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Betsy's Story: a realtimer tale

Betsy's kid brother comes back with a secret.

Published onJul 10, 2023
Betsy's Story: a realtimer tale

My baby brother Ben still scares me.

I probably should be over this by now. It’s been some years since he ran into my room and woke me up with a giant hug. I was seven years old, and he was four. Being mid-August here in British Colombia, the sun was already up at five AM. But I wasn’t, until my kid brother bounced on my bed giggling and shouting, “She’s alive!” That was my last really restful sleep for weeks.

At breakfast, Ben told us he could remember the future, and then, why we didn’t. Like that’s our fault. I really, really did not want to hear what he said on that Saturday in 1967. It scared me good.

You see. On October 12, 1974 in the future/past, at 10:43 in the morning, me and Mom diddone got killed outright when a logging truck lost its load on Highway One, East of Chilliwack. We were taking a tuna casserole and a lemon bundt cake to my aunt Nancy, who lives in the next town over, and was feeling poorly. Our Chevy was crushed like a soda can in a compactor.

After that, Dad sold the house and he and Ben moved to Vancouver Island, where dad took a job at his brother’s garden center nursery. Our family visited Uncle Steve a couple months ago. He grows all kinds of flowers. Unlike Ben, Uncle Steve had no memory of the future. Friends have told him that he got some kind of poisoning from working in the soil with a cut on his hand. That was pretty soon after Dad died.

Dad diddone died of a sudden heart attack in 1986. Ben explained all this that first day. He said “forewarned is forearmed.” Out of the mouth of a four-year-old. We watched TV all morning. News of the time quake dominated the airwaves.

Apart from announcing mom and my fatal accident, and Dad’s heart problem, Ben kept his reports about the future-none-of-us-experienced to occasional anecdotes. He groused about Canucks hockey—forty plus years and no Stanley Cup—and he mentioned future natural disasters, volcanoes and tsunamis, and such, and big events, like the Moon landing. But nothing about his own future, even upon interrogation.

Since Ben moved away from town, my timedrifter friends don’t have any stories about him. However, the gruesome details of my future accident: these they told me, each of them, singly and serially, in confidence, like a dirty secret.

I guess if you drive your car off a bridge, that’s just another accident. But if you’re tooling casually down Highway One and a load of fir logs picks that very second to tumble onto your car, well, that’s national news. Like getting struck by a meteorite in the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly store.

It could be that Ben is really wise. Really modest. Perhaps really guilty. Maybe some combination. But, he’s not talking. He’s not fleeing, either, like those kids who figure their survival chances would improve some distance away from where they diddone what they did. He just refused to open up.

“None of that has happened,” he’d say. “I’m making my future right now. In the present.”

“But you’ve got a half-century of knowledge and experience,” I protested. “It’s really selfish of you not to share this with me, your favorite sister.”

“I just want to be a kid,” he said. “It’s a lot better this time around.”

When Ben turned five, he joined the Cub Scouts. At seven, he took piano lessons for a year. He loves baseball and hockey. He begs dad for chemistry sets as Christmas presents, and has his own stinky laboratory in our basement. He hangs out with realtimers at school, and doesn’t show off in class. Of course, his grades are high, and he doesn’t study at all. His teachers adore him. If he were a holy terror of a child the last time, he’s an angel this time.

My friends tell me I’m so lucky to have him as a brother. Their timedrifter siblings are enormously entitled. They’ve been to college and had lots of sex and travel and whatever, and they never stop talking about it. My best friend Sally’s kid brother keeps talking about how he misses Pornhub, whatever that is. He explained it to her, but she won’t tell me. He just turned nine, and Sally is worried he’s going to grow up to be a real creep.

Yesterday was spectacularly weird for me. That was the day we were killed in the future/past. Our timedrifter friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers gave us a “Stayin’ Alive” party in the local park. The Bee Gees song of the same name was a huge hit the previous year. Now, it’s the theme song for these events.

Parties like this were an almost daily happening around Chilliwack. Apparently, Mom and I played hop-scotch with Death and we won. This means we get some kind of anti-funeral. Like the other kind, this event is more for others than for the dead, or, in my case, the not-dead-yet.

The party started with a five-minute countdown to 10:44—the minute after we were dead the last time around—then a long round of hugs. Us kids were “treated” to party games; you know, pin the tail on the donkey, Simon says, an egg and spoon race. Somebody brought recorded music and a portable speaker. We sat down for a long potluck lunch, with beers for the adults and lemonade for everyone. Mom and I sat through a series of short testimonials on how much people missed us when we were dead.

As a big surprise, the driver of the logging truck appeared. He had survived the accident and the ICU, and also the next forty-five years. Today, he had started his Saturday drinking early. He teared up as he recounted the horror of the mishap, and mumbled how sorry he was for our calamity. His voice picked up then. He reminded the crowd that he was not the one who fucked up the loading of the logs. He was just the driver, and he needed another beer.

