Traveler

Eight was probably too old for a wacky straw, Lissie decided, as the smiling waiter approached her poolside chaise lounge with her second Pineapple Dream Surprise of the day. She thanked him and waited until he'd left before removing the blue plastic spiral from the tall, frosted cup and, after licking off the creamy yellow slush, setting it on the low table beside her, next to her magazine. She glanced over the rim of the cup as she sipped it, her plastic heart-shaped sunglasses hiding her observant eyes – did everyone get one? Maybe it was just part of the resort's sense of humor. Where the Sun Never Sets on Family Fun! was printed under the arcing dolphin logo on every staff member's shirt, every menu, all the paper sleeves that were replaced every day, without fail, around the drinking glasses in their hotel room bathroom.

The family a few chairs over seemed to be wacky straw-less; the teenage boy, still reading the thick, water-wavy book Lissie had seen him with all week, seemed to have forgotten about the paper cup beside him, and it was nearly floating in a puddle of condensation under the hot sun. The little boy, still wearing the bright orange arm floaties, sipped from a lidded child's cup whenever his mother, semi-visible under her enormous straw hat, pressed it into his small hands.

Lissie's mother, seated next to her, was absently swirling the dregs of her iced tea and also staring into a paperback book, though Lissie noticed she hadn't turned a page in several minutes. After their quiet breakfast, Lissie's father had drained his coffee mug and left the table, saying he'd meet them later at the pool, but so far he hadn't arrived. The same thing had happened at dinner on the big porch overlooking the ocean (veranda, her mother called it) two nights earlier. Lissie pretended to be asleep when he returned to their room late at night, but she couldn't make out their muttered conversation through the bathroom wall.

"I'll be right back," her mother said suddenly, tossing the book aside without marking her place. She stood up, wrapping her gauzy sarong around her waist. "Stay here, okay? Don't go anywhere. And don't—"

"—go in the pool until you get back," Lissie finished. "I won't." She reached for her Young Adventurers magazine again. This could take a while.

Her mother headed towards the hotel with a determined look. Nearby, the little boy squealed with either amusement or frustration as his mother applied another layer of sunscreen to his apple-cheeked face. A trio of girls sporting identical honey-blonde braids raced each other across the width of the pool, sending droplets onto the concrete in front of Lissie. She watched the dark spots fade away in the sun, wishing she had a watch to time their disappearances. Maybe there was a way to tell the temperature by how fast water dried up.

"Can I sit here?"

Lissie looked up from the pavement, surprised. A youngish woman, maybe around her mother's age, dressed simply in shorts and a sleeveless blue shirt, was standing by the reclined chair on her other side. Lissie felt herself smile when she noticed a raven tattooed on her arm, its spindly feet clutching a ribbon that seemed to twist around back into itself. Ravens were Lissie's favorite animal; not enough people knew how smart they were.

"Yeah," Lissie answered, nodding. The woman sat, glancing around at the other families and checking her watch. It was an oversized, funny-looking thing.

"What are you reading?"

Lissie showed her a page of the magazine. "It tells you how to do an experiment where you make a soda can squash itself just with cold water."

"How does it work?" The woman looked interested, her eyebrows raised.

"First you heat it up on the stove, and then in the water, it—" She checked the article again. "It turns back from steam to water again, and the air pressure makes it implode. I want to try it."

"Sounds cool," the woman said, and sounded like she meant it. "You like science?" She checked her watch again.

Lissie nodded eagerly. "Uh-huh. It's my favorite. But sometimes it's really hard."

"Yeah, it is. But that makes it more fun, right?" She gave a sly grin, like they already shared an inside joke. "When you figure something out, it's like your brain won a prize."

"Yeah." That was exactly it. Did everyone feel that way?

Watch check, look around. "I'm Ama, by the way," the woman said, giving a friendly little half-wave in her direction.

"I'm Lissie." Then, realizing her potential mistake: "My mom will be back in a second." She closed the magazine over her finger.

"Oh, cool." As if taking her cue, the older boy a few seats over stuck a folded cocktail napkin in his book, closed it and stretched, leaning over to address his mother. "Are you and your parents having a good time here?"

"Yeah," Lissie said automatically. "I like the pool a lot, and the beach, and the food's good." She paused. "I don't know if my mom really likes it here. Or my dad."

"They don't seem happy?"

"Not like I thought they would." Their flight to the island had left early in the morning, when the sun was barely up, and Lissie's favorite aunt had stayed overnight so she could drive the three of them to the airport. She was fighting to stay awake in the backseat of the car, a band of orange just starting to appear on the edge of the navy blue sky outside, when she heard her mother say, in an undertone to her sister, something about "the vacation resort of last resort." She didn't know what it meant, but her aunt said shhh as her dad approached the car with the last of the suitcases. "They seem the same as at home."

