Page 31 of Intersect
“Don’t imagine you do a lot of this in D.C.,” my grandfather comments as we cast ourlines.
“I don’t think I’d want to eat anything that came out of thePotomac.”
He nods. “So why don’t you tell me why you’re really here,” he says. “Because no one travels to a medical conference with nothing but a gym bag. Did your dad send you to check up onme?”
I laugh to myself. My grandfather never did miss much. “No.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “I did want to ask you some questions, though. About your firstwife.”
A shadow crosses his face, a kind of sinking, deep-seated grief I suspect is always present, justhidden.
“What do you want to know?” he asks, his voice slow, gravelly withcaution.
I lean forward, my elbows pressed to my knees, and turn my head toward him. “Do you really think shedrowned?”
There’s a flash of something in his eyes,knowledge, gone nearly as soon as it appears. “No one knows for sure,” he replies. “Why do youask?”
I hesitate. There is a ninety percent chance he’s going to decide I’m nuts by the time we get off this boat. “The woman I’m seeing, Quinn, may have a genetic mutation, one I think I may have as well. And I’m trying to figure out where I gotit.”
He grows still. “What kind ofmutation?”
I adjust my line, as if his question or my response are casual. “The kind that might be responsible for someone’s disappearance. Something not a lot of people seem to knowabout.”
My grandfather is silent, staring hard at the water. “I’m not sure what youmean.”
“Quinn has a brain tumor,” I reply quietly. “Unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Growing with no sign of blood flow to the site. We’ve been told she can do things other peoplecan’t.”
“What sort of things?” my grandfatherasks.
I’d hoped to get him to talk without being forced to admit what I’m getting at. If I’m wrong he’s going to think I’m crazy. “Timetravel.”
He’s quiet. He’s quiet for so long I grow certain he’s looking for a diplomatic way to end our fishing trip entirely before he goes home to tell my parents I need medication. “And you’re wondering if your grandmother did it too,” he says. “Because shedisappeared.”
I run a hand through my hair, realizing how insane it sounds when stated outright. I jumped on a plane and flew down here like a fucking lunatic because a woman who lived next to the water disappeared over fifty years ago. “I know it sounds crazy,” I tell him. “We’re just a littledesperate.”
He doesn’t look at me but stares straight at the water. “It doesn’t sound all that crazy to me,” he saysquietly.
My head jerks toward him. “Are you saying shedidit?”
He sighs. “Shedid.”
I grip the fishing rod, stunned into silence. I came here because I thought it was possible, but learning it’s true still shocks me. It also means Quinn’s theory may be right—I carry at least one mutated gene and she carries two. Which means there’s a 75 percent chance any daughter we have would be able to timetravel.
“It’s funny,” my grandfather muses, “how you can convince yourself of anything until you learn otherwise. Once I knew the truth about your grandmother, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t wondered. She had these eyes like nothing I’d ever seen before, and she was so beautiful we couldn’t walk down the street without getting stares. But I never questionedit.”
I didn’t either. I noticed the same things about Quinn—the way people stare as she passes, the color of her eyes—and it never occurred to me that she was anything more than genetically blessed. I guess it’s human nature to explain away the unusual. Quinn denies all these strange incidents in her childhood meant anything, my mother and I both have these bizarre dreams we rationalize away. We’ve spent our lives insisting unusual things were normal. Maybe it’s time westopped.
“So when she disappeared,” I ask, “did you know what happened? Do you know where shewent?”
His face sags. He stares ahead at the water, but his mind is somewhere else. “I was trying to save money for medical school and she kept saying she could go back a few years. Make an investment for us. I always said no. I didn’t want her to do it, not until your father was grown, because it was a dangerous business, time travel. Never know what you’re going to find or where you’re going to get stuck. And I think she mostly didn’t do it, but the temptation was just too strong I guess. A few months after she disappeared I got a financial statement from a broker. We somehow had 400,000 dollars in stock, which was a fortune back then. I researched it, of course. It looked like the original investment was made in 1921. I kept hoping she’d come back—” He flinches. After all this time, the memory still hurts. “Obviously, it didn’t work out thatway.”
I can already feel it, the sick turning of the gut I’d have in his place. That could be Quinn. She could go back and I’d have no fucking way to find her. “How would she have gotten stuck there? Couldn’t she just time travel right backout?”
He pulls off his hat and straightens it. “She once told me if you go back a ways, it sometimes takes all you’ve got. You’re so exhausted you have to recover before you can jump back. And if you stay someplace too long you weaken until youcan’tget back. But I don’t think that’s what happened toher.”
“No?”
He shakes his head. “She was only 25 when it happened. If she somehow just got stuck in 1921, she’d have still been alive when she got to 1962. Even if she didn’t want to come back to us, she’d have let me know somehow that she wasokay.”
I’d pictured it as something simple, like a jump over a yardstick. It’s not simple at all. It’s deadly, and here I’ve been pushing Quinn to try. “I’m so sorry,” Iwhisper.