A Timely Proposition

I still think that none of this ever would have happened if I hadn’t allowed Aunt Frida to push me into drinking a third glass of wine at Thanksgiving.

I’m not much of a drinker, but during the holidays, my cousins like to go big. Every time I nearly emptied my glass, Aunt Frida was already pouring me a refill with a wink, assuring me, “It’s okay, Charlotte! It’s not like you’re driving.” By 9:30 my head was swimming, and I could barely see straight as I tried to climb the stairs and find the guest room where my uncle had placed my belongings. It’s been a long time since I’ve been back in this house. Lost in a maze of hallways, dizzy with double vision, I stumbled through the last door on the right.

My suitcase was actually waiting in the room across the hall, but I was too guttered to realize that. I practically crawled up the spiral staircase and into my Aunt Frida’s attic storage space. There was a small circular window under the eave of the angled roof, and the full moon shining through it gave me just enough light to take in my surroundings. The walls were lined with stacks of boxes, vintage suitcases, and even an old dress form with a dusty straw hat haphazardly thrown on top. I stumbled toward a shelf filled with leather-bound books and journals. I picked a plain-looking black book from the end of the row, untying the leather strap with fumbling fingers and allowing it to fall open to a random page. I half sat, half fell beneath the circular attic window into a poofy floral armchair, a cloud of dust rising up and nearly choking me. When the dust cleared, I squinted for a minute at the words on the page, willing them to come into focus. I saw my Aunt Frida’s loopy cursive handwriting. This appeared to be one of her old planners.

February 27, 1992

Pick up bread, eggs, tomatoes

Drop off the dry cleaning

Go to the post office

Pick up Charlotte from school

*Felix and Cindy’s anniversary*

February 28, 1992

Talk to the police

Call the insurance company

February 29, 1992

Make arrangements with the funeral home

Pick out caskets

Arrange a caterer

Write up obituary

I slammed the book closed, refusing to read another word. Hot tears streamed down my face, and I opened the journal again. Without hesitating, I began ripping out the pages. This was the record of some particular days that I didn’t need any help remembering. My parents were involved in a fatal car crash when I was only seven years old. They were out celebrating their anniversary, and they were hit by a drunk driver while waiting at an intersection for a red light to turn green. My Aunt Frida was watching me that night. She’s been taking care of me ever since.

It was the single most devastating event of my life. I was made an instant orphan. My Aunt Frida took me in and treated me as her own, but I never felt like her house was home. I lost all feelings of home on the day that my parents died, and I could chase that feeling for the rest of my life, but I’ll probably never be able to find it again.

If there is a single day that I wish more than anything that I could erase from the past, it’s that one. I wish I could erase my parents’ car crash. I never realized before that grief could hurt so much that it feels like unbearable physical pain. I remember spending days at a time curled up in my bed, convinced that I was actually dying, closing my eyes tight and wishing that I might join my parents and never wake up again. Sleep was my only reprieve from a waking nightmare.

It was those muddled, drunken thoughts that prompted me to search for a lighter. I found one tucked away in a dresser drawer housing several half-melted candles. I held several pages from the journal in one hand and lit the bottom of the page with my other hand, dust and fast-falling tears mingling together, blurring the words on the page. Then several things happened at once: an old record player sitting in the corner started up at random, playing Stevie Nicks’s “Silver Springs” hauntingly out of tune, in extra slow speed. A single rumble of thunder shook the house, close enough that it almost seemed to originate from the foundations of the house itself, and rain started pouring down outside, beating against the single-pane window in the attic. The record jumped and skipped ahead to the bridge, and in a wobbly voice I sang out the lyrics, watching as the flames licked and consumed the worst days of my life. I heard the door below slam and someone ascending the spiral staircase with a clipped, panicked step. I quickly blew out the pages in my hand and dropped what remained of the journal entries onto the dusty wood floor, stamping them into ashes with my foot.

“Charlotte!” I heard Aunt Frida call from the stairwell. “The smoke alarm is going off downstairs. We think lightning struck the house. Are you up here?”

I caught a brief glimpse of her, moonlight illuminating the worry etched deep into the lines on her face, before I hit the floor and blacked out.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I came to, there was daylight streaming through the windows, and I was lying on a couch in my Aunt Frida’s living room. My father’s face was hovering over me, his eyebrows knit together with concern. He looked...different. But it took several seconds of staring and slowly blinking for me to figure out what had changed. His hair, a bit more gray. His eyes, a bit more tired. He’d lost the scratchy mustache that had tickled my face so many times when I was a kid.

