I DID IT.
The dog was all over him. Licking him. Yapping excitedly.
It was shaggier than the dog Adam had just seen in the viewfinder. Older.
But definitely alive.
Lianna pulled Jazz away. “I don’t know why he always does this to you, Adam. He just loves you so-o-o much.”
“But—but—this is—how can you be so calm?” Adam stammered.
He knelt down and hugged the cocker spaniel. He felt the warmth of Jazz’s tongue on his cheek.
“Liannaaaaa!” a voice called from the kitchen. “Is your boyfriend here yet?”
“Yes!” Lianna called back. She smiled at Adam. “Sorry. That’s what she says about any male.”
Adam nodded. But he wasn’t listening. He was staring at the white-haired woman in the kitchen entryway.
Lianna’s grandmother.
“Oh…my…god,” he murmured.
“I know.” Lianna nodded, sniffing deeply. “Those cookies smell awesome. Let’s go before Sam eats them all.”
But she died in the train wreck.
I didn’t save her—just Jazz.
Adam felt light-headed as he walked to the kitchen.
Mr. and Mrs. Frazer were bustling around, doing chores. Grandma was taking a tin of hot cookies to the table. Sam was reaching over her shoulder for an early helping.
Lianna sneered at her brother. “Pig.”
“Swallow, please,” Mrs. Frazer said.
Adam sat numbly. Grandma was approaching the table again with a tray of steaming mugs. “Here’s your hot chocolate, Adam. With mini-marshmallows, just the way you like it.”
How does she know that?
Adam tried to recall memories of Grandma, but he didn’t have many. A couple of handshakes and some small talk, that was it.
It doesn’t matter.
Everything’s different now. I saved Jazz, and everything’s different.
He suddenly thought about the car in the driveway.
“Uh, Mrs. Frazer…” he began tentatively. “Your Chevy…what ever happened to it?”
“I sold that hunk of junk, oh, three or four years ago,” Grandma said. “The gears kept slipping.”
“She almost ran over Jazz,” Sam piped up.
Grandma sighed sadly. “Poor little puppy. I went into Drive instead of Reverse, and he was in front of the car.”
“I never saw a dog jump so far,” Mr. Frazer said.
Adam nearly choked on a marshmallow.
“I like my Volvo much better,” Grandma said. “It makes me feel like a teenager.”
“You drive like one,” Sam commented.
“Sam!” Lianna said.
“The car’s all dented up,” Sam explained. “Dad says Grandma should give up driving.”
“Oh?” Grandma said.
Lianna’s dad and mom exchanged an apprehensive glance. “All I meant,” Mr. Frazer said gently, “was that you might…consider giving up driving. Your eyesight—”
Grandma gave a little derisive hoot. “My eyes are holding steady, thank you very much.”
She still drives.
She never killed Jazz, so she never gave up driving. And because she didn’t give up driving, she never took that train…
It was all becoming clear.
Saving Jazz had saved Grandma.
Adam downed his hot chocolate in one gulp and stood up. “Thanks for the dessert. Lianna? Can we see that movie now?”
“Sure.”
Taking his videocamera, he went into the den.
He let Lianna in and shut the door tightly.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “I am spinning. Do you realize what this means?”
Lianna glanced at him curiously. “What what means?”
“Grandma. Jazz. They’re alive.”
“Why shouldn’t they be?”
Her eyes were blank. Baffled.
She doesn’t know.
“Lianna, you know about the videocamera, right? About what it can do?”
“Adam, of course I do. That’s why we’re here. To talk about Ripley’s ridiculous idea. It’s bad enough you want to go. How can you possibly let him? And what on earth do you mean by—”
“I have to go. Because I can change the past, Lianna. I just did it. I saved Jazz’s life—and your grandmother’s.”
“Uh…say that again?”
“Lianna, listen to me. As of a few minutes ago, you had no Grandma and no Jazz. Do you remember that?”
Lianna shrank back. “Adam, something has happened to you. You’re crazy.”
“Okay. How about the big train derailment about two years ago—it killed about twenty people?”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“Your grandmother was supposed to be on that train. Why? Because she was supposed to have given up driving. Why? Because exactly four years ago, on that day when her Chevy slipped into Drive, she ran over Jazz. She killed him. But I changed that, Lianna!”
Lianna reached for the doorknob, but Adam placed himself in her way.
“Let me go, Adam.”
“Don’t you see? I went into the past. I knew what was going to happen to Jazz, and I stopped it from happening. And now the whole past has just…reshuffled. As if the accident never happened.”
“Please. Go home before I scream!”
