Never a Hero, page 2
Joan had run back to Gran’s place, terrified. He did something to me, she’d told Gran.
Gran’s green eyes had been luminous in the low kitchen light. He didn’t do something to you, she’d told Joan. You did something to him. She’d leaned close. You’re a monster, Joan.
A few months ago, Joan had learned what the rest of the Hunts had always known. Her mum’s side of the family were monsters: real monsters. They stole life from humans. They used that life to travel in time.
Now, in Joan’s own kitchen, there was a slight stirring as if from a breeze, although nothing in the room moved. Dad didn’t react. Joan had felt it with her monster sense. The wave came again, rippling through the world without actually disturbing anything.
Sometimes the timeline seemed like a living thing—a creature with a will of its own. Tonight, Joan perceived it as a natural force, as if the storm itself had come inside.
Dad closed the oven door with his elbow. “So tomorrow night?”
You might think you can shut it out, but you can’t. Joan folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m working tomorrow.”
“Don’t you finish up at four?”
“I’ve got an essay.”
“Can you do that on Sunday?” Dad asked. “The thing is, your gran reminded me . . .” He hesitated. “Tomorrow is the fifteenth anniversary of your mum’s death. I think your gran wants to spend some time with you.” He looked down at his oven mitts. “I should have remembered it was a special day,” he said. “I suppose you and I always celebrate your mum’s birthday instead.”
A familiar pressure of emotion started. Joan shoved it down. She hadn’t expected Dad to say that. Dad talked about Mum all the time, but Gran never talked about her.
“Is that okay with you?” Dad said. When Joan didn’t answer immediately, he said, softer: “Joan, are you okay?”
He’d been asking that question in different ways for weeks. You seem so quiet lately. Is anything going on? Have you had a fight with your friends?
Joan tried out the truth in her head.
I found out that I’m a monster, Dad. The Hunt side of the family are all monsters.
Or another truth.
The boy I loved was a monster slayer. He killed Gran and the rest of the family. But I unmade him. I unraveled his life. And now the Hunts are alive again. But they don’t remember.
He doesn’t remember me.
The hollow grief of it hit her again. She couldn’t tell Dad any of it. He wouldn’t believe her. She didn’t want him to believe her. She wanted him safe, here at home, far away from the world of monsters.
“I’m fine,” she said. She tried to make it sound real. “Just. You know. Stuff.”
Dad searched her face. “What stuff?”
“Normal stuff.” Joan needed to keep the emotion out of her voice. “Nothing stuff. Everyone’s stressed about school this year—you know that.”
“Joan—”
“You don’t have to keep asking, Dad. I’m really fine!” It came out frustrated. Joan pressed her lips shut. She didn’t want to fight about it. She didn’t want to tell Dad more lies than she already had.
In the silence, the wind rattled the windows. Dad’s sigh was barely audible over it.
Joan looked past the kitchen’s open-plan arch to the photos on the living room wall. Joan and Dad. Joan as a baby. Mum. The three of them together in a park, Mum and Dad holding Joan’s hands. As a kid, Joan had stared at those photos for hours, trying to match her own features to Mum’s. Joan had always looked more like Dad than Mum. More Chinese than European.
“You remind me so much of her,” Dad said. He’d followed her gaze. “More and more every day. She’d have been so proud of you.”
That pressure of emotion again. There were things about Mum that Joan really didn’t want to think about. Mum had died when Joan was a baby. Her death had always been a fact—one that Joan had learned before anything else, before she’d learned to count or read. An immutable fact. A foundational fact of her life.
“Gran never talks about her,” Joan pushed out. “Like, never. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
Dad was silent, his eyes still on the photos. “I didn’t understand that either for a long time,” he said. “But . . . your gran and your mum didn’t always get on. They had an argument just before your mum died. I think your gran felt very guilty about that. I think she blamed herself for your mum’s death in some strange way.” He took off the oven mitts. Mum must have bought those ones. All the dark stuff in the house was hers; Dad preferred bright colors.
