Little, Kathryn

Fiction - by Christina Tang-Bernas

The first time little Kathryn Chou notices something’s wrong with her, it’s her sixth birthday. She’s braiding blue supermarket-bag twist ties into a ring for herself when she notices her aunties whispering in the corner. “Did you notice how pale her hair and eyes are? Look at her skin. Like a gwai lo. Or half of one, at least.”

“No,” the auntie with the big cloud of hair says with a sharp little gasp. “You don’t think—”

“All I’m saying is that right around the time she became pregnant with Kathryn, Marilyn was working a lot of overtime. And that white boss of hers is quite young and attractive, if you like that sort of thing.”

When they see Kathryn staring up at them, they quiet their laughter and move away.

“Mama,” Kathryn asks that night. “What’s a gwai lo?” Her lips stretch around the words, and she rolls them around her tongue, like lucky candy tasting of strawberries and condensed milk.

Mama pauses in the middle of fussing with the blankets. “Where did you hear that word?”

“The aunties said I’m a ‘gwai lo.’” She looks up into Mama’s sharp brown eyes. “Is that a bad thing?”

Mama glances over at Baba, standing in the doorway of Kathryn’s bedroom. Something unknown passes between them, and Mama’s lips have turned into thin straight lines by the time she turns back. “Gwai lo means ghost person.”

Kathryn laughs. “That’s silly. I’m not a ghost.” She stretches out her hand and wiggles her fingers in the dim blue glow of her moon-shaped nightlight. “I’m not invisible.”

Mama doesn’t laugh. “That’s a big word there. Invisible. Where did you learn that?”

Kathryn shrugs. “They’re in my head. The words.”

When Mama bends to kiss Kathryn on the forehead, she notices Mama’s hands shake. Some of the kids at school are scared of ghosts. Maybe Mama is too.

“I’m not a ghost,” she repeats.

It’s a few years later that Kathryn understands what gwai lo really means. It means her hair is sandy brown, and her eyes are amber with flecks of green, and her skin burns a little too easily in the sunlight. It means people sometimes look at her funny because her Mama and Baba have golden skin and shiny dark hair and eyes like the rich dirt in their backyard garden.

Nainai, Baba’s mama, catches her flipping through old photo albums, the ones with pictures from Mama’s office Christmas parties, scrutinizing every white man in them.

She cackles.

“You care too much about what other people think,” Nainai says, her wrinkled face creasing further still. “Our line, your baba’s ancestors, has had some as pale as you, going back a long time. You can’t predict where the genes will show up.”

She passes a gnarled hand over Kathryn’s hair. “In fact,” she continues, “you look just like my own baba. So stop worrying. Be grateful they’re only calling you a ghost. They used to call my baba a devil.”

And most of the time, Kathryn tries to believe Nainai. She had escaped from Nanjing during the terrible occupation, followed her husband from China to Taiwan with almost nothing, and then gave up everything again to join her son in America. So Nainai probably knows when to worry and when not to.

Still, Nainai doesn’t have any pictures of her baba, does she? So it proves nothing.

For her social science class in eighth grade, the teacher assigns everyone an essay to be written on some aspect of their personal heritage. Callan babbles on and on about how his Irish name had been passed down in his family and means “Strong in Battles,” all the while flexing whatever miniscule muscles he possesses.

The other girls coo and fawn over him.

Kathryn rolls her eyes.

She knows Mama had named herself after Marilyn Monroe when she’d arrived in America for graduate school. “So glamorous.” And Baba admired John Wayne’s swagger.

“Where does my name come from?” Kathryn asks in the middle of dinner.

Mama pauses in the middle of passing Baba her signature tofu and tomato dish. “I’m not sure—” she begins.

“I think Kathryn’s old enough by now,” Baba interrupts. “And she’s going to find out eventually.” He rubs his palms against the tops of his thighs and clenches them.

Kathryn leans forward, watching invisible messages shimmer between her parents. “Old enough for what?”

