clusters of people in beach gear stream by, dragging coolers and umbrellas and a few small children. “What better place for a couple of folks running for their lives and concerned with the fate of humanity?”

For the moment, though, we stay in the car. Ethan takes out the
New York Times
from this coming Sunday and divides it into parts.

“You can properly read now, can’t you?” Ethan asks, watching me trying out the small print on the front page, as proud as if he’d taught me himself.

We are playing it cool, but I can tell we are both uneasy, afraid to open the paper and look inside. When my family emigrated, we travelers brought so few artifacts back with us that this newspaper is almost as strange to me as it is to Ethan.

I start with the weather at the top. “You could find success as a weather forecaster with these papers,” I say.

Ethan is glancing uncertainly at the sports section. “And
make a bloody fortune gambling on sports scores. I always start with this page, but it seems so wrong to look at it.”

“I know what you mean.” I take that and the business section and put them to the side. “Let’s not worry about these for now.”

Together, we page through the front section. Just glancing from headline to headline, column to column, I don’t see anything that strikes me as out of step with the general stream of news, at least not so far as I follow it. The immigration has apparently done a good job of not fixing anything. Maybe it has also succeeded in preventing uncontainable changes.

At one point Ethan puts down the paper and just gazes at me like,
How did we get here?
My heart goes out to him. I am used to the world being out of order.

I think of the look on his face when he found his drawing in Poppy’s storage box. He’s been through a lot today and it’s not even noon.

I touch my fingers to his wrist. “I’m sorry to get you mixed up in all this.”

For a moment he looks at me in our old way. “I’m already so mixed up over you, Henny. Since the first day I saw you. There’s no getting out of it now.”

“I think we should look at the Metro section,” I say, after we split a corn dog, a bag of chips and a lemonade from the snack bar and get back in the car. I unfold it and put it in front of us. Under the fold there is a prominent article accompanied by a photo of a man and a photo of a woman.

Ethan leans in. “Holy shit, do you know who this is?” He
means the woman. I move aside so he can scan the columns. His finger stops on her name at the top of the article. “Yeah, it’s definitely her.”

“Who?”

“Mona Ghali. The scientist who wrote the papers I told you about. At the lab where I interned last summer.”

“The paper you wanted to show to Ben Kenobi.”

“Exactly.”

“My God. What happened to her?”

We’re both so agitated and flustered, we are reading all spasmodically and out of sequence. I go back to the headline. “I think she’s dead.” I read aloud,
“Lovers’ Quarrel Turns Deadly.”
I try to slow down and read the first couple of paragraphs carefully and in order. “I guess it turned deadly for her.” I point to the man. “This guy”—I look for the name—“Andrew Baltos killed her.”

Ethan looks aghast. He’s stopped reading. “She’s dead?”

I check the date again, just to be sure. “No. She’s alive at the moment. She’ll be dead on Saturday night at around seven-forty-five.”

Ethan is staring at the article without quite bringing himself to read it. “Why? Why would anyone do that to her?”

“It seems to say this guy Andrew is her boyfriend and they had a fight.” I read on a little ways. “The guy is not denying he killed her. He claims he did it in self-defense and that she had a gun.”

Ethan takes a moment to absorb this. “Do you think this could be it?”

We both know what “it” is. It’s too momentous a coincidence not to be. “I think so.” My hands flutter nervously as
I refold the paper to get the crease out of the middle of the picture. “Did my father know about her?”

“I told him about her work. Not the wave-energy work as much as the dark-matter stuff she was doing on the side. I don’t know if I said her name. I never got the chance to give him that paper she wrote.”

I rest my eyes for a minute before I read on. “And it was her birthday.”

“She got killed on her birthday? Gets killed?”

“Like Shakespeare. Shakespeare died on his birthday.” I finish the article. “I thought we’d be looking for something like a political assassination or maybe even a corporate assassination. You know what I mean? I wasn’t imagining a girl on her birthday in a fight with her boyfriend.”

Ethan is staring at the picture. “Well, but this girl is kind of a special case.”

I go back to the paper. “The lab is in Teaneck?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where it happened. Happens.”

He is shaking his head. “Crazy. I’ve been there probably a hundred times.”

“That could be useful, right?” I lay the newspaper on the dashboard to study the man’s picture up close in full sunshine. “We have to find out who this guy is. We should find out everything we can about him.”

Ethan is nodding. “I’ve still got her paper in my backpack. I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“She’s not.”

“Supposed to die, I mean.”

“We’re going to keep her alive, remember?”

We scour the rest of the newspaper from May 18, just to be sure, and then read through the other three papers we brought, which take us through the end of the month.

We find something important almost right away. In the paper dated May 21, an article buried deep in the Metro section describes an unusual turn in the case of Mona Ghali and Andrew Baltos. What appeared to be a lovers’ quarrel and an accidental killing in self-defense has begun to appear more complicated. Two computers in Mona Ghali’s office were wiped nearly clean and a file cabinet was emptied.

We also have a newspaper from May 28, reporting that Mona Ghali’s apartment had been messed with too. Files had been taken from her home computer, and the place had been thoroughly searched the night she died. Is supposed to die.

A related story from the May 27 paper, which we do not have, is also mentioned here. As soon as the plot started to thicken, Baltos disappeared before the police could take him into custody, and they think he fled the country with a fake passport.

“That is lame,” Ethan points out as I read it to him.

“He sounds like quite a mysterious character,” I say, looking up from the paper. “He’s not a US citizen, they can’t figure out his real name, and they have no idea how he got here. He must have gotten into this country illegally.”

“So maybe it is more the way you were imagining,” Ethan says when I finish reading everything I can find. “Baltos wanted to kill her—wants to kill her—for her work and the work she’ll do in the future, and that is also the reason we need to save her.”

“But this guy doesn’t know the work she’ll do in the future. He doesn’t have the kind of knowledge we have. He can’t possibly know this is the fork.”

Ethan is staring at the man’s picture again. “Are you sure?”

“Well, he can’t be part of our immigration.”

“How do you know?” Ethan asks.

“Because he’s in this newspaper. These were written and printed before we came.”

“Right, of course.” Ethan shakes his head as though to straighten out his thoughts.

“Still, you can cause the fork without knowing you’re causing the fork, obviously,” I say. “And he must have suspected she was onto something. Was he trying to steal her research? Use it for his own glory?”

Ethan considers this. “Well, if he did, he didn’t get very far with it. The future as Ben Kenobi described it is a climate fiasco. It doesn’t sound like it benefits from any revolution of zero-emissions wave energy.”

“No. It doesn’t. It didn’t. No glory there.”

“Maybe he’s a corporate spy, working for big oil. You know, some big greedy oil conglomerate trying to squelch a new technology that could put them out of business. You read about stuff like that sometimes. Or maybe you just see it in movies.”

I stare at my toenails, thinking. “It’s a good theory. Hard to prove.”

Ethan shrugs. “Too bad we can’t do Internet searches of the near future. I mean, hey, it’s only a couple days away.”