“Don’t. Think about it, Lianna! Didn’t you say I couldn’t change the past, because what’s done is done?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what if I can? What if I did? What if Jazz and Grandma really were dead, and I saved them? What’s done is done, right? Their deaths suddenly never happened—so you have no memory of it!”
“Nothing happened to them!”
“So that proves it!”
“Just because you say so? Just because you claim Grandma and Jazz died, I’m supposed to accept that? Adam, you could say that up until ten minutes ago, we were all chimpanzees—but zoom, you went into the past, changed that, and wiped out all memories.”
Hopeless.
How could she believe him? How could anyone believe a story like this?
I wouldn’t believe it.
He flopped down onto the sofa.
“And what about your memory?” Lianna asked. “Wouldn’t it be wiped out, too, if what you say is true? Why do you remember these deaths?”
“I don’t know! Maybe it’s because I did the time travel. I saw both versions. I mean, I’m the same person. Even if I jump back and forth in time, my memory stays in a straight line. It records everything I see.”
“That is the most horrible, ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Lianna said.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. If only I’d had a tape in the camera!
Adam spotted a package of blank videotapes in the Frazers’ wall unit. He stood up and took one. “The next time I go into the past,” he said, “I’ll have proof.”
He pressed EJECT and shoved the tape into the slot.
It stopped halfway.
He pushed harder. No luck.
“What the—?” Adam peered into the tape bay. Bits of plastic and metal were twisted off, mangled. “It’s broken.”
“You dropped it pretty hard on the driveway.”
“That wouldn’t damage it on the inside, would it?”
Maybe…or maybe it’s something else.
Adam thought back. He’d had the camera with him all day. No one could have tinkered with it.
Except for one time.
“Lianna, when I left Ripley’s bedroom to get snacks, what did he do?”
“Are you suggesting…?” Lianna’s voice trailed off. “Well, I did go to the bathroom for a minute. But Ripley wouldn’t have done something like that.”
“You said he wants to time travel. Maybe he tried to rig this for himself.”
“You think so?”
Adam’s head was throbbing. He stretched out on the sofa and took a few deep breaths.
Okay. Think.
You don’t really need that tape.
The camera will work without it. It did for Jazz.
Just don’t let Ripley near the camera before tomorrow.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I see in him,” Lianna said quietly. She began running her fingers through Adam’s hair. “I mean, we’re still together and all, but each day we seem farther apart.”
Adam felt a sudden rush of feeling. And exhaustion.
His eyes were beginning to close.
“Go ahead,” Lianna whispered. “Sleep.”
She put a movie in the VCR. A dreamy, sappy soundtrack began to play.
Adam drifted off in a cloud of thoughts—Ripley, Lianna, Edgar, and a thousand other people all swirling around to the music of Lianna’s video.
Then, once again, the accident began to assemble itself in a dream. Once again, he saw the ice and the swirl of hockey uniforms.
But the perspective was different. The dream was framed as if Adam were watching the past through the videocamera lens.
And just as the event unfolded, just as Edgar began skating around the younger Adam, taunting and teasing, Adam felt a tug. As if someone had entered the dream and was trying to take away his camera.
Ripley. It must be Ripley.
Adam’s eyes opened.
Lianna was slowly pulling the videocamera out of his arms.
“What are you doing?” Adam cried out.
Lianna recoiled, letting go of the videocamera. “Nothing!”
“You’re taking it!”
“I am not! How could you even think that? I just wanted you to be comfortable.”
Easy. Take it easy.
“Sorry,” Adam muttered.
“Adam, you are paranoid.”
“I know. It’s just—I had this dream—I was watching the accident—Ripley was taking my camera away.”
“Adam, trust me. He will not get that camera. No way. No matter what he tells me to do—?
Lianna’s face suddenly froze.
Adam’s sleep-addled mind snapped to full attention. “What has he told you to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Did he tell you to take the camera?”
“It doesn’t matter, Adam. I have a mind of my own.”
Adam felt a chill. He took the camera and stood up. “I better get home. Sorry, Lianna. I guess I am paranoid—and nervous.”
Lianna shrugged and turned back to the TV. “I’ll let you know how the movie ends.”
Adam felt weak as he walked home.
He glanced backward at Grandma’s car.
Was it there earlier?
He couldn’t remember.
Maybe the whole episode was all some kind of concoction. Maybe Grandma and Jazz never died.
After the accident, the doctors had told him he’d had a concussion. Concussions were serious. You may forget things, they’d said. You may see things that haven’t occurred.
And it may not happen right away. It may happen much later, when you least expect it.
Four years later?
Was that what was happening?
Maybe the camera was one big illusion.
Maybe I’m totally cracking up.