by Brenna Lemieux
There was no knock, or if there was I didn’t hear it. Just the front door opening, that sigh of pressure exchange. Had I drifted off? Hard to say. Max had conked out in the toddler bed beside me, finally. A difficult day: Pat at a gig, and the news I couldn’t hide my reaction to, that little boy biking with his parents. And now an intruder?
But then—nothing. I strained, gripped the railing to heave myself up. My audition for Cirque du Soleil, I liked to joke to Pat. The mattress squeaked.
Footsteps in the apartment.
Double-alert, I eased myself over Max, out of his bed. Scanned for a weapon.
The closet. That broken tube fan we kept thinking we’d fix.
Outside, floorboards: movement. But why weren’t they hurrying, whoever it was? Digging around for cash? And how had they gotten in? We were on the third floor. The building was always locked.
I inched to the closet, eased open the accordion door.
Or maybe Pat, home early? Some disaster at the wedding—A last-minute change of heart?
The fan was half-buried beneath a bag of too-small clothes, which we really should have donated by now. But hope springs eternal. I listened: footsteps. I pushed aside the bag, slowly, carefully. Lifted the fan—Heavier than it looked. I crept to the bedroom door and opened it, clicked it shut, brandished the fan at the—
Fed? A man in the telltale gray suit, pacing our hall.
And then the shock: An infant in his arms. Newborn. Brand-new, from the looks of it. Something deep in me clenched: A forgotten pang. A ghost surge of milk.
“Natalie Burch?”
I confirmed, lowering the fan. Why did he have an infant?
“Can I see your ID?”
“Why are you here?” I said. Barging into my home and asking to see my ID. I mean, of course. But still.
“Timeline Department,” he said, shifting the baby to one hand—dexterously, I’ll admit—while fishing an ID from his back pocket.
My heart, calming, sped up again. We hadn’t yet been visited by the Timers, or at least not via house call. That we knew of. Though of course we were part of the larger-scale shifts they’d implemented in the last two years. Was this—? Oh god. I turned to Max’s door, to check that he was still alive, still three, still safe in bed.
“Max is fine,” said the man. Greg, per his ID. I handed it back to him. “Can you get your ID? She’s getting hungry.”
That pang again, and this time a familiar dampness. I looked down. Not the ghost of milk: I was lactating.
“Oh, god,” I said, realizing.
Greg the Timer, for what it’s worth, smiled. I fumbled toward the sofa, where I’d flung my purse that afternoon and dug out my wallet with shaking hands. Handed him the ID and, after his nod, accepted the baby. And there she was, warm and solid and utterly familiar. I leaned in for a whiff of scalp. Claire. Claire! But of course she was here. Where else would she be? I looked up.
Greg was prying open a box I hadn’t noticed: diapers, wipes, cream.
“All right, then, Natalie,” he said, standing. “You’ll find all the paperwork is in order.”
This proved not quite true, but we sorted it out. “I’ll leave you to it.” He turned, his hand already on the doorknob.
“Wait,” I said. Claire was nuzzling my chest, which had swelled noticeably in the last five minutes.
She whimpered.
Greg turned.
“I don’t—” but my thoughts had gone jumbled. I didn’t know where to start: Would we have to explain? Who could we refer to? Did I have time off work?
The whimper rose. The last thing I needed was for her to wake Max.
“I’ll leave my card,” said Greg, and he set it on the bookshelf near the door. He smiled, “And congratulations, Natalie.”
When he was gone, I sat with Claire on the sofa and let down the nursing bra I was somehow wearing. Because yes, they’d managed that much. And other things: the porta crib set up once again in our bedroom, three casseroles crammed in the freezer. And when I opened my work email to message my boss, I found an OOO message: I was out on maternity leave, apparently. For immediate needs, contact Ebony.
Still, there were plenty of kinks. I mean, about half the population (Pat and me included) still remembered the pandemic (or anyway, that was the latest estimate). But I’d heard with the targeted adjustments things tended to go more smoothly.
