Chapter 15: Bill, Part 1

Bill pulled the car into a driveway of a small but nice house. I hadn't said another word once he told me that he'd been stuck in the past for two years. I was devastated. I was not going back to my own time. I was going to have to relive my entire life.

How was this possible? Why was this happening to me!

The garage door closed and Bill pulled in and turned off the engine. We sat there a moment. "I know you have a lot of questions, Kenya. I don't have a lot of answers, but I'll try the best that I can."

He got out of the car and came around and opened my door because I wouldn't move, sitting like a lump. He led me through the garage and into the house where I looked around at a modern kitchen. It certainly wasn't designed like a 1980's kitchen but like one that you might see in my own time. There were granite counters, ebony cabinets, black appliances, and slate floors.

Bill walked to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer. "Do you want one?"

I shook my head wordlessly.

He cracked the top. "I usually don't do this. I don't want to stunt my growth. But today feels like a day for a stiff drink, and this is about as stiff as it gets these days." He took a long swig.

No matter his "true" age, it was unsettling watching a kid swigging back a beer. "Where are your parents? They let you drink…and drive a car?"

He scowled and made a dismissive motion. "I don't live with my parents. I had to ditch them a long time ago."

My eyes widened. "Are you saying that you live here alone?"

"Yep." Bill walked from the kitchen into a larger room where he had a leather reclining chair situated in front of a television set. A leather sectional was nearby with simple side tables. The room was decorated tastefully and expensively.

"This is a nice house, Bill," I said while looking around. "How did you manage this?"

He sat on the sofa and gestured for me to sit as well. I took a seat adjacent to him. "Well, I am from the future. I use what I know to get ahead. I've always been smart like that."

"But how?"

He smiled. "We can talk about that later. There's a lot to talk about. You've been here two days. Have you told your parents that you're from the future?"

"It's just my mom. I told her yesterday."

"And how did that work out for you?" He asked as if he already knew the answer.

"Not so well. She didn't exactly believe me. I tried to tell my brother, and you saw how that worked. How am I going to get home if I can't convince them that I'm from the future?"

It was a rhetorical question but Bill answered anyway. "How is convincing your family going to get you back to your real time? And by the way, what is that time?"

"It was 2016 when I left. October 2016. What about you?"

"A couple months after you. It was February 2017," he said.

"Wow…" I blinked at him. "You're from my future, too."

He smiled, finished his beer, and placed the empty can on the side table. I noticed that he used one of the coasters. He truly was an adult and not a little boy even though his cheeks were rounded with youth and he didn't have the slightest hint of facial hair or a voice that cracked in preparation for puberty.

"I'll tell you how I got here. But first, you were saying that you didn't think that you'd be able to return if you didn't convince people that you were from the future."

"Oh yeah. Well, it's why I'm here. I thought I needed to fix my past. And if I could do that then I would wake up in my real time."

"And everything wrong in your life would be fixed, right?"

I nodded slowly.

He shook his head. "No. What happens is that you get placed in a mental hospital. That's what happens."

I lightly bit my lip. "There has to be a reason for us being here. If it's not to fix things, then why?"

Bill leaned back and studied the ceiling as if he was seeing something that wasn't actually there—maybe his past or maybe he was hoping to see the future again.

"In 2017 I was a simple, ordinary man." Bill stated while staring at the invisible nothing in front of him. "I've been divorced twice. I'm a teacher at an inner city high school where I also coach football. I served in the Navy and was deployed once to Afghanistan. I have a girlfriend that I care for, but I never plan to marry again. I have no children, no pets, and I live comfortably despite the fact that for most of my life my parents' believed me to be an underachiever.

"I smoked too much, drank too much, and had a mild heart attack that required me to change my life. I admit to doing so while kicking and screaming. But I eventually followed the orders of my doctor and I dropped some weight and got healthy again. I thought my life was coming together…"

Bill paused and I waited patiently for him to continue realizing that this was not an easy story for him to tell.

"One day when I went to class, there was an envelope on my desk. I thought one of my students had left it for me. It was weird, though. The envelope looked fancy like it would contain an invitation to something important—a wedding or a graduation. But when I opened it, there was just a fancy sheet of paper inside that just had a date written on it. June fourth, 1979.

"I asked my students who had left it but none of them seemed to know anything about it. I put it in my briefcase and asked the other faculty. None of them knew what it meant and none had received one." Bill sighed and shrugged. "I figured it was left on my desk by mistake and I pretty much forgot about it. After work I went to the gym and did my workout, had dinner with Jeannie, my girlfriend. We went to bed, and when I woke up my mom was in my bedroom waking me up."

Bill finally met my eyes. "The problem is that my mom died years ago and I don't remember her ever looking so young. I thought I was having a nightmare. So at first I wasn't even afraid. I just tried to figure out the purpose of this particular dream. Dreams always mean something—even if it's just because you ate one too many bean burritos for dinner.

"So I ate breakfast and my mother was rushing me to get ready for school. I barely remember being eight years old. But all of these memories began to return to me and I remembered school. I remembered my teacher's name. I even remembered the name of my best friend. I think that's what convinced me that I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't making this crap up in my head. This wasn't some crazy nightmare. This was really happening.

"I got to school and it was freaking insane. We had social studies. I forgot all about social studies. Jimmy Carter was the president and we were being taught that Margaret Thatcher was just elected as the Prime Minister in the UK."

Bill looked at his empty can of beer as if he wished for another. Instead he took a deep breath.