Derek Hartmann-Reyes was the kind of nine-year-old his mother sometimes called the boy who thinks about whether to walk.

She said it warmly, in the voice she used for the things she'd noticed about him over nine years and had decided were worth naming out loud. He hadn't decided yet whether he liked the phrase. He thought, on most days, that it was probably true. He thought, on the other days, that it might be a thing his mother said because she didn't have another way to say Derek pauses before he does anything. He thought, sometimes — though he didn't tell her this — that the pausing was something he'd inherited from her, the way other kids inherited their mothers' eye colors or their fathers' jaw lines, the inherited thing that didn't sit on the outside of him where people could see it but sat instead in the area behind his sternum where most of his real thinking happened.

This afternoon, he was in the garden outside his mother's kitchen.

The garden was small — fifteen feet by twenty, on the south side of the small Hartmann-Reyes house at the east end of Haven's residential row — and it had been Carolina's project since they'd moved into the house in 2046. Carolina had built the raised beds herself in the first summer, with cedar planks she'd gotten from Sigurd Holst's lumber pile in exchange for some clinic-work credit and a bottle of Argentine wine her cousin had sent her from Buenos Aires. The beds were four rows of two boxes each, with the narrow paths between them that Carolina had paced out, in March of 2046, with Derek balanced on her hip — Derek who'd been five, who'd been pointing at the bare ground and asking Mami, are we going to plant carrots there. The carrots had gone in two days later. The garden had been the two of them ever since.

This afternoon they were tying pea vines.

Carolina knelt across from him on the patch of soft soil she'd worked over that morning, the small twine roll on the flat board beside her, and she was showing him how to loop the string around a pea-vine stem without bruising it. The trick was the loop. The loop had to be soft. The loop had to support the weight of the climbing vine without cinching, because — Carolina had explained, in the careful Carolina-Reyes-medical voice that had made these explanations all his life — a stem that's been cinched too tight is a stem that's begun to fail, and the failure will show up in the leaf-color in eight days and you won't know why.

"Like this," Carolina said.

She did the loop.

The string went around the pea stem in a small soft figure-eight that touched the stem on two sides and pulled against the trellis behind, holding the vine to the bamboo strut at the angle the vine wanted to grow. The knot at the trellis end was a small clean square knot. Carolina did it with her careful hands — the same hands, Derek understood without being able to say so, that had done seven thousand careful things to careful patients in the careful years before he was born.

"Now you."

He did it.

He did it slower than she had. He looped the string around the stem of the pea plant in front of him, with the care to not pull too tight, with the inward focus that had been, since he was about four, his Derek-face when he was learning a thing. The loop was a soft figure-eight. The knot at the trellis end was a clean square knot. He'd been watching his mother tie square knots since he was five; the knot was an unconscious gesture by now.

He looked up at her.

She smiled.

"Good," she said. "do the next one."

He did the next one.

He did them, one by one, down the row of pea plants in the bed Carolina had planted in the second week of April. The plants were six inches high. The bamboo trellis was forty inches high. The gap between the current plant-height and the trellis-top was the reason Derek was tying them up now — to give the vines the support they'd need across the next two months as they climbed.

He liked the work.

He liked the green smell on his hands. He liked the weight of the twine roll on his knee when he set it there between knots. He liked the moment of feeling a vine settle into its support, like the moment a careful sentence settled into a careful place in a book. He liked being beside his mother.

He'd liked these things, in the quiet way he liked anything, for as long as he could remember.

He thought about that, sometimes, while he tied the knots. He thought about how his mother had been beside him for everything — for his first food, for his first walking step, for the day at three when he'd come down with the fever that wouldn't break and she'd sat with him for thirty-six hours straight without leaving the room. He'd been told this story at six by his Aunt Marisol. His mother had never told him. His mother didn't talk about the things she'd done for him; his mother only did them. Derek had decided, at six, that this was a quality of his mother he wanted to inherit when he grew up.

He'd been working on the inheriting, in his quiet way, ever since.

Carolina, beside him, stood up.

"I'll get more twine," she said. "There's a roll in the shed."

"Okay."

"Don't stop. Keep going."

"Okay."

She walked to the shed at the far end of the garden, in the quiet way Carolina walked anywhere. The shed door was thirty feet from the trellis. The walk would take her, Derek understood, about thirty seconds.

He went back to tying pea vines.

He tied one. He tied another. He set the roll of twine in his lap to free his hands for the careful knot at the trellis end. He could hear Carolina's footsteps on the gravel path between the beds. He could hear the click of the shed door's latch.

