Chapter 17: Tell me in the morning that you love me, show me.

April 30th, 2023, San Luis Obispo, California - Earth

Howard was dreaming, that much he knew. He was outside, at a play table, and a young girl was serving him a cup of tea. Maybe four, or six? She was short, but her hair and clothes pushed her older.

The yellow dream chairs were somehow comfortable, unlike their real-life plastic counterparts. Even in the dream he did have to sit a bit awkwardly to stay at a reasonable height to the table. To his right a large patchwork doll, like a four foot tall Raggedy Ann – buttons and stitched face under awkward string hair. To his left, a purple unicorn. The girl served the other two guests and lifted her cup, indicating for him to drink.

Howard had no idea who this was. Her smile could crack a glacier, her eyes were big and curious, green eyes like his own, the hair a soft auburn which was long, a fourth the way down her back. She had picked an exorbitant white dress for the tea ceremony, and somehow, she had not gotten grass stains on it despite how far into the back yard their little picnic was setup at.

“I thought I was your favorite daddy. I'm your only daughter.” She sipped her drink with a large slurp.

“Grace?” Grace did not have green eyes. The girl shook her head.

He got as quiet as possible, and whispered it, “Mira?”

“No! Please, this is important.”

“I don't have a daughter.” Grace had given birth to a son, Edward, he was about two and a half, and now Thomas, who was about nine weeks old.

“Not yet. I need to be born soon daddy. There's not much time. The stars are going to be wrong, and the time of monsters will come. I can only go back to as far as I was born.” Her eyes had gone dark, obscured by shadow, a fog had started to emerge around the backyard, the sky had gone to nighttime. Distant blinks of light were moving, reshaping. An uncomfortable coldness entered his dream.

He heard crying, he looked down and saw his baby son Thomas under the table. He lifted the boy up and held him close.

“This is all his fault” it was not a spoken with the voice of a young girl, it had a coarse echo, reverberating deep.

“Is it because Thomas is your favorite” The baby turned his body towards his, what, dream sister? Prophetic future nightmare? Thomas pointed a finger and stuck out his tongue.

“Yeah...” Thomas turned and hugged his dad harder. “I mean, no, stop that. I don't have a favorite.”

“I need to be born,” the young lady demanded.

“I can't. Grace needs time to recover, and Thomas needs time to grow too.” Stars started to fall; others blinked out. Distant noises came from the fog. The girl shook her head and stood up.

“There are others, what about her?” She snapped her fingers. The doll to his right started to move, no longer a being of cloth and string and buttons, but a human. It was Mira but young, her face from before the wedding. She was wearing that sweater he liked that pressed too close to her breasts.

NO. “No, no no, she's... Mira and I have something special.”

How do you explain this? My ex-wife, who I have turned into a baby, who I make call me daddy, is someone I am not sexually interested in because I think of her as my daughter - sort of.

“Look I promise, I promise as soon as Grace is ready, I'll convince her, we'll try around Christmas, please just stop this.” Thomas spit up a little, it got over his father's shirt.

Five kids. Well, three kids and two dependent adults. The girl nodded, the fog shifted, Mira vanished, the sky shifted back to cyan and white clouds and sunshine. The table vanished and when his attention was turned, so was the girl. He looked down at Thomas, the boy seemed unusually alert.

“Dad, thank you for saying I'm your favorite.”

“You can talk now?” The baby's eyes grew wide, and he covered his mouth.

Howard woke up. He turned his head to swipe a glance at a clock – not quite six. The barest light of a distant streetlamp shone through the bedroom window. The world had a glow. Grace was locked on her side, her arm wrapped around her son, large breasts flopping onto the bedsheet. Thomas had rolled over and was looking directly into his dad's eyes, deep in stare, like he was reading a book. White drool had gathered on his son's mouth. Howard leaned in and grabbed carefully between Grace and the baby and pulled Thomas closer.

He whispered, “Looks like you're up for the day, enjoying your breakfast snack.” Something was wrong with his own mouth. He pulled up a finger, wiped his lips, and looked at the white smear. Odd, maybe some milk had pooled on the sheets or pillow.

He took Thomas up and started morning cleaning. The baby was cooperative in keeping quiet for the rest of the house and shared a happy energy. Howard carried his son to the kitchen just as the clock was ticking to six, and with one hand started setting things up for the morning. He paused as he laid out a sippy cup and plastic silverware for Edward and Mira, turning his head to Thomas. The dream still bothered him.

“Thomas?”

