Carol held her coffee as though it was the elixir of life. It very well looked like it was, too; in the cafe’s more direct light, Jake could make out dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“Are you alright?” Jake asked. “You look…”
“…like hell,” Petra offered.
Carol gave that crooked smile again. Something about it was really familiar. “I’ll be fine. It’s just… really exhausting getting here.”
Jake shook his head. “I don’t get it. Getting here? From where? And why?”
Carol chuckled. “You know, my father told me you’d ask that. He said you’d be… ‘methodically and relentlessly inquisitive’. I guess he would know.”
“Would he? Do I know him?” Jake was starting to dislike the number of things about this situation he didn’t know.
Carol sipped her coffee again. How she stomached it black and extra-strong like that was beyond him. “You will,” she said. “Pretty intimately.”
Jake frowned. “Carol. This is beyond frustrating. I think you owe us an explanation. So let’s start with who you are, and who your father is, or else Petra and I will just have to leave you to it.”
“Jeez,” Carol said, sighing. “That brings back memories. You haven’t used that tone since I was nine, Dad.”
Jake wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. Fortunately, Petra was. “Bullshit,” she said bluntly. “He’d have been a kid when you were born.”
Carol smiled at Petra. “That’s true, Mom. Or it would be, for any other family.”
Jake opened his mouth to protest, but found he couldn’t speak. He stared across the table at Carol as she took another sip of her coffee with those soft-looking lips… lips that curved the same way as his daughter’s. There was a mixture of relief, fatigue, and love in her eyes, and those eyes looked familiar because he’d seen them in the mirror thousands of times before. “Holy crap,” he finally said.
“Holy fucking shit of God,” Petra replied. “How… well, I know how… when??”
Carol smiled. “Soon, actually,” she said. “I’m younger than I was when we first met, so some things have changed. Which is good, because you both told me that you wished you’d found the family talent a few years sooner. Before what happened with Sarah.”
Petra leaned forward. “Family talent? You mean I can stop-” she lowered her voice. “I can stop things too?”
“Not as well as Dad,” Carol replied. “You always carried the remote to help. But yes.”
“So the remote,” Jake broke in, “You planted it?”
“Yeah… sorry about that. You’d have found it in a few years, anyway. Or rather, sort of accidentally made it. Subconsciously. I don’t really know how it worked. But it just focused a power you already had. One that you both have. I think it’s a recessive gene or something.”
Jake raised a brow. “So then you…”
“Have two copies, yes. I learned to bend time from a very young age. But by then, Sarah was already… well, let’s just say that she took the news about you two really badly. Oh, and she’s been cheating on you.”
“That seems far-fetched. She practically hates sex.”
“No,” Carol said, “she hates losing control. Think about it. She used sex to control you when you were younger, used it to make you fall in love, to make you marry her… can you name one major life choice that didn’t start with her jumping on you and then making the decision for you?”
Jake thought about it. As much as he hated to admit it, Carol was right. The wedding, the pregnancy, the house, his job… every time something important was to be done, Sarah slept with him. The only exceptions were lately when he’d used the remote to influence her.
“Okay, so she’s a bitch,” Jake said, leaning back. “I knew that. It’s not an ideal basis for marriage. But that doesn’t mean she’s cheating on me.”
“Actually,” Petra said sheepishly, “she has been. I was going to… I don’t know what I was going to do, actually. But I followed her when she went out with- holy shit wait I know you!” She pointed at Carol. “You’re Cheryl! That girl from mom’s work!”
Carol shrugged. “Yeah. I may have been keeping an eye on things.”
“You introduced her to Jerome!”
“Who the hell is Jerome?” Jake asked.
“This is Jerome!” Petra shoved her phone under Jake’s nose.
Jake took the phone and stared at it. On the screen was a series of images of his wife with a black guy who he’d never met before. She looked to be eagerly kissing, sucking, and fucking him. “Hang on a minute, how did you get these? And how did ‘Cheryl’ get involved?”
Carol sighed. “Look, I’m only doing what you yourself told me should be done. You said ‘If only it’d all happened sooner, and if only the Jerome thing hadn’t gone on so long’ so I fixed it.”
“You fixed it.”
“Well… almost. I mean if it was fixed I’d leave you alone. But it’s not, yet. I went home and things are still pretty fucked up.”
“And the pictures?”
“Well,” Petra said sheepishly, “I have a bit of a confession to make there.”
Jake frowned and stared at his daughter. She looked more than a little guilty.
“Well, you see, I sort of followed her, and- well, here.” She fished the remote – his remote – out of a pocket and handed it over.
Jake felt angry and disappointed at the same time. “Petra, this… you can’t just steal a thing like this without asking. What else did you do?”
“Well… there was this thing with Jeremy.”
“What ‘thing’?”
“This thing where he found out about us and tried to blackmail me into fucking him.”
Jake blanched. “Why didn’t you tell me about that?”
“Because I handled it. He hasn’t so much as looked at me since.”
“What did you do?”
“I… tricked him… intofucking his mother.”
Jake coughed on a sudden urge to laugh. “What?!”
“Yeah… she thought it was her husband and he thought it was me, and then I wiped the pictures off his drive.”
Jake chuckled. “That’s brilliant. I shudder to think how that little family discussion went.”
“So… not mad?”
Jake leaned over and kissed his daughter. His younger daughter. Or rather his physically younger… this was confusing. “I can’t stay mad at you, Pet,” he said. “And clearly you’re responsible with it. Just… you should have talked to me. About this, about Jeremy, and about your mother.”
Jake suddenly became aware of Carol smiling across the table at them. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just that seeing you two like this… it’s pretty different for me. Where I’m from, you’re both older. Still very much in love, but this is just sweet.”
Jake smiled back. “That’s good to hear, I guess. So, then.. what is it you want to accomplish here?”
Carol finished her coffee, waved to the barista for another, and started to explain. Read more »