"Are they fighting?" Ama's voice was gentle.

"Not really anymore. But they don't talk much." She tried to remember the last time she saw them laugh together. Thanksgiving? Her last birthday? Her insides suddenly felt heavy, weighing her down.

Ama let another silence hover between them, long enough to hear the oldest honey-blonde girl announce to the other two that it was time to play mermaids. The teenage boy stood and loped off towards the indoor restaurant. "I think this is probably the worst part, the in-between part where you don't know what's going to happen. But they'll figure it out. It might take more time to get there, but soon they're gonna figure out a way for everyone to be happy."

Lissie looked at her. Ama reminded her of her aunt, maybe; kindness without that syrupy-sweet tone adults used to make kids feel better. The raven on her arm looked joyful, its outstretched wings shimmering with deep blues and greens within the black. "I hope so," she said, lifting her shoulders in a small shrug.

"Trust me," Ama said, smiling again. And again, she checked her watch. "Anything else good in there?" She nodded at the Young Adventurers magazine.

Lissie flipped it open again. At breakfast, she had been reading a story about plans for a Mars habitat until her mother reminded her, yet again, no reading at the table. As she turned to the photo of the large white dome, there was a clunk and a dull slshhh, followed by a bonk bonk bonk as her tall plastic cup, still half-full of melting Pineapple Dream Surprise, toppled over on the small table, rolled off and bounced away across the concrete.

Several nearby families looked around, startled by the noise. The youngest of the blonde girls let out a loud "uh-oh" that made a few of the adults chuckle. Ama's arm was half raised, frozen in mid-air as she winced.

"Oh God, I'm sorry," she said, speaking first to Lissie and then looking around at the other guests. "My fault. I'm so clumsy."

A waiter hurried over, towel in hand. Over his shoulder, Lissie saw the boys' mother suddenly throw her phone down and get quickly to her feet. "Jeremy," she said sharply, crossing to the deep end of the pool, where the toddler was standing and hanging onto the silver ladder with both hands, dipping one foot experimentally into the water. "No deep end, remember?" she said, kneeling beside him. "And these stay on." She picked up the orange floaties from where he'd cast them onto the pavement.

"I'm really sorry," Ama was repeating to the waiter, who was reassuring her politely as he mopped up the yellow mess with efficient speed and collected the plastic cup from under another chair. "Can she get another pineapple thingy when you have a chance?"

He retreated to the hotel. Ama made an embarrassed face. "Yikes. Awkward. What were you going to say?" she prompted, again indicating the magazine.

Lissie began to explain about the astronauts' simulated habitat as the teen boy reappeared and rejoined his family, prompting a beaming smile and outstretched arms from the younger brother, as though he had been gone for days. Ama stood up abruptly.

"Sorry," she said again. "I just realized I'm late for something." Lissie barely had time to register this before she added, "Keep doing science stuff, even when it's really hard. That's when it's the most worth it, okay?"

"Yeah, okay." Lissie nodded, feeling slightly bewildered. "Bye?"

Ama smiled at her and turned to go, walking purposefully towards the beach. Her bright blue shirt seemed to stay imprinted on Lissie's eyes for several seconds. But then she blinked, and Ama slipped between two palm trees and was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ama knew she was meant to spend at least half an hour in the hyperbaric chamber after every trip, but she compromised on about eight minutes before jumping out and hurrying to Control Room D. Her head swam, but she was too excited to wait.

"Did it work?" she blurted out. Horatia took off her headset, looking amused.

"Hello to you too," she said, eyes twinkling behind her oversized glasses. "That was not thirty minutes."

"Yeah, whatever, dock my pay." Ama threw herself into an empty chair and wheeled close to the console, squeezing right up to her friend's shoulder to look at the oversized screens in front of her. "Did it?"

"You know very well we're supposed to wait to present to the whole team in a few hours," Horatia told her in a slightly mocking singsong, eyes on her screens. She typed rapidly even as she spoke, and Ama grinned; of course she wouldn't make her wait to hear about the results of her first big solo job.

The screens bloomed with dozens of separate windows: complex graphs, a series of magazine articles, a small dot moving slowly around a satellite-view map. She took a big breath, sat back in her chair and grinned widely at Ama.

"It worked," she said. "He's at the research lab right now."

Ama let out a yell of joy and threw her arms around Horatia, who gave a startled laugh and returned her hug with one arm. She pointed to one of the screens. "Look, he accepted the Harvard offer, published at nineteen, double PhD…" She pulled up a photo of two beaming young men with their arms around each other, one clad in a mortarboard and an eye-wateringly bright red gown with black stripes. "And there's little Jeremy, alive and well," she added.

