Fifteen

Chapter Two

Fifteen

The next morning, my eyes opened slowly to a strange sound.

At first, I didn’t move. I just laid there, half asleep, trying to figure out what I was hearing. It sounded almost like footsteps, but above me, which made no sense. I didn’t live in a two-story home. I didn’t live in an apartment. There shouldn’t have been anyone walking above my head.

Maybe there were raccoons on the roof again.

I sighed and wiped the sleep from my eyes.

For a second, I forgot to be afraid.

I reached beside me automatically, my hand searching for the warm little body that was always tucked close to mine. Emma usually slept pressed against me, her tiny feet digging into my stomach, her breath soft and milky against my shirt.

But my hand touched nothing.

Cold sheets.

My eyes opened fully.

“Emma?”

I sat up too fast, and everything around me seemed to tilt. I blinked, waiting for my room to come into focus. Waiting to see Francisco beside me. Waiting to see the baby monitor on the nightstand. Waiting to hear the familiar hum of our house waking up.

But there was no baby monitor.

No king-sized bed.

No Cisco.

No Emma.

I sat on the edge of the bed, and something felt wrong immediately. Usually when I sat up, I had to scoot toward the edge before my feet could touch the floor. Emma and I always slept closest to the wall.

But my feet were already touching the floor.

Concrete.

I stared down.

My hardwood floor was gone.

“No,” I whispered.

Maybe I wasn’t fully awake yet. Maybe this was one of those dreams where everything felt too real until you noticed one tiny thing that proved it couldn’t be. I rubbed my eyes with both hands, hard enough that little sparks of light appeared behind my eyelids.

Then I opened them again.

Still concrete.

Still not my floor.

Still not my room.

My chest tightened so fast I could barely breathe. I looked behind me again, like maybe Emma would suddenly appear if I looked hard enough.

She was gone.

I stood up, but my legs felt wrong. Too light. Too small. Like I had stepped into someone else’s body and didn’t know how to move it yet.

“No. Wha—what?”

I turned in a slow circle.

The bed. The walls. The old dresser. The door. The concrete floor. The faint smell of laundry detergent, dust, and the shampoo I used when I was a teenager.

My heart dropped into my stomach.

Wait a minute.

This was my old bedroom.

This was the bedroom I grew up in from ages twelve until eighteen years old.

I must be dreaming.

I had to be dreaming.

A crazy, realistic, stupid dream.

I let out this weird little laugh, but it didn’t sound like me. It sounded scared. “Okay,” I whispered to myself. “Okay, I’ll just get back in bed and close my eyes, and I’ll wake up.”

Francisco was going to find this so funny. I was always having super realistic dreams, but this one was the realest yet. I could already imagine myself telling him about it later while he laughed and shook his head.

I climbed back into the bed, pulled the blanket up to my chest, and closed my eyes.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I guess I’ll just count to one hundred or something. That should snap me back.”

I took a deep breath and let the air slip from my mouth slowly.

One.

Two.

Three.

I tried to picture my room. My real room. The bed. Cisco’s arm thrown over his head. Emma curled beside me. Bella and Alex probably already awake somewhere in the house, arguing over something ridiculous.

Ninety-seven.

Ninety-eight.

Ninety-nine.

One hundred.

I opened my eyes.

My old bedroom door stared back at me.

I shook my head. “There is no way this is real.”

My voice cracked.

“Absolutely no fucking way.”

I ripped the blankets off me, jumped up, and started searching like I could find proof that I was wrong. I opened drawers. I looked around the room. I touched the wall. I grabbed the doorknob and squeezed it hard, waiting for my brain to wake up, waiting for the scene to blur, waiting for anything to change.

Nothing did.

I opened my bedroom door and went down the hall. A few steps to the left, exactly where I remembered it, was the old bathroom.

Sure enough, it was there.

The bathtub I never used sat untouched. The walk-in shower still had bottles of shampoo and body wash on the shelves, the same way it did when I was a teenager. The huge walk-in closet still had dirty clothes piled on the floor, hinting that someone had recently showered.

Someone.

Me.

My hands started shaking.

I turned toward the mirror and froze.

For a moment, I didn’t even recognize myself.

I knew the girl staring back at me. Of course I did. I had been her once. But I had not seen her in so long that looking at her felt like looking at a ghost.

My face was younger. Softer. Rounder in places I had forgotten it used to be. The crow’s feet that had once painted the corners of my eyes like eyeliner were gone. My skin was smooth in a way I hadn’t appreciated when it belonged to me the first time.

I lifted a hand to my face.

Fifteen.

I looked fifteen.

My breath caught.

I looked down at my left hand.

No ring.

My thumb moved anyway, rubbing over the place where my wedding band should have been. Muscle memory. My body remembered it, even if this version of me had never worn one.

Then I touched my stomach.

Flat.

Toned.

Untouched.

A tear rolled down my cheek as my fingers moved to the place where my C-section scar used to be.

It was gone.

There was no proof.

No scar.

No stretch marks.

