BY FRANK T. SIKORA

Copyright is held by the author.

MY FATHER leaned over and whispered, “Take it slowly, son. Don’t rush.”

I nodded, bent over the engine, hopelessly pretending that I knew what I was doing. “I can’t screw this up again,” I said. “Anne will never let me hear the end of it.” I felt ashamed at the admission — still worried about the gentle wrath of my little sister.

My father placed his hand on my shoulder. “Be patient with your sister. Anne may be the loneliest girl in the world.”

The statement startled me. My father and I were in the mist of what turned out to be our last lengthy conversation, and until that moment, a joyful one, one that drew us closer than ever. The conversation took place in our garage as he tried to teach me, again, how to change the spark plugs in his car. I was 16, and he spoke about his experiences in the Pacific Theatre, World War II, the greatest generation then, and I believe it so now, with reservations.

When speaking of that era, we did not discuss segregation or the Jim Crow laws, discrimination against Indigenous peoples, or the rudimentary medical knowledge: Kids crippled from polio or dying from measles, and almost every cancer diagnosis a death sentence. 

My father talked about his brother, Bob: His humour, kindness, courage, how they had joined up the same day, being stationed in Hawaii, and the pretty local girls. My father never talked about the deaths or the suffering: Tarawa, Iwo, Okinawa. Despite all he and my uncle had endured, my father never mentioned the suffering.

When he spoke of Anne, however, his voice quavered. Like he had been holding back a long buried sorrow.

I didn’t answer because I never thought of my sister as lonely. A tad judgmental, yes. Different and distant? Definitely.

I tried my best to please my father, but as I disconnected the wires from the plugs, sparks flew, and somehow, my right sleeve caught fire. I quickly smothered the small flames with a towel I had on my belt and stepped back and stared at my father with a look that I suspected ranged between befuddled and disbelief. 

My father calmed leaned back and said, “Well, that didn’t go as planned.”

I shook my head in agreement. 

My father grabbed my arms, removed my gloves, and inspected my hands. “You’re not burned or bruised. You’re going to be OK.”

“I followed your instructions,” I said. “That shouldn’t’t have happened.”

“Yet, here we are,” he said and softly chuckled, realizing as well as I that I wouldn’t’t be joining the family business. He and my uncle ran an auto repair shop. “Let’s clean up,” he said. “I’ll fix the car later.” He gently rubbed my neck. “I appreciate the effort.”

“Let’s not tell, Anne.”

“Do you think you can hide this from your sister?”

“No, but I don’t want Anne to think I’m stupid. I’m not as smart as her.” Years later, I learned it’s not as smart as ‘she.’

“No one is. I’m certainly not.” My father said. “I think Anne is smart in a way that few understand. Smart in a way that keeps her apart from her friends, and terribly lonely.”

At dinner, Anne laughed at my ineptitude, but not in a cruel way. At 13, she never fell in with the middle school mean-girl crowd. Always kind, yet always out of reach. She was, and still is, lovely: long red hair, heart-shaped face, and slender build, but she preferred books and looking up at the stars at night with a telescope she built rather than worrying about her make-up and stealing boys from her classmates. 

In high school, she joined the science society — one of only two girls in the club. At that time, we started drifting away from each other. I started drawing and painting, hanging out with the art crowd. She sank deeper into her studies — weekends in the library and late nights working on secret projects in her bedroom.

She taught me chess, however, and I wasn’t bad. On Sunday nights, we played in the living room, listening to our favorite records: The Who for me and Dusty Springfield for her. I wished she had joined the chess team. We could have played together when I was a junior. “That’s your thing,” she said, but I think it was more than that. She secretly cared about her social status, and young girls didn’t play chess back then.

Young girls didn’t time travel either, but Anne did. 

Anne started dancing along Time’s strings at an early age. I learned about her ability when I was 10, on a brisk and windy fall Saturday morning, as Anne and I walked toward our house, carrying our library books. This was about a month before Mom left. One day, Mom was here, and the next, she was somewhere else. No note. Nothing packed. Just gone.

I was chatting away about baseball, not totally watching the world or listening to Anne as she sang indecipherable songs when a large dog galloped toward us on the sidewalk: a brown Great Dane, supposedly friendly, named Gorgeous, which he was in a slobbering, big ball swinging sort of way.

Anne shrieked as Gorgeous approached, the giant beast barking loudly and baring its big teeth. I stepped in front of Annie. I was many things, but never a coward. How could I be? I was the son of a machine gunner and the nephew of a flame thrower.

