The Before

“Why then?”

Protectively, she froze at the center of the device, as if it would shield her from his question. Ceily finally emerged from the sleek nanocarbon posts which supported the shimmering tendrils of crystalline fiber to face her brother’s accusations.

He’d found her out, waiting until she’d fled the present, like she had so many times before, and then stood vigil until she’d returned from the past.

He wasn’t asking how she’d created a time machine. Ceily knew it’d taken more attitude than inventiveness to construct it. No. Her brother, Foster, was not interested in the how. He knew his sister was brilliant. You didn’t become a particle physicist triangulating tachyons without being brilliant. Fearing for her, he was focused on the why.

“What good can it do, Ceily? You’re fixating. It’s not gonna change things.”

“It helps me handle the present,” she whispered as she began to disengage from the device.

“Yeah, look at your present, Ceily. You’ve got a Nobel Prize discovery hidden here in your basement. An invention that could turn the world on its head, and you’re using it as a therapy tool,” Foster pressed. “You’ve been living in the past too long. It’s not gonna bring back Mom, Dad or Bobby.”

She shook her head as her fingers moved across the touchscreen at her makeshift desk, the filaments of the cage dimming as the device settled into a purr no louder than the fluorescent tubes that hung along the open rafters.

“You’re right. This won’t bring them back, but I can go back to them. I can be with them again. You could too.”

His eyes hardened at the offer. “Go back to September 10 and pretend I don’t know they’re all gonna die the next day?” His step towards her was an accusation. “I’d have to tell ’em. I’d tell everyone. I’d make that damn machine take me back where I could do some good. Stop the whole thing. Change everything, and give us some peace. ”

“It wouldn’t,” Ceily said, ashamed.

“So you say, sister.”

“It wouldn’t change things in the way you think, Foster.” She stepped clear of the device and went to the bottom of the staircase. “We might be able to prevent it in one universe, but it would happen to us in another. 9/11 was a shearing event. It spawned a new us. Causality is not like thermodynamics. There is a free lunch — an infinite buffet of possibilities in the multiverse — and that means somewhere we’d all suffer the same fate. I can’t push that onto some other Ceily and Foster. I can’t.”

“What’s it like?” Foster’s eyes brightened warily.

Ceily met his searching stare. “Like it was before. Right here in the house. Upstairs in the kitchen, we’re eating, laughing, Monday Night Football’s on. Daddy’s looking so proud of us. All of us.” She reassured him. “That’s why I go back then. The before.”

She half closed her eyes. A half hour ago, she’d been with them. Waved goodbye to her parents and Foster on the porch and then climbed into bed with her husband, Bobby.

“I need to feel what it used to be like. To believe it was real,” she pleaded.

“But, you know,” he insisted. “How can you sit and laugh with them? Relive it all and then leave them to be crushed and burned the next day?”

“I can’t change that knowledge,” she admitted, “but when I see their eyes. The promise we all held. I can think about the future again.”

Foster shook his head. “It’s not right. If we can’t help them, it’s not right. It’d drive me crazy. It’ll drive you crazy. Look what you’ve become.” His hand swept over the incomprehensible array of equipment. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. You stopped returning calls and texts. That’s why I’m here. You’re fading away.”

“No!” Ceily’s voice was sharp. “This,” she pointed to the machinery “is to keep me from fading away.”

“It’s an escape!”

“It’s a way to remember what I once believed. Before.”

“You can’t get innocence back like that. Ignorance ain’t bliss, sister.”

Foster’s words knifed at her. “I didn’t ask for this knowledge.”

“Tell me how this is sane, Ceily?”

She sighed. “I can’t. So, why can’t I fight insanity with insanity? Why can’t I just live in the quiet before the storm?”

Foster couldn’t meet her eyes. “What does it take to go there?”

“Desperation.”

“What does it take to come back?”

Ceily voice trembled. “Love.”

As Foster stepped into the crystalline filaments of the time device, Ceily whispered, “On the porch when we’re saying goodbye, give Mamma a kiss…before she has to ask you.”

“Before?”

“Before. It changes everything.”