Then the thing in his chest started.

He'd been feeling it, off and on, for months.

The first time had been in February, on a morning when he'd been carrying water from the rain barrel to his mother's kitchen. The water had been heavy. He'd been thinking about whether to set the bucket down and rest for a minute. He'd felt, then, the tug behind his sternum — the slow pull, the not-quite-dizziness, the sense that the air around him was waiting on him, the way the air sometimes waited for him to make a decision but more — the way the air waited, specifically, for him to decide when to be.

He hadn't known what to do with it.

He'd set the bucket down. He'd waited for the pull to stop. It had stopped, after a minute or so. He hadn't told his mother. He hadn't known what to call it.

The pull had come back, on and off, perhaps a dozen times since February. He'd noticed, over the dozen times, that the pull was always the same shape and the same direction — the backward-direction, the something I just was direction, the feeling that the air just behind him in time was a place he could, with the effort of a not-quite-decision, step into.

He hadn't stepped.

He hadn't, in fact, even let himself fully consider what stepping would mean. He'd been, since February, the kind of nine-year-old who'd decided that the tug was a thing his body was doing and not, yet, a thing he was going to act on. He'd been thinking about whether to walk.

This afternoon, in his mother's garden, with the green smell on his hands and the roll of twine in his lap and his mother thirty feet away at the shed door —

He let it pull.

He didn't, he realized later, decide to let it pull. He let it pull the way a tired person let themself sit down — the releasing of a resistance he'd been holding without knowing he'd been holding it. The pull strengthened. The area behind his sternum did a slow inward turn. The garden, around him, did a thing he'd never seen anything do before.

It became thinner.

Not blurrier, not darker, not stranger. Thinner — as if the garden's present-state had become, for a second, a thin overlay on top of some other state of itself that was waiting underneath. He could feel the other state. The other state was the place the pull was pulling him toward.

He let it pull again.

The thin overlay folded back.

He was —

He didn't have a word, immediately, for where he was. He was kneeling in the patch of soft soil. The roll of twine was in his lap. The stem of the next pea plant was in front of him, untied. His hands were the same green-smelling hands they'd been a minute ago. Everything was the same.

Everything was also slightly, exactly, different.

The pea vine in front of him was untied — but he'd just tied it. The roll of twine in his lap was unrolled to the point it had been unrolled to a minute ago, before he'd done the last knot. The footprint his mother's gardening clog had made in the soil to his left was crisp at the edges, the way fresh footprints were crisp before the soil had dried slightly around them.

And his mother was not, anymore, at the shed door.

He turned his head.

His mother was in the middle distance, halfway between the trellis and the shed, walking away from him. He could see her back. He could see her dark hair pulled into the loose ponytail she wore for gardening. He could see her slow steady walk on the gravel path. He could hear, very faintly, the sound of her clogs on the gravel.

She was walking to the shed for the twine she'd just said she'd get.

She hadn't gotten there yet.

He was, very specifically, back at the moment she'd stood up and walked away.

His chest did a thing he'd never felt it do. It was, he thought afterwards, the sensation of being afraid for one breath and then deciding to not be — the inward gathering of a child realizing that what had just happened was the thing the tug had been pulling at him to do, and that the tug had been right that he could do it, and that the consequence of having done it was that he was now here, in the minute he'd just left, watching his mother walk to the shed for the second time.

He didn't move.

He understood, in the second after the fear, that he had to decide what to do next. He could stay here. He could be in this minute, which was a minute he'd already lived once and was now living again. Or he could —

He didn't know the second option's name.

He thought about it for a quarter-second. His mother, in the middle distance, took another step toward the shed. The clogs sounded against the gravel.

He understood, then, the second option's name.

He could be in the now again.

He didn't, he realized, have to take a step or close his eyes or count. He only had to release the other inward turn — the one he hadn't, until this moment, known he'd been holding. He released it.

The thin overlay folded the other way.

The garden, around him, returned to the minute it had actually been. The footprint to his left was no longer crisp — the soil had had its minute to settle. The pea vine in front of him was tied, with the soft figure-eight he'd tied it with, with the clean square knot at the trellis end. The roll of twine in his lap was at the unrolled point it had been at when he'd set it down to do the knot.

And his mother —

His mother was right there.

She was kneeling beside him, with the new roll of twine in her hand, with the small smile on her face she always wore when she'd come back from the shed for any reason. She'd just arrived. She'd just gotten the new twine. She was about to ask him how the row was going.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

Her smile faded, very slightly, at the edges. She did the thing his mother always did when she'd noticed something in his face that hadn't been there a minute ago — the inward focus, the careful attention, the waiting-without-pressure that was, Derek had decided at five, the most important quality his mother had.