He had the baby's full attention. A coo came out of his mouth.

“Who is your favorite, mommy or daddy?”

Thomas whipped a hand out and touched his father's chin.

“If mommies in the room, who do you say is your favorite?”

Thomas's head turned and he removed the hand, as though trying to point towards the bedroom, or perhaps bored with the topic.

“You silly goose. You were in my dreams last night.” Thomas started to giggle, laugh, and sucked on his fingers as he turned back to his dad.

“Yes, you were you stinker.” Howard had grabbed a container of breast milk from the fridge and poured some into a sippy cup he had ready for Edward and Charles. Today was going to be hard, it was the last day with mommy before she went back to her big important job saving the multiverse.

Over the next fifteen minutes the remaining members of the household found their way to breakfast. First Edward, a precocious toddler with blond hair like his grandfather, but now he had picked up some browning hairs as he aged. His face and eyes matched Howard's, and the boy quietly found his waiting cereal and sippy cup. Howard had even laid out the morning comics with some crayons. Edward had a habit of eating three or four large bites in a row, and then would chug his milk greedily, before returning to the paper holding the crayon tightly with his paw grip.

Mira and Charles were next. Charles leading her in with a hand and helping her up into a chair with a permanent booster strapped to a seat near the short edge of the table. Howard would be able to feed her while keeping an eye on Thomas, who was currently preoccupied with a small mirror. Charles found a way to his other grandson, giving him a quick hug, pointing at something Edward had been working on and giving him a small thumbs up and a whisper before moving to the fridge.

In the three years since he had retired, Charlie's body had found a new strength. Light color was coming in some of his hair, and his skin had a healthy tan. His pajama onesie had a big sag of weight in the bottom of his torso, he couldn't compress his pants fully this morning, and he had a waddle. His forearms and limbs had a lumpy presence as well, the contour of a man who spent a couple hours a day on the swing set.

Mira was worse. She had gained some weight and her hair had lost some of the shine. Her face was starting to gain wrinkles, not from stress, but from lack of attention. She hadn't worn makeup in years or gone through the morning ritual of a half dozen beauty products that had postponed the onset of her forties. Howard asked a soft question, “Mira, baby, do you want to try some milk today? Grace has been making extra.”

Mira's at the loudest (inside voice) she (was allowed to) do, gave a firm “NO!.” If Grace hadn't already been up, it might have woken her. The four men looked at her, even Thomas, like she was a child with poor taste, turning down a chance to try a steak and instead begging for chicken nuggets. They quickly returned to their prior morning state: girls were dumb. Charles grabbed a bottle from beside the fridge, began filling it with ice and water and sat between Mira and Edward, giving her the drink. Howard began feeding her cereal.

“I wanted your opinion on something,” Charles remembered before puttering off and out of the kitchen.

He returned with a long piece of paper, taller than notebook and long like an architect's draft. He unfurled it placing it in front of Howard, the edges still coming up slightly from the rolling. The drawing had been made with colored pencils, and it captured a moment from this spring. It depicted the cul-de-sac their house was on, as seen from their front porch. The houses were the wrong size, the cars were huge but flat side on, the trees small, and the distant flowers and bushes large. It conveyed all the important information of the landscape, and the strange size differences teased the imagination.

Howard took one hard look, “Were you aiming for something... post impressionistic?” It had a rich contrast of the inviting spring day against disconcerting, unnerving size differences. It was like Charles had made size a symbol of something, but there was no rational explanation immediately coming to mind. The whole sketch was unfamiliar, serious, and mysterious, like his morning dream.

“I couldn't figure out how real paintings got farther away objects to be smaller, I tried using my fingers to guess, but yeah it looks a bit sloppy.”

“Charlie, you're untrained. It took two thousand years for artists to learn how to do perspective, you're not going to get it from first principals.” Howard liked the picture. It had a Rousseau vibe. It was unprofessional, even anti-elitist, but still meaningful. He could probably sell to someone, not a real collector or a studio, but maybe a college student looking to spice up their dorm. “We can pick up a book at the library later if you want.”

“Oh...” Charlie’s eyes darted to the fridge. The front to bottom were covered in Edward's pictures. A flower, his family, a picture of the neighbor's dog. Howard stood up and grabbed a paper off the fridge that was a several stripes of marker – green, blue, and brown, perhaps his son's own attempt at the same landscape. Howard carefully took it down.

“Hey! That's mine!” Edward looked up. He had been working on one of the paper's puzzles, one which was asking to find the stuff that is different picture between two drawings.