“What do you know?” Mama tells Baba, plunking the heavy ceramic dish on the table instead. For a long moment, she says nothing, her lips pressed together, nostrils flaring.

“Fine.” She sighs. “Kathryn, you’ve been stubborn since the day you were born. I wasn’t ready, not even eight months yet, but you decided you wanted to come out no matter what. Your baba drove me to the hospital very fast, but on the way I—” Mama swallows. “I started to bleed. A lot.”

And then Mama tells Kathryn the story of how Baba had hit a white woman when he’d run a red light at an intersection. Mama had yelled at him to stop, to help the woman, but Baba didn’t listen. Mama was bleeding so badly, Baba knew that if he paused in his reckless drive, Mama and the baby might die. Afterwards, all Mama could remember was pain, so much pain, and then so much happiness.

“I sat in the waiting room,” Baba says, quiet and subdued, when Mama’s words trickle away. “Watching for the doctors to come out and tell me whether I’d gained a daughter or lost a family. A woman sat near me, with these blue eyes. We looked at each other, the both of us with blood on our shirts and caked underneath our fingernails. She started crying, telling me about this woman who’d been hit by a car, about how she’d just found out this woman had died. I knew. That I’d been the one to—” He swallowed, rubbing his hands together, scrubbing at them.

Mama placed a hand over his, stilling them. She looked from the hands to Kathryn. “We named you after her,” Mama says. “Because she gave her life so that you could live.”

Something clicks in Kathryn’s mind. “That’s why there’s always an extra portion of offerings during the Half July Festival. It’s for this other Kathryn, isn’t it?” But no, there’s something else nagging at her, like something seen at the wavering edges of her peripheral vision.

Because the way Mama is looking at her now is the same way Mama always looks at her, but especially during the Half July Festival every year. The Half July Festival, also known as the Chinese Ghost Festival.

Kathryn swallows. “Do you regret giving me her name?”

Mama looks down at the table. “It’s appropriate. All things considered.”

“What things?” Kathryn insists.

“Her last words,” Baba says, “were that she was coming back.”

Kathryn scoffs. “What? You can’t seriously believe— You can’t really—” She stops. “You do believe those words,” she finishes, her voice small, wondering, wounded.

Mama shakes her head. “We don’t know what to believe.” There’s a note of finality, and Kathryn knows better than to push when Mama sounds like this.

For her school report, Kathryn writes about Chinese ghosts. She writes about the Yuan Gui, the spirits of people who died wrongful deaths, and about the Shui Gui, the water ghosts who drown their victims and take possession of their bodies. She writes about how humans die and become ghosts and then resurrect and become human again.

She doesn’t write about how her mama looks into Kathryn’s eyes and sees the ghost of a white woman looking back at her. Or how, sometimes, Kathryn looks in the mirror now, at her hair and eyes and pale skin, and sees the same thing.

When she starts high school the next year, she insists on being called Kat. She’s fifteen when she first tries to bleed the ghost out of thin slices across her upper thighs. It’s the same year she stumbles across H.G. Wells in the school library.

The novel is a revelation.

If she could somehow travel back in time and prevent this other Kathryn from being hit by Baba, wouldn’t it solve everything?

Well, not everything, as she comes to discover in her preliminary research.

For one, the moment she’d step into the past, she’d likely be shunted into an alternate universe. She’d save another version of white-Kathryn. Another version of herself would grow up. Nothing would change in her own past.

But at least other-Mama might hold this other version of herself closer, and other-Baba would stop washing his hands so often, as if blood still lingers in the pores of his palms. And maybe other-Kat could be sure her accomplishments are her own, and not because someone else’s neurons are firing inside her skull.

She could live the rest of her life knowing these truths.

