‘Those ain’t answers,’ protested Riley. ‘Those are riddles.’
More of the theatre disappeared and Chevie began to shake. The stalls vanished one by one and were replaced by an ocean of grey fibres.
‘I could take your hand and see where the wormhole sets us down,’ said Chevie. ‘I would love to do that, but after a while it would eat away at me that I could have saved someone, and I didn’t.’
Riley knew then that Chevie was talking about her own father. How could he argue with that?
‘The wormhole will try to take you, Riley, so be strong. Tell it where you want to go. I will shield you from the worst.’
Riley was barely listening. ‘So the great Chevron–Savano romance is over? That’s it, then?’
There were tears in Chevie’s eyes as she cupped Riley’s face.
‘Not quite it,’ she said, and kissed him for the second time.
Malibu. California. 2008
The old lady wore sunglasses.
Never took them off in public. A bouncer teased her about it once in a Route 66 casino.
Hey, grandma, what’s with the shades? You a vampire?
The old lady did some kind of kung-jitsu hocus-pocus on the guy and his partner. Stretched both of them out on the craps table. And she didn’t have to take the shades off to do it either. Nobody asked her about the glasses to her face after that, but they talked plenty behind her back.
I mean, the old gal’s gotta be eighty, right? She took out Gary and Ted like they were two sacks of trash. And did you see all that silver? Goddamn rings and bangles. The old dame jingles and jangles like a sack of spoons.
That was how it had been for Chevie these past few decades, for the old woman was she. Six months in a place; a year, tops. Then she lost her temper, pushed someone’s face in and had to move on. She stayed in California near the coast, keeping an eye on herself, her younger self, trying to figure out how to stop her dad’s bike exploding without actually causing the explosion. Her first thought had been to stick a blade in the gas tank on the morning of the accident, but what if he didn’t notice the leak and got gasoline on the pipes? Then she considered busting her dad’s leg in a bar fight. A mercy break. But one of the problems with that was that she knew enough about the time stream to realize that it often shook out the kinks, and the Harley road crash would come back round in a couple of months. The other problem was that he was her dad. And breaking your dad’s leg was never going to be a walk in the park, especially not for the hobbled parent. Not to mention the fact that the wrong shard of bone could slice the wrong artery and she would have to watch her own father bleed out in front of her eyes.
The idea to hang around just to change a life had come from Garrick. Albert Garrick. The magician who was death.
He sure is dead now, Chevie often reassured herself.
Garrick had stayed around for practically two hundred and fifty years just to kill his apprentice . Whereas Chevie’s plan had been to emerge at the beginning of the twenty-first century and save her dad, but she did not have Garrick’s core of hatred to sustain her in the inter-dimension and was forced to exit one century early. Then she had survived two prisons, three armies, a marriage and a hippy commune just to save her dad.
Chevie never had any kids, though. Probably just as well. No fun having an immortal parent with cat’s eyes, right? Something else she hadn’t been able to fix.
No. Immortal was the wrong word.
She was growing older, but slowly. A gift from the wormhole. Chevie had ridden it out for as long as she could in there, but she was like a sugar cube in a vat of coffee and eventually she had to get out or stay forever. That had been over a hundred years ago.
Now the day had come … maybe. Chevie couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure of the day, but she had it down to a month, and this was the month. And so every day of the month she had dragged her slowly ageing carcass up through the Malibu hills, along the road that snaked past the ten-million-dollar estates and further up past the old frontier houses and round the back of the Savano cottage, where she sat on a stump and wondered why she was so uncertain all of a sudden, when she had been dead set on her knife-in-the-gas-tank plan for the last couple of decades.
She sat and drank from a flask of iced coffee and wondered what the hell she was going to do. Would she really leave it until the last minute to act, until her pop threw his leg over the motorcycle?
Pop? I could pop him one, I suppose. Maybe my subconscious is giving me a solution.
Not much of one. Sure, she had taken out those two meatheads in the casino but they were dough balls. Her dad was faster than a rattlesnake even with a few beers sloshing around in his stomach, which he would not have at this time of the morning.
Sugar in the gas tank?
No.
Cut the brake lines?
Hell, no.
Chevie wished Riley were sitting on the stump beside her. The boy magician would have had a plan. She had gone to find Riley in London before the First World War and found him alive and well, living over the Orient Theatre with a wife and daughter (in matching yellow dresses on that particular day) and working as a stage magician. Riley had looked so happy pulling daisies from behind his little girl’s ears that Chevie could not make herself intrude.
That should have been me in that yellow dress. That could have been us.
