Second Chances

Brian reached her first. “Oh, my God, she’s burning up!”

She was. As Jennifer touched Jenn her skin felt hot and dry. Feverish. And her wound had bled clear through her bandage. Her jeans were saturated too. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“We’ve got to get her to a hospital!”

“We’ve got to figure out what I did wrong.”

Jenn roused, groaning, swearing softly. “Brian! Oh, God, they shot him! Gotta get up…”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’m here, Jenn. I’m all right. You’re just having a nightmare.” The sound of Brian’s voice seemed to soothe her and she quieted.

Jennifer took charge. “Grab her feet,” she told Brian. “Help me get her back into bed.”

The sheets were stained a bright shade of red. Jennifer lowered Jenn down on top of them anyway.

Now what?

Jenn was in a great deal of pain, made worse by her feverish state. She drifted, hovering across the line of consciousness, on the edge of some terrible nightmarish place, and she fought to stay awake.

“Get a towel,” Jennifer ordered Brian, and as he vanished back into the hallway she glared down at Jenn. “For a registered genius, you are one hell of an idiot. How could you possibly have forgotten the basic rule of first aid? Apply pressure to stop bleeding.”

Jenn was pale and her teeth chattered from a sudden chill. “I did. In the car. It stopped.”

“Yeah? It looks like it started again.”

“I didn’t think I’d be around long enough for it to matter.”

“Well, I’ve made my decision. No way am I following your path. But you’re still here, so it looks like I’m going to have to do more than simply make up my mind to change my future. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”

Silently, Brian appeared, holding the towel out for Jennifer. She took it, using it to gently apply pressure over the makeshift bandage.

“I’ll find some blankets,” Brian murmured, taking one look at the way Jenn was shivering.

“Thanks,” Jennifer said.

He met her eyes briefly before he left the room. He knew as well as she did that their situation had just dropped from bad to worse.

Jenn had drifted off again, before offering up any suggestions.

Brian brought a pile of blankets into the room and began covering Jenn. “Maybe I have to take action,” she suggested, helping him. “Maybe I should call my boss. Tell him right now---today---that I’m leaving NASA. I could call Jeff Nelson at Harvard. He always promised that he’d do whatever was necessary to get me into the medical school there. He was a friend of my father’s,” she explained to Brian, “who always wanted me to complete my degree and go into medical research.”

She made the phone calls quickly, from the telephone on the bedside table, as she continued to apply pressure to Jenn’s still-bleeding leg. She turned slightly away, because she didn’t want to see Brian sit down next to Jenn, on the edge of the bed. But he didn’t. Instead, he sat quietly on the floor, away from both of them, leaning back against the wall.

She could feel him watching her as she spoke on the phone, and she felt a pang of longing so sharp, she had to clear her throat before she could talk. Jenn loved him enough to die for him. How could she possibly compete with that? After all this was over, what would happen? Would Brian even want to see her again, or would she remind him too much of Jenn?

She dropped the phone back into the receiver, and Jenn fought to open her eyes. “I’m still here,” she whispered.

Her boss had expressed regrets about Jennifer’s decision to leave NASA, but he’d been supportive and had wished her luck. Dr. Jeff Nelson, a man whose anatomy classes Jennifer had audited while in her teens, had been overjoyed that she was intending to complete her medical degree. Nelson had never understood that Jennifer had needed to know enough about the human body to make sure that her time-travel device delivered a living, breathing person rather than some compressed bundle of protoplasm to the past. That was Jennifer’s sole purpose for studying medicine. Achieving a medical degree to dangle off the end of her name meant nothing to her. At least not until now.

But despite the sense of forward motion she’d gotten from her phone calls, nothing---apparently---had changed.

“Maybe I need to do more.” Jennifer rubber her eyes with her free hand, wishing there was time to lie down, to take a nap. She wanted to sit down next to Brian and pull him into her arms. But she wouldn’t do that. Not in front of Jenn. “Maybe I need to erase my hard drive. Maybe I need to delete the files of my research notes.”

It would damn near kill her to wipe out nearly 8 years worth of research. But she was going to have to do it----because she didn’t want to end up lying on that bed with a bullet in her leg, filled with vividly violent dreams caused by extremely nonresidual memories of Brian bleeding to death as she held him in her arms.

“Maybe,” Brian said quietly from where he was sitting on the floor, “Jenn hasn’t left because James Dixon is still out there somewhere. Maybe this has to do with him. Maybe until we confront him….”

Jennifer turned to look at Jenn. “Confront Dixon…..?”

Jenn didn’t answer, held prisoner by her feverish dreams.

And then the doorbell rang.

next chapter