The Time Traveler's Almanac

Dr. Tilly held that one for the longest time, gripped between her knees. Once she’d gotten to forty she thought she’d been an emotional bulwark, but now she felt as though all her insides were scooped out and replaced with packing peanuts. She felt thick and heavy. Danny re-read the sign six times, eyes darting to her face before going back and reading it again, and she thought she imagined him swallowing.

“Well,” he said, with admirable calmness, “what do I do with that information, Dr. Rosamund Tilly?”

She scribbled inanely: I’m not sure? Romantic embraces??

“So you immediately assume I’m in love with you, in a fit of o’erweening hubris,” snapped her best friend, but even as she gaped and horrible dread filled her he made the queerest half-smile expression. The smell of sofa and dusty chinchillas no longer irritated Dr. Tilly. “Don’t mind me,” he said, and Danny leaned over to kiss her. He kissed her kindly until she didn’t want to be kissed kindly any more, at which point he smeared her chapstick from her top lip to her bottom lip. “Please just talk,” he said, and she was too busy trying to memorize the way that his mouth felt and how the cradle of his hips were against her own. “I love you. Say it again.”

“I’ve never loved anyone else,” said Dr. Tilly.

*   *   *

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

*   *   *

This time all she did was unfold herself: got up wearily off the sofa and could not look him in the eye, had that quizzical expression of his burned repulsively into her brain forevermore. Dr. Tilly stood up and paced around the room, hating every hair on her head and every brick in 14 Arden Lane’s walls, and at one point kicked the chimney grate until it hurt her big toe. Danny just watched.

The cellphone buzzed for the umpteenth time in the pocket of her skirt, and now she yanked it out savagely to read:

8:18 PM

Sent from: Sparrow

Dont forget to fix the fridge mum!

Dr. Tilly imagined that the house was a little sorry as she got the hairdryer and proceeded to defrost everything up to and including the freezer, cartons of milk and meat sitting on the countertop as Danny watched and provided towels. If there had been a Queen’s Award for feeling exhausted, she would have won it. Feeling tired made one feel sadder and when one was sad one felt tireder, and she got down on her knees and scrubbed out the remnants of old carrots as she half-daydreamed about being kissed.

“There,” she said, “are you happy now, you wretched house?” Nothing happened. Her brain burst into tears.

Danny looked at her expression and said, “All right. Plan B,” and did what he did every time she had a pressure headache, which was to turn off the lights so that only a thin filter from the kitchen made its way into the sitting-room. He spread the sofa blanket out on their laps and put his arm around her, and they listened to the far-off roar of cars in the street and the tiny squeaks of chinchillas dust-bathing. Dr. Tilly thought she understood why he was angry: there they were, two people who knew each other so well that just by an expression he could tell what she needed, and all they did was stand and stare at opposite sides of the crevasse.

“A time loop?” he said, when she finally told him. “You’ve got to be kidding me. A time loop? You met my doppelgangers?” The expression on her face must have been like a coffee stain that couldn’t be wiped clean, so he relented: “Well, I suppose worlds really did collide.”

The house tried to get back into her good books by making tiny mandarin-coloured lights appear like fireflies, and she nearly forgave it when Danny reached out and let one alight on his finger. When he passed it to her it was sweet and warm like tumbledryer lint. So was his hand.

“Yes,” said Dr. Tilly, “they did, now that I think about it.”

*   *   *

When everyone else in the faculty asked about her tired face the next day, she said “House troubles,” and everyone nodded as though that made any sort of sense. The neighbours had stuffed two notes about the hedge in 14 Arden Lane’s letterbox and the house had retaliated by covering them in snails; the water pressure in her morning shower had been shocking; the house had made jasmine bloom from the ivy trellises, but Rosamund Tilly informed it that this was a poor show and botanically incorrect. It was Danny who had to call her at lunchtime as she sat down to mark some coursework, and she hadn’t any lunch.

“Tuna salad and three crackers,” said Daniel. “You?”

She looked in her desk drawer. “Five Peppermint Tic-Tacs.”

“Rose, that’s disgusting,” he said, and she could hear him drumming a pen on his desk. Danny didn’t mince words: “Look, you can’t go on like this, and I don’t mean your lunch. God only knows what your house will do the next time.”

“It’s lonely,” she said, though her heart wasn’t really into defending it. “The girls are too far away. I was thinking of getting another chinchilla.”