TWENTY-EIGHT
“We call it shifting. Old stuff to all you guys by the time we started kindergarten. For us . . .” She looked at her brother and they both shrugged. “It’s how it is. How it’s always been. It’s our life.”
“We were up to middle school before we tumbled that not everybody lived with vamps and zoms and weres.” Her brother chortled. “In fact, hardly anybody did. Made for some strange-o sleepovers.”
I shuddered at the thought of keeping everyone’s nature hidden from various strange children all in some stage of sugar inebriation and, judging from the looks on Tina’s and Sinclair’s faces, they were having the same horrific vision.
“It’s like your pregnancy, Mama.”
“I don’t really . . .” Jess shot a look at me and I gave her my “what?” shrug. “I don’t remember much of it. Just that everything worked out. Mostly I felt like whatever was going on in—”
“Your uterus of the damned,” Marc supplied helpfully.
“That everything would be fine,” she finished after shooting him a glare that practically smoked. “Other people worried—Betsy’s mom worried and then Betsy did, too, for a bit—but we . . .” She looked at DadDick.
His reply was slow and careful, as though he was considering every word before speaking. “It all turned out. And it was like any other pregnancy—back me up on this, Jess—in that mostly we wanted healthy babies. And like I said, it all turned out.”
Sure, it did. But it was all the way around the world from “any other pregnancy.” The way the Ant laid it out,12 I didn’t just accidentally change the timeline on my trip to the gross past (no air-conditioning) and horrific future (too many zombies). Moving myself from various dimensions of existence left me changed, and it wasn’t just the vampire thing. I couldn’t zap myself to and from Hell the first time I woke up dead; I couldn’t do it a year after I woke up dead. I couldn’t do it at all until a few months ago and the speed with which I started to get a handle on it was a little
(terrifying)
disconcerting.
So take my undead shenanigans + the Antichrist being a blood relative × Satan always ready to stir up trouble ÷ time travel = I am subtly changed, and by subtly, I mean incredibly. One of those things where if any one of those factors had dropped, we wouldn’t all be in the kitchen talking to Jessica’s newborns who could legally drive.
Long story short (ever notice how when people say that, it almost always indicates “this is gonna be a long story no matter how I tell it, so get comfy”?), even though Jessica was a regular person (comparably speaking), my physical proximity sort of rubbed off on people I spent the most time with. Marc wasn’t rotting because I was around. And Jessica’s pregnancy, which only existed after I changed the timeline, was supernatural . . . or so scientific we lacked the understanding to get it.
A lot to take in, even for us. Having the twins explain their maybe-mystical, maybe-science-we-don’t-understand natures to their parents was the best way to keep them calm and help them accept the chaos they had to know was coming.
Coming, hell. The chaos was here, and the chaos loved Orange Juliuses. The chaos was pretty damned adorable.
“Sometimes you were three months along”—she was prompting her mother—“and then the next day you’d be six months along. And a week later you’d hardly be showing and a week after that you’d look ready to—”
Her son mimed an explosion, complete with waving hands and those phlegmy blowing-up sounds boys can do almost from birth.
“Nobody who lived here noticed, because you’re all under Onniebetty’s spell, for lack of a word that actually makes sense. Grammy Taylor noticed, but only because she didn’t live here.”
Grammy Taylor . . . awwww! Good to know my mom’s still around in fifteen years. Except . . . um . . . wait, the twins aren’t time traveling, they’re twins from a different universe, so my mom might not be . . . damn, I’m getting a headache . . .
“We’re the same. You see? Your pregnancy was kinda the harbinger to our natures.” They stopped talking and making explosion noises and looked expectant, as if that was all they had to say and we were about to assure them that, yep, we got it now, thanks for stopping by.
Tina cleared her throat. “Young lady, if you please, speaking only for myself—”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You’re not alone in not getting this,” Marc added. “I thought a medical/scientific background would help me. I was wrong.”
“—could you elaborate?”
“Sure, Teeney Tina. Mama and Dad are norms,” the girl said. “The only ones in this circus of a home. Everyone else—including us—is mystical or supernatural in nature. Mom was pregnant after Onniebetty—”
Marc snickered and I took the high road of maturity and only kicked him a little. “Nnnnf!”
“Serves you right,” I muttered under my breath.
“—changed the timeline. Once Onniebetty was back, she was around for the whole thing. It changed us. In another timeline we don’t exist—Mama picked Betsy, not Dad.” Shooting her father an apologetic glance with Jessica’s lovely brown eyes, she continued. “After the change, though, Dad never gave Mama the ultimatum, so we’re here. But it’s us through all the iterations of the timelines. In some timelines Mama didn’t get pregnant for years. Or got pregnant much sooner. Any timeline where things didn’t go exactly the way they did in this one means we’re older or younger or not here yet. It’s . . . I know it’s a lot to . . .” She made a snatching motion with her hands. “It’s a lot for your brains to grab. I guess the best explanation is that your newborn twins have shifted into a timeline where you and Dad coupled up much earlier.”
“But you wouldn’t be here? You wouldn’t be alive?” DadDick’s tone brought my attention back to him in a hurry. He talked like someone had a hold of his throat.
I got it, as much as a nonparent could grasp such a thing. It was one thing for me to have the “hey, when I left, you were out of Jessica’s life forever, and now that I’m back you’re not only here but you’ve knocked her up, weird, huh?” conversation. It was another for him to love his life with Jessica and the twins and realize that if one little thing had been different, he’d be alone.
