“… Roman!” Steve was screaming at the top of his lungs. “Hey, Roman, where are you?!”
For a moment so raw and traumatic that she’d retreated again to that very dark place inside herself so she could protect and preserve her sanity, the smell of Emily’s sweet baby hair filled her being. It was like she was infused with the forever that would be motherhood of this daughter. She didn’t love her other two children any less, but hope of seeing them again existed where none did for Emily. So she glowed in the warm light that her daughter’s scent powerfully alit within her. Mama. Those moments felt like a very long time to Kayla. It was joyous and beautiful with grass, a summer breeze, the warm bed she’d just left her previous body in … and then it was gone. Ripped away like the flaying of her skin when the scent was replaced with something very different. It was a damp, musty, and humid smell that now surrounded her, and it smelled cold, if that was possible. It unceremoniously pushed Kayla out of the safe warmth and into the reality that she was no longer in her home in 1989 with Steve and Emily and a baby on the way. Now she was in a place where the familiar voice of her husband was screaming in a tone that wasn’t familiar at all anymore. It was once. But those days were over so long ago that hearing it was truly hearing a memory.
The fact that she was soaking wet wasn’t foremost on her mind, and, actually, neither was the grief, because she was forced to acknowledge the fact that she couldn’t see straight. Literally. Kayla was so nauseous and dizzy that she fairly fell into Steve. He stopped pushing on the door of the storm drain when he felt her body fall against him, his reflexes impressively quick considering what he had to work with in the storm drain.
“I’ve got you! I’ve got you!” Steve turned at caught her, as she was completely incapable of finding her footing between the rising water and her own rising gorge. Her eyes rolled, and while she didn’t care if she lived or died at this moment, she couldn’t help it when she tried to tamp down the nausea. Steve held her against him his hand splayed very tightly against the back of her head. It lasted only a moment before he tried to stand her up, because he needed both of them able-bodied. “Look at me! Look at me, baby, you’re gonna be ok!”
Kayla could only whimper through the jump effect and her grief. I am never going to be ok again.
“I’ve taken care of you before, haven’t I?”
There were six Steves in front of her, the dizziness was so bad. Had the jump sickness ever been this bad? But she knew where she was now. She knew who she was, when she was, and who those six Steves in front of her weren’t yet. She wanted to jump into his arms and hold him so that when his awareness jumped in she could be there for him literally on arrival. And at the same time she wanted to lay down right there and drown in this very watery tomb.
Now there were only four Steves, her grip on his forearms as he held onto her shoulders very tight so that she could maintain her balance. This Steve had no idea that she wasn’t herself and would have found her face inscruitable, only he barely saw it with the grate above their heads throwing dark shadows over her in the metal-walled room.
Finally, the two remaining Steve’s coalesced into one, and the fact that they were in Stockholm and not Salem came roaring into her with a horrible clarity.
“Don’t you give up on me, Kayla! You hear me, I’m getting you out of here!”
Steve dove under the water, leaving Kayla alone with the misery he was never going to understand. Her memories of actually being trapped while the water came in were spotty, because it was just that traumatic for her. She vaguely remembered him swimming around trying to free them, but she really had no idea if any of this was right or not. All she knew was that a moment ago she had a baby, and now she didn’t. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up!!! Kayla backed up until she hit the hard metal of the wall. Steve rose back out of the water.
“No,” she shook her head.
“It’s no use, it won’t budge!” he said as the water poured off of him. But they were having two entirely different conversations.
“Noooo,” she repeated. Steve misinterpreted her grief as fear that they weren’t going to make it.
“This isn’t over yet, baby!” he promised her.
Kayla looked into her empty arms, and the most helpless feeling dug a hole into the pit of her stomach. “Emily …” her voice rang hopelessly as the sound of the rushing water swallowed up her daughter’s name as surely as the slipstream had. Steve could only look at her, the fear of her death mounting.
