After dropping Gram off for the night, Roni lucked into a parking space one block from her apartment and walked in the opposite direction. Two blocks later, she sidled up to a stool at Connor’s Corner Bar. Near midnight and only a few customers — the heavy drinkers not willing to call it quits on a weeknight. A few of them eyed up Roni, perhaps hoping to get lucky, but thankfully, they read the situation right and returned to their drinks.
Roni ordered a shot, downed it, and ordered another. She wanted liquid fortitude to get her through the night — and only liquids from this universe. With any luck, the alcohol would provide a better sleep aid than any pills.
“You okay?” a grizzled man said from the end of the bar. He must have been near-seventy and had a beer gut to prove that he had spent most of his years in one bar or another.
“Fine,” she said, though her shot spilled on her hand as she attempted to bring it to her mouth. Throwing it back, she ordered two more.
“Care to talk about it?”
She glared at him. “Do I look like I want to talk?”
Sipping a beer, he said, “No, ma’am, you do not.”
“Then why are you bothering me?”
“People don’t usually come to a bar like this to be alone. They come to spill their guts, sometimes their drinks, and not be judged. Or to drown their sorrows, as the saying goes. Is that why you’re here? You broke up with a boyfriend or something?”
Roni swung her foot out and slipped off the stool. Her legs wobbled and the room took a short detour before lining up with her vision. Four shots in quick succession on an empty stomach — not a smart idea.
The man shook his head, and a few other men stared at her. “You all think you know what’s what,” she said, her words not quite crisp and clear. “You sit here in this pit and drink away, and you think you got it all under control, figured out, that you know the way the world works. Right? There are rich folk and poor folk and hard-working folk. But you’re wrong. There’s worlds and worlds and worlds out there. You can’t ever figure it out because the rules are not set in stone. It’s all in flux. One day, you’re struggling to find a job and have a good, normal life, and then BAM! Next day, nothing makes sense. Pretty soon you find yourself breaking into an old lady’s home to steal her memories.” Roni laughed at that. “Memories. Got to steal some since I ain’t got enough of my own.”
The men watched her as they would the television. She certainly wasn’t the first to get drunk too fast and monologue about things that made no sense. She wouldn’t be the last. For them, she was the entertainment for the evening.
She thought about ordering another shot but held off. Four was already three too many. Stumbling out of the bar, she let the night air refresh her senses. With her head clearing, she weaved her way back to her apartment.
By the time she reached her door, her stomach had decided that rushing alcohol through the body might not have been such a good idea. She clamped her mouth shut, fumbled with the keys, shoved open the door, and darted to her kitchen sink. The booze burned coming up as much as it had going down. Afterwards, however, she felt better, clearer. Which only served to bring back her jumbled thoughts over what had happened that night.
It had been thrilling — if she wanted to be honest — but the way Gram spoke bothered her. So nonchalant. As if robbing people had become second nature and only a slight inconvenience to the day.
Roni guessed that dealing with rips between universes year after year jaded a person towards other matters. After all, what better justification for any crime than trying to save the universe?
She meandered into her living room. Shoving aside a pile of rumpled clothes, she made room on the couch to plop down.
“It’s over,” she said, her voice hollow in the late night.
At some point in the next day or two, Elliot would track down Darin. Gram and Sully would join him and together, the three of them would stop the current madness. None of that, however, involved Roni. She had done her part, and she had nothing left to offer the group.
Gram knew that all along. She knew Roni did not have magic powers like the rest of them. She knew Roni would not be casual about thievery. The whole talk of legacy and decisions meant nothing. Gram had put on that act because she knew Roni would never join.
Roni rubbed her throbbing head. Where were these thoughts coming from? She and Gram had not gotten along much lately, but Roni knew better than to think so ill of her. Yet it felt like the truth. Not in some mystical, clairvoyant way, but rather, it seemed to Roni that she could assess Gram better lately.
“Or maybe I’m still a bit drunk,” she muttered.
She let her body fall to the side, her head resting on the clothes pile, and she closed her eyes. Something poked at her side. Trying to ignore it, to let sleep take over, she wiggled deeper into the clothes. But that only made the object poking her dig in more.
Sighing, she sat back up and tossed a cushion aside to find out what lay underneath. Her photo album — blue with thin lines of gold swirls. Though she knew she would grow maudlin if she looked through the book, especially half-drunk, she opened it anyway.
The simple album contained the only photographs Roni owned depicting her with her parents. Ten pictures. That was all she had.
She knew every part of the photographs. She knew the way her mother’s hair curled up at the ends in the one at the beach and how her father’s hand squeezed her mother’s side in the one from a New Year’s Eve party. But of all ten, the best one showed her mother holding baby Roni in her arms while her father gazed on mesmerized by the beauty of the ladies in his life.
The rest of the album was empty.
One blank page after another.
A thought burst forth in her head — something so strong and obvious as she thought it that she could not conceive how she had failed to think of it before. Her lack of memory, her lost time, had to be connected to Gram and the Parallel Society. It wasn’t normal to lose so many years of memory — not unless there was a birth defect or a physical trauma. Mental trauma could cause amnesia but not like this. Could it?
And like that, she settled into the idea quite easily. Tomorrow, whether Gram wanted it or not, Roni would accept her position in the Society. She would learn all she could about the Society, she would do her best job as their librarian, and she would have access to all those books. If the answer waited for her in there — and she felt more and more confident that it did — then she would find it.
Thinking about that huge room full of old journals and diaries and maps, Roni whispered, “This might take years.” That did not sit well. The idea of spending so much time wrapped up in the Society that she might end up like the Old Gang churned her stomach — or was it the alcohol?
But would it be so bad to spend that time in the bookstore? She would be able to learn all about the other worlds. She would get chances to help people like Darin, and in the future, she would be able to help them the right way instead of this mess they were cleaning up. And with some more honesty in her heart, she admitted she had nowhere else to go. At least, the Society would give her a reason to get out of the apartment in the morning.
She closed her eyes and sunk her head back into the clothes pile. Tomorrow morning. She would deal with these questions tomorrow morning.