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“Dad, why is every day the same now?” Andie asked.
Nyles looked up from his Candy Crush game and tried to kick his brain into gear, but it continued to stall out because his daughter had just spit out her pacifier to ask that question. Yesterday he’d been thrilled to hear her say something close to “Dada,” and called Sarah at work to share his excitement. Andie speaking in fully enunciated sentences was strikingly new behavior. He was pretty sure he hadn’t zoned out and missed some in-between milestones somewhere. Also, that particular sentence, and what it implied, left him more than a little nervous.
“What do you mean, pumpkin?” he said, hoping that she’d respond with some babbling, and the sentence was just an early-morning delusion of his.
Her face screwed up in frustration. “Same pancakes. Same Dora. Same dogs at the park.”
Goddamnit. A quick Google search left him with the impression that this was at least six months too early for Andie to speak in full sentences.
But Andie had half her genes from his genius girlfriend, so maybe it was within the realm of possibility. Maybe the brilliance showed early, in speech and in boredom with routine. Sarah would still have about twenty minutes left on her commute, and this wasn’t really a conversation that they could have on the bus. But there was one other person who might know.
“Nyles!” Howard exclaimed, sounding absolutely delighted to be called out the blue. Which was kind of annoying. Nyles didn’t mind being liked, but he resented being liked under false pretenses. His father-in-law believed, (as did the rest of Sarah’s relatives) that Nyles had “saved” Sarah from a life of underachieving and overdrinking. Nyles could sort of understand why. If you weren’t in the time loop, Sarah’s sense of purpose and new boyfriend appeared to show up at precisely the same time. And Nyles and Sarah couldn’t exactly explain that Sarah’s sense of purpose had shown up long before she and Nyles had committed to each other.
(Nyles’ family similarly believed that Sarah saved him from cheerfully drifting through life, but that didn’t bother him, because they were right about that.)
“So quick question about Sarah—when did she start speaking in sentences?” Nyles asked.
“I think she was around two? She started reading around then, too. Kind of spooked the neighbors when she’d read out license plates and yard signs.” Howard chuckled at the memory.
“Oh,” Nyles said, deflated. Sarah was indeed brilliant, but shockingly early speech couldn’t just be something Andie had inherited from her mom.
After a long silence, Peter asked, “Are you worried about Andie? She’ll be fine. Every kid hits their milestones at different times. Sarah took longer to speak, Tala took longer to walk, their brother Nico had a phase where he ate nothing but grilled cheese for months, and they’re all doing great now.”
“Thanks,” Nyles chirped “That’s helpful.” If there was one silver lining of being trapped in a time loop for centuries, it was learning how to tell convincing lies.
“Same Giorgio’s every day,” Andie had crawled over to the couch, and looked up at him expectantly. “Why?”
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“Are you sitting down?” That was what people did in movies when they had to deliver bad news, and Nyles had never had anyone gently break bad news to him in real life.
“What's wrong?” Of course, Sarah would sense that something was wrong, just from the slightest tremor in his voice. “Is everyone ok?”
“Well, nobody’s in any immediate danger,” he hedged.
“Just say it!” she snapped.
“I- I think Andie’s stuck in a time loop. She’s suddenly started speaking in complete sentences six months early, and she just said we go to Giorgio’s Cafe every day, even though we haven’t been there in two weeks. I was thinking of going today. And she’s complaining about watching the same episode of Dora, even though was a new episode this morning.”
There was a loud thunk on the other end of the line, followed by a garbled scream that might have been “FUUUUUCK.”
Nyles’ knees buckled. He grabbed the kitchen counter for support. He’d been just barely holding it together through a combination of grim determination and some residual layer of denial, and Sarah’s scream had pierced right through that.
“You were right.” Sarah said hoarsely. “I should have been sitting down for this. Ok. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to pick me up from work right now, and we’ll look for the time loop vortex.”
Nyles quickly packed the diaper bag, strapped Andrea into her incredibly complicated car seat, and drove off.
_______________________
“I think we start with Giorgio’s,” Sarah said, without so much as a greeting, as soon as she got into the car. “It's the outlier of the day, so maybe that’s where the weirdness snuck in.”
That sounded more like a hunch than a solid theory to Nyles, but he’d follow Sarah’s hunches to the end of the Earth.
“What were you going to do here?” Sarah asked. “We should stick to your original plans as close as possible.
“I was going to get a gyro for me, apple slices for Andie.” At Sarah’s skeptical look, he added. “Ok, I was also thinking about splitting a babyccino with her, happy?”
“Well, go with that, then. And get a souvlaki for me.”
They got their order and put Andie in a highchair, surreptitiously scanning the room for anything that looked like it might lead to a time loop.