Kat reads every book in the local public library about time travel, fiction and nonfiction. She trawls through whatever academic journals she can obtain, a dictionary at her side, spends late nights sifting for nuggets of information in the midst of the kooks and conspiracy theorists populating the obscure internet forums. Spiral-bound notebooks line the bookshelves in her room, notes written in tight, tiny handwriting. Her senior year of high school, she receives the highest grade in her English class and ekes out a passing grade in Advanced Placement Physics. It’s only her extensive studies that carry her through the AP Exam, but it’s enough. She declares a physics major in her college applications.

It’s only when she’s sent to her university’s counseling office after two disastrous semesters, and a man who looks like a praying mantis tells her she needs to switch majors or be forced to drop out of school, that she concedes maybe physics isn’t her strength.

But, like Mama said, Kat’s always been a little too stubborn. If she can’t solve it herself, she’ll research her way to someone who can. She starts going through every paper published by the physics professors at her school, then all the other universities nearby until she finds what she’s looking for.

Kat notes with a cursory glance that no matter the campus, science buildings all tend to look alike, bland and utilitarian. Her heels sound over-loud in the stark hallways. After wending through corridor after corridor, she finally stops in front of the room number she’s looking for.

Kat straightens, smoothing her skirt down and readjusting the neckline of her blouse. Be mature and articulate and knowledgeable. She takes a deep breath, pulling the door open.

A curly-haired man smiles back at her, his pale-green eyes glinting in the overhead lights.

All her prepared words dissolve and sink into the base of her skull. Heat blooms over her cheekbones. “I’m looking for Professor Hajj?”

“This is her lab,” he says, “but she just left for the day.”

“Ok, thanks.” She turns to go.

“Was there something specific you needed?” the man calls out. “Maybe I could help.”

Kat pauses. “I had a question on some of her research. I can come back another time. Sorry, I should’ve made an appointment or something.”

“Well, then, I can definitely help,” he says. “She advises me. For my doctorate. So I know all about her research.”

The doorknob is cold in her grip. “I don’t know.”

“Try me.”

Kat turns back. “What do you know about time travel?”

He props his elbows on the big slab of a lab table, tilts his head. “Why?”

“I need to know how possible it is to go back in time and change one event,” Kat says.

“What, like killing Hitler?”

“No,” she says. “Like saving someone’s life. Not anyone famous or anything.” She shuffles her feet. “It’s personal.”

“Well,” the man says, “that depends on whether you can surmount the Grandfather Paradox.”

“Uh,” she hesitates.

“I could explain, if you’d like,” he says, standing up. “Over coffee? I know a great place nearby.”

Heat spreads over Kat’s entire face. “Ok.” She grins.

“My name’s Brandon, by the way.”

“Kat.” She stops. “Kathryn.”

“Kathryn,” he repeats, and the sound of her name said in his rumbling voice pierces through her gut. “It’s nice to meet you.”

On their third date, she confesses she knows all the theories he’d been expounding on. She’d only pretended ignorance so he’d keep asking her out.

He laughs, says, “And I thought you couldn’t get any better.” Then he kisses her.

On their fourth date, he takes her to see the stars. She shivers in her thin sweater as he names all the visible constellations, his fingertip tracing the vast expanse above them. “Someday, I want to travel in space,” Brandon whispers, in keeping with their hushed surroundings. He wraps his thick warm coat over her shoulders.

“Ok,” she says. “You travel through space, and I’ll travel through time, and we’ll meet in the middle somehow.”

They spend their sixth date holed up in Dr. Hajj’s lab, their murmurs over theory devolving into a heated debate regarding which movies depict multiple-timeline versus single-timeline theories correctly. They end up at Brandon’s apartment for an all-night movie marathon.

Six months in, Brandon pulls her close. “I think I love you.”

Kathryn stares up at him. All she can hear is static. “Thanks,” she manages to say.

His face stills into a collection of stern angles. His arms fall away.

“Brandon…” All the words that normally wait for Kathryn’s command flee under the immense burden of his palpable disappointment, and his name trails away into a pathetic wisp of sound.