“It’s not over yet!”
Kayla dropped her empty arms and jerked her head this way and that, searching in vain, irrationally hoping Emily would be there. The fact that she wasn’t just wet but was completely sodden with water as more of it poured on top of her at a cacophanous level was secondary at best, because her heart was accepting the fact that Emily was not there. Would not be coming. Would never be anywhere. Steve watched her panic.
“You just calm down! Calm down!” She dropped her face into her hands and started to truly sob. “We’re not gonna drown, we’re getting out of here, baby,” Steve assured her.
“No, no, NO, NO, NO, NOOOO!!!!!” Kayla cried with the grief of every mother who’d ever lost a child. She squeezed her eyes shut beneath her palms screaming her cries like she’d never screamed them before, her body in uncontrollable convulsions of grief. The pain that ripped through her at the loss of her daughter, no different than if she’d been killed, was so raw that she knew part of her would never recover. Somewhere inside of her she was thankful that Steve was not there to witness it, because he would not have survived the sounds she was making.
The destination Steve, however, wasn’t exactly unaffected and flinched like he’d been slapped. Kayla turned to face the gunmetal gray wall as the cold, November water continued to pour in from the pipe where Orpheus had opened up a scieve, whether his intention was to distract or kill them they never did find out. Steve didn’t know what to do for her, he was at a complete loss. He tried to calm her, alternately trying to hold her against him and pounding on the door for help, but she was inconsolable at that moment by anyone. Only seconds ticked by, but it felt like torture to both of them. Finally, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around. He took her face in his hands, and she quieted. Unfortunately for this version of Steve, who was in a panic that he was failing her, he had no idea what was happening. All he knew was that she was about to die before he could tell her how he felt about her.
Kayla absently registered the fearful look on his face. She saw how much he clearly loved her here. So far removed from the year and even from herself in this horrible moment, she saw objectively what she was too busy trying to survive to see the first time through: His terrified devotion. If she were in her right mind it would have touched her to experience this in the way Rolf had intended when he set them on their journey – as a gift of a second chance. As it was, she did not have it within her because her baby was dead. He was so blissfully ignorant, here. He didn’t know that he was going to be lost in time and have to leave his children. “Oh Steve,” she managed. “You just don’t understand.” Her tears continued as she lovingly stroked her finger down his scar. She was too bereaved to see the effect her touch had upon him.
Steve gathered her up and held her as the sobs split her body open. “Baby,” he said as he caressed her head and pulled her into him. “I never wanted anything to happen to you Sweetness, I never did!” Her wretched sobs threatened to swallow him up far quicker than the water would.
“Steve … I need you,” she cried as she burrowed into his neck.
“Oh, baby,” he said. A shiver ran through him from her words, though he had no concept of their true meaning. “There’s something I want to tell you! Something I want you to know!”
It was then that Steve arrived into himself. Soaking wet, freezing cold, in more than three feet of water, with his wife wrapped tightly in his arms crying in abject grief.
He knew just by the feeling of her in his arms that she hadn’t been here long. It was only a moment more before the rest of his senses kicked in to tell him where he was. When they finally did, driving out the sound of his name on his daughter’s lips for the last time, Steve wanted to die.
Kayla told him once that she’d been broken, and he finally understood it when he felt equally broken at the photos he was shown in the compound. It was the worst thing he’d ever experienced in his life. The ending of his wife’s life. The threat of that same end to befall his child. It stripped him of all sanity, and he didn’t want to go on. Now that completely and utterly desolate feeling had returned, only it was worse. It lived in the pit of his stomach and clawed at him with razors, trying to burrow through him like a parasite done with its host. It was anguish. He felt it as it worked like acid from within.
The arms that were squeezing her when he jumped in continued squeezing her, but now Kayla felt his whole demeanor change. Instead of holding on to her for her own comfort, he now was doing it for his. His fingers dug into her shoulders, and he buried his wet face in her equally wet neck and sobbed out one word.
