Temporally Out of Order Read online

  “It’s 1849.”

  “What?” I hadn’t heard him right. Or something. “You just said—”

  “It’s 1849, yeah. That’s what the kid says. And he’s seriously wigged out by me, and the car—that’s why the woman ran, they have no fucking clue what it is.”

  I shook my head. “Are you listening to yourself? That’s—”

  “Check your phone.”

  “What?” But I reached down to grab my cell phone. I didn’t expect it to have signal, and it didn’t. I held it up as though to say “And … ?” when I realized it wasn’t telling me it didn’t have a signal—the display was dead. Completely. Even though I’d just finished charging it.

  “Mine too.” He touched his pocket. “Not like we don’t have signal, like there’s no signal anywhere to get.”

  Was he fucking with me? Was this a prank? If so it wasn’t funny … but no. I remembered the way he’d been, driving here, the escalating irritation and frustration. He wasn’t that good an actor. He wasn’t a good actor at all. He was freaked out, and dangerously close to losing his cool.

  “You’re trying to tell me that, according to that kid,” and I lifted my chin in the direction of the house, “we took a left turn at Albuquerque and ended up over a hundred years in the past?”

  The Bugs Bunny reference was enough. Shan’s faint uptick of a grin mellowed the slightly panicked look still in his eyes. “Hope to hell you got a warranty on that GPS, lover, because it’s seriously borked.”

  oOo

  I took more convincing than Shan, but no matter how I poked around, I couldn’t find any way to convince myself this was a prank.

  The sullen-eyed kid was named Elias, and his mother was Mercy, a misnomer if ever there’d been one. She wanted nothing to do with any of us, or the car, no matter how often her son tried to get closer to sneak a peek. She kept yanking him back by the collar of his shirt. And they insisted that the year was 1849. June 11th 1849. The same day it had been that morning, just nearly two hundred years ago.

  I tried to remember local history from that time, and came up blank, but one thing that was obvious was that homosexual couples—especially mixed race homosexual couples with a kid—weren’t on the “happy to see you” list.

  It was Max who wore mother Mercy down, or at least softened her to less than stone. Me she gave side-eyes to, which might or might not have been a step up from the way she ignored Shan entirely, like the color of his skin might rub off on her. But Max did the trick.

  “God wouldn’t forgive me if I turned away a child in need,” she said, square and stern with the bulk of her house to protect her, arms crossed over her apron and a squint-eyed frown on her face, “but you stay away from me and mine.”

  “Lady, with pleasure,” I muttered, turning on my heel to stalk back to the car. I’d rather sleep outside with the goats than under a roof with a bitch like her. I’d throw everyone back in the car and drive off, if I could see anywhere to drive too. Grass, a couple of plowed fields, and trees in the distance, that was about it. Philadelphia was just a few hours’ drive away, but our phones, tablets, car—not a single one of them was showing an erg of power.

  We were stuck. And if it really was 1849 …

  Shan, the map spread out on the hood of the car, had come to the same conclusion: this was our destination, for now.

  Max had the dogs on the leash, keeping them away from the small herd of goats, and Elias was inching closer, clearly wanting to pet them but afraid of what his mother might say if she saw him. My stomach rumbled unpleasantly, reminding me of the dinner we weren’t getting at my mother’s house, and making me wonder about what kind of meal we could expect from Mother Mercy.

  “Oh god,” I said, my eyes going wide. “Coffee. Do you think she’ll make us coffee?”

  Shan looked up from the map then. “That’s what’s freaking you out about all of this? Seriously?”

  “No. Fuck no. But it’s the only thing I can wrap my brain around right now, okay?”

  We paused a moment, ready to butt heads for lack of anything else to do, until the sound of Max’s laugh reached us both, forcing us to relax. Not in front of the kid, don’t lose your cool in front of the kid: our mantra for too long for even this to break it.