He shakes his head. “Forget it. Let’s just focus back here.” Brandon laughs. It’s dry and terrible. “It’s all you want me around for anyways. My math. My key to Dr. Hajj’s lab, her research.”

“Stop it. You know that’s not true.”

“Really?” he asks. “So, if I were to tell you that I won’t do this anymore. That I’m not going to help you on this quixotic task of flinging you back in time for some unknown reason that you still haven’t gotten around to telling me about,” he flings his arm out, “on top of doing my dissertation, because no one is going to approve of me changing my thesis to a topic that sounds more like science fiction than fact, that you’d still want to spend time with me? Huh?”

Kathryn opens her mouth, but the right words have yet to return, so she closes it again.

“Yeah,” Brandon says. “That’s what I thought.”

She calls him after a week of silence and tells him about the other Kathryn.

He’s quiet for long enough she has to check her phone to make sure he’s still on the line. “Ghosts aren’t real, Kathryn.”

She invites him to meet her parents.

“I’m still mad at you,” Brandon says.

He comes for the Mid Autumn Festival. They all sit outside, heads craned skyward, munching on mooncakes filled with red bean paste and lotus paste and salty yellow egg yolks. The full moon glints in Brandon’s eyes and turns them silver. Nainai tells stories about Chang’e flying to the moon and her companion, the Jade Rabbit.

“A rabbit in the moon,” Brandon laughs. “Or was it the spirit of one?”

The quiet surrounding them goes brittle. “It’s just a story,” Baba finally says. It sounds like the truth. It also sounds like a lie. Mama clears her throat and starts gathering up the dishes.

Nainai cackles, pats Brandon’s shoulder, and asks him when they’re going to produce great-grandchildren for her. “I refuse to die until I can hold them in my arms.”

“Well,” Kathryn says, “then I’ll never have children. That way you can live forever.”

When Kathryn drops Brandon off at his apartment, she lets her hand touch his shoulder before he can leave. “I’d still want to spend time with you, even if you didn’t want to help me with my project.” Her voice is overloud in the confines of her beige compact sedan. She pushes on. “But I’d find someone else to help me instead. I won’t give this up, even for you.” Then she clams up, squeezes her eyes shut. Too far.

“Ok,” Brandon says. He feathers a ghost of a kiss across her temple, his strong hands resting over her hidden scars. “I get it.”

For their first anniversary, she opens a ribbon-festooned box to find a notebook full of scribbled mathematics. “What’s this?” she asks.

“It’s your time machine,” he answers. “Or at least the basics of it.”

“What?”

Brandon grins. “I think I’ve figured out the underlying theory, and it could really work, provided we can harness quantum superpositioning.” He flips through the notebook. “You know how the basic theory is that if unobserved, a particle could theoretically be anywhere. And then when it’s observed, all those possibilities coalesce into one, and the particle becomes fixed in space-time?”

Kathryn nods.

“Well,” Brandon says, vibrating with excitement, “What if we could control where that particle appears, not just in space, but also in time, since it’s technically the same dimension? And do it on a larger scale, because you’re quite a bit bigger. Uh, I mean, well, not that I’m saying you’re big—”

The realization bursts over Kathryn. She covers her mouth with her hands, so it comes out muffled when she says, “I love you, Brandon.”

He stops, stares at her. “Please,” he retorts. “You just want me for my brains.”

“That too,” Kathryn says, smile sneaking out. It’s exhilarating, this feeling of contentment. She enfolds herself around it, tucks it away deep inside.

Mama suffers a heart attack shortly before their second anniversary.

Kathryn visits her in the hospital, Brandon hovering behind her clutching the droopy bouquet of sunset-colored supermarket flowers. Mama’s hand is bonier than Kathryn remembers, cold and clammy.

“I’m sorry,” Mama says. Kathryn’s not sure what Mama is apologizing for.

“It’s ok,” Kathryn says. She should tell Mama about the time machine, but she doesn’t. Not yet. When it’s the right moment. When they have something more solid to go on.