Ama helped herself to a red popsicle from the mini-fridge. Dry mouth was another annoying side effect of trips. "What'd he end up doing?"

"Let's see…" More typing. "He took a gap year in Australia and now he's in a band." Her mouth quirked wryly. "He's living with Dan in Boston now. 'Another surprising fact about this promising young epidemiologist – he genuinely enjoys living with his little brother,'" she read aloud from one of the pages onscreen. "'"I know that sounds really annoying to most people, but we've always gotten along well and we have a good time together," he laughs. "After a long day at the lab, it's nice to just come home and relax and watch a superhero movie together."'"

"That's so sweet." Ama was moved, even more than she expected to be. But the brothers' bond was the emotional root of it all, of course, and the thing that changed, or rather would have changed, everything. "No wonder he went so off-track before." The idea of a great mind like that swallowed by grief, smothered by regret, was chilling.

"What'd you decide to do?" Horatia asked, glancing over at her.

"Just knocked over this big cup." She licked a sticky red droplet on its way down her wrist. "Everything's plastic by the pool, obviously, so it just made this big, dumb noise and it got Carla's attention." Ama and the rest of her team had intimately researched the family, their behavior and choices and incentives and deterrents; it was easy to forget that she'd never actually met any of them and never would. "She looked up and saw him at the deep end and grabbed him before he fell in the water."

"Nicely done, very clean." Horatia nodded approvingly. There was a pause, and she raised her eyebrows pointedly. "And…?"

"Annnd…" Ama drew the word out teasingly. "And yeah, I talked to her for a bit." Third person, their team had agreed, was just the least headache-inducing way to phrase it. "I talked to myself" meant something else, and "I talked to me" or "I" sounded ridiculous.

Horatia thumped her elbow on her desk, chin perched eagerly on hand. "What was it like? What was she like?"

"It was weird," she admitted at once. "But kinda great? I wouldn't have described myself as shy, but she had this kind of quiet eager-to-please thing going on. And she really wanted to tell me about everything in her science magazine, but it was like 'ugh, should I? Does this adult really care about what I'm excited about?' You remember that feeling?"

"I definitely do," Horatia said, with a dry chuckle. "And it's not surprising you were shy, that was a hard time for you."

"Yeah, and about to get harder." Ama sighed, tipping back in the chair. "I wish I could've just told her outright, this next part's going to suck for a while, but it'll get a lot better when they just get divorced and stop dragging it out. It was much easier once they moved on and learned how to coexist."

"But you didn't—"

"Of course I didn't." She gave her friend an admonishing 'what do you take me for' expression and adopted a stern tone. "'No declarative statements or potentially influential intimations of future occurrences outside of established mission parameters, including but not limited to information pertaining to events personal, financial, political—'"

"All right, all right." Horatia held up both hands. "Forgive me, I have complete faith in your professional integrity." The bosses had taken a chance on Ama, a rookie agent, mostly because traveling within one's own timeline was thought to cause the least amount of temporal disturbance. Risking such a dangerous violation would have ruined any chance she had of proving herself, and this was everything she had wanted for so long now.

"You'd better by now," Ama grinned. "No, I kept it vague, just 'they'll figure it out, grown-ups are just like that sometimes' sort of thing. I think it helped a little."

"A successful side quest in a highly successful mission," Horatia agreed. She leaned over and mimed affixing a medal to the front of Ama's rumpled travel suit. "Amaryllis Wells, a grateful nation thanks you for ensuring the eventual discovery of an effective treatment for Cyndonian viral hemorrhagic fever, which will come to be known as CVHF or, colloquially, the Red Plague, and also for comforting a sweet little nerd in her time of need." She pinched a tiny section of fabric. "That gets a smaller medal, admittedly."

Ama nodded solemnly, gave her a formal salute, and then did a regal, cupped-hand wave at an imaginary crowd of admirers. That was their eternal joke: no one outside of their teams would ever know what they did, no matter how much it changed or improved the world. No headlines, no prizes, no history books. That was the whole point. Their shared joy and relief was all there was.

Clearly thinking the same thing, Horatia cast an eye over her appearance. "You'd better get fixed up. Everyone's going to want to go out and celebrate after we present later."

The raven on her arm seemed to flutter as Ama clapped a hand on her friend's shoulder and stood, tossing the popsicle stick in the trash and heading off back to her quarters. Maybe the bartender at their favorite after-work bar could figure out how to make a Pineapple Dream Surprise.