Chapter 9: Five Days in October
"You're going to miss the funeral."
"I know," Max said.
Chloe and Max had ridden in The Beast back to Chloe's apartment because Max (enigmatic to the point of frustration) told Chloe that she didn't want to say what she had to say in public.
She sat across from Chloe at the far right side of the green sofa in the living room. Chloe took the recliner.
"Can I have something to drink?" Max asked.
"Okay. I have water, uh…"
"Anything stronger?"
"Like… Pepsi?"
"Like booze," Max said.
Chloe stared at her.
"It's noon," Chloe said. "And you don't drink."
"I've heard alcohol loosens your tongue," Max said. "And I want my tongue loose. And we're not in a relationship anymore, so you don't get to make a joke about how funny that sounded."
Making a joke about anything was the furthest thing from Chloe's mind. Ex or no, Chloe had ensconced herself in such a dead-zone of human contact over the past three years that Max was still the closest person in her life by default, three years without seeing each other or no. Even Chloe knew when to keep her mouth shut.
"Alright," Chloe said. "Rum and Pepsi it is."
Chloe mixed the drink in the kitchen: a splash of rum and a surplus of soda. She brought it into the living room and handed it to Max, who immediately took a sip and made a face.
"Okay," Chloe said as she sat back down. "My dream seems to have upset you."
Max laughed, and it was not a happy one. It was ragged on the edges, and too high to be anything but pained.
Max took another sip and made another face.
"Five years ago, I fell asleep in my photography class."
"The one Mark Jefferson taught."
"Yeah. I had a very strange dream. I was up on Koch's Folly near the lighthouse. I walked up the hill, looked out over the cliff to the ocean below, and saw a massive tornado coming toward Arcadia Bay. And that's when I woke up. I finished class, went to the bathroom to splash some water on my face, and saw a blue butterfly go into the corner and land on a bucket. I took out my camera and took a picture. A moment later, Nathan Prescott came in… followed by you."
Chloe shifted in her seat.
"You tried to blackmail him. You had an argument. He pulled out a gun, and he killed you right in front of me."
Max stared at her lap, and her last statement held such a finality that Chloe fought the urge to look down and see if she was still there.
"Max… that didn't happen," Chloe said, trying not to sound like an asshole. "I'm alive. I hope that's obvious."
Max smiled, and seemed to reproach herself at the same time for doing so.
"This is where the story gets weird."
"Weirder than me dying and not noticing it?" Chloe asked, failing not to sound like an asshole.
"When the gun went off," Max said, ignoring her, "I reached out for you, and when I did, I felt something… bend. Swirl in the world around me. I felt like my brain was trying to burrow its way out through the back of my skull. And I found myself back in Jefferson's class. At the exact same moment that I woke up from that dream about the tornado."
Max went back to staring at her lap again.
"Are… you saying that you went back in time?"
"Yes," Max said. "I'm trying not to look at the look on your face. I know it's not a good one."
Chloe would have given anything for a mirror. A great worry gripped her. This girl was clearly suffering from some kind of delusion, and Chloe wondered whether asking about it constituted enabling. And yet…
"What happened next?" Chloe asked.
"I finished the class again. Went to the bathroom again. Took the photo again. You and Nathan came in again and had the argument again, and I pulled the fire alarm before he had a chance to shoot you."
"Max… that didn't happen, either."
"I told you it got weirder. Chloe, I didn't just go back in time. I could control it for a few seconds at a time. Always back though, never forward. I used it to… to do stupid shit. Snoop through people's things, get through locked doors. Get paint on Victoria Chase."
"Like a little rewind?" Chloe asked.
"Yeah," Max said. "That's what we called it."
"What 'we' called it? I knew about this too?"
Max nodded.
"Okay," Chloe said. "So what did we do with your rewind power?"
Max lost herself in memory for a moment and smiled. "I took the heat with David for you having pot in your room. I guessed how much change you had in your pockets. We used a gun you stole from David to shoot beer bottles at the junkyard."
Chloe felt an iciness deep within her, as her own memories unearthed themselves from a forgotten corner and urgently stumbled to the front of her mind. Not only had she stolen a gun from David a few days before that day in the bathroom five years ago, she still had it. It was in her bedroom closet a few feet away… and to her recollection, she had never told Max about it.
"I almost shot Frank Bowers with it," Max said, continuing. "We broke into Principal Wells' office at Blackwell using a pipe-bomb on the door."
"Where the hell did we get a pipe-bomb?"
"I made it," Max said, trying to suppress a grin.
"You know how to make a pipe-bomb?"
Max laughed, with real joy this time, before the smile on her lips faded and the memories came back. Her eyes were dreamy and lost, like remembering a warm blanket from a childhood she never had.
"We swam in the Blackwell pool late one night. And…"
Chloe could see Max's face break but for an instant, before recomposing itself. Max sniffled and blinked. Her face looked at Chloe but her eyes looked down.
"And I fell in love with you, Chloe."
Max's eyes finally made contact with hers. Chloe could see tears welling up, and she was struck dumb.
"But… but rewinding time wasn't all I could do," Max said after she took another sip of her drink. "I found out I could… jump through photographs."
"What do you mean?" Chloe asked. "Like, physically?"
"No," Max said. "It's kinda hard to explain. Like… Like a transfer of consciousness. I go into a photo, change something, then come back and the world's different because of what I did."
"Give me an example."
Max looked at Chloe with a mixture of pity and trepidation. "God, it was hard the first time I told you about this, too."