“I think this dinner is a big step for your gran.” Behind his glasses, Dad’s eyes were wet.
He wanted to go to this dinner, Joan realized. He wanted to see the Hunts tomorrow. He wanted to remember Mum with Mum’s family on this anniversary.
Joan took a deep breath. “We’ll both go together?” she said. Dad would be at this dinner, she reminded herself. The Hunts wouldn’t be able to talk about monster things in front of him.
“Of course,” Dad said. “It’s a family thing.”
“A family thing,” Joan echoed. Not a dinner with monsters, but a dinner with Mum’s family and Dad. “Right,” she said. “A family dinner.” And after their dinner, Joan and Dad would go home to their normal lives. It wasn’t like Joan would be pulled back into the monster world.
Two
It was a hot morning, but the path to Holland House was cool in the shifting shade of trees. Joan could hear the sounds of the garden already: kids laughing, peacocks cawing, the booming voices of the tour guides.
She emerged onto the lush lawn. It wasn’t even noon, but the place was already packed. It seemed that everyone had had the same idea: to take advantage of the good weather at the park. Costumed guides led groups of tourists toward the maze. Kids kicked up water in the shallows of the pond.
Beyond them, glints of glass reflected the morning sun. Holland House was always beautiful, but this was its best time of day. The redbrick facade glowed.
Joan was struck with a pang of grief out of nowhere. It didn’t look like this anymore, she remembered suddenly.
It had burned.
She woke with a start.
Light showed through cracks in her bedroom blinds. Outside, it was still raining heavily, a relentless roar. Joan tried to slow her breathing. The ache of loss hit her again. In her memory, Holland House had been one of London’s most popular tourist attractions; people had visited from all over the world.
In this timeline, it lay in ruins. People didn’t even remember its name.
Joan rubbed her eyes. The dream had been so vivid that this actual rainy morning seemed surreal. She glanced at the clock. Still pretty early. She had a vague feeling that something difficult was happening later today. A math exam? No, it was Saturday.
Then she remembered. She was seeing the Hunts tonight. I got the feeling that your gran wanted to talk to you about something, Dad had said. Joan’s empty stomach turned over. What was Gran going to say? Joan half wished that she could step back into that dream—go back to that sunny day, so far from here, to that long-gone house.
Too late, she registered that she’d veered into dangerous emotional territory.
The morning light dimmed, as if night were falling again. The patter of rain muted. Even Joan’s own growing panic felt far away from where she was. She had a flash of Aaron touching her, his gray eyes alarmed. Hey, stay with me.
Still half-asleep, Joan fought to ground herself in the present moment, as Aaron had taught her. She focused on the details of her physical surroundings. The sound of rain. Shadows of striped morning light on the wall. The rough embroidery of her quilt. She clawed back each sense, one by one. It felt like forever before morning dawned again and the rain rose back to a roar. Joan’s next breath was a choke of relief. She sat up and gripped her knees. I’m here, she told herself. I’m here and I don’t want to be anywhere else.
These fade-outs were getting worse, she knew. She’d done her best to stop them. Her bedroom walls had once been covered with old maps and illustrations of ancient places, but now they were bare. She’d dropped history at school. She’d tried to remove everything from her life that might trigger her desire to travel in time.
She remembered Aaron’s words. You nearly died. You tried to travel without taking time first.
She should have told Gran about this problem weeks ago, she knew. She shouldn’t have been avoiding the Hunts for so long. Tonight, she told herself. She’d tell Gran tonight.
She forced herself from her warm bed. The floorboards were cold, even through her socks, and the chill helped to ground her. She found her work uniform and pulled it on. Then she went to brush her teeth.
In the kitchen, Dad was working on his laptop, specs on, phone to his ear. Tupperware boxes of pineapple tarts were stacked up beside him, labeled in his neat handwriting. The Hunts, one of them said.
He pressed mute as Joan headed past him for the front door. “Aren’t you having breakfast?”