I took a picture of Claire and texted it to Pat.
“How perfect is she?” I wrote, though I’d meant to write, “Um… little update.”
“I’m losing my mind,” he wrote back. “Can you talk?”
“Is this really happening?” he said, when I picked up.
“I think so?” I said.
“I don’t—I just got this feeling halfway through our last set,” he said. “And then I saw your text, and I was like—oh, shit. It’s Claire.”
Claire. He’d known. Of course he’d known.
“Are you heading home, then?” I said.
“As fast as I can.”
“As fast as you can safely,” I reminded him.
The letter of explanation arrived the next day, dated the day after. Incredible technology, sure, but almost laughably buggy still. Upon review of the timeline, an error was detected. The period I’d gotten late in January was supposed to have been a pregnancy. Claire. And so they’d adjusted accordingly, etc. etc., and by the time I’d finished reading and passed the letter to Pat, who had taken over supervision of Max holding his sister on the sofa, I was sore between my legs and exhausted in the way I remembered from three years earlier.
On the news, we kept hearing about the baby boom—the Second Boom, they called it—and the grandparents collectively grew extra fond: a generational namesake. It was a relief to have good news, to have the headlines offer some solace. A difficult pregnancy, though I’d been ready for it at my age. And there was an air of easing too, knowing we were finished. We’d never wanted more than two, and the stress of Max being born in the summer of 2020 had affected me, even though they erased that later. Still, something of it had stuck. I had memories, though they blurred slightly after Claire, and no wonder—she was a hungry baby, growing, no concept of night and day, and everything they say about second children is true: We barely remembered to take pictures. Max was constantly calling us to look at his trains and his stuffed pandas and his underwear, which he’d taken to claiming were “a little wet” every time he peed, demanding we change him. Classic in the realm of child psychology, I imagine.
My parents, just three miles away, watched Max some days, cooed over Claire.
My mother was delighted at the timing: a late-September baby could be pumpkined for Halloween, posed adorably for Christmas. She’d been acquiring costumes since the summer.
One night in bed, Max asleep in his room and Claire dozing beside us in the crib, Pat said, “Do you think we’ll ever forget Claire’s Revision?”
It took me a moment to come to—I’d already nodded off. “They say you do if they make things worse.”
“Think we’ve been Revised for the worse?”
“Impossible,” I said, reaching for his hand.
He squeezed mine. He’d been sick during the pandemic. Long sick. Furious that the people in charge kept ignoring the science, kept insisting we’d be fine. And when the Revision happened and we still remembered, he was grateful, yes, but also angry: All those resources spent on it, when they could have just done the right thing the first time. Yes, I agreed. But at least they’d done something. He’d had to stop working, and we hadn’t had the right insurance. Max had only been one. Hard to articulate how difficult those months were—how terrifying. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re firmly behind us or because the Revision fuzzed out the specifics.
Claire rolled over, sat up, and crawled. This time around, I had a playgroup. I sat with other mothers in the same room and commiserated about exhaustion and sneeze pee and nightshirts that reeked of turned milk and didn’t worry that our breath would kill each other or our sweet angels, who were drooly and sticky and soft and perfect.
Then one week, I couldn’t find bananas at the grocery store. Claire was fed and happy in the cart, Max at a park with Pat, so I dashed to a second store. No luck.
Unpacking at home, I turned on the radio.
“Worst we’ve seen since Panama Disease,” the announcer was saying. “And it’s unclear when—or if—the beloved yellow fruit will return to shelves.”
I turned to Claire, upright in her wheeled bouncy seat, sucking on her silicone spoon, Spoony “Uh-oh,” I said.
And she said, “Uh-oh,” her one and only word.
Okay. We’d known there was an extinction threat. I’d been reading articles about that for at least a decade. We could pivot. I’d bought sweet potatoes. I forked one and put it in the toaster oven. Fine.