Halfway through the meal, Andrea threw her apple slices on the floor. “I wanna go play in the ball pit,” she whined.
“The ball pit. I bet that’s it!” Sarah lifted Andie out of the chair and made her way to the children’s play area.
Nyles followed and caught her by the shoulder. “Are you crazy? Do you want to just jump right back into that again?”
“I don’t want Andie to be trapped in a baby’s body while she gets older, like that creepy Brad Pitt movie.” Sarah argued.
“I just think maybe we can figure out a way to get her out without getting stuck in it ourselves,” he said.
“I might need more than one day to figure out a way to help Andie. And if I can’t do it today, I want to take full advantage of the loop, so we don’t waste time reinventing the wheel every morning. But if you don’t want to risk it, I can do it alone,” she said, her voice breaking a little on that last word.
“That's not what I meant,” he reassured her. “There’s no one else that I trust more than you to figure things out. And if you need someone to hold down the fort and do laundry and make French toast while you’re the hard work, I’m up for it.”
He took her hand as they walked closer to the brightly colored ball pit. The hairs on his arms prickled in a familiar way, spreading all the way up to his shoulders. This had to be it.
He gripped Sarah’s hand tighter as they approached the pit. That thrum of energy pulsed over them. This was undoubtedly the second craziest thing he’d ever done for love.
_____________________________
If it hadn’t been for Sarah holing herself up in front of her laptop all day, and Andie offering extensive commentary on her waffles, it would have been easy to forget he was in a time loop again. The beauty (and challenge) of being a stay-at-home dad was that he dealt with a lot of repetition in keeping Andie alive and fed. And this particular day didn’t have a playdate or birthday party or other event that might have broken up the monotony.
Once Sarah had verified that this time loop seemed to be following the same pattern as the one at Tala’s wedding, she hunkered down with a lot of math and complicated-looking diagrams to see if the old solution would work. On the fourth or fifth day or so, while Nyles was heating up some ramen noodles for lunch, Sarah pushed her chair back from her desk and groaned. “Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered at the computer screen.
Nyles looked to see if Andie had heard that; he wasn’t sure how much of their conversations she was picking up. But she was engrossed in a Daniel Tiger show on the TV. Nyles had found some episodes of shows that they’d watched so long ago that they seemed “new” to her.
“Do I want to know what that’s about?” Nyles said. “Or do you just want to eat some carbs and stew over it?”
“Our old plan should work, in theory,” Sarah said. “But I don’t know how to blow up a ball pit at Giorgio’s without collateral damage. We were lucky that the old time loop vortex was way out in a cave, instead of at everyone’s favorite lunch spot and cafe. I mean, I could try to figure if we could safely blow up the bystanders, the ones not in the time loop, but that could take months or years to figure out. We’ll need to get the place all to ourselves.”
To Nyles’ great surprise, a solution came to mind immediately. “We rent out the place at night for a birthday party. Cassidy’s mom did that for her cousin’s graduation. They cater everything in advance and then there’s only one person there to clean up afterwards. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with an excuse to get that person to leave.”
“Oh,” Sarah said, with less enthusiasm than he might have expected. When he gave her a questioning look, she added, “I was hoping that it might take a while for us to figure out that part of it, and maybe I’d come up with a plan that doesn’t involve explosives anywhere near our baby.”
“Right, that is kind of worrisome,” Nyles agreed. “Do you want to just take more time, anyway, see if it shakes something loose?”
“I would, except I’m worried about Andie. Yesterday when you were making breakfast and I was trying to get her dressed, she had a tantrum because I couldn’t find her hippo shirt. And I was relieved, because that felt normal.”
“In her defense, that hippo shirt is the hottest lewk for the toddler crowd this season.”
Sarah continued as if Nyles hadn’t tried to lighten the mood. “Then she asked, ‘Why are you home all the time now? Are you ever going to fix the day so something new happens?’ I don't want her to get bored with life before she starts preschool.”
“I don’t think one more day or two will make that much of a difference to her,” Nyles said, thinking of his own bouts of time-loop-related ennui.
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For the next two days, Sarah hunched over the computer, barely speaking to Nyles or Andie, until she broke the silence with a demand for a California burrito, with extra fries and salsa. Nyles put in the order, quietly hoping that this was a sign of a potential breakthrough, and not a meltdown.
Sarah wolfed down the burrito and washed it down with a beer. “All right, I think if we position it right, we can use less powerful explosives. We shield Andie with our bodies, so she has a better chance at survival, in case I miscalculated any of this.”
Nyles pushed aside the thought of Andie stuck in a time loop, watching one or both of her parents dying. “Put me closest to the bomb.”
“What?” Sarah’s eyes widened in shock.