"Derek," she said. "What are you looking at."

He thought about how to answer.

He had an instinct that the truth was the only answer he could give her, because his mother had been the source of every truth he knew about himself, and because withholding a truth from her was an act he'd never, in nine years, tried. He'd lied to her once, at six, about whether he'd eaten the last of the cookies on the small blue plate, and he'd confessed within twenty minutes because the weight of the lie in his chest had been heavier than the punishment for the cookies could possibly have been.

He'd known, since six, that lying to his mother was a thing his body wouldn't allow him to keep doing.

"I went somewhere," he said.

She set the twine down.

She set it down very slowly. The new roll landed on the flat board beside her with the soft sound a roll of twine made when it was set down by a hand that was being careful. She didn't take her eyes off his face.

"Where," she said.

She said the word very softly. She said it in the Carolina-voice she used when she was about to take a piece of medical information very seriously without panicking the person who was giving it to her — the clinic-voice he'd heard her use, sometimes, when one of the Haven children had come to her with a cut or a bruise that the child was afraid to say how they'd gotten.

"Here," he said.

He thought about how to say the second part. He thought for a second. He said it.

"Just back a minute."

She looked at him.

She didn't, for a quiet quarter-minute, say anything.

Then she took his dirty hand in hers — the small dirty hand that had the green-smell on it, the dirty hand his mother had touched perhaps four million times in nine years — and she held it the way she'd held it when he was three with the fever, with the firm gentle pressure of a hand that was telling another hand I am here, and I am not going anywhere, and you can tell me anything.

"Derek," she said.

"Yes."

"Tell me again. Exactly how it felt."

He told her.

He told her about the tug. He told her how it had been coming on and off since February. He told her how he'd been ignoring it because he hadn't, yet, known what to do with it. He told her about the feeling of the air waiting for him to decide when to be. He told her about letting it pull. He told her about the garden becoming thinner. He told her about being back in the minute. He told her about her, in the middle distance, walking to the shed. He told her about deciding to be in the now again. He told her about the second turn.

He told her all of it.

She listened.

She didn't, the whole time he told her, look away from his face. She didn't interrupt. She didn't, at any point, do the thing his Aunt Marisol sometimes did when listening to him, which was the quick small breath-intake that meant she was about to say something. His mother only listened — with her full attention, with her hand still on his hand, with the Carolina-face that was, Derek understood as he told her, the only face he could have told this to.

He finished.

She nodded.

She nodded once, slowly, in the careful way she nodded when she'd taken in a piece of information she'd needed to take in.

She didn't panic.

She didn't, in fact, do anything to suggest she was even surprised. She did the thing his mother did when she'd received the piece of news she'd been preparing for — the quiet acceptance, the reframing of her hands on her knees, the careful slow exhale of a woman who'd known, somehow, that the thing she'd been preparing for would arrive on the afternoon it had arrived on, and who'd preferred, by being prepared, to receive it without flinching.

She'd been preparing for a long time.

Derek didn't know, at nine, how long she'd been preparing. He didn't yet know about the man named Friedrich Hartmann who'd been his father — about the work that man had done before he died, about the reason he'd died, about the reason Carolina had been the only one of the man's colleagues to survive the raid in San Diego in March of 2041 with a one-year-old boy in her arms and a decision in her chest about what she would and would not let happen to that boy as he grew up. Derek didn't know any of it. Carolina hadn't, yet, told him.

But Carolina had known, since the night of the raid, that her son's arrival in the world had been an arrival across a kind of distance the rest of the world wasn't going to be able to see for a long time.

She'd known, since he was an infant, that this afternoon in this garden might come.

She'd, in fact, been ready for it for nine years.

"Okay, baby," she said.

She said it gently. She put her other hand on his cheek — the cheek that still had the dirt-smudge from where he'd brushed his face an hour ago — and she let her hand rest there for a quiet moment.

"Stand up," she said. "We're going inside."

He stood up.

She picked up the twine roll. She set it on the flat board. She left the row of half-tied pea vines exactly where it was — the half-finished work that would, she'd already decided, stay half-finished until tomorrow. She put her arm around his shoulders. She walked him, in the slow Carolina-way, back across the garden, through the kitchen door, into the cool of the kitchen.

She put him on the kitchen bench.

She made him toast.

