Page 75 of Deja Who
“Yes,” she said, remembering, “just a couple of years ago. They stuck a microphone in my face and asked me why I hadn’t figured it out sooner, preventing the last two rapes.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I invited them to fuck the fuck off.”
“I sure hope so!”
“Sorry about the language.”
“It seems appropriate in that instance.”
“That was the part of the interview that didn’t make it past their editors.” Not to mention one of the last interviews she’d had to endure. She should have tried the “fuck the fuck off” method earlier. She should have tried it on...
No. She couldn’t think of Archer now.
The cabbie snorted. “No doubt. Anyway, that’s how I knew what you looked like. I never met you when you treated my niece for her chronophobia. Five years ago?”
Leah thought about lying, but couldn’t stomach the thought. “I... I apologize, I don’t—”
“It’s fine. I wouldn’t expect a doctor to remember every single patient she saw.”
“But chronophobia isn’t that common, you’d think I—”
“Stealing clocks?”
Thatsocked the memory home. “My God, yes! I can’t believe I forgot.” Leah giggled in spite of herself. “Your niece, Maya. She was... well, kind of a treasure.”
The old-fashioned endearment perfectly fit Maya Ryan, who feared time and the passing of time. She was Leah’s second client with chronophobia, and by far the most interesting. Maya believed the best way to prevent time from passing was to break every watch or clock in her home, and steal and hide/bury/destroy every watch or clock outside of her home. The police, of course, eventually got involved.
“My niece couldn’t sit in a classroom, she couldn’t go to a movie theater or the grocery store or a school play without being obsessed with the clocks, with the watches people around her were wearing... she was a wreck. So was my sister. But you were pretty nice about the whole thing.”
“I was?” Nice? Really? Was it possible there were two Leah Nazirs living in the Chicago area?
“Yeah, you figured out that she’d died some ten or fifteen times already, always because she’d run out of time.”
Leah remembered. In 1881, Maya had ingested poison as a child in Wyoming and hid rather than confess what she’d done; by the time she’d been coaxed from her hiding place and rushed to the hospital, her time had run out. In 1927, she had ignored all theDangersigns, found a hole in the fencing, and sneaked into the William A. Clark house, which was (as the signs had warned helpfully) set to explode. Tick-tock boom. As a young mother-to-be in Seattle twenty-three years later, she hadn’t realized she’d developed eclampsia; when her labor started, so did her convulsions. By the time the baby had been removed via emergency C-section, Maya had been clinically dead for three minutes.
The cabbie brought Leah back to the present by saying the last thing she expected. “‘You were right to be afraid then, and you’re right to be afraid now. Your fear is a gift; not a thing to suppress or fight.’”
“How did you know what I—”
“She said it at least once a week, often enough that I memorized it. She was so grateful to you. I am, too.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.”
“She’s dead now. There was an accident by the side of the road and she got out to help. Got clipped by a truck crossing the midline.”
Leah groaned. “Of course she did. I’m so sorry.”
“Us, too. But youdidhelp her when nobody else could.” The cabbie adjusted her rearview mirror, the better to gaze straight into Leah’s eyes. “I’ve hopes I’ll see her again in her next life.I’ve hopes she’ll live a lovely long life and die old and loved in her bed. You helped her break the cycle, you know.”
“I did? Hmm.Shedid, at any rate,” Leah replied, thinking hard. “Or it was broken for her. Something changed and the pattern broke. That’s... hmm.”
She didn’t say another word until the cab pulled up to her apartment building, which looked a lot like a long gray Lego upended on its side. The cabbie didn’t, either, but got out of her seat and gave Leah a slow, careful hug, which Leah managed to return in kind without bursting into fresh tears.