“It's just going to the side until we can find a permanent place for it. Is it OK for your grandpa's picture to go up here?”

Charles opened his sippy cup. With a fast hand he pointed to get Mira's attention at something away and in the next room. Her view obliged, following his finger. With his other he dumped half his milk into her cereal. She looked back confused, only to see him struggling a bit to put the lid back on.

Howard had brought himself above Edward to comfort him, the boy was not working on a matching puzzle. He had already completed the 're-arrange the letters' puzzle and had moved on to the next one. It was not a difficult one, a nine-by-nine grid, thirty-five numbers pre-filled, but the boy had been making some notches along the side and had confidently filled in about half the squares with his crayon.

“He can have a spot. But just one. I already have to share with my brother.” Edward had had a meltdown when they brought out all his old first year toys, only to find they were not for him. Howard took it as a victory that the two-year-old did not go into a tantrum again.

Howard brought Charles's picture to the fridge; it took two magnets to display the masterpiece. He returned to feed Mira, but now she was getting extra fussy after just a few bites. He had to resort to making locomotive sounds to get her to cooperate.

Grace entered with Thomas in her arms, he was nestled into her chest. Motherhood had changed her radically. She looked ten years older than her twenty-two, and her breasts had swollen like squash.

“Mommy look!” Edward held up the puzzle he had completed first, pointing at the circles with letters he filled in. Howard tensed as the half-filled number puzzle flopped to the side. Grace only took two seconds to examine the paper before casually letting her son down.

“Edward, 'train' is spelled with an 'eye'.” She hadn't meant to be dismissive; she was still tired.

“I like this better,” was Edward's defense.

Grace made her way to Charles and with her other arm came in for a hug. “How's my big boy doing? How was the movie you went to last night with daddy?”

Charlie wiggled a bit from the hug, then answered, “It was good, I liked the part where the physicist cheated on his wife, but everyone forgave him.”

Grace chuckled a bit, “Well, that's just a movie not real life.” She turned to Howard. “You guys got back late.”

“It was over three hours, maybe I should have worn one of Charles's diapers. He was good. But um.” He didn't want to correct his wife in front of the children, but the dream had bothered him, and he was determined to take a different path the second time around. He let his voice get lower, “I think we should be careful what terms we use to describe your parents; it might confuse Edward and Thomas.”

Grace nodded, understanding, but was interrupted by the toddler, “What's hard to figure out? Here I made a picture.” The boy rushed over to the fridge and grabbed one of his masterpieces, a portrait of his family. He slapped it on the table and pointed at the drawing.

“Here's me.” He pointed at the center at a facsimile of a self-portrait. It was nearly the size of all the other people and had been drawn with crude ovals and rectangle shapes for clothing, his own hair made of triangles. He pointed to two others, a man and a woman holding his hands to the side of him. “And here's mommy and daddy.” And then to a circle wrapped in an oval floating with a smiling face, “And here's my brother Tommy.”

He brought his crayon to a couple people clearly placed an inch above his mother, their size was between his own and his parents. “And mommy has a mommy and daddy, Gram-pa Charlie and Gram-ma Mira.” And then to the other side, “And Daddy has a mommy. Granny San-cra-dee-aiego. Everyone insists she doesn't wear diapers like my other grandma, but I saw them!”

That statement caused Howard to frown, both because he had not realized his mother had a condition, and because he wanted Edward to focus on things other than what they wore down below. Mira slapped her sippy cup in frustration on the table to distract him from the implications of his son's description. She wanted more food. He grabbed a large bite with a spoon and brought it to her mouth.

“And Daddy has a daddy, but I don't 'member him, and Mira has a mommy and daddy, and they also are grandma and grandpa, that's the only hard part,”

Howard had gotten extra creative with his in-laws. He called the plan 'The Days of Future Past', after the comic book. He had “brought forward” their teenage minds while making them 'forget' decades of their lives. He had told them their future selves had swapped bodies with the past in a desperate attempt to save the planet from a plague. It must have worked because the future only got Covid and not that Ultra-Avian Flu. Grace became the daughter they did not remember raising, and Mira was their granddaughter who had suffered a terrible accident with her husband Charles a few years back.

Finding oneself decades in the future would have been a nightmare, except their older selves were rich from years of hard work and savvy investments. Their house alone was worth millions of dollars, and quite frankly was too much house for the couple, having chosen to keep it for nostalgia reasons that did not make sense anymore. Now they got to live in the future! The twenty twenties were a technologically advanced society beyond the wildest imaginations of teenagers from the nineteen seventies. With proper medication, diet, and exercise, seventy could be the new forty. The two in-laws had been teenage lovebirds, who had originally put off marriage until they finished school, and now they were married, and they had no obligations to work or family. In a way they had skipped over the 'bad' fifty years without having to experience all the hard work or hardships.

