Margaret

2014

WE DON’T CALL IT A GIFT. I did once, entirely by accident. The word just slipped out the way words sometimes do when you’re trying to read a book, eat a peppermint pattie, and have a conversation with your dad all at the same time. Big mistake. My dad whirled around, cobra fast, and corrected me so sharply that I swallowed the stupid pattie whole. Luckily it was fun-sized, even though there was nothing fun about it that day.

No, what most of us call it—when we talk about it, which isn’t often—is “the quirk,” sometimes “the O’Malley quirk” although that’s not quite right because it’s been paddling around in our gene pool for so long that there are plenty of people with other last names in our family who have it. Plus, rumor has it (“rumor” being mainly my uncle Joe) that other people totally unrelated to us have the quirk, too, or had it. Picasso, for one. Harriet Tubman, for another. But no one really knows that for sure. It could just be Uncle Joe, trying to lump us in with the important folks.

Lots of families have genetic quirks. Double-jointed thumbs. Perfect pitch. Synesthesia, where sounds and smells—and letters—or in the exceptionally cool case of Duke Ellington, musical notes, blossom into colors before your eyes. Heterochromia, where your eyes are two different colors; a girl named Iris (that was her name, no lie) on my field hockey team had this, and everyone was crazy jealous, including yours truly. Extra ribs. A photographic memory, which some scientists say doesn’t even exist but which seems to run in families all the same.

My family has time travel.

As for how it works, well, all I can tell you is what my dad told me. It’s not magic, exactly, although parts of it seem pretty magical. So do a lot of natural occurrences, though, when you think about it: the Northern Lights, those people who can reel off prime numbers up to six digits the way you and I would recite the multiplication table, the speed of light, black holes, monarch migration, and practically every single thing bees ever do.

My dad gave me the scoop the day after my tenth birthday. It wasn’t some big, ceremonious presentation, no “now my child, I will pass down the wisdom of the ages” type of thing, and he was really careful not to scare me. But he was serious for sure, especially when he swore me to secrecy. “Not even Charlie,” he told me, which is how I knew he meant business.

We were sitting on our front porch eating leftover cake. Every now and then, while he was talking, my dad would sketch pictures in the air with his fork or draw a little diagram on his napkin. Since my dad’s not such a great drawer, this wasn’t so helpful, but that was okay because he is an excellent explainer.

Here’s what he said:

“Time isn’t just one long tunnel all of us humans travel down, keeping each other company inside while we’re alive, and that we leave behind for the rest to keep on exploring when we die.”

Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about the nature of time before, but if I had, I would’ve described it more or less the way he just had, so I said, “It’s not?”

“Nope. Time is a garden hose stuffed in a suitcase.”

I laughed.

“No kidding,” said my dad. “An infinitely long garden hose stuffed into a very big suitcase, a suitcase larger than just about everything you can think of, including our universe.”

“That’s big.”

“Yep. And the hose is stuffed in such a way that every bit of it is touching every other bit of it, if you can imagine that.”

I tried. “I can’t.”

“That’s okay, I can’t either. But the point is that every bit of time is actually curled up cozily beside us, all day every day, even if it is hopelessly, eternally just out of reach. Out of reach unless—and here’s where things get tricky, so please pay attention—you figured out a way to poke a pinhole in the walls of the hose, those walls being otherwise known as the limits of reality as we know them, and you slipped through the pinhole from one loop to the next in an instant.”

“Yeah, but nobody could do that,” I scoffed.

It’s possible that I rolled my eyes at this point, because my dad said, “Once you’ve stopped rolling your eyes, ladybug, do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Picture your average pair of workout pants.”

I laughed, again.

“Or shirt. Actually, any item of breathable, high-performance athletic apparel will do. When you look at your item, it appears to be all one piece, right? But actually, it’s full of holes, exactly like . . . can you guess?”

I shook my head.

“The fabric of the universe! Everything you see around you is at least as much not-there as it is there. The spaces between the particles inside the atoms that make up your own body? Huge, like the distances between the stars in the Milky Way. The pinholes in the garden hose? No need to poke them yourself; they’re already there, at least until they close up. The basic material of reality is all loosely connected and shifting, the tiny bits shimmering and scattering into holes that flash open and shut, blinking all around us.”

