“Let me.” Wayne motioned to his watch. “You can’t interact with things outside oftime.”
“Why? I got time with the wish, didn’t I?” Jo flipped her watch, affirming the fact. The numbers10:00 still read where her stopwatch usuallywas.
“Time doesn’t just run because you walk through the Door. Thankfully,” Wayne added the last word as a mutter under his breath. “You have to activateit.”
“How do I dothat?”
“Let’s not worry about that for now,” he said with more delicacy than Jo had previously thought possible for him to muster. As Jo moved to object, he continued. “I have some time still leftover from a prior wish. So, just in case, I’d rather preserveyours.”
“Didn’t Snow make it clear that I wasn’t going to be of help anyway? Shouldn’t I usemine?”
Wayne just shook his head, clearly not wanting to go down that route of conversation again. Jo watched closely as he pushed in a knob on his over-sized Rolex. Just like that, the hands began turning on the face. She didn’t perceive him as any different, but the keypad opened up with a flick of hisfingers.
“Code?”
“Eleven, Seven, Two,” Jo recited, watching his fingers depress the buttons as though that—of all things—was the most magical thing she’d seen. “And press the car buttonafter.”
The door groaned open, then closed again as they slippedthrough.
The garage was a little messier than she remembered, but she hadn’t visited her mother in months, so that could very well have been a recent change. Either way, she ignored the little details for now and started for the interiordoor.
“It should be unlocked,” she informedWayne.
Sure enough, it was, and he ushered them both inside, closing the door behind them and pulling out the pin on his watch again. Time stopped flowing through the device and the hands stilled. Jo gave him a once-over, waiting for some magical aura to appear, but he seemed the same as he alwayshad.
She didn’t know why everyone was making magic out to seem so complicated. All this “learning her place.” From what Jo had seen, so far, magic was about intention, determination, and simpleactions.
The moment Jo took more than a step into the house, however, all thoughts of magic and time vanished from her mind. Out of reflex, she found herself sniffing the air, heart clenching when she could smell none of the familiar scents ofhome.
“You all right?” Wayne asked softly. Jo startledslightly.
“Oh, yeah. Fine,” she replied quickly, clearing her throat. “Just. . .habit.”
“To sniff your house?” He asked, and his obvious attempt at keeping the mood lighthearted almost worked, the grip around her heart loosening afraction.
“Whenever my mom knew I was coming home, she would always make my favorite dessert,” Jo said, taking a breath as she reminisced, even though it came away lacking. “The first thing I would smell whenever I visited wassopapillas.”
A brief pause, and then, “Your mother used to feed yousoap?”
She couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up her throat, but she offset it with a tight roll of her eyes. “Yes, Wayne. My mother used to feed mesoap.” After a second, however, she felt her own face soften, the laughter settling into a sigh. “Sopapillasare like hollow donuts you can pour warm honey into. When you take a bite, the honey pours out all over your fingers, and it’s just. . .” She took another breath, this time more to combat the renewed tightness in her chest than any lingering desire to smell dough and honey in the air. “They’re just really good, that’sall.”
She didn’t wait to see Wayne’s reaction, and instead continued wandering through the house onautopilot.
Besides more of that relative messiness, it was still in much the same shape as she remembered. There were more little details depicting slight, barely recognizable change, however, like no upright piano in the hallway; a smaller, lower-quality television in the living room. As she walked into the kitchen, she noticed a lack of fruit in the bowl by the toaster, a pile of bills stacked in its place. Without turning her watch on to get a closer look, she could tell some of them were recent, especially the ones with Final Notice stamped in bold red ink along thefront.
It occurred to her then, just how much her mother had been relying on her for financial stability. The money she made from various odd and usually illegal jobs—high paying stints with the Yakuza, usually—had always gone at least in part to her mother. Without that cut, how difficult was it for her to getby?
“This your little sister’s room or something?” Wayne’s voice pulled her through the kitchen and to the back of the house, her distraction giving way to confusion the moment she approached the opendoorway.
“This—” she heard herself whisper on a half-second delay. Jo swallowed to clear the lump in her throat and make room for the rest of the sentence. “This is myroom.”
But it wasn’t. Not really, not anymore. The walls were painted a light blue, toys and stuffed animals littering the floor. It was obviously a room belonging to a little girl, nowhere near what her own childhood room had been. Her walls had been a messy collage of movie posters and sticky notes, her “toys” limited to various computer parts and video games. Whoever this child was, she was very much not JosephinaEspinosa.
And why should she be? Jo remembered the vague conversation of a miscarriage somewhere around when she’d turned eight, a passing comment about how it had probably been for the best. A casual joke about Jo being enough of a handful, though Jo was already old enough to recognize that it was more about another mouth to feed and all too recently filed divorce papers. Maybe, in this version of reality, Jo’s lack of existence meant the creation of this littlegirl’s.
Maybe embryonic Jo had been the one whomiscarried.
Wandering throughout the room, letting her fingers brush against a bright, floral comforter, a stuffed unicorn, it finally hither.