“Sweet pea?” he whispered tentatively. The pet name, whispered so gently, wrecked my heart in places that I’d thought were dried up and forgotten.

I tried to sit up, tears stinging my eyes, but he lightly eased me back against the pillows.

“Easy, pumpkin. You took quite a fall just now. You might have a concussion.”

Memories that didn’t belong to me flooded my mind, skipping and jumping in time like a record. I had just climbed up on a barstool to take a photo of the entire family together for Thanksgiving, and my chair had wobbled and sent me crashing to the floor. Before that, college graduation, with both of my parents smiling and crying as I crossed over the stage, birthdays in which my mom would try to outdo herself with crazier and more impressive gifts each time, Mom holding my head in her lap and stroking my hair gently as I cried over my first breakup, my younger brother being born when I was eight years old. Images and memories from the last 18 years flooded my mind almost faster than I could comprehend.

“Mom?” I looked around the room expectantly. A woman with a stylish white streak in her long dark hair and clear plastic frame glasses appeared by my side. She grabbed my hand and held it between both of hers, watching me with eyes full of love. She wasn’t quite the same as I remembered either, but the longer I looked at her, the more familiar she became. A guy in his late twenties with a shaggy mop of hair approached me wearing a smirk on his face. He punched me in the shoulder and chided me for being a loser. I was lost for a moment, and his smile faltered at my confusion.

“I’m just messing around, Char. Don’t be so serious. It’s freaking me out.”

I searched the recesses of my brain for memories of him, too, but they were slower in coming. An entirely new person had just come into existence, so I suppose it might take some time for my brain to catch up. The longer I stayed silent, the more concerned everyone became. I struggled to come up with a name for the person standing in front of me who was clearly my little brother.

“Charlie?” I whispered it as a question, not totally sure that I was right.

Charlie ran a shaking hand through his frazzled hair and dropped all pretensions of playfulness. He turned to our dad and urgently whispered, “She can barely remember who I am! This is serious. We should take her to the hospital or something.”

Dad turned to me and forced a smile with too many teeth. “Nothing to worry about, Kiddo. We’ll have this all straightened out soon.”

While they were loading me into the back of a car that I didn’t recognize, I caught a glimpse of Aunt Frida. Every single person in the room was looking concerned and anxious, but she was the only one who looked just as confused as I was. I exchanged a nervous glance with her, and she mouthed, “How did you do that?”

“Do what?” I replied, though I knew exactly what she was talking about. Aunt Frida had stepped into the attic at just the right moment to witness me erasing time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Later, I woke up in the middle of the night in a hospital bed. My parents (and Charlie) had stayed with me until visiting hours were over, and then the nurses had gently pushed them out the door. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 3:00 am. Everything was quiet except for the subdued beeping of the monitors tracking my vitals and the distant chatter of nurses out in the hallway. My head was pounding, and I was about to push the red button on the side of my bed to call for some painkillers, when I noticed a dark shadow in the corner of the room.

It was a person.

I swallowed a scream and reached for the red button, but he crossed the room and grabbed my arm quicker than I would have thought possible.

“Not just yet, Charlotte. We’ve got a few important matters to discuss.”

He handed me a small paper cup with two white pills inside. I gave him a quizzical look.

“Go ahead,” he assured me. “It’s just something to ease the pain in your head.”

I set the cup down on my bedside table and turned to him with arms crossed.

“I need to know who you are and how you got into my room,” I demanded in what I hoped was a defiant voice.

“Charlotte, I work for the U.S. Government, the Eccentric & Supernatural Precinct, also known as ESP. I’m here to let you know that you’re under arrest for making permanent and destructive damages to the space-time continuum. The usual penalty for the crimes that you’ve committed is 25 years in a high-security federal prison.”

“Wait...WHAT?”

“However, the director of my division is making an exception in your case to offer you a plea bargain. If you agree to do some freelance work for us, we’ll let you go free of all charges.”

“What kind of freelance work?” I asked suspiciously.

“We need you to erase some specific events from time. You will have two weeks to complete your first task, and we’ll pay you $20,000 for the job.”

“What if I’m not able to erase time again? I’m not exactly sure how I did it the first time...”

“Simple. If you can’t complete the job, then you’ll spend some time in federal prison. You have three days to decide. Use this to contact us once you’ve made your choice.” He handed me what looked like a smartwatch and walked out the door without looking back.

Wait until Aunt Frida hears about this one, I thought.