But it wouldn’t be right to drag Riley into her world again.
After all, she could feel the time tunnel calling her and she knew how volatile her connection to this world was. Only the silver that adorned her fingers and limbs kept her form stable, and even then she could feel herself fade if she happened to cross a ley line or if there was an electrical storm flashing on the horizon. More than once she had awoken to find orange sparks circling her like quantum vultures.
No. The kid deserves a life. The best thing you can do for him is to steer clear.
She still thought about Riley in the present tense. Maybe she would see him again. The classifications past and future were not as concrete to her now as they had been once.
I have never loved anyone else, she realized, and then, with more than a dash of self-pity: I have never been loved by anyone else.
She felt a sudden jealousy again towards that young woman in the yellow dress.
‘You dead, old lady?’ said a voice.
Chevie bristled. She was an old lady, and older than she looked, but somehow she had managed to hold on to her rebellious teenage attitude.
‘Not yet, I ain’t,’ she said, turning on the tree stump to find a young girl studying her from behind a hacked fringe.
Hacked, thought Chevie, because I cut my own hair.
It took a second for her to realize what was going on.
I am being glared at by myself. I am meeting a younger me. This is exactly what all those time-travel movies warned me never to do.
She did not need to ask what Little Chevie was doing here. This had been her favourite spot to sit and watch her dad work on his motorcycle.
‘That’s my stump,’ said the girl, pointing at it with a hunting knife that seemed like a battle sword in her ten-year-old hand.
‘You’re not supposed to have that knife.’
Little Chevie responded quick as a flash. ‘You’re not supposed to sit on my stump, grandma. My name’s on it. I carved it there with this knife I’m not supposed to have.’
At that moment, for the first time in her long life, Chevie understood that maybe it was a little annoying to try to hold a conversation with a smart alec.
‘This stump is nature, kid. And you can’t own nature. That’s what we believe, right?’
‘We?’ said Little Chevie. ‘What do you mean we?’
‘Shawnee,’ said Chevie. ‘We. The tribe.’
Little Chevie twirled the knife in a reckless fashion, which made Old Chevie wonder how she had made it to adulthood with all her fingers attached to her hands.
‘You’re tribe?’ Little Chevie sa
id doubtfully. ‘You don’t look tribe.’
It was a fair comment. The silver had lightened Chevie’s skin a few shades. She was not exactly Garrick pale, but in a couple of decades she would be.
‘Yeah, well, I’m tribe all right. Take my word for it.’
Little Chevie raised the eyebrow of scorn and Old Chevie couldn’t blame her. Some old lady turns up on her stump trying to claim some kind of kinship. What kid wouldn’t be suspicious?
She had to earn this young brave’s trust and, as Little Chevie folded her arms across her skinny chest, time-travelling Old Chevie thought she saw a way in.
‘I can prove it,’ she said. ‘That I am who I say I am.’
Little Chevie’s other eyebrow shot up. ‘Yeah? Grown-ups prove stuff every day. Lies mostly.’
Chevie remembered how anti-establishment she had been at ten years old, a common trait among Native Americans, and wondered how she had ever come to work for the federal government.
Old Chevie pointed at the fake tattoo drawn in Sharpie on Little Chevie’s biceps.
‘I like your mark,’ she said.
‘Don’t talk about my mark,’ snapped the kid. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’
‘I know it’s a chevron and you are named for it,’ said Old Chevie. ‘I know your father bears the same mark and so have all the Savano men back to the Shawnee wars, where your ancestor William Savano fought the Long Knives with Tecumseh at Moraviantown. For every officer he killed in battle, William daubed a chevron on his arm in blood, as this was the sergeant’s symbol. He was a fearsome warrior. So, in memory of William, the Savanos have worn the symbol. And you intend to honour William, just as they did.’
Little Chevie must have been amazed to hear her own patter recited verbatim back to her, but she didn’t show it. Instead her scowl softened ever so slightly.
‘How do you know this, grandma?’
Chevie stretched the neck of her T-shirt, baring her shoulder to reveal the same mark ingrained in her skin.
‘That’s how I know.’
Little Chevie was genuinely impressed now and prodded the mark with her forefinger. ‘Wow. It’s right in there. How did that happen? A burn or something?’
Chevie covered her mark. ‘No. It’s a part of me, of who I am. I am the spirit warrior of the Savanos.’
She almost winced, so outrageous was this line of bull, but Little Chevie was going for it.
‘I didn’t know we had a spirit warrior. What is a spirit warrior?’
Chevie nearly felt bad about manipulating a child, but the stakes were high and the little version of her was tough and would get over it.