It is the dream of every teenager to finally grow up, become an independent adult able to make his own decisions, and to be rich. A wish had been granted, not on a monkey paw, nor by a friendly genie, but from something in between.

Howard explained as the past healed, their memories would converge with their current selves, and that sometimes they would remember things. He had mentally regressed them, tweaked their personality and self-image and perception of each other. He had not actually sent their minds to the past. That is not possible right? All those memories were still in there somewhere, and as they emerged their personal history would be recontextualized, a happy gift from their past selves. Meanwhile, they could enjoy themselves, travel, and just live life to its fullest. The two were now in Chile, enjoying their 'second' anniversary since they had renewed their vows.

“Grandma and Grandpa?” Grace hadn't been included in the plan for her grandparents. Oh well, mommy didn't need to be included in every decision daddy made.

“Oh, and Uncle Aaron. I just found out about him. He's mommy's brother. He's coming for, um...” The boy looked up at the rest of the table. Edward knew this.

“Fireworks” Howard tried to help.

“Easter?” Edward was guessing.

“Hotdogs, hamburgers, sparklers, parades.” Howard continued.

“Thanksgiving,” The other food holiday.

“Fourth of July” Howard finally told him.

“Independence Day” Charlie gave the correct answer, lowering his drink slightly to converse, before chugging the rest of his milk.

“Aaron is coming for the fourth?” Grace finally woke up from her morning stupor. Outside of some management of mom and dad's social media, she hardly even knew him, and given her family's need for privacy, she was not sure she wanted to. She had fallen away from her adult friends as well, none were parents, and none had real jobs.

“I thought it would be good for Charles, and Aaron reached out after Thomas was born, I said...” Howard thought she would be fine with this. This was her brother; family should be important to her.

“He's going to see us. He's going to see mom and dad and...” She sat down just holding Thomas, unsure what she was going to say.

Howard kept comforting her, “You and your brother share many things in common. He's not in a great place right now, he had to move back in with his mother.”

Edward had continued his discussion of his picture, “Now, let's do it from mommy's perspective. Mommy has three boys, me, Tommy, and grandpa.” The adults were not listening to him.

“I'm not sure that's a good idea. What if he tells someone?” Grace's voice kept a solid tone, unable to decide between criticism and concern.

“And daddy used to be her daddy, but now it's Grandpa Alan.” Edward felt it important to get all the details right.

“You and your brother have shared interests. He messaged me, I sent him an e-mail saying your dad was back with your mom living with us and the two were into a lifestyle we respected.”

“And mommy's mom, grandma, is daddy's daughter Mira and so that's why she's in diapers.” Edward turned away from the picture and spoke to the adults, “Is Uncle Aaron gonna to be in diapers or he is gonna to be changin' them.”

Howard flatly told him, “Changing them,” he answered Grace, “Look, he just wants to see his family, he's fine with this. Might even learn a thing or two to help back home.”

While Howard and Mira kept tabs on her parent's social media, Aaron had contacted Howard in a different way. Howard had joined a few groups, mostly to stay on top of news and reviews for products aimed at people who were physically older but were not ready to be big boys and big girls. It let him know when there was a sale, who was making clothes, or if someone was selling a crib in his area. Through these groups he saw what people were paying for audio tapes, the lengths they would go to train themselves, just so they could better pretend to fit into their lifestyle. How much more would they pay for the real thing? Howard started offering consultation services.

It was not cheap. A high price was important to make it clear this was real and keep the number of clients small. It was spread mouth to mouth, though he did send a few suggestive e-mails to his former colleagues and friends. A thousand bucks could turn a nicotine addiction into another kind of oral fixation. Getting up too many times at night? For five grand his clients would sleep soundly and deeply, and always wake up satisfied. For ten thousand he would correct the past just like had done with Mira. It was surprising how many people wanted to experience a life where they had never been taught something so basic and fundamental. Or at least they thought they did. In two years, he had had more than a dozen personal consultations.