“Emily!”
She didn’t feel the signs of him jumping in, but she felt her husband’s broken soul paw at her own and knew that everything in that storm drain had changed even before he’d cried out their lost daughter’s name. Kayla held him very tightly.
“Oh, Steve,” she cried.
Steve sobbed with his wife as the equally sickening jump effect worked its way through him, his eyes shut tight even after it passed. He couldn’t open them and face his new reality.
They were beside themselves. Neither of them had the will do do anything but cry at their devastating loss as the water poured on top of them, around them, their tears mingling with it to drench them in misery. They cried and shook in each other’s arms, but the actual sounds were muffled by the roar of the water reverberating against the walls.
You have to get out.
The innate will to live screamed feebly at Steve. But he was never going to see his daughter again, and he could feel that fact break his heart into more pieces than he’d ever have the ability to get back. It was too much, and like Kayla had once done, he was retreating into a breakdown, only for him it didn’t happen all at once, it was sneaking up on him one inch at a time.
Finally, with the water nearing their shoulders and the danger to their lives very real, the water stopped. The decibel level dropped so dramatically that the miserable sounds coming out of them were a shock to hear. In the back of their minds they knew that Orpheus was out there and that they really weren’t safe just because they were no longer going to drown. They knew what they were supposed to do next – escape and go to Helga’s Inn; they both remembered it with a clarity that could not be forgotten. But their will to go through these motions was non-existent. Instead, Steve slowly quieted, then Kayla. But they did not move. They stayed in each other’s grief-stricken embrace while the water drained, whimpering and sniffling in the immediacy following their loss.
You have to get out.
The memory of this moment in November of 1986 came back to Steve like a slow dissolve from one scene to the next. He remembered her fear. He remembered his own that she’d die and he’d lose her. Steve pushed his instinct to live away. He didn’t want to hear himself try to survive. The horrific jump effect had passed, the water had drained, and now he had nothing to distract him from his own pain. And his pain was deep. So, he didn’t want to do anything but stand there and drown, and now he couldn’t even do that.
You have to get Kayla out.
Steve slowly pulled back from her and looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time. They were full of terror last time, he still remembered. This was a pivotal moment for him back then, realizing she wasn’t going to die and that he loved her. Now her eyes were filled with a different kind of terror, and he had to look away, because he positively could not take it.
“She’s gone, Steve,” she cried.
He nodded.
“We’re … gone.”
“I know.”
“What are … how … she … she …”
Steve put his fingers to her freezing cold lips that were quickly draining of their color. “Not now.” He shook his head. “We gotta get out,” he rasped.
“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye … I wanted … to tell her … what if she gets hungry? …”
Steve put his fingers to her lips again and shook his head. The look in his eye was so full of pain that she was scared. Not of him but for him. It immediately re-focused her.
They both jumped out of their skin at the sound of the door’s heavy locking mechanism unlocking. They’d now let go of each other for the first time since before Steve even arrived into his body. It made them both insecure.
“What do we do now?” Kayla sniffled.
“We open that door and we go.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Steve swallowed and looked away. “We open that door and we go.”
Kayla could feel her connection to him thin. She held her hand out to him, and he couldn’t help how the lost look in her eye affected him. So, he took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. But he felt adrift. And completely helpless.
The water receded enough to allow them to slosh over to the door. Steve opened it, and the whole thing wasn’t even real. There they were again. Soaked to the skin after almost dying in there again. Expected to know exactly what to do and where to go after more than 20 years again. Only this time they’d lost their child and, therefore, their will to care.