Mama has another heart attack a few months later.

For once, dressed in black, cemetery mud squishing underneath the heels of her shoes, Kathryn is glad to consider ghosts might be real.

Baba withdraws into himself. His hands look red and chapped when she stops by. “You shouldn’t wash your hands so much,” Kathryn says. She looks down at her own ink-stained hands, fingertips littered with pale-pink papercuts, and resists the urge to hide away the evidence of her own compulsions.

Nainai moves in with Baba. Baba says it’ll be easier for him to take care of her. Kathryn knows it’s more the other way around. “Thank you,” she tells Nainai.

“I remember when your baba was a baby, wouldn’t sleep, crying all the time.” Nainai looks over at her son, puttering in the kitchen. “Life comes full circle, doesn’t it?” She sighs. “We do what we must, for the people we love. Speaking of which, when are you and Brandon getting married? Oh, wait…” She waggles her eyebrows. “We’re all modern now, aren’t we? You don’t need to be married to be having babies.”

Kathryn repeats Nainai’s words to Brandon while they’re both in the university library, Brandon trying to fit in some work on his actual dissertation, Kathryn using Brandon’s log-on to deep-dive into the university archives for physical constructs of quantum computers that they can base potential prototypes on. Brandon waggles his own eyebrows in response to Nainai’s insinuations, and it’s so similar, she almost suffocates herself trying not to laugh too loudly in the hush of the library.

When Brandon rolls out blueprints for their prototype a few months after their third anniversary, she watches his knobby knuckles shift under his skin. She’s always liked that his skin is paler than hers, more blue-tinged. She feels more Asian standing beside him, and less like a gwai lo.

Nainai and Baba come for Kathryn’s graduation. They have the celebration dinner at a local seafood buffet. Brandon fills up on too much fried rice. Baba plows through the snow crab legs. Nainai barely eats anything. She says things don’t really taste like much anymore.

Baba calls them a week later to tell them Nainai passed in her sleep. “It was time,” he says. The words sound automatic, as if he’s said them a million times already, to others, to himself.

“I guess she got tired of waiting for her great-grandchildren,” Kathryn says to Brandon, sitting on a hard wooden pew, waiting for the funeral to start. Brandon only squeezes her hand.

For their fourth anniversary, they send a loaf of banana bread forwards in time. They try to watch some TV while they wait, but Kathryn has no idea what show they’re watching, much less what’s happening on it. Her eyes keep drifting over to the wall clock.

Three hours later, the loaf is sitting on Brandon’s kitchen counter.

“Well,” Kathryn says. “It works. I think.”

They eat it for dessert. She can’t tell if her thick slice tastes better because they added extra bananas this time, or if it’s because it tastes a little like hope. She banishes the silly thought and takes another determined bite.

They buy a hamster for $15.99 at the pet store in the mall and name her Weena. She doesn’t reappear in her cage when she’s supposed to.

“Oh god,” Brandon says. “Do you think we’ve killed her?”

“More like sent her to the wrong time or place.”

“What if a dinosaur eats her?”

Kathryn rolls her eyes.

It takes them three days to find Weena in Brandon’s sock drawer. They have no idea if the prototype sent her to the wrong place and she’s been living in the drawer ever since, or if they sent her to the wrong time and she escaped into the drawer without them noticing, or both. Worse, the prototype refuses to work again.

After seventeen more prototypes, they realize there are no issues with inanimate objects, but if they send anything alive, the machine breaks. Or simply doesn’t work, no matter how many times they try to send their chosen creature.

A gray chinchilla has taken up permanent residence with Weena. 

Plants are hit and miss. There’s something rather philosophical about that.

Eventually, they’ve refined their design as much as they can. 

“So we know we can send something forwards in time with relative accuracy, but how do we know if we can send something backwards in time?” Kathryn asks over breakfast waffles.

“I’m not sure there’s a definitive way we can test that,” Brandon says. “But the math works.”