There were always those who had darker designs, not to transform themselves towards some 'ideal', but to direct his skills upon another. They wanted curses and hexes, something to bring revenge on an ex-lover, a misbehaving spouse, a colleague, or boss. He had been avoiding those kinds of requests, and was about to politely decline, but the fifty-dollar PayPal consultation fee had come from Aaron's personal e-mail. The man had made some attempt to protect his personal identity, but the financial world was the weak link that doxed his brother-in-law's identity. Instead of taking the request, Howard reached out directly, and told him his dad had decided to be three again and was now living with Aaron's sister and children. He wanted to learn if Aaron had the right stuff. Howard was interested in talking to him about expanding operations, even starting a franchise. He needed to see if his brother-in-law had the stomach to begin incorporating vengeance and help build a catalog of the grotesque and the fantastic.

“I'm just nervous. I get so worried about everything. I just, don't like finding out this way, I thought we were making decision together.” Grace was not sure if she was upset by this, but she was not in a positive demeanor and expressing it out loud through the conversation to work through the problem.

Howard knew what to say, this was not his first rodeo, “Grace, we are making decisions together, you have a big important job, and you're a full-time mommy. I need to look out for you, and that means keeping in touch with family and friends. You have to trust me on some of these things, it's easy to get locked into your own world and become an island. You have to trust me to keep tabs on this, so we have a strong healthy network.”

Her friends were other mommies, and people at work, and most of them were in their thirties and forties. One mother had even invited her to a wine tasting after Thomas was born, only for Grace to realize she had never had a drink of alcohol, she was pregnant when she turned twenty-one. Her former high school and college friends seemed immature, their social media feeds were focused on parties, breakups, internships, and the harshness of classes. Her high school friends were not even in the market to get married. Some of them were twenty-four! No one had warned her that if she charged headfirst into adulthood, that there would be consequences to accelerated maturity. She was glad Howard was looking out for her on this, he knew firsthand how difficult making friends would be.

It finally clicked for Charles what mommy and daddy were talking about. Uncle Aaron was his son Aaron, who he had not seen in... Well, time is less important these days. Now Aaron would see him like this. He had raised his son for eighteen years, from cribs to college, and now his own son would see him in a diaper. Some part of him felt he should feel shame at that, but what bothered him more was he was not involved in the decision. He was not going to cry though; it was mommy's last day together and he promised he would be extra extra good today.

“I think I'm just concerned about tonight. Everything is riding on this.” Grace had worked through her own emotions enough to identify what was bothering her.

“What's tonight?” Howard had been underemployed for years. The first thing to go had been his sense of time, but other than Grace returning to work tomorrow he could not recall anything special. What day of the week was it? Sunday?

“The dinner. My boss is coming over, we're going to discuss the new project I have planned when I go back tomorrow.”

The nightmare message from his unborn daughter. Thomas's psychic powers. Edward doing sudoku. Charles's artistic eye. Finding out about his mother's incontinence from his son. Grace complaining about her brother coming, and then casually dropping she had invited her boss to dinner. And now he was finding out he needed to plan a full course dinner the day of. All these secrets, and now everything was exploding like atomic bombs. It was too much for six thirty in the morning. He was about to lose it. They were supposed to be a happy family.

“All done! Dank you 'dah dah'. I wuv you” Howard’s attention went back to Mira. Her face was covered in drooling milk that was finding its way down onto her pajamas. They were just one big happy family, those other issues were small and would be lost in time, but together they would face any challenge. He stood up and addressed the table.

“Attention, members of the Finnigan household. Today is a special day, it's mommy's last day with us before she goes back to work. She's a bit down because she doesn't think we can handle ourselves. But we're all going to be big and strong today and we'll show her we will be just fine while she's at work. It'll be like a practice run for the big show tomorrow. Mommy is going to spend the whole morning and afternoon focusing on just her, treating herself to a nice spa day, and the four of us are going to run errands and get the house clean. She won't have to worry about anything.”

“So, now we need to get everyone cleaned up from breakfast, then we're going to go shopping for tonight's meal, we're going to stop by the library for a book for Charlie and Edward, and while I'm preparing it everyone is going to pitch in and get the house nice and clean for our guest tonight.” Even as he spoke it, he could see the schedule being laid out in his mind. An hour for shopping, then diaper changes, then thirty minutes at the library, another hour to prepare dinner and get it in the oven, thirty minutes to make lunch, twenty minutes to clean the bathrooms, ten minutes to assist Edward in cleaning his room, and onward the tasks were built in his mind and his calculating brain was organizing the logistics of managing a household. This was doable, it would be tight but doable.

Edward still did not understand why his mom had to go back to work, “Why doesn't mommy just have another baby and then she can stay home another nine weeks?”