Joan scrubbed a hand over her face. Controlling the fade-out had taken longer than she’d wanted. “Slept in,” she said. “I’ll grab something at the bakery.”
“We should eat more fruit,” Dad said, a bit absently. Joan could tell the client was saying something to him on the phone. He called to Joan as she left. “Have a good day!”
Joan worked every Wednesday evening and all day Saturday at an old-fashioned cake shop with a window full of scones and fondant fancies. Inside, the owner had packed ten tables into the small space between the counter and the door, and all day long, people scraped their chairs back and forth on the wooden floorboards to allow servers and other customers to pass.
Joan barely had time to think between spooning thick cream into ramekins for scones and cutting slices of Victoria sponge. It was eleven a.m. and then one forty-five p.m. and then two thirty p.m.
By three thirty, most of the cakes were gone, and the bakery was empty except for Joan and her friend Margie. Joan wiped off the chalkboard and wrote: 50% off everything.
“Have we sold any of these meringues?” Margie said. She held one up—a blobby white thing with a dip in the middle. “What even is this?”
“Maybe a snowman?” Joan suggested. It was November. “Like a festive thing?”
Margie took a bite, and her expression turned thoughtful. “Huh.” She offered the rest of it to Joan, stretching over the counter.
Joan had picked up a tray to clear the tables, and so she leaned to take a bite from Margie’s hand. Meringue crumbled in her mouth, an airy candy cane. She raised her eyebrows.
“Right?” Margie popped the rest into her own mouth. “They’re good. Why aren’t they selling?”
“Maybe they need faces.”
“Maybe little arms,” Margie said. “Little chocolate arms . . .” She held out her own arms, hands starred to demonstrate, and Joan grinned. “You started that English essay yet?” Margie asked.
“You haven’t?” Joan was surprised. Margie was so organized that she kept the calendar for their whole friendship group. If Joan wanted to know when Chris was free, she’d ask Margie, not Chris.
“I can’t even look at it!” Margie said. “Remember how nice Mrs. Shah was last year? What’s going on with her? She’s the worst now.”
Joan paused, laden tray in hand, not sure if she’d heard right. “How nice she was last year?”
“Guess she prefers teaching history to English.”
“Mrs. Shah taught us history last year?”
Margie gave her a funny look. “Why are you saying it like it’s a question?”
It was one of those unsettling moments when Joan’s memory didn’t align with other people’s. Joan’s history teacher last year had been Mr. Larch, a short man with a booming laugh that bellowed from his whole chest.
Joan went into the kitchen to stack the dishwasher. It was a big industrial thing that Margie called RoboCop because the top half had a thin visor-like screen, and the bottom half opened up like a mouth. When she closed RoboCop again, there was a dark mark at the edge of its silver door—the size and shape of Joan’s thumbprint. She rubbed it idly and was surprised to find that it was rough like a burn mark.
Her mind, though, was on Mr. Larch. When had she last seen him? He was usually on uniform duty, standing at the school gate to call out people wearing sneakers or the wrong socks. But he hadn’t been there in months.
“Hey, where’s Mr. Larch these days?” she called over her shoulder to Margie. “He on holiday or what?”
“Who?” Margie called back.
“Mr. Larch from school,” Joan said, but when she came back out, Margie looked blank.
“Who’s Mr. Larch?”
Margie used to do impressions of Mr. Larch all the time. “You know,” Joan said. “Big glasses. Always banging on about uniforms.” She mimicked: “What color are those shoes, Margie Channing!”
“What are you banging on about?” Margie said, her smile half-amused, half-confused. “There’s a Mr. Larch Reading Garden behind the library. Is that what you mean?”
Joan felt a curl of unease. There was nothing behind the library—just a big weedy stretch of ground up to the fence. When had she last gone back there, though? Not in the last few months. Not since she’d returned after the summer.
“That’s not your guy, though,” Margie said. “It’s dedicated to some teacher who died ten years ago—way before our time.”