No ring.

No baby sleeping beside me.

Nothing on my body said I had ever been a wife. Nothing said I had ever been a mother. Nothing said Emma had ever grown inside me, or that Bella and Alex had ever held my hands, or that my life yesterday had been anything more than a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream.

I knew it wasn’t.

Yesterday, I had gone to sleep as a thirty-one-year-old woman, and I had woken up fifteen years old again.

I was back in my childhood home.

I was back in my teenage body, untouched by the life I held so dear.

None of it made sense.

I could still feel Cisco’s fingers running through my hair. I could still feel his soft kiss as he whispered, “Goodnight.” I could still smell Emma’s milky breath. I could still hear Bella and Alex laughing somewhere down the hall.

And yet, I was looking at a girl who had never experienced any of it.

My stomach turned.

I barely made it to the toilet before I puked whatever it was my fifteen-year-old self had eaten the night before. I gripped the edge of the toilet and gagged until there was nothing left, until my throat burned and my eyes watered.

Then I sat back on the cold floor and cried.

Not cute crying.

Not a few silent tears.

I sobbed so hard my chest hurt.

So many questions filled my brain, and none of them had answers.

What happened to the thirty-one-year-old version of me?

Did she just disappear?

Did everyone wake up and I was gone?

Were my babies looking for me?

Was Emma crying?

Who was holding her?

Was Francisco scared?

Cisco.

CISCO!

His name hit me so hard that I pressed both hands over my mouth like I could keep the panic inside.

I couldn’t breathe right. The bathroom felt too small. The walls felt too close. My ears started ringing, and for a second, everything went quiet except my own heartbeat pounding in my head.

I rested my forehead against my knees and tried to force air into my lungs.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

But every breath came with another thought.

My babies.

My husband.

My house.

My life.

Gone.

A knock sounded at the bathroom door.

“Can I use that?” a tiny voice asked.

I lifted my head.

Standing in the doorway was my little brother.

Oliver.

He was so small that for a second all I could do was stare at him. If I was fifteen, that meant he was only six years old. The same age as my sweet Bella.

“Oliver?” I said.

He just stared back at me.

Then I realized what this looked like to him. To him, this was just another morning. To him, he just needed to go potty, and his big sister was sitting on the bathroom floor crying by the toilet.

I grabbed some toilet paper and wiped the tears and snot from my face. “Yeah, bud. You can use it. I just wasn’t feeling good.”

I stood up and walked toward him, patting his head as I passed.

His hair was softer than I remembered.

I forgot how quiet he used to be.

The man I was used to was twenty-two, married, and very opinionated. We talked on the phone for hours sometimes. Honestly, he had become one of my closest friends.

But here he was.

Tiny.

Six years old.

Still needing someone to tell him breakfast was ready.

He walked into the bathroom and shut the door, and I stood on the other side, silently crying all over again.

How could this be real?

How could any of this be real?

Coming down the hall was my sister, Eliza.

She would have been about eleven or so. Her hair was messy, and she had that dramatic annoyed look on her face that she had worn through most of our childhood.

My heart started pounding as I watched her get closer.

“Oliver is in there,” I said quickly, because I couldn’t handle an awkward silence. I couldn’t handle her looking at me too long.

She dramatically tilted her head back and let out a groan before turning around and heading up the stairs to the half bathroom near the front door.

I watched her walk away, and my throat tightened.

In my timeline, she was twenty-six.

A mother.

My sister had a child of her own. A whole life of her own. A future that existed yesterday and didn’t exist here.

My heart hurt for her.

I didn’t think she was living the same reality as me, but how was I supposed to know? And even if she wasn’t, I was still having to mourn the loss of my future nephew, too.

How was I supposed to just pretend I didn’t know that about Eliza?

How was I supposed to look at Oliver and not think about the college graduate, the successful accountant, the man who called me and talked for hours?

How was I supposed to look at Evan and not think about the young man he would become?

Here, they were just babies.

And so was I.

I wiped my face again and went upstairs.

The house looked exactly the way I remembered it and nothing like I wanted it to. The same walls. The same stairs. The same sounds. The same heaviness.

My mom was in the kitchen with one-year-old Evan on her hip.

I hesitated.

My mother and I had always had a strange relationship. When I was little, she was my best friend. I never thought she could do any wrong. As I got older, I started to see her differently. By fifteen, we were fighting almost every day.

So, yes, I hesitated.

I had no memory of this exact day from my childhood. What had happened between us the night before? Was she mad at me? Was I mad at her? Had we already been fighting before I woke up inside this nightmare?

Before I could decide what to say, she looked at me.

“I told you to come in here and make Evan’s bottle.”

Her tone hit me in the chest.

Not because it was surprising.

Because it wasn’t.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I don’t want to hear sorry. Just get it done. I need an hour more of sleep.”

She handed Evan to me.

He laid his head on my shoulder.

My body reacted before my brain did. I held him close, one arm under his legs, one hand on his back, like I had held my own babies a thousand times. He smelled like sleep and baby lotion and old pajamas.

