37

It felt great to be home, but it felt horrible to have to tell Papou the truth. Corey shook as he and Leila walked down the stairs to the ground-floor apartment. Through the windows, he could see that the front living room was dark, and he had the sudden urge to run away.

Corey tried his apartment key, but it didn’t fit. “Jammed,” he said.

“You probably bent it,” Leila said. “I do that all the time.”

From behind them, a cat meowed. “Not now!” Leila hissed.

Corey turned to see an enormous white cat lumber away down the street. “Is that . . . ?”

“Auntie Flora, aka Catsquatch. We’ll deal with her later.” Leila pressed her face to the window. “I think someone’s in the kitchen.”

Corey rapped gently but firmly on the door. When no one answered, he tried again. Just as he was reaching for the buzzer, the door swung open. An old-time movie star with a carefully groomed silver beard and a cashmere sweater beamed at them. “Heyyy, welcome! Long time no see, huh?”

Corey had to blink his eyes. “Papou?”

“I know, I look like I’m about a hundred years old, right? Come in, come in!” He ushered them both into the living room, turning on the overhead lights. “How about I throw in a log and start a fire, like the old days?”

“Papou, you . . . you . . .” Corey sank into a plush sofa facing a brick fireplace. Leila and he exchanged a baffled look as she sat stiffly next to him. Sunday New York Times magazines were stacked high on the coffee table, and all were open to the crossword puzzles. Every square was filled in with pen. “Wow, Papou, you clean up really nice. When did you get here?”

“Ha! Nicely! I clean up nicely,” he declared, taking some kindling from a pile in a brass bucket. “Take care of your adverbs, paithi mou, and they will take care of you! Well, let’s see, I guess we got here around noon. Your mother was pretty galferstabbed, as you can imagine.”

Leila cocked her head. “Galfer—?”

“Flabbergasted,” Corey said. “He does anagrams on the spot.”

“Bravo!” Papou said, beaming.

“Papou, you said we,” Corey said. “‘We got here around noon.’ Who’s we? You didn’t bring Smig, did you?”

Papou put his finger to his lip. “Shhhh. But that’s funny.”

He had a big, expectant smile as he kneeled by the hearth. With quick, practiced movements, he threw in the kindling and rolled up some old newspapers among them. Then, after laying a log on top, he set the papers aflame. “There,” he said, sitting back on an armchair. “So, Corey. Catch me up. I want every detail.”

Corey swallowed hard. He realized that Papou knew. He had to know. And yet he was so upbeat, so excited about his own return to the family. “You’re amazing, Papou. Really brave.”

“I know,” Papou replied with a laugh. “Tell me about you!”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” Corey replied, fighting back the urge to cry. “I’m so, so sorry. I tried. I really did. It just didn’t work. But I can try again. I will. I promise. There’s just one thing. I—I think I have to tell Mom and Dad. About the time traveling. Everybody has to know.”

“Yes, of course,” Papou said. “That was always part of the plan. Just as we said—”

“It’s more than that. I had a scare, Papou. It was an accident. I went back a hundred years ago and almost got stuck in time.”

Papou leaned forward. “Oh?”

“Corey?” Mrs. Fletcher was coming down the stairs now, dressed in a nightgown. “Where on earth have you been all day?”

Corey took a deep breath. He looked at his grandfather, who gave a nod. “I have a lot to say, Mom,” Corey said. “But I need to say it with everybody here. The whole family.”

His mother gave him a worried look. “All right,” she said tentatively. “I’ll go get Zenobia and your dad.”

As she went upstairs, Papou stuck a poker in the fire and jostled the log. Sparks flew, rising upward. Corey’s mind tumbled back a few hours, to a hundred years earlier. He thought about the small fires in the Gash. The coal furnace in the Tenth Avenue locomotive. The stars above the Hudson River. The flames that exploded from the top floors of the World Trade towers . . .

“Corey? Is that you?”

A voice called out behind him, a voice too strange to be heard in his own house, yet familiar in a way that made him feel light-headed and a little scared. He wasn’t sure if it was real or part of his fever dream.

He turned.

Walking into the room was a woman with silver-black hair pulled into a ponytail, and that dream vanished like a spark into ash.

As Corey stumbled backward, falling on the sofa, she gave him a bright smile. “Guess what? We brought baklava, your favorite!”