“That’s not him,” Joan agreed. Mr. Larch was definitely alive. He was short and loud and kind. When Joan had struggled with the order of prime ministers, he’d made up a song on the spot for her. The tune still got in Joan’s head sometimes. Then John Major took the stage, and—
Margie popped another meringue into her mouth. “I’m going to hand-sell the hell out of these,” she said with her mouth full. “I’m not letting them go off the menu.” She grabbed the tongs. “Hey, you doing anything tonight? We could get those essays over early.”
“Tonight?” Joan echoed. She’d noticed things wrong with this timeline—big things, like the destruction of Holland House. Small things, like Nick going to her school now. But . . . No. Mr. Larch wasn’t dead. He was just teaching somewhere else. For sure.
“Dad’s making that pasta you like with the tomato and mint.”
“Yeah,” Joan said absently. “Sounds good. Oh, wait.” Her heart sank. “I’m having dinner with my gran tonight. Dad and I are going down to London.”
“Why are you making that face?” Margie squashed her mouth. “I thought you loved going there.”
“I do, but—” Joan stopped as Margie gripped her arm painfully. “What’s wrong?” Joan said, and then she realized that Margie’s face was pink with excitement.
Margie nodded at the window. “Is that who I think it is?” she hissed.
Outside, a familiar muscled figure examined the display cakes, black T-shirt riding up as he bent. Joan swallowed. It was Nick.
Margie grabbed for her phone. “Is he coming into the shop? No. Yes. He’s—”
Nick walked around to the bakery door and pushed it open. Behind the counter, Joan’s phone lit up. A message from Margie.
Stop everything nick ward just walked in
Then one from their friend Chris:
in where?? In the bakery???
Margie: he looks SO good
Chris: NO IM SO JEALOUS
A rush of emotions hit Joan. She’d promised herself that yesterday was an aberration—that she’d stay away from him. But here he was, and some stupid part of her was glad of it. Standing here, in Joan’s ordinary world, he seemed larger-than-life. The school football star. The hottest guy in school.
Hollywood hot, Margie had said about him. He was classically handsome, with soft dark hair and a square jaw. He could have been the lead in a movie: the hero. It seemed absurd suddenly that any version of him had ever been into Joan, let alone that they’d been soul mates in a kind of way.
Nick’s gaze swept over them, and his face lit up. It took Joan a second to understand that he was smiling like that because he’d seen her.
“Hi,” he said. The hi encompassed Margie and Joan both, but his eyes returned to Joan as if he were compelled. “Did your phone survive the adventure?”
Joan could see Margie at the edge of her vision, staring at her, and she felt strangely on display. She nodded, and his smile warmed.
Joan’s phone lit up again. Another message from Margie—just from her to Joan.
Since when do you know nick ward??
Joan shook her head. Please don’t say anything, she willed Margie. She needed to get Nick out of here. “You came in at the right time,” she said to him out loud. “Everything’s fifty percent off for the end of the day.”
“I did come at the right time,” Nick said, still smiling, and then he reddened, as if he hadn’t meant to say it aloud.
Joan’s whole body felt too warm suddenly, like she’d been standing in the sun. In her peripheral vision, Margie’s smile was turning Cheshire cat.
Joan’s phone lit up again. She glanced down, expecting another message from Margie, but to her surprise, it was an incoming call from Gran.
Joan hesitated. She should answer it, she knew. But . . . she was at work. She’d see Gran in a couple of hours anyway. She hit the red decline button.
“Well, that’s me done,” Margie announced. “Going to take this lot to the charity.”
“What?” Joan said. Margie had only boxed up the meringues. And she and Margie always took the leftovers down together. “But we haven’t—”
“Back in ten.” Margie was already slipping the loop of her apron over her head. She turned her back to Nick and gave Joan an exaggerated wink.
“Margie,” Joan said. All she needed to say was: There’s more to box up. Margie wouldn’t question it; she’d stay. Joan opened her mouth, but no words came out. Her face felt like it was on fire. Margie’s grin widened. You’re welcome, she mouthed. And then she was walking out of the shop.