  Shan folded the map and put it back in the glove compartment and we spent the next few hours trying to keep Max and the dogs occupied, making it into as much of an adventure-game as we could. Later on, as dusk was falling, Elias brought us out a simple dinner—a thick, pea-laden soup and dark bread—and then came back with a few rough blankets and a rolled-up tarp, dropping them and then backing off again. He wouldn’t meet our eyes, but he couldn’t stop staring at the car.

  Well, that made sense. Two strangers, one of them with dark skin, was excitement of a normal sort. A car—never mind it was a dirt-common Toyota—was something else entirely.

  “How does your vehicle move?” Elias might be a racist prat-in-training, but he was still a kid, with a kid’s curiosity. But trying to explain an internal combustion engine to someone with no understanding of … well, anything, was beyond both of us. I reached down to scratch my leg where something had bitten me, and sifted my brain, trying to find something that would work.

  “You ever see a water wheel?” Shan, keeping a safe distance from the kid so that Mother Mercy wouldn’t come out swinging a rolling pin, made a gesture with his hands that was probably supposed to be the movement of a wheel. “Like a mill would use?”

  Elias nodded.

  “We have something similar to that inside the … the vehicle. The wheel turns, and that makes the outer wheels turn.”

  As explanations went, it wasn’t too bad a handwave. So long as Elias didn’t ask how we got water to flow inside the car… We were all three running on blank-eyed acceptance of the shit we couldn’t deny, at this point, I guessed. Elias was either going to grow up the most open-minded futurist of his century, or he was going to convince himself it was all a delusion when we finally went home.

  Assuming we got home.

  On that thought, I picked up the blankets and gave our offspring a gentle nudge with my foot. “Maxine! Help me find a place to set up camp, okay?”

  We’d better get settled before night fell. I had the feeling it got pretty damn dark out here.

  oOo

  Jack and the kidlet took to sleeping in the rough like it was the best thing ever. Neither of them had been scouts—well, Jack hadn’t, and kidlet was too young yet. But I had horrible memories of rain-sogged sleeping bags and having to pee in the woods, and none of it had left camping with any romantic glow. Camping out under an oilskin tarp, rolled in scratchy wool blankets that smelled of goat, wasn’t creating any, either.

  To be fair, pretty much everything smelled of goat. And after a while, it wasn’t that bad.

  After forty-eight hours of that crap, I would have killed someone for a hot shower and a safety razor, though.

  “Maybe if we—”

  “Just … stop, all right?” I put a hand up, feeling the tension shiver in my body like a physical pain. “We don’t know anything, so anything we suggest is just … crap.” We’d spent the past two days trying to hammer out some way to get home, exploring on foot as far as we could, hoping to find … I don’t know, a signpost or a portal or a magical wardrobe. Nothing except grass and goats, and a woman who ignored us when she had to be outside, yanking her son out of our reach whenever we started talking.

  I just couldn’t do it anymore. The tension was going to snap soon, and I knew what happened then. I wasn’t going to start yelling. I wasn’t going to let Jack start yelling. We weren’t going to do that to Max.

  “So what, accept that we’re stuck here, make the best of it?”

  “Maybe.” I felt the urge to shrug and—knowing it would just set Jack off again—repressed it, staring out across the grassy expanse.

  “You’re giving up?”

  “I’m not giving up.” I could feel my control stretchi
ng and snapping; why did Jack always have to push?

  “Don’t turn away from me, Shan, damn it—”

  “Dads?” Max ran up to us, her hair a mess and a grin a mile wide on her face. “Dads, Elias said there’s goats being born but we have to go over the hill. Can I go? Can I?”

  I looked at Elias, who was standing off to the side, slightly diffident, his hands shoved into his pockets, the dogs seated at his heels. The poor kid was just lonely as hell out here, without anyone his own age to play with.

  I waited, but for once, Jack didn’t seem to have an opinion on the subject. Or he was biting his own cheek trying not to let the argument continue while Max was standing there.

  “Yeah, all right.” The kid’d been good, accepting this as some unexpected adventure, trusting us to figure things out. How much trouble could they get into, going over the hill? And Max had already seen puppies being born, so it wasn’t like Elias would be exposing her to something new, without appropriate parental supervision …

  Or we were going to parenting hell. Shit.

