Page 5 of Time for You
Several days later, Daphne blinked against the bright sunlight, holding her hand up in front of her eyes. Despite the fluorescent lights of the ED, she always felt like she was emerging from a cave after a shift. She was bone tired and thought about just abandoning her bike on the rack for the day, calling a RideShare, and going straight home to collapse into her nice, big, soft bed, but the air was warm and sweet, and a lone bird chirped from its nest above the ambulance bay.
It had been a long, grey winter, and the thought of missing out on one of the first real spring days convinced her she had been right to ride her bike to work that morning, as cold and dark as it had been. Later, Daphne would wonder whether there had been some sort of mystical force at play, but for the moment, it simply felt like the right thing to do. Like the spring weather was calling to her.
Daphne rode down the street, past the buses belching fumes and the restaurants tentatively opening their patios for happy hour. The few people standing around outside were huddled in the small patches of spring sunshine, since the shade still held winter’s bite. All she had on was the hoodie she’d thrown into her locker that morning and her scrubs, but as long as she stayed on the sunny side of the street, it wasn’t too bad. The moon, looking lost in the daytime sky, slipped out from behind a skyscraper.
Half a mile later, she turned into a small park nestled in the heart of downtown. She rolled to a stop, breathing deep. Spring was stillhesitant, a hint of green grass here, a budding tree there, but the air felt new and fresh, like anything was possible.
Again, in retrospect, there were signs. But for the moment, Daphne stood in the park and listened to the traffic trundling by, eyes closed and face lifted to the sun. It felt good, healing. What she needed to heal from, she couldn’t say. Anders (or more likely, his chatbot) had tried to text her a few times, but after her complete lack of response, he’d stopped trying. It didn’t hurt—he sucked—but she did vaguely wish there were a man out there who’d be willing to fight for her. Or at least not give up that easily. Another bird chirped, and Daphne inhaled the scent of new grass and soil warming in the sun.
She got back on the bike, aiming it for the side street that would eventually lead to the apartment complex all the residents wound up renting in, since it was not horrifically expensive and boasted only a short commute to the hospital. The road had a slight decline, just enough that she could start gathering speed and coasting, wind whipping through her hair as a few straight blond locks slipped free from her helmet. This time of day the street was quiet, just a few blocks from the towering buildings of downtown, lined by low, squat apartment buildings with dark-brown brick facades. She savored the feeling of freedom and let the wind blow away her doubts.
Up ahead, there was an odd shimmer to the air, almost like a heat mirage. Except it was only in the bike lane and reached up vertically, rather than horizontally. Besides, while the sun was warm, it was only early-spring-in-Minnesota warm, not nearly strong enough to heat the pavement enough for a mirage. Daphne squinted, and the shimmer twisted in the air like a tornado, darkening into a plume of smoke before winking out of existence entirely.
And then she blinked. Because it wasn’t possible. One second, she was looking at the odd trick of the light in the empty street a few yards away, and the next, a man stood right where it had been. Just—standing there, having appeared out of thin air, like the mirage had simply deposited him right in front of her. He hadn’t gotten out of a car and walkedover, hadn’t been on the sidewalk before—nothing. He simply wasn’t there, and then he was.
Daphne stared at him, bewildered, and he stared back. It was so odd, so distracting, that she didn’t realize exactly where he was standing until it was too late.
And then she ran straight into him.
Daphne hit the ground, bike tangling with the man she’d just hit. She let out a loudoofand rolled clear, gasping for air. She took a beat and assessed herself—she hadn’t hit her head, and there weren’t any broken bones as far as she could tell, either. She had a large scrape up the side of her calf and she’d banged her elbow pretty badly, but neither was something some disinfectant and bandages couldn’t handle.
She turned to the man she’d hit. “Are you okay?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.” He didn’t reply, which wasn’t a good sign, but maybe he was just dazed. He was looking around, eyes wild, like he’d never seen a city street before. “I said, are you okay?” she repeated.
Finally, he looked at her. His eyes were blue, she realized, completely unnecessarily, but then she realized he was staring at her like she was an animal in the zoo. “I—my God, what are you wearing?” he asked in an accent she couldn’t quite place.
Up close, Daphne could see that he was dressed oddly formally for a Thursday afternoon—a three-piece suit, it looked like, although there was something slightly off about it. The fabric was too thick, and the tie seemed strangely old-fashioned. A costume, she decided, although for what she couldn’t say. And he had been wearing a hat—not a winter hat, or a baseball hat, but an Abraham Lincoln–type hat. That was now a good three feet away, knocked clear by the force of their impact.
“I could say the same to you,” Daphne replied dryly. She pushed herself up, dusted herself off—her scrubs were shot, but she had more—and knelt next to him. No blood, no visible trauma, at least. “I’m a doctor. Did you hit your head when we crashed?”
He cringed away from her, glancing desperately up and down the street, as if he were looking for rescue. “Miss, I—whatever it is you think you are doing, I must insist you stop.”
Daphne kept her eye roll in check. She’d had difficult patients before, and someone being a jerk didn’t make her not a doctor. She just had to retreat into what she and the other residents called their Doctorsona, otherwise known as “pretending the mean shit a patient just said doesn’t bother you.”
“Please let me check you out. You may have a head injury,” she said, just a touch more coolly.
His face still contorted in shock, he looked at her bike, which was badly mangled and half on the street, half up on the curb. “Is that abicycle?”
Make that definitely a head injury.He scooted away from her again, once more eyeing her suspiciously. He had a pocket watch, she noticed, and she decided he was either a lost cosplayer or an actor on his way to rehearsal. Or maybe just a very, very weird person. He started looking around again, vaguely terrified. “Miss, where—wherearewe?”
And there’s another bad sign. Shit.The last thing she needed was to have given someone a traumatic brain injury. “Minneapolis.”
If she’d thought that information would calm him down, she was wrong. “The mill town? InAmerica?”
She wouldn’t call it a mill town, although downtown had thatGold Medal Floursign, and there was definitely a museum nearby called Mill City or something like that, so it probably had been, at some point. But she decided to sidestep the issue entirely, because honestly, that was a weird way to describe a major metropolis. “We’re in the United States of America, yes. I’m going to check your pulse and do some simple tests, okay? As I said before, I’m a doctor.”
“Nurse,” he said, without really looking at her. “You mean you’re a nurse.”
Oh good, he’s one of those.“Doctor,” she repeated.
He sighed, aggravated. “If you were a woman doctor, I would have read about you in the newspapers,” he insisted. “Maybe it’s you who has the head injury.”
Daphne decided to ignore his accusation and took his wrist in her hand. “If you didn’t think you were in Minneapolis, where do you think we are?”
He looked around, jerking his arm away. She wasn’t that worried about his pulse, all things considered, but procedures were procedures. “Edinburgh?” he said, and this time when he spoke, she picked up his accent. He was, unfortunately, off on the location by several thousand miles, but maybe he was just a tourist who was concussed. Hopefully.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