When Kayla looked up Steve was standing on the other side of the hatch-like door. She was in shock, rooted to her spot. “Come on,” he said, “door’s open.” Steve paled when he allowed himself to really look into her eyes. The light was gone. He remembered this day in this storm drain, and part of him had wondered if they’d ever jump back here. Her eyes had looked at him with such fear but also like he was her hero. She’d been terrified, and that fear broke down those walls he’d erected. He’d let himself hold her so tightly against him. Her eyes were bright then, her spirit lit them up even if she’d been terrified. Now that spirit was all but snuffed out. Her eyes weren’t bright now. That was when his withdrawal really started. When his wife’s spirit died. But Steve held out his arms for her to take them and follow him out. So, she did.
So much of Steve died on the way out of this second trip through the sewer tunnels. His daughter was gone, and he didn’t know where she was. He was going to be damaged no matter what, but at least if he knew that she still existed and that she would go on and be raised and live her own life with the memories he and Kayla had worked so hard to give her, he could have found a will. It would have been some comfort. But he didn’t know that. The timeline was dormant in that lab of Rolf’s now. As dormant as this one was destined to be.
He didn’t know how he got there when they reached the ladder. Without a word, they climbed up to the street.
Like last time, they stood soaking wet, the fact that Steve’s orange street-worker vest was drawing attention to them that they did not need only vaguely on their minds at best. Kayla looked like a drowned rat, her blue makeup now sitting below her lashline making her beautiful face appear as heartbreakingly forlorn as her heart was.
“We’re soaked,” Kayla’s teeth chattered. “What—do we do now?” Steve looked around, motivated to do absolutely nothing. “We should—go to Helga’s.”
“No,” Steve said softly.
“The hotel?” she asked. But we—”
“No.”
Kayla turned to him. “We-went to Helga’s last time,” she sniffled flatly. “We should do that.”
“What’s the point?”
“It’s cold?” she answered defeatedly. Steve started to pace. “The hotel was … far? I—I don’t remember where—where it is … Orpheus is still after us—”
“I don’t give a sh*t about Orpheus, our baby is dead!!!” Steve roared with a pain that made Kayla fall to her knees and weep right there in the middle of the street in broad daylight.
Remorse flooded through him, but his anger at the world remained as he dropped to his own knees beside her. “I’m sorry,” he cried. “I’m not right, here, Kayla, I’m—I’m—I don’t know what to do with this. I—“
“Me, too … me, too, Steve, I know.”
They got up, took each other by the hand, and began walking to Helga’s in silence other than involuntary sniffles. As they approached the door of Helga’s Inn, which neither of them had seen in almost 25 years, another kind of rage flared through Steve. Because he remembered the first time they did this, and that memory was something sacred to him. Sacred in its place in their relationship and what it meant to them both. Because it was the first time he’d realized he loved her. Now it was marred by this unholy retread like a grotesque imposter. These moments were harrowing for them, yes, but they were also something beloved to Steve, this love that flooded through him back then.
“Tell me when you fell in love with me.” Kayla had asked when they jumped to Stockholm and played 20 questions all over again.
“Baby, I don’t know the exact moment it happened, but I can definitely tell you the exact moment I first knew.
“Tell me,” she smiled.
“It was right here in Stockholm two days ago. In the storm drain.”
“The storm drain …,” she whispered.
“I thought we were going to die in that storm drain, Kayla. Right before the water stopped, I was about to tell you … that I loved you. I didn’t know it. But I realized it when I thought we weren’t going to make it. And when you came up out of there, that’s the moment I felt how much I loved you for the first time. That I was truly in love with you. I knew it as I walked us back to Helga’s.”
“You’ve never held me tighter than on that walk. I’ll never forget it”
“I was scared out of my head of these feelings, Sweetness, but I couldn’t help myself. What I was feeling for you there overwhelmed me. I had never felt that before for anyone.”
These were terrifying but beautiful steps they were taking in 1986, not just from the storm drain to Helga’s but into deep love with each other. And now this – jumping back here now. It wasn’t enough that they had to lose Emily, now they had to have these moments taken away from them, too.