As Gorgeous leaped, flinging its 150-pound self at Anne, I dropped my book and threw myself into the dog’s path. I closed my eyes and let out a slight squeal, but not much. I felt the heat and wind of the beast rise above me, expecting the dog to crash into Anne. I expected Anne to be hurt, or worse, but when I rolled onto my side and then up onto my feet, I saw only her books on the ground and the big brute running down the street, apparently treating me and my sister like hurdles rather than prey.

I twisted left, then right. I searched the ground as if she had disappeared down a hole, but there was no Anne — tiny, barely 30-pound Anne, but not a dwarf Anne, like our mother, delicate as a blade of grass Anne.

I spun and stammered, looking far and near for my sister. I checked the road. The yards down the street. The yards across the street. Eventually, looking directly left and up at the massive oak that threw the whole Nelson yard into shadow. The same oak with the treehouse stationed securely among its ancient but sturdy branches. The same oak with the hawk’s nest at its top. At first, I saw nothing, but sensing something scary and wonderful, I looked up at that tree again. Then twice more, focusing my gaze on a large branch more than halfway up and to the right of the treehouse where I finally found Anne comfortably seated — an older version of Anne, teenage Anne with the same long red hair, slender limbs, and heart-shaped face, but still tiny, barely four feet tall Anne. “I’m OK,” she said with a broad smile.

“I don’t understand,” I said. 

“Someday, you will,” she said. “Just don’t worry. Soon, I shall return, my younger self. Oh, don’t tell Mom. Don’t tell Dad. Don’t tell anyone. Promise me that, and I will share my secrets. Not all, but enough to keep you centered.”

“What would I tell?” I said, and at ten, I honestly didn’t know, but I knew that whatever ‘it’ was, it was special: My Marvellous Sister Anne.

A week after my father and I changed the spark plugs in his car, Father drove off to work on a Monday morning and never returned. Never turned up at my Uncle Bob’s garage. The police came. Strong men with big bellies and silver shades at first. When they failed to unearth the unknowable, slender, stern men in black suits and skinny ties knocked on our door, asking questions of me and Anne, but neither of us had answers. Although I suspected Anne was holding back. 

After the strange men left, I asked Anne, “What do you know?” 

“Not as much as I would like,” Anne replied. “But some stuff.” She looked older than her 13 years.

Days later, a social worker showed up, a plump and pleasant woman with one eye slightly askew. “Suspicious,” the social worker said. “First your mother, and now your father vanishes.” Holding her clipboard, she stared at Anne, who stood strong and firm by my side, my hand in hers, and not the other way around. 

“Aren’t you two scared? Worried?” The social worker cocked her head, focusing on Anne more than me. I was the older brother, but I felt so much younger. One thing Anne always said was, “Time travellers age sidewise.” I never understood the concept, but I tried.

I told the social worker, “I’m not scared.” I wanted to be brave like my father. He always said courage is never the absence of fear; it is standing your ground when others run. So, like him, I held fast, although my knees shook like a cartoon character.

Anne, without prompting, said, “They will return someday. I will find them. I will see to that.”

“Sometimes, people just disappear,” I said, and Anne pinched my arm, so I said no more.

After the social worker left for the other room to make a call, I glanced at my sister. I saw the outer planets, the gas giants, swirling around her head, and the spiral arm of our galaxy twinkling down her slender form. It was as if she had slipped into the spaces between the stars, between moments, ready to disappear and explore. 

I wanted to reach out to her, but I lacked the nerve. 

Annie and I moved in with Uncle Bob and Aunt Joyce. They were a quiet couple, barren of children but not bereft of love. They gave us separate bedrooms and hearty, well-nourished meals. They took us to the library. They paid for our college educations.

For the next few years, Annie jumped back and forth across our parents’ timelines searching for clues — the tiny time travelling detective, mostly leaving at night while Uncle Bob and Aunt Joyce slept and returning in the morning, exhausted, hair tangled and eyes moist with thick tears. I wanted to help, but she refused. “This is my task,” she said. “Mine, alone.”

It doesn’t have to be. I wanted to say, but I stayed silent, retreating inward, burying my resentment but not my love for my marvellous, sad sister Anne.

When she wasn’t searching, Annie cloistered herself in her room, emerging only to eat and check on me, barely speaking. Other days, when her eyes shone bright and blue, Annie taught me about entangled protons, black holes, and the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. I understood them as much as I knew how a car’s engine worked, so I went into the arts and became a full-time sculptor and part-time painter. Eventually, I taught at the University of Milwaukee and showed my work in small galleries in the Midwest. 