Kathryn looks at the machine gleaming in Brandon’s living room. There are so many loose ends to tie up if she’s really going ahead with this. Closing her financial accounts and updating beneficiaries. Cancelling her apartment lease. Packing up her things. And who would she give her things to? It seems so final, all of her worldly possessions dispersing into new hands and new lives. “I was thinking of waiting until after your graduation.”

“I—” Brandon starts. Then he stares down at the table. “It’s never going to be the right time, Kathryn. You could wait until I graduate. Or until your baba passes away. Or just until that movie you’ve been wanting to watch comes out in theaters. But there’s always going to be another movie. Another milestone. Something else worth waiting for.”

“What are you trying to say?” Kathryn’s words fly out sharper than intended.

“I told myself I wouldn’t ever ask this of you. But I don’t want to regret this for the rest of my life.” He raises his head to meet her eyes. “Stay, Kathryn. I’m asking you to stay with me. Maybe you won’t be able to change the past. It wouldn’t even be your own past, Kathryn, not really. But we can make the future work. I mean, you just graduated, we have our whole lives ahead of us, so many years to experience together. I know what I’m asking is huge, but—” Brandon stopped, swallowed. “Please, Kathryn, think about it.”

She wants to stay, to see what life could be like without the constant weight of a dead woman’s ghost wrapped around her shoulders, the weight of Baba’s chapped hands and Mama’s tight lips. She wants to be the kind of person who is brave enough to find out, but— “I can’t.”

Brandon’s shoulders sag briefly before he straightens again. “I just had to ask,” he says.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. Really, it’s ok.” He clears his throat and smiles. “Then I guess we should start preparations. I don’t want to be accused of murder when you suddenly disappear.”

Kathryn stays the night and stays quiet when Brandon clings to her in bed, his breathing betraying his wakefulness. She clings back.

Kathryn visits Baba. Clutter gathers in dusty corners. Unwashed dishes pile up in the sink, the underlying stench of old oil and bits of rotting food permeates each breath of air. They watch television together for a few hours before Kathryn summons up enough courage to ask, “What if someone could go back in time and make sure the other Kathryn, the white one, didn’t die?”

Baba sighs. “What’s happened has happened, Kathryn. There’s no use thinking what-if questions like this.”

“Yes, but what if?” Kathryn persists.

Baba turns his head to glare at Kathryn. His palms are cracked in places, and there is a bandage around one finger. “Why are you always so stubborn? Can’t we just watch in peace?”

She cooks the tofu and tomato dish for the both of them, but it doesn’t taste quite right, and Baba says he isn’t really hungry anyways. He asks about her supposed job hunt. Kathryn shrugs, not wanting to lie, and silence falls between them again.

Afterwards, she hugs Baba as tight as she can, pulling a reluctant smile from him. “I love you.”

He nods.

Kathryn releases him and leaves.

Brandon doesn’t say anything when preparations take longer than expected, dragging out day by day. Days of legal paperwork and cleaning, of watching television with Baba, of gathering moments and memories. Nor does he say anything when Kathryn finishes final preparations a week after Baba passes in his sleep.

Kathryn is surprised Baba lingered as long as he did.

She drives to the cemetery. When they’d purchased a plot for Mama, Baba had bought one next to hers. Not wanting to be left out, Nainai had purchased the one beside his.

Kathryn crouches before the three gravestones, bare hands clearing away the dirt and grass from around the edges. She places a dish of mandarin oranges and fluffy white bao on the ground and settles down beside it, crossing her legs. The moon hangs low in the sky, almost full and luminous in the early twilight. A breeze ruffles through her hair, and she imagines Nainai’s steady presence beside her. Her fingers trace the letters of Mama’s name. The stone is cold. Kathryn wishes she could hold Mama’s hand one more time. “Am I making the right choice?” she says, the words stilted and awkward in the stillness of the gathering night. She doesn’t expect an answer.

