Time Drifters
Chapter Twenty-One: The Big Switch

I went full out, realizing that Helene and Adrienne had longer legs and they were putting distance between us. The pounding in my head came back, or maybe it had never really left. The slope was so steep. It had been hard coming down but going back up my strides weren’t getting me very far. It felt like every time I took a step, gravity was taking me backwards instead of up.

My legs and lungs hurt and I had to pause, realizing I was only halfway. The side of the driveway was cut into the cliff on one side and there was a sheer fall down on the other, and that tumbling feeling returned from when I’d come in. I was panting and feeling like I was in a fun house, without any of the fun.

“Come on!” Adrienne urged from farther up.

I looked back, but the work light was blinding. I couldn’t tell if Mr. Bramley was staring up at us, but my imagination filled in some possibilities and it gave me a second wind. I braced my hands on my knees, leaning forward into the hill, punching out step after step.

“Hurry!” Helene said, when I was nearing the top. She grabbed my hand as we ducked under the metal gate at the top of the road, and then around to the left, but I yanked my hand away.

“I have to go back to New York State,” I panted, pointing towards the Rainbow Bridge.

“Doesn’t matter where you are,” Helene said, insisting that I follow her. “The Drift will find you, the same way as it sends you.”

“Wow,” I said.

“And don’t imagine I’m going to slip up and tell you something a first-year shouldn’t know about just because we’re in a hurry,” Helene added, casting a quick look back at me as we power walked along the grass. Our feet were rustling through the dense patches of crisp, fallen leaves, and in the dark the sound seemed to leave a tattletale trail of noise.

“Why couldn’t we just… ride with him?” I asked.

“He doesn’t have time to find the faulty switch,” Adrienne said, as much out of breath as I was. “And we don’t want to start shimmering back while we’re in the truck with him.”

“Give him a heart attack,” Helene concluded, suddenly laughing. It was infectious. Even though we were stumbling along, we all started to crack up.

“That’d be funny,” I said, picturing the shock on his face as his passengers started to glow funny colours and then disappear.

“The Burning Spring,” Adrienne exclaimed, sounding disappointed as we passed a sign pointing in the opposite direction, leading to the Fallsview Observation Tower. “I never got to see it.”

“Maybe next Drift… if you’re lucky,” Helene said, not unkindly.

“I have to stop,” Adrienne said, bending over and bracing herself as we reached a sidewalk.

“There’s too many people here,” Helene warned, looking around. “It’s not like countryside.”

It was a bitterly cold and quiet evening, but there were still couples and families with young kids strolling along the sidewalk and driving by. The smell of garlic and butter wafted from an Italian restaurant across the street.

“Can’t we just go in and steal a pizza to go?” I asked. I suddenly realized what I’d said. Helene smiled at me and nodded.

“Good thought. Bad timing,” she said. “We need to get up into the park, somewhere we won’t mess up people when we start returning.”

A black car stopped at the intersection. An older man was driving, his radio turned up so high that we could hear the news report in progress.

“… twenty-two year old man identified as Roger Allen LaPorte, a former seminarian and member of the Catholic Worker Movement, set himself on fire today in front of the Dag Hammerskjold Library of the United Nations building in New York City. The incident came exactly one week after the death by self-immolation of…”

The light changed and the car drove on. We looked at each other for a long moment. Without saying anything, we began to follow Helene up the hill and into the woods of the park.

“It’s coming… the war,” said Helene, turning to look at me.

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging it off. She and Adrienne both knew as well as I that the Vietnam War had come and gone. I knew, generally, that it was a messy ending. No one felt very good about it. But it was over long ago, in our times.

Adrienne gasped and suddenly grabbed the back of a park bench.

“You feel it?” Helene asked.

Adrienne nodded, and pulled a stack of papers out of her jacket. She looked at them, longingly and then let them all flutter from her hands into a large green waste drum. Her notes. I went to fish them out but she stopped me, her fingers touching my arm.

“I didn’t want to deceive you,” she said with quiet urgency. She looked at Helene. “She said it was important. We both know the Future-Ones have their reasons.”