She made it the way she always made it — the bread she'd baked on Friday, sliced thick, with the salted butter Marisol had given her in a small glass jar for her birthday in March. She set it on the small blue plate. She set the plate in front of him on the kitchen table.

"Eat," she said.

He ate.

He ate it slowly. He ate it with his deliberate Derek-way that was, his mother had told him at six, the eating-way of a boy who knew that food was a thing worth giving its full attention to. He didn't, while he ate, ask her what she was going to do next. He didn't, while he ate, ask her if he was in trouble. He knew, without asking, that he wasn't in trouble. He knew, also, that whatever she was going to do next was a thing she was going to handle — and that his job was to eat the toast.

He saw her hand, as she set the plate in front of him, tremble very slightly.

He noticed it.

He didn't, at nine, know what to do with the noticing. He filed it away. He decided, in the quarter-second of having seen it, that his mother's hand had trembled because his mother loved him very much and because love, sometimes, was the kind of thing that made hands tremble even when the person whose hand it was had been prepared for the thing she was now handling for nine years.

He kept eating.

His mother walked to the kitchen wall where the telephone hung. She picked up the receiver. She dialed the Franklin house — the number she'd dialed perhaps four hundred times in the years she'd lived at Haven, the number that connected her, in three short digits, to the Tim Franklin who'd, since 2042, been one of the people she trusted most in the world.

"Tim," she said.

Pause.

"It's Derek."

Pause.

"He went back a minute."

A longer pause.

"Yes," she said. "In the garden. Just now."

Another pause.

"Tonight, if you can. After the children are in bed."

Pause.

"Thank you."

She hung up.

She came back to the table.

She sat down across from Derek. She picked up a piece of toast from the plate — she'd cut him an extra piece by habit, and she ate it now — and she chewed it slowly, watching him eat his own.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

They didn't say anything for a long minute. They didn't need to.

The kitchen was quiet. The spring sun came in through the south window in the late-afternoon angle it always came in at. The pea vines in the garden, half-finished, waited the way the unfinished work of a household always waited — for the people of the household to come back to it when they were ready.

Derek finished his toast.

His mother nodded.

"All right," she said. "Go play with Captain for a while. Stay in the yard. I'll call you when Tim gets here."

"Okay."

He got up.

He walked to the back door. He stopped at the threshold — the habit he'd inherited from his cousin Jorge, the habit of pausing at the line between two places, the habit Jorge had taught him at five by demonstrating it at the front door of the small Holst house and saying Derek, this is where the inside meets the outside, and that's a thing worth knowing.

Derek stood on the threshold.

He didn't see two sides at once, the way he understood — without ever having been told, but by the Derek-intuition that read his cousin's perception accurately — Jorge sometimes saw at thresholds. Derek only saw one side. He saw the kitchen behind him, with his mother at the table eating the extra piece of toast. He saw the yard ahead, with Captain — the Mitchells' mixed-breed dog who'd, sometime in the last week, decided that the Hartmann-Reyes yard was a yard he wanted to spend afternoons in too — lying on the grass in the patch of sun.

He saw one side at a time.

But he understood, in the quiet of his nine-year-old chest, that he had his own version of Jorge's noticing — that his own threshold wasn't a doorway but a minute, that he could stand on the line between now and just-before-now the way Jorge stood on the line between here and the-other-here, and that the membrane between the two was — for him — the area behind his sternum where the tug had been pulling at him since February.

He'd been thinking about whether to walk.

He'd walked.

He thought, standing at the back door, that he was probably going to walk again. He thought he was going to be careful about it. He thought he was going to ask his mother, the next time, before he walked. He thought he wasn't, for a while, going to walk further than a minute.

He stepped into the yard.

Captain saw him. Captain stood up. Captain came over and put his head against Derek's knee, in the way Captain greeted the Haven children he'd decided were his.

Derek put his hand on Captain's head.

"Hey, Captain," he said.

Captain's tail moved once, slowly.

Derek sat down on the patch of grass beside the dog. He looked up at the sky. The spring breeze that had been blowing through Haven for twenty-four days now — since the afternoon of April the fourteenth at four-seventeen and thirty-two seconds — was, this afternoon, blowing very softly across the yard, ruffling the hair on Captain's neck and the edges of the clouds at the corner of the sky over the cottonwood three lots away in the Vance yard.

Derek didn't know about the breeze.

He knew only that the afternoon was an afternoon he'd done a thing in.

He knew, also, that his mother was inside, and that she was making the phone calls she needed to make, and that she was probably also, in her careful way, sitting in the kitchen for a quiet minute with the feeling of having received the news she'd been waiting nine years to receive.