Annie ended up at MIT. My Marvellous Sister Anne rewrote quantum proofs for fun and jumped back and forth in time, still looking for our parents while completing her studies at the top of her class. She made only two friends in school: a shy Korean boy with mismatched socks and the second-shift head librarian, a position I didn’t know existed.

A year after her graduation, she popped into the apartment that my fiancé and I rented, a small two bedroom loft in the attic of an old farmhouse, not far from a spring fed lake, a place I imagined my children and I would fish, and where I would sketch.

Annie, took me by the hands and thanked me for all I had done for her. “But what have I done?” I asked.

“You never abandoned me,” she said, “as I must abandoned you, now.” She reached up and pulled my face close to her. I wasn’t short as she. I had my father’s height. “Say good-bye for me.” She kissed my cheek.

“Why must you leave?”

“There’s work to do.” She grinned, the old mischievous Anne emerging. “Top secret stuff.”

I wanted to ask one more time about mom and dad, but I was afraid. I stood there, washed in tears. So much to say, and so little courage to say it.

The years passed as the years do.

On my 57th birthday, with my children Kenneth and Abby and their spouses sitting at the picnic table and all the grandchildren running with sparklers along the beach, Anne popped into the backyard just as the day faded into dusk, fireflies alight, and chicken and carrots on the grill. 

Aunt Joyce and Uncle Bob were still alive and reasonably well, resting in lawn chairs while my wife, Marie, tended to the food. I stood on the pier, staring at the water and the boaters on the lake, trying not to think about my treatment, my numbers, and my next set of scans. 

Annie appeared amid her personal fireworks display, still young, though now in her 40s, and still tiny with the same luminous eyes and long red hair now tied back into multiple ponytails. No one besides me noticed her at first, but then we all did, and we surrounded Anne and hugged her, and the grandchildren grabbed her tiny legs, latching onto her knee-high leather boots. Her green and blue checkered dress waved in the twilight from an unknown wind. 

“Where have you been?” my uncle asked, in a voice harsher than may have been warranted but not cruel. It had been years since Annie had walked among us, including the years teaching at MIT, the research years in Germany, the years working for clandestine government organizations, and the years where she just winked out somewhen and somewhere, leaving only letters to me and reinforcing the promise I made to keep her secrets, occasionally visiting me on my solitary walks in the woods. 

We never talked about my diagnosis, nor did I ask about my future because “every present has multiple futures, uncountable possibilities, and infinite varieties of entanglements.” With a laugh, she added, “We all end up back among the stars with the possibility of forming new particles — new lives.” 

“It sounds wonderful,” I said, and for a moment, just a moment, I wasn’t afraid.

Anne never found Mother. She never found Father, either, but when she returned home on that summer day, she promised me that she would come home more often because she said, “I get lonely, too.” 

“There are times when I wish I could join you on your trips,” I said that night after dinner. “I don’t want to leave my wife and children and grandchildren, at least not now, maybe near the end when the sadness and the pain become too much to share. Every moment is, you know, well, precious, and what a cliché I have become.”

“You can’t join me, nor can I tell you all I have learned,” she said. “I wish I could.”

“Do you still work for the government?”

She shook her head no. “I work for Time.” She said, but nothing more about the subject.

I thought I saw a tear. Anne shook her arms and said, “Much of it is all so wonderful and too much of it is all so terrible. The suffering we all endure. Will endure. Every time and place, every moment, someone or something is suffering. Even the particles that have no names. Yet, somehow, love endures. Like an undercurrent, love is everywhere. You are loved.”

“Yeah?”

Anne nodded. “Look around.”

“So many truths are possible. I guess. Even contradictory ones.”

My marvellous sister Anne grabbed my hand. “Remember this: the universe balances suffering with love.”

“It seems like an unbalanced equation,” I said.

“Indeed,” Anne said. “See, you’re not so dumb.” 

Before Anne left the next morning, sneaking out into the dawn and jumping to unknown spaces, Marie, Anne, and I chatted in the kitchen while everyone else slept in the rooms upstairs. Marie held Anne tight. My marvellous, empathic wife — pouring love into Anne’s tiny body, the same love that Marie gives me every day. It was a moment worth cherishing. Worth writing down. Worth sharing. All of it. The sadness. The uncertainty. The fear. 

The love that balances the world. 

***

Frank T. Sikora writes speculative fiction. A few of his short pieces have won awards.  Most don’t, but he keeps trying. His work has been published in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. When he is not writing, he works as a substitute teacher, cross country and track coach, and Uber driver. Yes, he is retired.  For more stories featuring talented writers from the U.S. and Canada, check out his blog:
600 Miles to Leadville.