Kathryn dusts herself off and heads back to Brandon.

They’re doing final adjustments to the machine when Brandon broaches the subject. “What happens to us,” he asks, “if this thing actually works?”

“You know all the theories, Brandon, even better than me,” Kathryn says. “You always knew that if we succeeded, that you, this present you in this universe would probably never see me again.”

Brandon clears his throat. “After you save that woman’s life, I want you to wait for me. This other-me in this other-universe. To grow up. Then come find me. I want to believe that no matter what changes in a universe, somehow, the little boy I am will always grow up to fall in love with you.”

“You hopeless romantic.” Kathryn runs her fingers down the side of his face and cups the back of his neck. “Ok, I’ll tell that boy that I love him and try to explain everything to him. And he’ll look at this old hag in front of him, who’s twenty years older than him and raving about being from an alternate timeline, and he’ll call the police who’ll throw me in an institution for the rest of my life.”

“You know,” Brandon says, “you’re not the least bit romantic.”

 “Or better yet,” Kathryn says, “come find me, somewhere in the past.”

“It might not even work for me. And even if I were to succeed, how would I even guarantee we’d end up in the same parallel universe?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“Such faith,” Brandon says, smile forming in the corners of his lips. “In that case, while you’re waiting for me to either show up or grow up,” Brandon draws her close before dropping to one knee, “you’ll need a new identity, won’t you? There can’t very well be two Kathryn Chou’s wandering around in the same area.”

Kathryn gasps. “Brandon, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to propose, you ungrateful brat.” His full-fledged grin lights up his face, and Kathryn tries to memorize every line and shadow, every nuance of texture.

She laughs. “You don’t even have a ring.”

Brandon climbs to his feet. “Please, that’s the easy part.” He grabs a handful of wires from off the table, holding them up. “Which color do you prefer?”

“Blue, please.”

“Coming right up.” He snatches up a wire cutter and a set of pliers, frowning down at them, until he holds up a circle of wire in triumph. “Ta dah!”

She applauds.

“So, is that a yes?”

“Yes, Brandon Little,” she says, “Yes,” and presents her left hand. The circle wedges on the second knuckle of her ring finger. “It’s too small.”

“Shoot, probably should’ve measured it around your finger first.” He pushes down on it, but it won’t budge any further. “I guess I’ll get you a better one when I see you next.”

Kathryn raises her hand up to her face, remembers a long-ago ring of twisted supermarket twist ties. “No, I like it.” She hurries to the refrigerator. “Let’s see, what do we have? Ah,” she pulls out a couple bottles of wine coolers, “this calls for a celebration.”

“Fancy,” Brandon says. She passes him a bottle and they clink them together. “To the future, and the past.”

“Hear hear,” she says.

Much later, they sit side by side, staring at the time machine. “You really think it’ll work?” Kathryn asks.

“I don’t know,” Brandon admits. “All my calculations say it will. But you know it’s a one-way one-shot, make-it-or-break-it sort of try. Still not sure why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.” He leans against her, his shoulder warming hers. “If it doesn’t work, promise you won’t be too upset?”

She shakes her head, “At least I’ll know I tried.”

“Kathryn?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Thank you.”

“You know, you really are the least romantic person ever.”

Kathryn kisses his cheek. “Maybe I’ll be more romantic in another timeline.”

“Promises promises.” His hand clasps hers. She can feel his pulse throb against her skin.

She wraps her arms around his waist. “Will you visit Mama, Baba, and Nainai for me? I don’t want them to be lonely, waiting for me to come.”

“I will.”

Kathryn stands up, hesitates, then grabs him to her, pressing a hard kiss to his lips. “Come find me, Brandon.”

She pulls away and steps inside the chamber of the machine, smoothing down her blouse.

“Ready?” Brandon asks, his hand resting on top of the door.

Kathryn takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “Yup.”

The door closes, leaving her in complete darkness and silence.