The front door opened.
“I’m hungry for pears!” Max shouted, running into the kitchen. He bent to his sister and gave her a juicy kiss, and she screech-laughed.
Pears. We had pears! It would be fine. And maybe the Timeline Department was already working on it. Maybe someone there had a baby who loved bananas, who understood how important a fruit could be.
What’s that saying about how, good or bad, you get used to your circumstances? We were guilty of it. Like Max, Claire breastfed for more than a year and didn’t manage to sleep through the night until she weaned. Pat and I were exhausted as a rule; we dragged ourselves from bed, from the sofa. We grumbled, gleefully handed the kids off to my parents for the occasional weekend respite. Relived the precarious tottering stage where the baby can hit their head on anything at any moment and you must shadow them at all times, only this time around four-year-old Max was demanding we read to him, tempting Claire across rooms with his big-kid toys: a ukulele from his grandparents, a remote-control car.
Kiwis went next, though we barely noticed. Then salmon and tuna. Then an acceleration; we started making grocery lists more as general guidelines (x units of starch, y of protein), then stopped altogether. Getting enough food was my goal; get enough calories from sources acceptable to the children. A relief, in its way. Supermarkets had always made me nervous: surely, that kind of abundance—that convenience—was not natural. Not sustainable. Now, you had to know when shipments came and go early to get there. They shifted to a voucher system, per-customer limits.
The economy, somehow, was booming.
The Second Boom had fueled a financial boom, all the charts soaring up, unemployment low, people buying, buying, buying. The experts they brought on the news offered sickening reframes:
“We’re finally seeing a more authentic kind of competition in the marketplace,” said one, ruddy jowls spilling from his collar. “We’re back to survival of the fittest.”
“Fuck you,” I said to the TV, too tired to care that Claire and Max were playing on the rug.
“What does that mean, Mommy?” said Max.
“It means, ‘Go jump in a lake’.”
“Fuck you!” said Max, over and over.
I lay on the floor. I’d been up since four to wait for oatmeal.
A thump. A wail.
I sat up. Claire, too close to the coffee table.
Max turned five and started kindergarten. The school had special buying privileges, so we let him eat there.
“Hey,” said Pat to me in bed. “At least he doesn’t have to mask.”
He handed me a tissue, but I couldn’t stop crying.
“I want them to Revise bananas back,” I said. “Why won’t they Revise back bananas?”
“Why didn’t they stop over-farming them in the first place?” he said.
But that was not what I wanted to hear.
At Claire’s second birthday party, we served mashed potatoes because that was the only thing she liked that was easy to get. Max and Pat made a special hat for Spoony.
I woke up one day a tea drinker—good. Coffee had gone scarce. And then, one cold February morning, we didn’t even have a kettle. We didn’t drink hot drinks in the morning, which made sense because when had I last seen coffee or tea at the store? What an odd, twentieth-century thought: coffee and tea. Relics!
This was the year the news finally started covering the climate emergency daily. It had become unavoidable; too many people had written in. And then, too, some of the coastal studios had flooded so badly they’d had to relocate. Summer became wildfire season everywhere. I found myself researching masks again. How many people were doing that for the first time (or thought they were)? How many remembered as we did? Every week, coverage of a new startup with a digital solution.
“Plant trees, you idiots!” Pat would shout at the radio. “Stop engineering obsolescence!”
A virus leapt from a bandicoot to a tourist.
“Habitat loss,” echoed the announcers. As if the habitat had gone missing like an earring back.
Max came home from kindergarten one day and asked, over his snack of raisins, “Why can’t they Revise the climate back?”
Claire sat in my lap, across the table. I smelled her sweet two-year-old scalp. “Maybe they can’t figure out how,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure they can,” said Max, tearing a raisin in half.
