Sam was seven and three-quarters when it happened again. Small for her age, in no other way outstanding, she was surprised when she leaned over and vomited cheese snacks onto the asphalt playground. Classmates scattered howling from the long aluminium bench. The ground swam. There were spots in the corners of her eyes again, that tingling in her legs. She held herself at the knees and stared as the black grains danced below. Any minute, the throbbing would begin in the temples, then the pressure from swelling veins, the inflated feeling. Light would burst the world. Jill was somewhere, running for help across the curved lines painted on the asphalt for games, pale ponytail swinging. Something came over her, the shape of a sound. She couldn’t let it get its tricks inside her. But, oh, the secret place that opens. All those lines that fold and unfold themselves. Into grids, curves, angles. Into doubles, circles. A lifted cup.
Another now. The next. This time, a white station wagon burns on the highway. Flags of fire flicker from its black shell. She’s close enough to feel the heat of it, but she’s not afraid.
She can smell the by-products of melting upholstery as they spill into the air, taste the smoke on her breath, even recognise the car and the figures beside it, but all she can hear is that strange high whine. The fire shimmers mutely. A pall of grey smoke rises over the bleached field. When the tyres catch, it turns black. It smells like danger, but she’s not afraid. She’s only passing. And almost as soon as she’s seen it, it’s gone.
‘Feeling better?’
She opened her eyes a crack and made a tiny motion that sent stars of pain shooting across her forehead. Ivy grabbed her by the armpits and raised her to her chest. ‘You’re all right,’ she said, a little desperately. The stars clustered. Sam felt loose, her muscles floppy. It was hard to tell where she began and ended.
‘Ow.’ She struggled out of her mother’s grip and put her hands against the neutral sheets. Like coming up from the bed of the sea, the dark down in the grasses. The pain was the same whether or not she moved; this was an improvement. She closed her eyes, returned with the water.
While she slept, the pain dragged out invisibly, like tide. On waking, the world was made of plastic. Pain still lingered, wriggling like fish under the surface, but everything else was freshly conjured: the bed, the room, had been replaced while she was sleeping. She stumbled out into a bright reproduction of her kitchen.
‘How you feeling, kid?’ asked Ivy.
‘’Kay,’ said Sam.
Her mother appraised her, then patted the kitchen stool. ‘Hop up, I’m making us banana smoothies.’
Sam obeyed, though it was more a drag than a hop. She tucked her legs around the stool’s for balance. ‘There’s a car on the road,’ she said.
Ivy glanced out the kitchen window to the street. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The Corolla.’
‘On the Hummock road,’ she said.
A long spoon landed in a glass with nearly deadly decibels. The blender whizzed, and Sam’s head with it. The machine went on pulverising. When Ivy clicked it off her face was kind again.
‘What’s the story this time?’
‘A white car,’ Sam continued, hands to her eyelids. She thought for a moment. ‘White station wagon. It’s hard to tell, because it was going to be on fire.’
‘Is going,’ Ivy began to correct her, then stopped. With her father, before he died, the nurses had said it wouldn’t help; it was better just to go along with it. But this was different, surely. She busied herself with pouring, rinsed the blender jug at the sink. When she put it in the drainer, her hands were shaking. ‘White station wagon. Like the Reiths’ car?’ she said.
Sam swallowed. ‘It was them. They were standing there watching it,’ she said. Her voice was weak but clear. If she told her mother everything now, then she could remember it too, and when it happened – if it happened – they’d both know what it was.
‘When did you see this? When did you go out there?’
Sam drank, looking at her smoothie. ‘Just now.’
‘You didn’t go out when I was at work? You’re not telling fibs?’
Sam shook her head as forcefully as she could manage. The remnant throbbing reared and subsided. She liked Mrs Reith, who worked in the Foodtown. She was familiar with her stockinged calves, her smell of vitamin cream and menthol cigarettes, her gangling sons. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.
Jill’s dog had been a singular, a happy animal, until he licked her on the neck. Full grown but with the bounding energy of a puppy, Milo would not be contained by Mr Ellison’s efforts at a front fence. He had bitten wires from their pickets all morning. He had licked her neck, and run, and been hit by a car out by the roundabout. She should have seen it. These were not just dreams, they couldn’t be. She was supposed to help.
‘You have a moustache,’ Ivy said.
Sam wiped her hand across her upper lip. ‘I thought it was now already,’ she said. She licked the liquid from her hand and told it, ‘Time goes funny for me.’
Ivy was careful not to watch her too closely. ‘You’re the funny one, kid.’
Sam drained her glass, suddenly ravenous.
They climbed into the Corolla, and Ivy yanked the seatbelt past the place where it always jammed. She turned through the town’s few streets, the plant stacks circling them like gulls, and headed out towards the pink hills, past the welcome sign and the scrubby trees and the swamp with no swamp, just salt and mosquitos. Out of town, the land turned bruised and treeless, cracked into deep gullies. Sam knew it was wrong before they made the highway. These gullies were weed-green; she’d seen the pale dry of a summer that was months ago, or months away.
When Sam said here, Ivy made a clicking sound in her throat and kept driving. Sam spun in her chair to stare out the window at the empty place. She watched it disappear, then kept her back turned all the way up to the turn-off and down the smooth of the highway, until the first close-together houses of Hummock lurched by and Ivy pulled over on the gravel.
‘So. Where are they?’ The engine idled, died.
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said, turning and letting her shoulders fall back into the seat. ‘It isn’t time yet.’
Ivy held the handbrake. ‘You see what you’re doing?’
‘No,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t understand. It isn’t now.’ She put one hand under the other in her lap, pinched herself at the wrist.
‘Sam.’ Ivy’s voice was soft on the outside, hard on the inside. Sam pinched harder, then let go.
‘This is wrong. It’s meant to be summer.’ She kicked at the wiring that snaked out from beneath the dash.
‘You’re impossible.’ Ivy hit the clicking indicator, restarted the car and turned sharply on the narrow verge. The gravel crunched beneath the tyres, and the gears got stuck. ‘You know it’s impossible, right?’ She waggled the gearstick until it found its place and pulled out onto the highway again, heading back to Clapstone. ‘Telling stories,’ she said, almost under her breath. She was a hard frame leaning over the wheel. Sam felt punctured.
‘I don’t mean to,’ she said.
Hearing the hurt in her voice, Ivy’s angles softened. She glanced across at her. ‘I know you’re not trying to be dishonest. You’re just confusing it. Maybe you saw something on TV and now you’ve got your memories jumbled.’
Sam counted the white poles with their little red reflectors until they were going too fast to keep up. She put her feet up against the dash. Ivy didn’t mention them.
‘But the dog was,’ she said.
‘A coincidence,’ Ivy replied, scrabbling in the console for her cigarettes. Sam reached down and found the box and got one out for her, but Ivy didn’t light it; she was watching the empty highway.
‘Time’s like a road, see?’ she said finally, pointing her unlit cigarette at the windscreen. ‘And now’s like a car. It goes straight along in one direction. You can’t jump around on it willy-nilly.’ She felt in the dusty console again until she found a lighter. The Aspco road was beautifully smooth. Hadn’t they just been up and back?
‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘But –’
‘No buts, Sammy. I told you, it’s impossible.’
‘It’s not impossible,’ Sam said, pressing her heels against the glove box, right in their marks from before. ‘It’s just not here yet.’