Kayla’s head wasn’t in the same place. It wans’t in, really, anyplace, because she was in a haze. She felt Steve walking beside her, and she knew they were in Stockholm heading … somewhere … but she was detachedly thinking about the timeline. More accurately, she was thinking about all 23 – now 24 – timelines. She saw them almost like a circuit board with bright, metal grooves branching off into finite ends that just stopped in a sea of green. Is that what they were like now? The end of a circuit? Maybe they were constructs in some creature’s imagination. Maybe all the creature had to do was imagine them and they would flare back to life. Or maybe she wasn’t even real because none of them was real and none of this was real.
When Steve stopped in his tracks, Kayla was thrown out of her head and was forced to see that it was all very real, after all. For several moments, her husband didn’t move.
“Steve?”
A panic like he’d never known in his whole life settled over Steve in one of those fractions of a second where you forget that someone is dead and decide you want to call them.
“Oh, Jesus, the stairs.”
“What?”
Steve very nervously adjusted his patch, then he held Kayla out at arm’s length by the shoulders and asked urgently, “Is the gate up?”
“The gate?”
“I didn’t put the gate up at the top of the stairs, did you?”
“I—”
“The gate, Kayla, the GATE!” Kayla swallowed the sting in the back of her eyes. “I was distracted! I – she was so upset I wasn’t thinkin’ straight this time, Sweetness, sh*t, sh*t!”
“Steve,” Kayla began tearfully.
“What if she crawls out of bed and goes to the stairs, she loves the stairs! She’ll fall down! Remember when she took that tumble last week?”
“Steve,” she tried to say very calmly, but her voice shook, “please don’t do this.”
He let her go and started to pace in short steps here and there nervously. “When did we last change her?”
Kayla shook her head in denial that this was happening. She couldn’t hear this, it was killing her. “Listen to me,” she begged.
But he couldn’t listen, because out of nowhere Steve realized that none of Emily’s things were in the bed with them except maybe her favorite burp cloth that she liked to walk around with, but her favorite stuffed animlas were … actually, he wasn’t sure which were where, some were in her room, but others were scattered through the livingroom, too. “She’s going to want her Winnie-the-Pooh,” Steve said worriedly. “Do you know where Pooh is?”
Pain flared in Kayla. This had to stop. “Steve,” she implored with the strength she had left. Because she was his anchor; he’d have to be hers later. She captured his foreams in her wrists and pulled him toward her, but he was fighting her. He didn’t want to be comforted, he wanted to go back. “Come here, baby,” she said lovingly.
“I … I can’t …”
“You can … you have to …” They were positively freezing as the water continued to saturate them, and if they didn’t dry off soon they’d get sick. But Kayla took this one more moment to try her best to ground him, because she’d never needed him more in her life. She held Steve’s face in her gloved hands. “You have to,” she said, locking eyes with him.
“Sweetness,” he whispered. “How do we go on?”
Steve wouldn’t get his answer, because at that moment Kayla was hit so hard by something that she literally lost her footing and would have fallen to the ground if Steve had not, even amidst the chaos, instinctively caught her in both of his strong arms. She was positively dead weight, because the vertigo was too intense for her to stand.
“Kayla?!” She couldn’t answer, because she was so dizzy that if she opened her mouth she knew she’d vomit. Her eyes rolled, and rather than fight to focus, she shut them while clutching to Steve’s orange vest. “Talk to me, Kayla!”
“Diz—St… som’ingz’rong …”
“Wrong? Is it the jump?”
She shook her head, no.
Only it was the jump. The intensity of these symptoms had never hit like this, and by the time she realized that she really was jumping it was too late to tell him.
That’s when Steve had to drop her, because it hit him, too. Now he’d put two and two together and knew they were done here. He tried to call for Kayla, but he didn’t know if he was laying flat on the cobblestones or flying.
When Kayla opened her eyes she realized that was a mistake, because she was just as sick in this new location as she was when she’d jumped from the old one.