He didn’t know her.

But he knew exactly who she was.

He’d seen her on the corner of Washington and Liberty. He’d seen her look at him, frightened and fragile, her face thinner and her hair jet-black. He’d watched her run away from a good but confused husband, taking refuge in a thousand-foot-tall box that would turn her to dust.

“I—I couldn’t stop you,” he said, his mouth bone-dry. “You went back to work. . . .”

“You kicked me out of your office,” Leila said.

Maria Fletcher sat on the arm of the sofa. Her smiling expression turned to confusion and she cast a quick glance to her husband.

“Are you okay, Corey?” Leila said. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“Did you . . . change something?” Papou asked. “In the past?”

“No!” Corey shot back. “I wanted to. I tried to. Just like we planned it, on our walk from the park! You had just come back from Canada. You were homeless. You’d gone back four times to nine-eleven, to try to keep her from going to work in the tower!”

Papou got up from the chair and sat by Corey, taking him by the hand. His eyes were intense and urgent. “Yiayia and I live in Maine, Corey. I haven’t been to Canada in years.”

Corey was short of breath now. He turned to his grandmother. “And you . . . how did you escape?”

“I never worked in the World Trade Center, Corey,” she said.

“No, you did!” Corey exclaimed. “Of course you did. At Karelian Group, in import-export!”

“Import-export, yes, but I’ve never heard of that firm,” she said with a shrug, “and I’ve been in that business all my life, so I’ve heard of all of them. Our company’s office was uptown.”

Leila was tapping on her phone. “Corey . . . ,” she said, her eyes fixed on the screen, “I’m looking at search results here. There is no Karelian Group. Does this have something to do with your time-hop?”

She didn’t know.

Leila didn’t know, and neither did Papou.

Their memories had adjusted to a new reality. A reality he had caused.

But how?

Corey’s mouth felt like sandpaper. For a moment he said nothing, for fear his head might fly off. Now his whole family was coming down the stairs. If they were talking to him, asking him questions, he didn’t hear them. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion.

He was picturing Ratboy’s face but wasn’t sure why.

Slowly he dug his hand into his pocket and fished out the wanted flyer. Shaking, he unfolded it and looked at the leering black-and-white photo of the man who had tried to kill him. The man who had died on his own knife, in a blaze set by the lantern he had smashed.

Corey ignored the list of aliases this time. Instead he focused on the label directly under his image.

His real name.

Eero Karelian.

I got me an education, fat man, he’d bragged to Oscar Schein. I’m gonna be in business someday, buying and selling in some fancy skyscraper while you’re passed out in your own piss.

In the history of New York, Ratboy was destined to succeed. But you can’t succeed if you’re not alive.

The butterfly effect. One change leads to another. Frederick Ruggles’s saved life. Ratboy Karelian’s lost life.

The paper dropped to the floor and Corey looked up to his grandmother. His yiayia. “You wouldn’t have wanted to work for them anyway,” he said.

His grandmother gave him a curious smile. Mom, Dad, and Zenobia were staring at him, looking like they wanted to go back to sleep.

But his papou’s eyes were tearing. Corey knew that somehow, he was figuring out what must have happened. “Oh dear God . . .” he murmured.

Corey would tell him all about it. Every detail. But that could wait.

He had a grandmother now, and it would be fun to get to know her.

He felt Leila’s arm around his shoulder. He put his around her, too—and his other arm around Maria Harvoulakis Fletcher.

His own, honest-to-goodness yiayia.

She was looking at him with such love. She’d been there. She’d seen him grow up. She knew him.

Would he ever gain those memories? Why hadn’t his own mind “adjusted”?

There was so much he didn’t understand. His thoughts flitted in his head like a small cave filled with a thousand bats.

He had to tell them. He had to explain what happened. But for now, he’d wait. The feeling was too good, and he wanted to savor it.

“I guess,” he said, “we should have that baklava.”

“We have baklava?” Zenobia shouted.

“Into the kitchen!” his dad announced.

Yiayia’s smile was like starlight, her laugh like a song heard for the first time. She took Corey’s hand and led him toward the kitchen. Her skin felt warm and soft and alive.

In his mind Corey heard a distant, Wyoming-accented voice shouting, “Yee-HAH!”

But he knew that was in his imagination. He had a big imagination.

Everyone said that.

And that was fine with him.