I tried to picture this, and, weirdly, I could. So I nodded.

My dad continued. “The problem is that almost nobody can see the blinking holes because most people’s perception is as holey as everything else. You know those flip books? The ones with a picture on every page, pictures that vary just a little, so that when the pages are turned quickly, the pictures turn into a kind of animated cartoon?”

“I made one in art class,” I said. “Remember? The guy diving off the edge of the soup bowl and swimming around with the dumplings.”

“I do remember. The animation with those books, even one as excellent as yours was, tends to be a little herky-jerky, but if you added more pages and flipped faster, it would smooth out, look continuous, tell a story. Same goes for perception. Take Mr. Yang, for instance.”

My dad nodded in the direction of our neighbor, who was running down our street, like he did every weekend morning, listening to his iPod and dancing to the music just ever so slightly. I smiled.

“Take him where?” I said.

“Ha ha. Your eyes are seeing him at just ten frames per second, which is pretty herky-jerky, but your brain is guessing what’s in those blank spaces and is kindly filling them in for you, adding pages to the flip book, so that Mr. Yang’s running looks seamless, smooth as silk.”

“Well, except for the dancing,” I said.

“In situations like these, your brain usually guesses correctly, but there’s always the chance that in one of the gaps, Mr. Yang doesn’t keep running, but instead jumps—at lightning speed—twenty feet in the air, grabs a Frisbee out of the sky with his teeth, and flings it into the distance. And you miss it because your eyes don’t see it and your brain guesses that he won’t grab a Frisbee, that he’ll just plain run, with a few dance moves thrown in. Get it?”

“I think so.”

“Similarly, your brain guesses that in one of the gaps between frames in whatever you happen to be seeing, a pinhole in the form of a portal into the past doesn’t blink open and shut. So you miss it, the portal, as though it were never there because, for you, it never was. Unless you’re an O’Malley.”

At this, I jerked my head around to look at my dad. He nodded.

“Or a Picasso or a Tubman, if Uncle Joe is to be believed, which maybe he isn’t. If you’ve got the O’Malley quirk, your big, odd, glass-green eyes, at least while you’re young, before your eyesight starts to fade, can see things other people’s eyes don’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like way more pages of the flip book than other people can see. Like the Frisbee between the teeth and the blinking holes in time.”

“Whoa.”

“Whoa is right. But even we don’t see this stuff all the time, because how would that be? Can you imagine it?”

I imagined it. Images coming at me from every direction all the time, bombarding my brain. I shivered at the thought. My dad grabbed a piece of my hair and gently tugged it, which was one of his versions of a hug.

“People would shut down, short out, freak, right? The O’Malleys, too. The good news is that, under ordinary circumstances, our brains block out all but what we need to know in order to function in an ordinary way. On a daily basis, we perceive more or less what everyone else does. But unlike everyone else, we can deliberately put ourselves in extraordinary circumstances, in exactly the right position and mood and frame of mind to, well, travel.”

“Travel,” I said, wonderingly, turning over the word in my mind. “Time travel?”

My dad nodded. “We can see the holes in time, choose the one we want, and slip through, quick as a mongoose, into the past. Possibly also into the future, although no one seems to know about that, which probably means either that we can’t do it, we just don’t see those portals, or that if any O’Malley ever has done it, she or he hasn’t, uh, well . . .”

“Lived to tell the tale,” I finished, grimly.

“Anyway, traveling is something we have to choose to do. Or choose not to do.”

And this is where the forswearing came in, the words generations of O’Malleys promised to live by, even if we knew they weren’t precisely true:

There is one Now: the spot where I stand,

And one way the road goes: onward, onward.

I forswore for the first time that day, and my dad would have me repeat it from time to time over the years, just for good measure. Everyone takes the vow. Nobody breaks the vow.

But, after my conversation with Grandpa Joshua about changing the past, saving Aristotle and therefore Luke and therefore (oh please, please) my dad, as I rode home from Charlie’s house, blindly, wildly zigzagging down the road like a bat in sunlight, I began to consider the possibility—and it was a terrifying one—that that “Nobody” might not include me.