“… Ok baby, but I’m warnin’ you, this is war.” It was Steve’s voice, but it sounded very different. She took a sharp breath, and the strong scent of perfume, which would have been otherwise fine, was threatening to overwhelm her. “You think I’m kiddin’? You know, I can trace a live target?” he boasted. Kayla grabbed on to the nearest thing to her, which happened to the the arm that belonged to Billie, perched on her hip. Billie elbowed Kayla back, assuming it was a friendly gesture, rather than one to stop her from collapsing with the jump effect. Kayla tried to focus on Steve, and once again there were more than one of him there.
“A live target!” he assured the two women while Bo snickered behind him. “I used to do it back in Cincinnatti all the time. A person stands against the wall, I outline their body – in darts – from 30 feet.”
Billie laughed, Bo snickered some more, and Kayla fell to her knees.
“I’m not kiddin’, come here – Kayla?!”
“Kay!” Bo got down beside her, “what happened?”
“Uh oh,” Billie added in genuine concern.
Kayla tried to say something, but the smell of the chowder cooking in the back of the pub mixed with Billie’s perfume was a very bad combination, and Kayla started to wretch.
“Jeez, Kay – Ma?!” Bo called out.
The man with no memory of how he was supposed to act as her husband had no problem knowing how he was supposed to act as an orderly and immediately grabbed the dishtowel that was sitting on the corner of the bar and very quickly tossed it to Bo for her to throw up into. Not quick enough to try to engage any further, however (which would have been a relief to him if he’d known, because the immediate attraction he felt for this new woman who’d just walked into the pub was awkward enough), because he froze, inhaled sharply, then, himself, lost his balance and fell into Billie. She caught him in her very toned and arms and gave him a lopsided grin. She stopped grinning when she saw that he was as ill as Kayla.
“Oh golly, if this thing is contagious we’re doomed, Bo!”
“Ma?!”
That was Bo’s voice yelling for Caroline, he had no idea who was holding him up, and he was oblivious to where his wife was.
“Bo?” he swallowed down his gorge.
“Down here, man,” Bo said completely confused by Steve’s eye looking for him erywhere but on the floor where he’d just been focusing.
Kayla was panting after having thrown up what little she’d eaten that morning, but the vertigo was righting itself very quickly. “Bo!” she called to him, but it was Steve who answered.
“Sweetness?”
Kayla looked up and saw that he was clutching on to Billie. His eye was still trying to focus. Clearly aware that the arms holding him up were not Kayla’s, he used one hand to reach toward his wife’s voice.
“Bo, what’s wrong?!” Caroline shouted as she ran out from the kitchen. Everyone in the pub was now staring. “Oh no,” she whispered under her breath, “I hope it wasn’t the food.”
Bo helped Kayla up, and she took Steve’s hand. “It’s me,” she said weakly, but she stared at her mother as she said it. It was a shock to see these faces around her so aged, especially since from her perspective, she’d just seen her much youger and blonder mother that night. Steve finally gripped her like he meant it and focused, the effect passing him, too.
“What just happened, are you two ok?” Bo asked.
Steve and Kayla stared at each other, taking in their middle-aged visages. Steve unceremoniously pulled himself from Billie’s grasp and touched his fingers to Kayla’s face. He couldn’t believe he was touching her. The real her. “Are we back?” he asked incredulously.
“Wait a minute, did you just call her Sweetness?”
“He did?” Caroline asked. “Is his memory coming back?!
Steve’s face fell as Kayla literally watched the hope get snuffed right out of him. “I don’t think so,” Kayla answered sadly. Steve watched her place a longful hand on her belly and tear up.
“Are you ok now?” Billie asked.
“This is so cruel,” Kayla openly cried. “This is so damned cruel.”
“You two sit down,” Caroline insisted, “I’m going to make you both some hot tea and toast.”
Steve doubled over, the tug at his gut for the next jump already upon him. “Oh, Jesus, here we go again.”
