Page 111 of Time Loops & Meet Cutes
Avery continues, “We were stuck in a time loop. Every day, June twentieth repeated as though it had never happened before, and we were the only people who could remember the previous versions of it. When we returned to the night market, everything was exactly the same as before, except the dumpling cart wasn’t there. There was no sign of your mother.”
“How did you get out?” Judith asks.
“We don’t know,” I say. “One day, the loop just ended, and it was January. We don’t have any memory of what happened in the regular world during those seven months, but apparently, we existed in it.”
Judith nods once more, as if this all makes some kind of sense. “I did not know my mother was doing… that.”
“She told us that the dumplings would give us what we needed most.”
Judith is silent for a long time. Finally, she says, “My mother could manipulate time.”
I let that sink in. I’d suspected something along those lines, but it’s still a shock to actually hear it out loud.
“Haveyoubeen stuck in a time loop before?” I ask.
“No, but a few times when I was a kid, she’d let me relive a good day.”
“Did the rest of the world move on without you? Did you lose the memory of a day that everyone else remembered?”
“Yes. She called it… ah, I don’t know. Conservation of time, or something like that.”
“Were these incidents caused by food?”
“I’m not sure how she made them happen.” Judith sighs. “I’m sorry, I don’t have all the answers you seek, but I believe your story, and I believe my mother was capable of causing it. Also, June twentieth was the summer solstice last year, yes? Her abilities were stronger around the winter and summer solstices—and a few other dates—but I’m not sure of the reason. She could make herself invisible then, which is why you couldn’t find her again.”
It had occurred to me before that it might have something to do with the summer solstice. But I didn’t see how that would help me get out of the loop, so I didn’t think about it much.
“Do you have any idea why she chose us?” Avery asks. “What did she think we’d need most, and how would a time loop have helped us get it?”
“Well, whatdidthe time loop do for you?”
“It allowed me to take risks I never would have taken otherwise,” I answer. “It also helped me better appreciate certain things in life, now that time is moving normally.” I pause. “Was she aware that would happen? What could she have possibly known about me? She’d never seen me before.”
“I’m not sure,” Judith says, “but she did have very strong hunches, and sometimes she knew a lot about a person without being told. One time, she told me not to date a certain man, told me bad things would happen if I did, and then I found her hiding in the bushes on a date. He was furious, and he never called me again. I was mad at her, of course, but I thought she was just an interfering, overprotective mother who wouldn’t let me live my own life.” She chuckles wryly. “A year later, he was in the news. He would scam the women he dated and leave themwith nothing. I doubt she had the power to know the details of your lives, but she probably had… a feeling.”
I absorb her words. “You don’t know much about her abilities?”
“No. When I was little, I thought it was something all mothers could do.”
At first, that sounds unbelievable. But when I was a small child, my parents were like all-powerful beings, and it took a while to understand that they were fallible too. I suppose I can see it.
“What day was it when you came out of the loop?” Judith asks.
“January twenty-fourth. Was that the day she died?”
Judith shakes her head. “No. She died on the fifteenth.”
So much for that theory.
“But January twenty-fourth was her wedding anniversary.”
Huh. Interesting.
“I really don’t know why everything happened as it did for you two,” she says. “She got sick in the fall. Even before then… she was ninety. I don’t think she could control her powers as well as she thought she could anymore, and maybe that’s why you were there for so long. My best guess is that January twenty-fourth was a date she preset. A fail-safe, so you wouldn’t repeat the same day forever.”
I think of the strange night when I saw 3:01 a.m. on my alarm clock. Did Judith’s mother try to get us out of the loop that night, but she wasn’t strong enough to do it?
“I doubt she had any ill intent, even if it felt that way. I suspect she only wanted to help you.” Judith pauses. “Though I’ve never been stuck in a time loop, my brother was. I don’t know the details because he won’t talk about it. But I do know that she was able to see what was going on in his reality, and she broughthim out when she thought he’d done what he needed to do. He grudgingly admitted that it changed him for the better, but he still resented her for it, and when she came to Canada, he made her promise that she wouldn’t do such things here. Until now, I thought she hadn’t.”