He let her have the minute.

He sat in the grass with Captain.

The breeze moved.

The cottonwood, three lots away, leaned.

Inside the Hartmann-Reyes kitchen, Carolina Reyes sat at the kitchen table with her hand on the cooling piece of toast she'd been eating, and she let herself, finally, do the thing she'd been holding in her body since the moment Derek had said I went somewhere.

She put her face in her hands.

She didn't cry.

She'd cried, in the years since Freddy died, perhaps four times — at the funeral she hadn't been allowed to attend, in the kitchen of a safe house in Tucson in May of 2042, in the car between Tucson and Haven in November of 2044, and on the afternoon in 2046 when Derek had said his first complete sentence and the sentence had been Mami, the sky is. She didn't cry now. She'd known, since the night of the raid, that the day of Derek's gift was a day she was going to need to be present for, not absent for, and that crying was the kind of presence that her son would have been afraid of.

She breathed.

She breathed the way Freddy had taught her, on the night they met in March of 2038, in the apartment in San Diego where he'd first told her about the work he'd done at Cognitas and the reason he'd defected. Freddy had taught her to breathe the way a man breathes who's been awake for too many nights and has decided that the only way to keep walking is to make each breath a complete act. In for four. Hold for two. Out for six. Hold for one. She did the cycle three times.

She lifted her face out of her hands.

The kitchen was the kitchen. Derek's blue plate was in front of her with the crumbs of his toast on it. The kitchen sun came in through the south window in the late-afternoon angle. The pea vines in the garden, half-finished, were still half-finished.

She was, she understood — sitting in her own kitchen at the table she'd shared with her son for three years — the only adult on the planet who could read what had just happened to him without flinching.

She was the only adult on the planet who'd lived it.

She'd lived it in 2034. She'd lived it again, in a smaller form, every day of her life since. The tug behind the sternum, the feeling of the air waiting on you, the deciding-of-when-to-be — those weren't her son's discoveries; those were her father-of-her-son's discoveries; those were the neurological signatures of a kind of temporal-substrate sensitivity Freddy had been working on the theoretical models for in the last six months of his life, and which he'd told her, on an evening in their San Diego apartment in March of 2041, would probably show up in our son, Carolina, if it shows up in him at all.

She'd been waiting nine years for the if it shows up.

It had shown up.

She sat in her own kitchen and let herself be, for a quiet minute, the person who'd been the right person for this. Then she stood up. She walked to the telephone. She dialed Marisol's number — her sister, four lots away, the other adult in her life who needed to know.

"Hermana," she said, when Marisol picked up.

"Tell me."

"Derek went back a minute."

"In the garden?"

"Yes."

"I'll come over."

"Tim's coming tonight after the children are in bed. Come then."

"I'll come now, too, for the afternoon."

Carolina smiled, very small.

"Thank you, hermana."

"Te quiero."

"Te quiero, Marisol."

She hung up.

She sat down again. She finished the piece of toast Derek had left her. She looked out the south window at the garden, at the row of half-finished pea vines, at the cottonwood three lots away in the Vance yard whose leaves were moving in the breeze that had been moving through Haven for twenty-four days.

She thought about Freddy.

He had been killed in March of 2041, in a Cognitas raid on the San Diego underground clinic where the two of them had been seeing patients for nineteen months. Derek had been thirteen months old. Carolina had carried him out of the building on her hip, through a back door Freddy himself had built for exactly that purpose. She hadn't seen Freddy fall. She had only known, by the change in the sound of the night, that he had.

She thought about how he would have been, on this afternoon, the Freddy he would have been at fifty-eight — the older version of the man she'd known at forty-eight — and how he would have come in from the workshop he'd have built in the yard, and how he would have washed his hands at the sink and sat at the table beside her, and how he would have looked at her, and how the look would have been the look the two of them had perfected across the three years they'd had together: I am here. We are doing this together. Tell me what comes next.

She thought about this for the quarter-minute she allowed herself.

Then she stopped thinking about it. She stood up. She put the blue plate in the sink. She washed her hands. She walked to the back door. She looked out through the screen at her son in the yard with Captain. Her son was sitting in the grass. Her son had his hand on the dog's head. Her son was, the way her son had been doing since he'd learned to sit at three, watching the clouds at the corner of the sky.

She watched him for a minute.

She loved him very much.

The breeze moved.

The cottonwood leaned.

Loading...

Chapters

Search

Settings

Reader Settings

Theme

Reading Width

Font Size

Bookmarks — hover any paragraph and click ⭐ to add