“I bet they’re working on something,” I said. Pre-RevTech, there had been talk of all kinds of Hail Mary solutions. Shooting particles in the air to reflect the sun away, I remember getting airtime. With unknown impacts. The assumption was that the Timers were cooking up a solution—in fact, that a climate solution was the reason for RevTech. But they kept not launching it. And then that CNN anchor had broken the story of how much energy Revisions required, how only five percent of it was renewable. A year ago, maybe. The station had immediately cut to commercial, but the damage was done; the fired anchor already had a website. And still, a year later, they hadn’t Revised away climate change. Almost enough to make you lose faith.
Claire banged Spoony on the table. “Raisin,” she said, the R clear as day. Max hadn’t gotten his Rs until well into his fours. Our golden girl. Our magic baby.
In April, the Energy Department published a breakdown of where all the electricity went, and Anonymous—silent for years—leaked a non-redacted version. Sixty percent of the federal energy budget was Revisions. And that was with nothing large-scale in a while. Or rather: who knew?
“It’s like Men in Black,” Pat said the day the report broke, catching Claire as she tumbled (on purpose) from the playground’s seahorse rocker.
“You ever flashy-thinged me, Zed?” I said.
Max ran down the grassy hill, arms spread.
“What’s Zed?” said Claire.
“British ‘Z’,” said Pat.
“What’s British?” said Claire.
“Crumpets,” said Pat.
I checked my email again. I was waiting to hear about a role I’d interviewed for. Nothing would come on a Saturday, but it was hard to resist.
“We still having t-o-t-s for dinner?” said Pat.
“Who knows,” I said, sliding my phone back into my pocket. Lately, nothing in the fridge matched our memories. So maybe that was where all the energy was going: More Revisions than we noticed, but not perfectly executed. At least asparagus was abundant this season.
“Mama’s turn,” said Claire, and I took Pat’s place.
“Dad-eeeeeee,” called Max, careening down the hill, and Pat jogged to him, caught him at the bottom in a full-body hug, and the sun was warm—too warm for this time of year, but pleasantly so—and Claire giggled, falling off the seahorse into my arms, and maybe the world was crumbling around us, but we had our arms deliciously full. It was 10 am, I should note. Formerly, in the coffee timeline, the hour when caffeine would hit me with this precise pitch of joy. So maybe it was joy after all, and not just chemicals. Maybe the sun’s angle touched some primal nerve.
“What’s for dinner?” said Max, swinging shut the playground gate an hour later.
“We think t-o-t-s,” said Pat.
“TOTS!” said Max. “Hooray!”
“Tots?” said Claire. “Tots?”
I met Pat’s eye: Maybe it will be fine, his said.
It was not. There were no tots when we got home. In fact, I found it hard to remember exactly what tots were, and Max had no idea what we were talking about, but Claire was inconsolable.
“I want tots,” she wailed, over and over, the way two-and-a-half-year-olds do, and Max tried to soothe her, tried to distract her with her stuffed unicorn, but she was furious, red-faced. She banged it with Spoony, tried to throw it but released too soon. It dropped behind her, which made Max giggle, which set her off even more. I begged silently that she wouldn’t hit him, but there she went, and Max was indignant—not physically hurt, but annoyed—and he scolded her, and Pat bent to Max to murmur one of his calming father murmurs, and I knelt to Claire to offer another bite of cheese.
A family, in other words. We were a perfectly normal family. Even Pat and I fell for it, let down our guard. We got bunk beds. We debated the feasibility of converting the tiny office to a second bedroom. We looked at Zillow and our bank account and gazed down our one hallway after the kids were in bed, at the invisible echoes of their tiny feet. We were complacent, you could say. When the reporters first started tying climate conditions to overpopulation, it didn’t trigger alarm bells. But why would it have? We had everything. Fruit was scarce, meat was scarce, lines were long—But if anything, that only served to underscore how superfluous so much had been before. How happy we were to be alive, sheltered, and fed.