“Or whatever the technical term is for your exploding thingy!”
"Nyles--”
“If something goes wrong, it’s better for Andie if the person who survives is the one who can actually figure out the space-time-whatsits and adjust them as needed.”
“You’re not wrong,” she conceded. “But just thinking about that—I just need a moment, ok?” He hugged her tightly; she leaned into it, then took a deep breath and pulled away a little. “I think we need to call one other person to make sure this goes off without a hitch.”
_________________________________
“You dumbasses jumped into another time loop on purpose ?” Roy hissed over the phone.
Nyles tried to dial down the antagonism a little. “It’s for our kid,” he explained. “She got sucked in accidentally, and we had to dive back in to figure out how to get her safely out of the loop.”
Roy’s glare softened; perhaps he was thinking of his own kids. “Well, shit. Ok. Are you expecting me to get into the loop with you?”
Nyles glanced at Sarah. “No,” she said firmly. “We can keep you out of it. I'm recording this call. If you promise to do this, we can send you the video and instructions on the day we decide to go through with it.”
“What exactly do you need?” Roy asked, a trace of suspicion in his voice.
“To create a distraction at a cafe in Ventura,” Nyles said.
Roy groaned in frustration. “Jesus Christ, that’s nearly two hours with good traffic. And it’s never good.”
“Look on the bright side,” Sarah said. “It’s closer to you than Santa Barbara is. Imagine how much worse your commute might be if the time loop vortex could afford to live there.”
_________________________
Sarah had finalized her plans, Nyles had bribed the cafe manager to book a birthday party on incredibly short notice, and as long as Roy showed up on time, they were ready to go.
Nyles had come in carrying a pile of wrapped gift boxes, which was probably laying it on a little thick. Still, the point of all this subterfuge was to avoid making the cafe manager suspicious. As he arranged the boxes on the table, he said to Jaime, “Hey, my dad is going to bring a birthday cake, and he’s got a bad back and a wobbly ankle. Do you mind going down to the parking lot and helping him with it?” He handed her a twenty dollar bill.
“Of course!” Jaime replied with a big smile— he'd probably overtipped, but since he was about to set off explosives in her cafe, it was probably also the least he could do.
Sarah’s phone buzzed with a text message. “He’s here now,” she told Jaime.
Once Jaime was gone, Sarah grabbed Andie, Nyles grabbed the diaper bag full of explosives, and they headed for the ball pit.
Sarah fussed for a few minutes getting the explosives in the right place, and lay down with facing away from them, Andie in her baby sling in front. Nyles positioned himself behind her, shielding her and Andie from the potential blast.
Nyles had been thinking a lot about what to say at this point. “Sarah, I just want you to know, that if I don’t make it out of this,” he began.
“C’mon, don’t do that. I have to press the detonator before they get back here.”
“Fine, geez. Idon’tregretanythingandIfeelsoluckyIgottospendthistimewithyou,” Nyles said.
And then, because he really didn’t want his last words to her to be petulant jumble, he repeated it a little slower. “I don’t regret anything, and I feel so lucky I got to spend this time with you.”
Sarah didn’t make a sound, but he could feel her breathing hitch—she must be crying. In a shaky voice, she said, “yeah, me too,” and pushed the detonator.
_________________________
Just like the last time, Nyles’ return to consciousness after the blast was a bit hazy. He found himself on the sidewalk, pushing Andie’s stroller while Sarah brushed a piece of plastic off his shoulder—possibly a remnant of one of the plastic balls from the pit.
“Did we do it?” he asked Sarah.
“Yeah,” she said, holding up her phone; a wave of relief pulsed through him when he saw they’d finally passed through the time loop date.
As the turned the corner near the park, he spotted some people walking small, strange-looking dogs.
As they grew closer, he came to a dead stop when he realized that they weren’t dogs at all, but tiny hippos on leashes. He grabbed Sarah’s arm, wondering if he had a concussion and needed to go to the ER. “Are you seeing those too?”
Sarah nodded, seeming less surprised by the sight. “Just roll with it, ok? Sometimes altering the space-time continuum leads to unexpected changes to the timeline.”
“Hippopotamuses!” Andie exclaimed in delight. “They don’t swim. They walk in the water!”
Sarah sighed. She whispered to Nyles, “I don’t know what we’re going to do if she starts reading Scientific American before she’s out of diapers. You know, if she turns into one of those kids that are so smart that they freak out the neighbors.”
Nyles shrugged. “I’m not worried. The only freakishly smart child I know of turned out pretty awesome. Wouldn’t want her to be any other way.”
Sarah considered this, looking like she might say something wry and self-deprecating, But instead, she just smiled warmly at him as they continued on their way back to their apartment.