I was more of a mother to him than our actual mother could be.

At the time, I thought she just hated us. I thought she hated being a mom. I thought she hated the noise and the mess and the constant needing.

But standing there at thirty-one years old inside my fifteen-year-old body, I saw it differently.

Knowing what I knew now, I believed she had suffered from postpartum depression.

Suddenly, I felt something my fifteen-year-old self the first time would have never felt.

Sympathy.

I had been a mom.

I only had one child less than my mother had.

I remembered after having Alex, how hard it was for me to mentally adjust to him and my new life. I remembered the exhaustion. The guilt. The feeling of being needed so much that there was nothing left of me by the end of the day.

I was sure my mother felt that too.

Especially since Evan was her fourth baby.

A surprise baby.

At forty years old.

So, I held that baby boy a little tighter.

Part of me was pretending he was Emma.

Part of me was trying to give Evan more of a mother’s touch than I had ever been able to give him before.

It didn’t last long, though, because Evan started squirming away the way most impatient little toddlers do.

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting him down on the kitchen floor. “Let’s make some breakfast.”

As I started his bottle, I heard the garage door open.

A few minutes later, the door connecting the garage to the house opened, and in walked my father.

That moment felt like a slow-motion movie.

In my timeline, my father couldn’t walk. He had been paralyzed during a car accident when I was twenty-eight.

But here he was.

Walking.

Carrying his work things.

Moving through the house like it was nothing.

Like it wasn’t a miracle.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

I watched him walk toward his bedroom, and for one tiny second, I forgot how terrible everything was. I forgot I was trapped. I forgot my family was gone.

My dad could walk.

Then the smile faded.

“I don’t care,” my mom screamed from her room.

“We can’t afford it, Beth!” my dad yelled back. “And you spend all day right here while I’m always away working to give you the life you want.”

“Oh, shut up! You always think I’m high maintenance and lazy. You made me have four children, David. I don’t know what you were expecting.”

I froze with Evan’s bottle in my hand.

There it was.

The house.

The real house.

Not just the walls and the floors and the rooms.

The fighting.

The tension.

The way every sound made my shoulders rise.

The way you could never fully relax because someone was always mad, or tired, or crying, or about to yell.

Eliza walked into the kitchen and grabbed the cereal box like nothing was happening. She looked at me and stuck her tongue out.

I laughed and stuck mine back at her.

For one second, it was funny.

Then it hurt.

Because I had forgotten how normal this was for us.

My parents fought more than they didn’t. My dad was rarely home. My mom was rarely seen. I was the constant in my siblings’ lives, and I didn’t know it when I was living it the first time, but it really took a toll on me.

I never really got to enjoy being a teenager.

Not the way other people did.

I spent so much of my childhood being needed.

Making bottles.

Finding cereal.

Helping with clothes.

Answering questions.

Keeping peace.

Holding babies.

Listening for footsteps.

Trying to make sure everyone had what they needed while pretending I didn’t need anything at all.

By the afternoon, my dad had gone back to work.

My mom stayed in bed.

And I held the house down.

Again.

I changed Evan. Fed Oliver. Cleaned cereal off the floor. Helped Eliza find something she swore someone stole even though it was under the couch. Made lunch. Washed dishes. Answered questions I somehow still knew the answers to.

It was strange how quickly my body remembered the routine.

Like I had never left.

Like the last sixteen years had been nothing but a long dream.

But they weren’t.

They were real.

Francisco was real.

Bella and Alex were real.

Emma was real.

They had to be.

By night time, I was exhausted in a way that felt different than being thirty-one and tired. This wasn’t the exhaustion of motherhood in my own home, with my own babies and my own husband waiting for me at the end of the day.

This was old exhaustion.

The kind I had carried before I even had words for it.

As I made my way back down the stairs to my bedroom, the possibility of this being a dream felt less and less real.

Dreams didn’t last this long.

Dreams didn’t make your knees hurt from sitting on the floor with a toddler.

Dreams didn’t smell like old carpet and baby formula.

Dreams didn’t make you remember exactly how lonely you used to be.

I crawled into bed and pulled the blanket to my chin.

For a while, I just stared at the ceiling.

I wondered if Cisco was okay.

Then I wondered if that even made sense.

Was there another version of me beside him right now? Was he holding Emma, confused because I was gone? Were Bella and Alex asking where I was? Was Emma crying for me?

Or had all of them simply stopped existing?

The thought made me press a hand over my mouth to keep from sobbing too loudly.

Please.

Please let this be a dream.

I closed my eyes and begged the universe to send me back.

Back to Bella and Alex fighting over who got to pick the TV show first.

Back to Cisco grabbing my hand and kissing it, telling me he loved me like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Back to Emma’s tiny toes pressed against my skin.

Back to my beautiful home with the huge backyard.

Back to the nice sourdough starter I had made the night before.

Back to the life I had waited thirty-one years to have.

Please.

Please let me wake up.

Please let me go home.