  Max looked at me, then past my hip at where I presumed Jack was still standing. “You come with?”

  I knew that voice. She knew we were fighting, even though we hadn’t raised our voices. She’d come over here not to get permission, but to interrupt us. Shit.

  “You go on,” Jack said, his voice tight. “It’s okay, Max.”

  Max’s face scrunched up, like she was going to argue, or cry.

  About two years ago, we realized that our arguments had been stressing her out, so we’d stopped, cold turkey. Except, I was starting to figure out, our not-fighting was stressing her out, too.

  “Ah, hell,” I said, forcing the air out of my lungs so I didn’t say the other things that had been building there. “Jack, you ever see goats being born?”

  His chin rested on my shoulder, just sharp enough to dig, his breath warm on my ear. “You know she’s going to want to bring one home,” he said, but there was laughter in the words now, not just anger, and I thought a goat kid might not be such a price to pay, for that.

  oOo

  Shan was curled on his side, a frown creasing his forehead, his breathing slow and steady, and I studied my husband with a sense of odd wonder. Despite the hard ground underneath us, he hadn’t slept so peacefully in the past six years. I was tempted to cuddle in closer, but the pressure in my bladder reminded me that I had to walk a distance to the outhouse, rather than a few paces into the master bathroom.

  The memory of that bathroom, with hot water on demand and towels that didn’t scrape the skin off, and … god, what I wouldn’t do for central heat and water pressure and a fully stocked fridge. And a takeout menu. I may or may not have had a wet dream about pizza last night. Although I didn’t think I was ever going to eat goat curry again. Not with the memory of tiny little goatlings—kids—in Max’s arms, still damp from the afterbirth their mother had groomed off them, already full of squirm and bounce.

  “All right,” I told the squirrel staring at me from a nearby rock. “So maybe this hasn’t been entirely a horrible no good very bad experience.”

  I rolled out from under the blanket, leaving Shan curling more tightly into the warmth, and noticed that Max was awake, sitting quietly on a rock with the dogs flanking her, tiny curled tails wagging slightly, the three of them watching the first glimmers of daylight peeking over the trees. When had Max gotten old enough to wake up before dawn, to take care of the dogs without reminding, to need time by herself? Where had the warm bundle I’d held in my arms, newborn and helpless, gone to?

  I went off to do my business, and came back to sit with her, the morning dew soaking through my jeans. I’d gone three days straight without a shower, and I felt disgusting, but at the same time, sitting next to my daughter, watching the sun rise over an empty field, there was also a strange nub of … not contentment, exactly. Calm. That was what I was feeling.

  It had been so long, I almost didn’t recognize it.

  “Are we stuck here, dad?”

  “No.” I said it, and I believed it. I had to believe it. This moment might be peaceful, but this wasn’t our world. For Max’s sake—for our own sake. I couldn’t let her grow up here, and I couldn’t let us grow old here, having to hide what we were, who we were to each other. “We’ll get back.”

  Max leaned against my side, and I wrapped my arm across her shoulders, and we listened to her dad snoring behind us, and watched as the sun rose over the green horizon and the dew dried around us.

  “How?” Max asked, when the dogs finally had enough of sitting quietly, and started to tussle with each other in the dirt.

  I kissed the top of her head and respected this growing-up child enough to be honest. “We’re trying to figure out how, kiddo. We’re trying to figure out how.”

  oOo

  When Shan finally rolled out of the blankets, we’d already had breakfast, saving him some on the tray. I’d even saved him some coffee, which he took with a tight smile of thanks. He was angry at himself for sleeping in, I could tell; he thought he’d screwed up somehow, leaving me to deal with things, and a few days ago I might have agreed. But that quiet time with Max—knowing that Shan needed his sleep … maybe not everything had to be shared equally. Not all the time.

  After breakfast, at Max’s urging, we wandered back over the hill to the wooden shed, so she could check on the baby goats and their momma. She ran ahead, arms pumping, feet practically skimming over the grass.

