Chapter Two

WHEN JOEY OPENED her eyes again, she knew she must be in the hospital and had likely been heavily sedated. What else could explain how well rested she felt? And that back pain she woke up with every day? Gone. Damn. They must have given her some good pain meds.

But when she looked around for signs that she had, indeed, been taken somewhere for help, she instead decided she must have died. She’d always wondered what heaven would look like and was immediately disappointed to discover it looked like her childhood bedroom.

I was hoping for Disneyland, she thought, taking in the full view around her.

Yes, this was definitely her childhood bedroom, just as she’d left it. For starters, she was lying on a waterbed. She rolled to her right and felt the familiar slosh of water and saw the assortment of pictures, books, and knickknacks decorating her bed’s built-in bookshelf. A picture of her and Betty dressed as princesses from her favorite Halloween, one of her and Dan at prom, and a framed shot of the three of them the day she got her driver’s license.

As she turned to see the wall opposite her bed, she realized something felt a little different. She reached down and laughed as her hands discovered two small, perky boobs, quite the difference from the large, post-motherhood ones she’d been carrying around for years. But wait, that must also mean…ah yes, her hands went further down to discover a tiny, flat stomach and an equally small pair of thighs.

How did I ever think I was fat, she sighed, remembering hours spent agonizing that she didn’t look exactly like the Calvin Klein underwear models who frequented her Cosmopolitan magazines. Well, if heaven was her childhood room, it kinda made sense that she had her old body back.

She stood up and was amazed to feel the floor under her feet. She kinda thought she’d float, but maybe that came later? She felt her arms, and everything appeared to be pretty solid. Maybe this was some sort of processing center, like in Chances Are? Yeah, that would make sense. Maybe when you die, they send you somewhere familiar first, so you don’t freak out. She was really starting to figure out this whole “being dead” thing.

Figuring it all out made sense, because she also felt mentally clear for the first time in…forever? She felt like she could do calculus again and it would all just click. This also made sense; as she had her high school body back, the brain had come with it. And, oh, what a brain it had been.

It’s not that she wasn’t a smart adult. Sure, she’d felt pretty dumb when the kids were little and they sucked every spare brain cell from her during the years of sleepless nights, breastfeeding, endless laundry, and Yo Gabba Gabba!. But even as they had gotten older, the brain she’d been so famous for as a kid always felt just slightly out of reach.

But now, in this weird limbo state she seemed to have found herself in, she could feel synapses connecting that hadn’t done so in decades. Which is why not being able to figure out how she’d gotten here was so jarring.

Thinking about it logically, she could remember every moment of being in the tent. It had felt warmer and warmer, but that was partially the wine. Or had it been the beginning of a heart attack? No, surely, there would have been some pain. There was something about going behind a screen. Then the panic because a stranger had told her she’d married the wrong person.

Dan. Had she left Dan behind? And the kids?

Before the weight of that thought could fully register, a knock on the door pulled her back to reality. Or whatever this new reality was, anyway.

“Just making sure you’re up, sleepyhead,” came a voice from behind the door.

“Dad?” she choked out, suddenly aware she could speak.

But whomever had spoken to her had moved on. She could hear feet shuffling through the house. A clock on her nightstand said 7:30 a.m. Her alarm had always been set for 7:32, a weird quirk because she loved numbers that were divisible by three, but that hadn’t stopped her dad from knocking a few minutes early every day. It had bugged her then, but the memory of it now made her oddly happy. Or the experience. This wasn’t a memory; it had just happened. Or had it?

If she could hear things outside this room, it stood to reason there were other things outside this room. This felt both logical and illogical at the same time. She could stand, she could talk. What else could she do?

She sat down at her desk and moved the mouse next to her teal iMac. The screen woke up, so she opened a document.

“I need to make a list,” she said out loud, again testing that her vocal cords worked.

She made a column and titled it “Evidence I Am Dead.” Underneath, she began to type:

Have magically returned to being a teenager

Felt a little funny at reunion

Family history of heart disease

No one knows what heaven is like; this could be it

Back doesn’t hurt

She scrunched her nose and looked at the list. Any good scientist would now test their hypothesis, but another thought nagged at her. What had Mary said? Something about seeing what her life could have been like? She made a second column and titled it “Evidence I Have Time Traveled.”

Have magically returned to being a teenager

Back doesn’t hurt

Have read extensively about time travel and it takes many forms

Crazy woman in tent alluded to similar scenario

I appear to be fully corporeal

This doesn’t feel like heaven

Joey looked at both lists for a few minutes, back and forth, as she tried to make sense of them or come up with a third, more logical answer. If she had gone back in time, what day had she gone back to? She stood up to shake out her hands, and looked around her room a bit more, hoping another clue might catch her eye. She opened her closet, saw a long, black robe hanging first in line, and gasped.

It could only be one day, and it was the most fateful of her life.