"You mean when you told nineteen-year-old Other Me?" Chloe asked. There was no sarcasm in her voice.
"I got it into my head that I could jump into a photograph of us when we were kids, so… I could save your father."
Chloe let her breath out. She had buried her father in more ways than one. She thought she had dealt with her father's passing, though no doubt she could find any number of therapists that would strongly disagree with her. But seeing his memory dredged up like this, in the ranting of a potential crazy woman, brought her to the brink of fury.
"I take it that didn't go well," Chloe said, slapping a placid face on her anger.
Max took another drink, and had gotten so used to the taste that she didn't bother making a face. "Time is fragile. I know this because William living meant that he bought you a car for your sixteenth birthday. A car that you had an accident in. You were paralyzed from the neck down, you had a tube in your throat. Chloe, your lungs were failing, and you asked me to… to…"
Max seemed to shut down. Her cheeks reddened, and she slouched even worse than she usually did, and the anger Chloe had been feeling at the mention of her father eroded. Chloe didn't know whether or not to believe this strange story, but now there was no doubt in her mind that Max believed it.
"It's okay," Chloe said, and she was surprised that she wanted to spare Max the agony of telling it more than she wanted to spare herself the agony of hearing it. "You don't have to say anymore about that."
Max straightened up, but continued talking to her lap. "I went back through the photo, undid what I changed and we were back at square one."
Max finished her drink and put the empty glass on the table next to the sofa. "We were the ones who discovered The Dark Room. We were the ones who found Rachel's body. We went to that junkyard to find Nathan, but Jefferson was there instead. He drugged me with something, and… killed you."
The hairs on the back of Chloe's neck stood on end. "So the dream I had this morning was a memory I had from a timeline that never happened?"
Max nodded.
"So… I got shot twice in one week."
"Well," Max said, "technically three times."
"Tech—Actually, never mind. Jefferson kills me. What happened next?"
"He took me to The Dark Room. David found me and rescued me. I found a photo that Warren Graham had taken of me the night before. I saved you. That damage was undone."
Max rubbed her face. "But all that rewinding I did… broke something in the world. That storm I dreamed about? It came. And every time I had used my rewind power, it just made the storm bigger. And… and we were standing by the lighthouse on Koch's Folly, and you told me that the only way to stop the storm and save Arcadia Bay was for me to go back through the photo of the butterfly I took in the bathroom that Monday, and… let you die."
The words filled the air of the apartment like a gust of wind from a cold snap.
"You seemed so sure," Max said. "You kissed me. You told me you loved me. And… I let you go. I went through the photo… It's the worst thing I've ever done in my life."
Now, after spending the entire conversation trying to fight it, Max Caulfield began to cry in earnest. Even now, three years after she had walked out on her, Chloe couldn't bear to watch it. It made her a strange kind of sad, like watching a porcelain doll break.
"Do you need to…"
"No," Max said, wiping her eyes. "No, I'm fine."
This was quite obviously not the case.
"Okay," Chloe said. "I'm getting the sense that this is where I come in. How did you go from letting Nathan kill me to stepping in front of the bullet yourself?"
"I got there a moment before you and Nathan came in. I had a little time to think, and… Chloe, it didn't make any fucking sense! I went there thinking you needed to die to stop the storm, but Jefferson killed you. You were dead for the better part of a day and the storm came anyway. It was all my fault, and the only way I could fix everything was if I died in that bathroom instead of you. You live, Nathan and Jefferson pay for what they did, Kate Marsh never tries to commit suicide, the storm never comes. Everyone wins except me. I had to die for it. But that was okay, because…"
For the first time in a while, Max looked Chloe dead in the eye.
"Because I loved you more than I cared about myself."
A silence. Max wiped her eyes as Chloe cycled through possible responses to what she had just heard. All of them were lacking.
"So… what now?" Max asked.
"I… Jesus, Max, I don't know. I mean, there things you know that I didn't tell you. And I just told you about my dream an hour ago, so you couldn't have made all this up on the spot, but… Why did you tell Other Me about your power, but not, y'know, Me Me."
"Don't talk like that," Max said. "They're all you. But I could prove it back then. When I went through the butterfly photo, I went to a point before I had my powers. Watching you die triggered it, and that didn't happen, so… I don't have the power. Technically, I never did."
"So you say you never rewound, and the storm never came. But didn't going through the photo count as a rewind in and of itself?"
"Apparently not," Max said. "Or at the very least it set the rewind number back to one, and the effects weren't nearly as bad. Like a drop of rain instead of a storm."
Chloe's eyes went wide. "The day of Rachel's funeral, one drop of rain landed on my boot, even though there were no clouds in the sky. Are you saying that was you?"
Max shrugged her shoulders. "I dunno. Maybe?"
Chloe opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again. Her head was filled with so many conflicting thoughts that it was like a war between two sets of equally angry bees.
"So… So I had a dream about my death in another… what, timeline? Dimension? Why do you think that's happening?"
"I don't know," Max said. "But there's someone I can call who might shed some light on it. And I know this is gonna sound weird…"
Chloe looked at Max, and given the way Max looked back, Chloe could guess what kind of look it was."
"I know this is gonna sound weird," Max said, "but I think this dream has something to do with Justin's murder."
Chloe had heard too much over the last few minutes to be even remotely surprised. "How do you figure?"
"Chloe," Max said. "This is Arcadia Bay. When was the last time something happened here that wasn't connected to, like, fifty other things?"
Well… she had a point.