  Shan took my hand as we walked, and I pressed my thumb into the flesh of his palm, a thing we’d started when we were first dating, a quiet way of saying “I’m here. It’s okay,” without being too obviously reassuring.

  “Not quite the getaway we had scheduled,” I said, and saw him swallow a laugh.

  “Yeah.” He tipped his head against my shoulder, a companionable thunk. “But if I knew tomorrow we’d wake up and we’d be home, I’d say this had been a pretty damn good weekend. Except you were right, your daughter is going to want a goat for her next birthday. Goatherd was not the career I’d had in mind for her.”

  “She’s worried we’re stuck here.”

  Shan frowned at the sight of Max surrounded by the small herd of goats, the shorter dogs weaving in and out of hooved legs like they’d been doing it all their lives. “We’re going to have to start thinking about that possibility, yeah. And if we are, Jack, you and Max could—”

  “Shut up. Just … shut up, okay? No. We’re not going anywhere without you.” My voice rose, and Max’s head turned like a radar on high alert, abandoning the goats to zero in on us. “Shit.” I forced my voice lower. “Look, Shan, I know you’ve got issues, god knows I know, but you can’t control everything.”

  “I can’t control a damn thing, obviously. Not even a fucking road trip.” He’d dropped my hand, taken a step away, raised his own voice. I knew what was happening, could feel it happening, but couldn’t find the words to smooth it over. The past few days—the past few years—had all been about making sure everything went smoothly for Max, but the idea that Shan would walk away from us or expect us to walk away from him? Fuck him.

  “So fucking don’t,” I shouted, furious. “Jesus, you think this is fun for me? You think I enjoy knowing my mom’s probably out of her mind, worrying about us? That the moment we try to leave here, we’re going to have to deal with the way people will look at us, what they’ll think, what they’ll say—what they’ll do? And then you start talking about abandoning us, for our own good?”

  Shan opened his mouth, and if I’d been less pissed I’d’ve laughed at how much he looked like a fish. “Damn it I—”

  And then Max was running toward us, skidding to a stop a few paces away, eyes wide and tawny skin flushed with anxiety. “It’s okay, munchkin,” I said, forcing my voice to a calm, even tone. “Everything’s fine.”

  She frowned at us, round eyes now narrowing dubiously. “Don’t. Dads, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” Shan we
nt down on one knee to reassure her, but Max pushed him away.

  “I hate it when you do that. I like it better when you and dad yell at each other, not when you’re all tight-faced and quiet. You touch more after. And you laugh more, too. The dogs like it better, too.”

  “They do, huh?” I said, amused. “Not sure any parenting handbook is gonna agree with you, kid.”

  “Well, maybe they should.” Max’s voice cracked, but her chin had a defiant jut to it that said she wasn’t going to budge on this. “Because I’m right.”

  “So we should try yelling and panicking and waving our hands a lot?” Shan stood up, turning to glare at me like this was somehow my fault.

  I flexed my own jaw back and forth, feeling the anger still rumbling under my skin, knowing I wasn’t mad at Shan, and he wasn’t mad at me, not really. Probably. “Maybe? Because not-yelling wasn’t doing the job either, obviously.” Some days it seemed like we spent more time trying to avoid problems than plowing through them. “I think we’ve agreed, we’re pretty much at the flailing and panicking stage anyway.”

  Shan hacked out a dry laugh, then sighed. “Yeah, what the hell. Okay, Max: next time we’ll have a huge screaming match, everyone can join in, then we hug it out. That good by you?”

  Max beamed at us like we’d just won dads of the year award, then tore back to play with the goats, like that was all it took to set her world to rights.

  It wasn’t that easy. Nothing was ever that easy. But we could try.

  “Your kid’s not a dummy,” Shan said.

  “Our kid,” I said. “You and me and her.” I reached out again and took his hand in mine. “Let’s go look at baby goats.”

  oOo

  The goats were cute, and Jack and I both—firmly, as a unit—denied Max’s request to adopt one.