That fall, when the Nobel announcements came out, the economics prize went to a pair who’d popularized the concept of degrowth. Out of nowhere, it seemed, though of course calls for degrowth had been there all along, and maybe the degrowth folks had always been a warring faction—my brain retained some early drafts, remember. Obviously. That month is still so clear to me—Claire had just turned three, was finally old enough to have an opinion about her Halloween costume beyond what Max could talk her into. She wanted to be a bee. He wanted to be a rainforest, spent most of his spare time sketching ideas of what that might look like, confident (despite my nudges) that we’d have time to make whatever costume he finally settled on. And every time I turned on the news—the radio in the kitchen or the TV in the living room—an expert was explaining degrowth. These experts did not look like the ones who’d come on to explain the strength of the economy while we worried about our sparse cupboards. They looked like the kind of people who’d camp in a tree to prevent its razing. Lean. Badly dressed. Raskolnikov, maybe, or Lupin.
At night, I worked on the bee costume. Pat scoped out what a last-minute tree getup might entail for Max, if he didn’t settle on a plan in time.
The day before Halloween—a Friday—I eased shut the door to the kids’ room. They were excited, had chattered more than usual. There was a block party the next day, a bounce house promised, plus trick-or-treating. I sank onto the sofa. I must have dozed; when Pat emerged from the kitchen, he woke me. Startled me. My heart raced.
“I have to—” but I couldn’t remember.
“What?” he said.
“The bee,” I said, but it was strangled, a whisper. Where was the bee costume?
“You were just working on it,” he said. “You put it in the—”
Like trying to pull something from a shared dream. Where had I put the bee costume, which was not finished? But what was not finished about it? Why were we making a bee costume, when he was going as a sycamore? Where was the bee?
“No,” said Pat, who figured it out before I did.
He turned to the kids’ room door. He looked back at me.
I opened my mouth but couldn’t manage words. I was on my feet before I knew it, hand on the doorknob. I twisted, Pat behind me.
Okay. The bunk bed was still there.
We met eyes, sighed together.
But then our sight adjusted. The bottom bunk was empty.
Pat seized my hand. I tiptoed closer, leaned into the bed.
It was made.
Pat peered into the top bunk, where Max was breathing smooth and slow.
Just Max, though. Just Max.
The letter was in our mailbox when we checked. In light of recent calculations, resource utilization, etc., etc. Global revisions. And the worst thing: it was a template letter. The last paragraph noted that there might be, as there had always been, a small subset of the population who would retain inklings of a previous Timeline, and that if such inklings caused any confusion or discomfort, to please reach out to the number provided.
They didn’t even send a suit this time. No one to scream at. No one to throttle.
And look: I’m not telling you all this to radicalize you against the Big Shift. I appreciate the good here. I appreciate that the Amazon has been restored, that we’ve got fungi eating through all that plastic waste, that young people can focus on their lives again, decide whether or not to reproduce, lose themselves in weird art without worrying the earth will burn if they don’t protest nonstop. And I’m not saying I’m better than other people because I remember how it was, because I’ve got the glitchy brain that still has the memory of those soft toddler cheeks against my own, the beeswax exhalation of that skin.
It’s just this: When you catch a fish to feed your family, the fish still has to die. The cooking fuel releases its carbon to the atmosphere. The dish soap flows into the watershed. Or—that’s a terrible metaphor for what I’m trying to say, which is that I understand there is no living without dying. There is nothing neutral about choosing life, about whose life you choose. There is no survival without sacrifice. Maybe metaphor is not the right instrument here. Maybe there is no comparison that can hold the loss of a child. The loss of our child. Maybe the only thing for it is to get outside, ride bikes with Max. Know that the air won’t poison us, that we’ll return home safely because they Revised away cars. Know, at least, that if she—our other baby—never lived in this timeline, that also means she’ll also never die.
Brenna Lemieux‘s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in CALYX, Catapult, Meridian, and elsewhere. She has also published some poetry. She currently lives in Chicago with her husband and son, and she is actively seeking representation for a novel.