One Last Thing Before I Go

by Eva Schultz

Dear Charlie,

I need to say a few things before I go. Captain Mayfield says it’s best to put our affairs in order before a trip like this. I haven’t said anything to you, because I didn’t want to upset you needlessly. But now that it’s time to leave, I realize that I need the closure if I’m going to finish this mission. Please forgive me if I say too much; no mom ever wants to hurt her son.

You have been everything to me these past 20 years. I think you know that, but I have to be sappy and say it. I wish your dad could have seen you grow up. He was a good man; I don’t know how I would have gotten through those early months after the bomb if I hadn’t had him there to lean on. I know you didn’t always want to hear me talk about Pete and the old days before the bomb; I know you would have liked it if your dad was the only one I’d ever loved. But even though loving and losing Pete was a turning point in my life, please know that loving and losing your dad was another.

I never would have gone into the Tempscorps if it weren’t for your dad’s encouragement, and we’ve needed every survivor we’ve gotten over the years in order to develop and operate the machine. If he hadn’t helped me believe that I could make a difference, who knows if we’d be going back now to fix things.

I wish I could show you what the world was like before the bomb. Seeing a skyscraper in a picture is nothing compared to standing in front of one and craning your neck all the way back trying to see the top. The air in a city smelled different. There were places where it was never dark, even in the dead of night. Back then people used to say that we needed to simplify, get back to nature. I’m not saying they didn’t have a point, but to be honest, I’ve missed cities.

And I’ve missed people I never even met. I never thought you could miss a crowd; it’s impossible to know who they all were and to mourn for them individually. But I miss that there were so many people out there in the world. Once we stop the explosion and put things right, they won’t even know they’ve been gone.

I won’t know, either – after the moment of the explosion passes, we’ll disappear – our 20-years- ago selves will live on, of course, but the timeline should just sustain the duplication long enough for us to make the change, and then that – combined with how big the event is in the time stream – means that this version of me will be gone.

I like to daydream that I’ll somehow come across the younger me in the minutes while we’re deactivating the bomb. In my imagination, I tell her your dad’s name, and I tell her all about you. I tell her to cancel the wedding to Pete and to go find your dad. But I know in my heart that, even if I had days to explain it all, it wouldn’t work. I just loved Pete too much.

I wonder if I’ll see you in my new children’s eyes. I hope when I see them for the first time, I’ll feel more than just new-mom happiness. I hope that, in some distant memory across realities, I think of the moment they put you on my chest in the med center. All I could do was stare at you; I couldn’t get enough of your face. I still haven’t.

Please don’t think that I haven’t thought about refusing to go or trying to get permission to take you with me. I’ve run the math, prayed, begged, wept. If I refuse to go, if I stay here and renounce the mission and let the explosion stand, I’m killing billions. Sometimes I think it would be worth it. But I know you would never burn the world to save yourself.

I know you’ll never see this letter. In the hour that it will take for me to arrive at the launch point and for us to start the machine and go back in time, you’ll still be at work. There’s no version of reality in which you ever see these words.

But it helps me to write them. I love you, Charlie, and if there is a world out there where you exist, I pray that a version of me is there, too, loving you forever.

Mom

Eva Schultz lives in Aurora, Illinois, where she is a business writer by day and a fiction writer by night. Her work has recently appeared inTDotSpec’s Strange Wars anthology, Backchannels, and Frontier Tales. She lives with a big orange cat named Gus and enjoys drawing, painting, and collecting typewriters. Visit her online at www.evaschultz.com.