Clearly his children were as alarmed by that tone of voice as I was, because in an instant they were up and at him with hugs and pats. It looked like he was trapped in a hurricane of gangly elbows and knees but it served its purpose: he calmed right down.
“It seems peculiar and way too unsettling but I promise, I promise—”
The boy took up where his sister left off. “—you get used to it, it’s no big by our fifth; you’re more disconcerted about Uncle Sink adopting four more Labs without telling you—never mind, I didn’t say that.”
“Four?” Uncle Sink said, delighted. “What an outstanding idea, how clever your children are, Detective.”
“Absolutely not!”
“We’re a little clever,” his son objected.
“Not you, hon, of course not you, and, come on, Eric! We’ve already talked about how we can’t take on more—we’re getting off the subject.” He turned back to his teenagers. “Can you control it? Can you—what’d you call it—can you shift back to newborn? Or—God forbid, I don’t know if my heart could take it—ahead to your twenties? Or any time in between?”
“Nawp.” He shook his head. “It just happens. In fact, I’m hugely surprised we’re still here. We’ll blip out pretty soon. That’s what you guys said it was like. We just blink out and there’s a ‘pop’ and—”
“From the air rushing into the space we just occupied. Science, hooray!”
“—and we’re back to the age you’d expect.”
“I thank you for taking the time to explain,” Tina said with customary courtesy. “And none of this makes the slightest sense.”
Welcome to my world, honey.
“Next time, bring hand puppets,” Marc advised, which I should have found sarcastic but instead thought was a pretty great idea. Hand puppets would definitely help.
“Maybe next time you see us like this you’ll be yawning from how everyday it is,” the boy said with a hopeful smile. His sister nodded so hard she had to steady herself against DadDick.
I tried to think about how these two could be any awesomer and came up nada. Well, maybe if they’d come back from the mall with Orange Juliuses for everybody. When I thought about how jealous I’d been of them even before they’d been born—I had been dreading being usurped in Jessica’s life by incontinent, nonspeaking infants—it made me want to squirm.
Speaking of the delectable orange drink of the gods, he’d left his drink unattended. Foolish boy! I sidled closer; all the stress and shouty emotions had left me parched. That Orange Julius was my due, he owed me the rest, or at least a sip, and nothing would stop me from—dammit.
“I was just getting it for you,” I whined.
“Nice try, vampire hag.” The brat helped himself to a noisy slurp. “Ahhhh! Never have I had a more refreshing beverage, all the sweeter because you were old and slow. Reminds me.” He tossed a silvery flash at Sinclair, who snatched it out of the air quicker than thought. “Thanks. Ace run, like always.”
Sinclair clutched the car keys and we all heard the plastic crack. Not good; now he’d have to use the actual metal key to lock, unlock, and start it. “I demand the truth. You will be blunt, but no harm shall come to you.” Were his . . . yes. His lips were trembling as he prepared to face catastrophic news. “Is my automobile intact?”
This was too much, even from Gearhead Boy. “You went from slutty loner to loving a lot of things besides me and it’s making me nervous.”
“By nervous, Onniebetty means insecure,” the other brat piped up.
“You stay out of this; you’re only a few weeks old. I’m serious, Sinclair. The cars, playing in traffic without the cars, Fur and Burr—”
“I forget! They jumped out of my mind, c’mon!” Jessica’s son handed me his drink (victory! that brat was no match for my wiles or how I was just standing there like a blond lump) and started for the mudroom door. “Right now it’s just Fur and Burr and they’re still puppies in this timeline.”
“Ooooh!” His sister was right behind him. “It’s fun to see them again when they’re babies,” she clarified, like we’d insist on an explanation as to why they would want to play with adorable puppies. “They grow up so fast.”
From Marc: “Wow.”
DadDick: “Yeah.”
From Tina: “She genuinely doesn’t understand the enormous irony in those comments.”
From me, since I finally caught on: “Oh! I get it. Irony! Heh.”
But at the last second, she seemed to change her mind, because she turned and came straight at me. “You ratted me out when I was fourteen,” she whispered, small, strong hands clutching my wrist as she leaned up and cupped a hand over my ear and her mouth. “But you didn’t rat me out last month when the garage accidentally burned down.”
“What?”
“Shhhh! So listen. It’s not your fault. You wanted to help and they saw it and used it. But you’ll do a good job. So don’t worry.”
“What?”
She spun away from me and charged toward the door. “I want a pup right now!”
“Wait, get back here,” I commanded. “What were you talking about? And we’ve got more questions.”
“Be speedy, then!” her brother shouted from the mudroom, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to his sister or to me.
“Get back here right now,” I said in my best “I’m the queen so don’t fuck with me” voice, which had the exact effect it did on Fur and Burr: no effect. Again: why couldn’t I intimidate people when I really needed to?
The mudroom door slammed shut and I was reminded that a) they had no control over when and where they shifted, or to what age, and b) they’d expected to be gone already. And at once, though there was no logic to it, I knew they were going. The others didn’t seem to pick up on it—or maybe were still brain-fried from the events of the last hour—because they were standing around staring at each other.
I rushed to the door and groped for the knob. “Wait!” I screamed, furious I hadn’t thought of this sooner. I wrenched open the door. “What are your names?”
I was greeted by Fur and Burr, who were yapping and licking the faces of two newborns, who seemed surprised but not upset and only wriggled in an attempt to avoid canine drool instead of crying.
Aw, son of a bitch. Now we’d have to depend on Jess and DadDick to know their names. Which would involve actually naming them.
I wasn’t going to hold my breath. Vodka and Orange Juice it was!