“What?! That’s not possible!”
“I’m tellin’ you!”
“Maybe we’re just really sick here!”
“We’re not sick, Kayla, we’re jumping!”
No one had a clue what either of them were talking about.
Steve squeezed Kayla’s hand so hard that when her own tug came again she was pretty sure she was being crushed. Everyone was trying to help, arms were embracing them, shouts to call 911 rang out, and before they knew it they were gone again.
In the next moment Steve was back in the pervious millennium. Same nausea, same vertigo, but now that he was expecting it he reached as well as he could for something to hold on to so he could stay upright. He didn’t even have to wonder where he was, he could smell it was the Emergency Center before it even came into focus. He forced himself to push through the chaos in his mind. When he did, there was Kayla, speaking … harshly to him.
Steve mumbled, “Has to be ’86 or ’87,” as he rubbed his forehead.
“What?” Kayla said, crossing her arms in front of her.
“Is it ’86?”
“Ya know what, I don’t have time for your games, Steve, so unless you’re sick, just leave.” Steve looked at her with an eye that made this destination Kayla stop short. She swallowed. “What?” she gentled her tone. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Because you’re so blissfully ignorant. I’m so glad you don’t have to feel this pain, Kayla. You don’t have a care in the world right now other than me comin’ in here and harassing you all day. I don’t want that to change. I don’t want the pain to start.
Steve had never looked at her that way before – no one had looked at Kayla that way before – and she couldn’t help how compelled she was to look into that … very, very, sad, green eye of his.
That’s when the jump effect kicked in yet again.
“Wait!” Steve shouted very suddenly, making Kayla back away, “where are you?!”
“Great, now you’re back to games.”
“The room wasn’t even done spinnin’, I can’t be goin’ again!”
Kayla’s look re-hardened, and she froze.
The room was spinning faster, so Steve gripped the counter, as if it could hold him there. “Hurry up, baby, hurry up! Kayla! KAYLA!!!”
She heard Steve screaming her name upon arrival. “I’m here!”
“I’m leavin’!” He took her by the back of the neck, and a million questions splayed across her face that he wouldn’t be able to answer.
Kayla felt like she was a living gyroscope, being spun into one destination, then spun right out of it. “I’m scared!”
“12.2 seconds, you can do it!”
The next jump Steve wasn’t so lucky, because he found himself behind the wheel of his car. It would have been a lot better if he’d been parked or at a stoplight, but unfortunately he was moving until the telephone pole stopped him, and he slammed head first into the big steering wheel. No airbags, no seatbelt, but lots of blood. His awareness barely made it through ten seconds in that car before he lost consciousness.
Kayla arrived into her seat at the front desk at Dr. Dennison’s office in Cleveland. She had no idea that’s where she was, it was so many years ago, now, that the identifying details of this workplace just weren’t in her. She didn’t know if the jump effect was improving or if she was just getting used to it, but she seemed to get her bearings sooner this time. Steve was nowhere to be seen, and her heart started beating very fast. Where was he? Where was she?
Emily.
Kayla tried but failed not to cry. It was just minutes ago in real time that she’d been ripped from her daughter and pregnancy and home and beautiful life. There was a calendar beside the phone on her desk. She was afraid to move, but she glanced at it and saw it said 1984.
“Ok,” she gasped, trying to get her head straight, but then the next tug. Kayla swore at the top of her lungs then shouted, “Make it stop!” But it wasn’t going to stop, because the slipstream was trying to find stability, compensating for the events it couldn’t justify into a rightful cadence. The nausea crept in, she whimpered, then dropped her head down into her arms on her desk and just waited for it to take her. 12.2 seconds later, Steve’s unconscious awareness followed her out of his destination body and left it there in the car.