When she blinks again, she’s standing in the middle of an empty sidewalk. Kathryn shudders, her eyes scanning the streets for any signs.

There.

Oh God, she’s actually in the right place.

She pushes through a glass door into a fast food restaurant. “Excuse me,” she says to the weedy boy standing behind the counter. “Can you tell me what date it is?”

He squints at her. “Are you on drugs or something?”

“Just tell me what day it is. And the year.”

His mouth purses, and he looks like he’s about to call his manager over. But, after a shrug, he tells her.

“And the time,” she presses. “What time is it?”

The boy’s head cocks over to an oil-clouded clock hanging up on the wall.

She puts a hand out on the counter to steady herself. It worked. It actually worked. She has five minutes to change history.

Kathryn runs outside.

Her feet pause at the corner. It’s this intersection. She’s sure of it; she’d managed to drag that small piece of information from Baba.

But there’s no one there yet that matches a white woman with dark hair.

Wait.

There.

On the other side of the street, a woman is crossing towards Kathryn. And off to the right, a dark-blue car is barreling down on her. The same car she saw in her mama’s photo albums with Baba’s hand lying possessively on the roof. Kathryn flings her arms into the air, trying to get the woman’s attention. “Stop,” she yells. “Stop. Go back.”

The woman startles and pauses in the middle of the crosswalk, staring at Kathryn. No. This is going all wrong. She’s done nothing except cause the accident to happen.

Kathryn dashes forward. She’s spent almost her whole life waiting for this moment. Mama always said she was the most stubborn child, and Kathryn won’t let anything prove her mama wrong. 

The woman’s shirt is soft, her flesh yielding underneath the force of Kathryn’s palms.

Pain explodes along her side. So much pain. Her breath flies out of her from the force. The ground rushes up to meet her.

“Miss? Miss! Oh God, oh God. Don’t move.” Hands pat against her shoulders and down her back. “Somebody,” the frantic voice shouts, “somebody call the ambulance. Please.” Something smooths down her hair. Kathryn thinks of Nainai and how much she misses her confident cackle. “Hey, it’s going to be ok. Ok? You’re going to be just fine. The ambulance is going to come and they’ll get you fixed up and you’ll be fine. Can you tell me your name?”

Kathryn tries to speak, but she chokes on the liquid filling her throat. She coughs. It splatters hot against her bottom lip. “Kathryn,” she says. Her chest hurts. She thinks of Brandon. He would still be in the living room, waiting and wondering if she’d succeeded.

She wonders if there’s a little boy with his curly dark hair and pale eyes out there somewhere in this alternate timeline who will never grow up to love her. If Brandon will really come for her, only to find no one waiting. And it makes her feel unbearably lonely.

She’s done what she set out to do, but, somehow, all she can think of is Brandon. “Kathryn…Little,” she says out loud.

“Ok, Kathryn, we’re going to get you help. I can’t believe the nerve of some people. Hitting someone and never stopping.”

“A-are you ok?”

“Don’t talk. Save your energy. I’m fine. You saved my life.” The woman’s bright blue eyes fill with tears. Her pastel-pink shirt is smeared with Kathryn’s blood. “Thank you.”

Blue eyes. A shirt stained with blood. Something prompts Kathryn to ask, “What’s your name?”

“Betty,” the woman says. “Betty Randall. Now, hush, no more talking.”

A roar of wind fills her eardrums.

No. No. She’d changed nothing.

And then—she realizes, labored breath easing, she’d changed nothing. She can almost see Brandon’s face, can feel his hands gripping hers as he’d slipped his makeshift ring over her finger. An infinite series of universes. Over and over again slipping that ring on, having it get stuck on the knuckle, an infinite spiral of them laughing and cheering each other with cheap wine coolers.

Brandon.

“I’m coming back, baby,” she whispers. “I’m coming back to you.”

And maybe, in a single universe, she’ll choose to stay with him instead, and she’ll get to save Kathryn’s life, all at the same time.