She spun and jogged a couple of paces, drawing in breath. She hadn’t had time to turn back to us when the shimmer ballooned outward from her solar plexus. It was crackling with white and gold light, much brighter than I had noticed in the others. Her form faded and her shimmer field dissipated. Now, there were just two of us.

“So much like the northern lights.”

I looked at her, but she closed her eyes and shook her head.

“What did she mean?” I asked, “Deceive me?”

“You are two of kind,” she said, sighing deeply. “She meant… She’s not Adrienne and she’s not from 2048. I am.”

“I… I don’t…”

“That was Helene, from 1998,” she continued. “And yes, I asked her to make the switch. The rest is true. We are both from Montreal station.”

“You going to tell me why?” I asked, feeling bitter from the trick. “Or don’t I get to know that… Adrienne?”

“You get it already,” she said. Her head dropped to one side. I knew the look. Christine at school did that when she wanted something. But Adrienne—this real version of Adrienne—she looked sincere, and a bit sad.

“I needed you to hear me, Liam,” she said, “without having you measure all of my words just because you thought that there was extra meaning in what I said. Being from the future.”

“I don’t think you gave me a chance,” I said.

“Part of what I said wasn’t about the future or the past,” she continued. “It was about human nature. And that’s what you really need to understand. That’s what you and me, and all the others that we Drift with… that’s what we face over and over again.”

“You don’t know me well enough,” I objected.

“I know you,” she said quickly. She was laughing but her tone seemed to convey that she had reason to correct my wrong idea. “We all do. Plus I care about you, Liam. More than you realize. You do believe me… about this, yes?”

She looked into my eyes and I nodded. Her curls bobbed as she nodded back.

I scuffed the dirt with my foot, feeling awkward that I was alone with this girl, that I’d been tricked all this time and that Adrienne had really been the one from the future. There finally seemed to be a moment to ask a question. But what?

“I know we’re not supposed to …”

She wasn’t there.

I wheeled around to see if she was hiding. I looked to the dirt where she had been standing, searching in the darkness for any signs of footprints but there were none.

“Adrienne?”

I called out again, but there wasn’t a sound.

“Are you there?” I asked. I felt the echo of my own voice in my head and it sounded loud, just like when I’ve been home alone, or poking around in the trees down by the Hudson.

Suddenly, the lamps on the pathways flickered and died. I looked through the trees and saw no lights, except something to the south. There were a couple of car horns echoing off of buildings, and otherwise just the distant thunder of the Falls.

Was it 5:16pm? Had it worked?

I ran farther up the hill to a clearing that was now bathed in the bright light of a rising full moon. I smiled. There was still this natural light to help out.

Down the hill in the distance, the headlights of cars glided along the roads, looking like phosphorescent fish swimming in a deep-sea cavern. The siren of a fire engine bellowed out and some dogs starting barking. To the south and west, there was one patch of horizon that was still beaming yellow into the sky.

Helene – actually, that was Adrienne, I corrected my memory – she had said that one of the power plants in Buffalo had remained on. That within seconds, the overload took out everything as far as New York City. All the way across the river and down east, hundreds of miles. One-sixth of the population of North America, she said. They were suddenly stumbling around in the dark. Everyone was out of place, waiting for it all to go back to the way it was.

“The sun has set and you all forgot to go to sleep,” I said in a half a yell. “We did it, and you’re welcome!”

I laughed, but even at that, I stopped to listen… just in case someone noticed and was putting it together.

I began to sift through Adrienne’s words and re-think her actions. She seemed to have a lot more specific knowledge about the Drift. And it had been the Future-One who had saved me when I arrived. Nice to think she thought I was worth saving. Although, for all of her confidence, I could feel her sorrow as she was leaving. As though she knew something wasn’t right.

War is coming, she said. But she had meant Vietnam, right? I shuddered.

The twins had told me that they liked knowing there was a future. They said that it made it all Okay. I didn’t know if I could agree.

I could feel my shimmer coming on. Standing in the clearing of this cold, moonlit park, it felt like daybreak in fast motion.

And I knew something else was coming, I just couldn’t figure out what.

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