Us kids played softball until mid-afternoon. As my friends left, each of them hugged me again and said how much my being alive meant to them. I guess that’s the upside of dying young in a different future; your friends experience your loss personally, and take the measure of your contributions to their lives. I think this should be a regular practice among friends, and not just around death. Friendship needs more gratitude. That’s my takeaway.

When we got home, Ben came up to my room. I was changing from the party dress into my casual clothes. He’s still just a kid, so I don’t mind him seeing me in my underwear. Not much to see, anyhow. He probably remembers a lot of naked women from his other life. He is already a cutie.

Ben shut the door behind him.

“Nobody is happier than I am,” he said. “It will be a joy to have these days, weeks, and years to get to know you.”

“That goes both ways,” I said. “Mr. Silent Guy.” I gave him a mock frown.

He leaned against the wall, hesitating. His hands worked, squeezing and releasing.

I slipped into my jeans.

“Uncle Steve…” he said. He moved over to the window, looking out.

I buttoned up my shirt. “Yeah?”

“Well, he hurt me. Several times. Really bad. Nasty stuff. Dad…” He closed his eyes, his face grew taut.

“Dad wouldn’t let that happen,” I said.

“Dad worked the days that Uncle Steve didn’t. I was alone in the house a lot with him.”

I went over, reached out and touched his arm. “You told Dad, right?”

“Dad was destroyed when you and Mom died. His brother Steve and me, we were all the family he had left. If I told him…”

Ben shrugged. “I ran away. I was fifteen. I hitched to Seattle and lived on the street. I found a job washing dishes at a coffee house in the U. District. The owner let me sleep in the shed out back. Paid me in cash. Probably saved my life. I changed my name, and I started reading. There was always books around, and authors, and poets, and philosophers. Hackers, small-time hashish peddlers, and petty thieves. Some pretty dangerous hombres, too.

“I had a full education, better than a lot of folks. I paid close attention. I finally learned enough, and saved enough to procure the birth certificate of a kid born the same year as me, who died in infancy. This got me a social security card. Now I was legit. But still wounded inside. You know, I missed you all the time.”

He teared up. “I hated the world that took you away. I hated without any target, just eruptions of anger. I was alone and ashamed. A writer who came in for coffee most days said I was ready to put some of that anger on the page. He gave me an old typewriter.”

Ben found a smile somewhere, “Best therapy ever.”

“Is that what you did, write stories?”

He nodded. “Dad died just before I published my first novel. My leaving probably accelerated his heart condition….”

“You don’t know that. You were right not to stay in that house.”

“There were seven more novels in the next twenty years. Now, they only exist in my daydreams.”

“You can write them again, make them even better…”

“I moved to San Francisco, and then New York. After that, I started doing screen plays. I had a place in Malibu and spun these stories up there. It was a life I could not have foreseen, and would not give up for anything.”

“What about family, a wife…”

“I was still too fucked up to be intimate with someone. Not for more than a month or two. I didn’t hurt anybody, I just wasn’t there for them, even when I wasn’t writing all day.”

“Did you ever confront Uncle Steve?”

Ben shook his head.

“I had a book signing in Victoria. I rented a car and drove by Steve’s house. Maybe I was looking for a confrontation. His van was not in the driveway. I knew where the hidey-key was. I let myself in and left him a present.”

He straightened up and held out his arms. We did a good sibling hug and he went to the door.

“A present?” I said to Ben’s back.

He turned. “A special treat. Something I learned about at that coffee house.”

“Should have been a punch in the jaw and forty years in the slammer.”

“It was better than that.”

“Wait. We were just in Victoria. How could you stand to be in the same room with that man?” Uncle Steve had been super nice to all of them, particularly Ben. Steve ran a successful business and was talking about becoming a Scoutmaster for a local Boy Scout troop.

“I needed to go there. I looked him in the eyes. I saw who he was. It gave me closure. Now, I think I can be rid of the shame that shrouded me my whole adult life. And…”

Ben’s mouth drew into a thin smile.

“I left something for him,” he whispered.

“I hope it was a cake with a bomb in it,” I said.

“Just a fresh tube of his favorite toothpaste. Fluoridated and minty. And that’s not all.” He hesitated. “You will always be my favorite sister, Betsy.” He grinned and was out the door.

That was yesterday. Today is Sunday. I have the whole day to make sense of things. I sat there in bed, lost in my jumbled feelings about what Ben had revealed. Mom called up the stairs to hurry me and Ben to breakfast. I heard Ben shut the upstairs bathroom door.

The telephone in the living room rang, and rang, and rang.

Mom was in the kitchen. Dad finally picked up.

“Hello?”

After a minute, Mom shouts, “Who is it?”

“It’s a hospital in Victoria,” Dad shouts back, “Steve is in the ICU.”

“What happened?”

“Wait!” Dad listens for a minute then speaks. “I’ll be there on the next flight from Vancouver.” I hear the phone slam on its cradle.

Dad shouts, “I need to get to the airport. Steve has severe botulism poisoning, he might not make it!”

I hear Ben in the shower. He’s singing Stayin’ Alive.

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