Chapter 4: The Call You Make

Three years pass like water down a drain. Fast and slow at the same time. You blink and it's January again and you're standing in a different kitchen in a different apartment that you actually own now, or the bank owns it and you own the debt, which is close enough to the same thing. David is asleep in the bedroom. He has an early meeting. He always has an early meeting.

You think about the phone calls. The warnings. The voice that was you but older. You think about how you ignored every word and did exactly what the voice said you would do and now you're here, in this kitchen, in this life, with this man who hasn't touched you in six weeks except accidentally when you passed each other in the hallway.

You pick up the phone.

You dial your own number. The one you had three years ago. You don't know if this is how it works. Don't know if time moves forward and backward at the same rate. Don't know if younger you will answer or if there's some rule about this, some cosmic regulation that prevents you from doing exactly what someone did to you.

It rings.

You answer. You hear yourself answer. You hear the younger voice that still has hope in it, or something like hope, something that hasn't been completely extracted yet by meetings and performance reviews and a man who says he loves you but never in a way that requires him to change anything.

"Don't," you say, because it's what was said to you. "Don't go to the interview tomorrow."

You listen to yourself ask who this is. You listen to yourself deny the impossible while accepting it. You give the warning about the bookstore and about the interview and about Janet and about meeting someone who will teach you that wanting is weakness, and you can hear yourself crying while you say it, can hear the three years of accumulated disappointment leaking out through the phone line.

Younger you hangs up.

You stand in your kitchen which is your kitchen now, legally, financially, in all the ways that matter to banks and credit scores. David is still asleep. You should go back to bed. You have a meeting in the morning. Not an early meeting like David's. Just a regular meeting. The kind where everyone nods and nothing changes.

The phone rings.

It's your number. But it's not younger you calling back. It's someone else. It's you but further. Years further. Decades, maybe. The voice sounds like gravel. Like something that's been ground down by time and is still somehow here.

"You called yourself," the older voice says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Did it work?"

You think about this. About younger you in that kitchen that belonged to someone in Austin. About the interview and the bookstore and the choice that was never really a choice. About the phone calls that changed nothing.

"No," you say. "I think I still went. I think I still made all the same mistakes."

"Of course you did," the older voice says, and it's not unkind. It's just tired. It's the voice of someone who's tried to fix things and learned that some things can't be fixed, only survived. "We always do. That's why we keep calling. We think if we say it the right way, at the right time, with the right words, maybe we can save ourselves. But you can't save yourself. You can only save who you're becoming."

"I don't understand."

"You will. In about forty minutes you're going to get another call. It won't be from the past or the future. It'll be from David's phone. From a woman whose name you don't know. She'll apologize. She'll say she didn't know he had a girlfriend. She'll hang up before you can ask any questions."

Your hands are shaking. The phone is shaking. Everything is shaking.

"And then?" you ask.

"And then you'll have a choice. The first real choice you've had in three years. You can stay, which is what you've been trained to do. Or you can leave. And if you leave, you can go anywhere. Even back to the bookstore. I checked. They're hiring again."

The call ends. You stand in the kitchen. David is still asleep. You have thirty-nine minutes.

You wait.