The Time Traveler's Almanac

Dr. Tilly went around and touched all the walls and the photographs, hoping the house would respond. New try. “Did worlds collide?” asked Danny Eight. On the next loop she went and made sure all of the chinchillas were coping in their hutch as Danny Nine craned his head, nonplussed, and that didn’t do anything either. Next. Danny Ten followed her as she left the house but going out into the street did nothing more than make her eyes squint in the chill lemon-rind glare of the lamps, and at 8:18 in that iteration her eldest daughter Sparrow sent her a text message she didn’t read. The neighbours peered at her through their curtains. “Did worlds collide?” asked Danny Eleven. In the throes of despair and rattling around the house like an old car, Dr. Tilly dusted her glass cats. Nothing happened, though at one point her cellphone tweeted in her pocket.

Sitting there on the sofa with what felt like an ice-cream headache, Dr. Tilly permitted herself an expletive: “Jesus H. Christ,” she said.

“Well?” said Danny Twelve. “Did worlds collide?”

She said a ruder word.

*   *   *

Dr. Tilly put her head in her hands, which caught Danny Thirteen’s attention immediately as he reached over to touch her shoulder. “What happened?” he said, and for a moment she was tempted to explain everything again; to rely on his thoughtfulness and candor, but instead she sighed and went to get her notebook. Perhaps waiting was another experiment too, and she didn’t have to worry him in the process.

I’m mute. The house is not happy with me.

“Is that all?” The relief in her best friend’s voice was palpable. “Well, that’s nothing. We could play Charades.”

NO

“We could enjoy the quiet.” Rosamund made a very rude motion like a gunshot salute, and seeing her so uncharacteristically hangdog he relented: “Well, come here and we’ll watch TV until the house forgives you, but we just missed the news.”

They both pretended to watch the Food Network on mute. 14 Arden Lane was silent except for the low burble of the dishwasher and the muffled sound of chinchillas in the next room. She put her head on the shoulder of his dusty coat and allowed herself five seconds of frustrated self-pity, and enjoyed those five seconds immensely. When she and Daniel were alone she pretended that he never flinched slightly or was given pause by anything, and she just smelled the old familiar smell of his shampoo and overheated laptop. At 8:18 her cellphone buzzed in her pocket, which she ignored.

She and Danny had once both sworn that they would be presidents, astronauts and rock stars, and now in their forties they shared mid-life crises in the same way they’d used to share chocolates. She knew she could be careless and cavalier and hard to deal with, and had won the lottery with Daniel. As best friends went he was reliably fantastic. She liked the way his dark hair was cut short, with sprigs of early grey at the temples, liked his hair in general: it was a pretty shallow thing to like about a person, but she liked so much about Danny that she was amazed by every new thing she found charming. There were lines at his eyes and mouth that made his rare smile a little lopsided and piratical, no asset for a chartered stockbroker. When she touched his hair he hesitated.

“It’s bizarre not to have you talking,” he said. “I have to admit, I don’t actually like it.”

Rosamund wrote afresh in her notebook:

Sometimes I think you’re angry at me.

“Don’t even try to have a conversation like this,” he said, avoiding the issue like a champ, “it annoys me watching you painstakingly write that out.”

There was a terrible loneliness in her as she touched his neck, folded down a piece of his collar. It wasn’t 14 Arden Lane that was lonely, she suddenly thought, it was her; she was an armoured creature, self-sufficient, but for the terrible fact of needing her best friend all the time excepting when she wanted to finish a book. Her fingers curled at his neck and she was aware of everything, aware of the outside night-time and how her clothes felt on her skin, of how his face was a mask and how he wouldn’t look at her. Her fingers brushed his cheek and his jaw and the side of his mouth, sifted through his hair. Rosamund Tilly was an empty glass.

“Don’t,” said Danny.