The smooth fabric felt good against Kayla’s naked body, and Steve’s immediate presence felt even better. The jump effect was still bad, but she did notice an improvement, probably because her husband’s intimate proximity made her feel safe. Still excessively nauseous, there was now only one Steve in front of her. The candlelight bounced off the white, satin bed linens with dapples of warmth, and the words he was saying to her were so very beautiful.
“I believe that the love that we have in our hearts for each other is like …” he paused to search for the right word, “infinite. No beginning, no end. Ya know why?”
The effect passed alot quicker this time, and she quickly realized where she was. The plane Steve had chartered after their first wedding. The peace and happiness on his face made her want to weep, because she knew that Steve’s heart would never be this whole again. Still, his words captivated her.
“Because we started out so far apart, and we found each other. And we’re so much in love. It was like we were always a part of each other, even before we knew each other. That’s why I believe that we always will be together, no beginning no end. Forever.” Kayla lost her resolve and let out a strangled cry. “Oh, baby, I love you.”
He kissed her with so much love, and she let him, because she didn’t know what else to do.
Steve pulled back, because her kiss didn’t feel right. He tilted her chin up to look at him and didn’t recognize the look in her eye. Before he could ask her what was wrong, his face went blank, and his eyelid fell to half. Kayla closed her eyes in resigned understanding.
Steve sucked in air and threw his arms up over his face. Kayla was startled when he recoiled like this and wondered where the hell he was on the previous jump to 1984.
“Steve! Steve, it’s ok! You’re ok!” He huffed out a string of garbled panic, and Kayla tried to steady him. Finally he recognized Kayla’s voice and stilled. “It’s me. I remember Stockholm.”
Steve adjusted his patch as he took a deep breath, and then squeezed his wife’s arm. “Sorry.”
“It’s ok,” she said quietly. She glanced around very tentatively and then said, “Maybe it’s over.”
All Steve could do was rub at the bridge of his nose, the crack of which was the last thing he remembered before showing up here. He said nothing. Then he slowly ran his hand over the white satin comforter, rubbing the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. Kayla watched him carefully; his actions unnerved her.
“We, ah … we’re on the plane to—”
“I know where we are,” he said without any of the reverence he’d just been speaking to her with. He continued his fascination with the material in his fingers. He did not look up.
“I wasn’t as sick this time. What about you?” Steve shrugged. Kayla was becoming alarmed at his demeanor, which was such an extreme change from what he’d just said to her. “Steve, are you ok?”
Now he looked up at her, and his face was not warm. “What the hell kind of question is that?” Kayla felt like she’d been slapped. Steve started to feel the remorse, but as soon as it got to his heart he shot up a protective wall instead. She breathed his name with more incredulous hurt in her eyes than he could bear, and Steve softened before the wall went all the way up. But before he could apologize he exhaled with next very insistent pull at his diaphragm.
“Jesus!”
“Again?” she whimpered.
“F*ck!”
For some reason this one induced sheer panic in her.
“No, please Steve, no, no, no, stay with me, please don’t leave!!”
The last thing he saw before the room spun out of control was the fear in Kayla’s eyes. It wasn’t because he’d just lashed out at her, it was because of what was now clearly happening to them. They were suffering now through chaotic, uncontrollable jumps. The warning from Rolf was pounding through Steve’s head, and he just knew they did this. He did this. Because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Because they loved each other with their bodies and actions and the way they lived their lives – out of sync with the way they’d originally lived them. Married to each other instead of Kayla married to Jack. Having a baby instead of living through separation, poisoning, rape, deafness, and being miserable. People who were supposed to be dead surviving, and people dying when they were supposed to live. Now the arcs they were creating were collapsing around them, he could literally feel them like the furrows in Kayla’s brow. He couldn’t do this to her. They lost their child, he wasn’t going to put her or himself through any more.
“Steve!!” Then she felt her own tug and moaned. “I love you,” Steve whispered. She heard him before she lost her focus, and thank God, too, because it would be the last time he would say it for quite some time.