TimeSlip by Caroline McCall Page A

you
can find yourself a new roommate.”
    Finn got through it by looking at her face the whole time.
The nurses thought he was tender and romantic and Ingrid was satisfied, so long
as she could squeeze his hand viciously. At the end of it they were presented
with a son. A boy with sherry- colored eyes. Finn’s heart melted. He was a dad.
    He looked down at the red-faced bundle lying in his arms.
This was it, the reason why he was sitting in a maternity hospital, with a
sleeping wife lying exhausted in a bed next to him. Some of his friends thought
he was crazy, but others were envious. He watched Ingrid’s chest rising and
falling. Her hair was a sweaty, matted mess and her face was red, but she
looked kind of beautiful.
    Finn remembered his own strict religious upbringing in a
tiny village in the West and the sense of liberation when he moved to the city.
“You are so lucky to have her for a mommy,” he whispered to the sleeping
bundle.
    He and Ingrid had been best friends since their first year
in college and had drifted into being roommates when he lost an acting job one
Christmas and couldn’t pay his rent. That had been a bad winter for both of
them. Ingrid had fallen apart when her dad died a couple of months later and
she failed her college exams. But they had gotten through it. When she moved
into her father’s old apartment, he had moved in to take care of her. Along the
way they had helped each other through the bad boyfriend breakups and now he
couldn’t imagine his life without her in it.
    A nurse arrived to take the baby from him. Finn dropped a
kiss on Ingrid’s forehead. “Night, Mrs. O’Leary, see you tomorrow.”
    * * * * *
    Ingrid had just sat down with her laptop when she heard him
crying. Adam needed changing again. She must have been delusional when she
imagined that she could write a book while the baby was sleeping.
    The last six months had been an exercise in crisis
management. They were the worst parents in the world. Neither of them had
siblings to call for advice when the baby wouldn’t stop screaming. Eventually
they caved in and did the inconceivable. Finn rang his mother. Within days, the
apartment was running like clockwork and the baby fed at the precise times arranged
by her. Mari O’Leary, or Madame Defarge as Ingrid liked to call her behind her
back, could have run a small country while simultaneously knitting what she
described as a layette. If she ever saw another knitted bootie she was going to
choke Finn with it. How did she ever have a feckless son like him?
    It was two months before Finn’s mother left. By that time,
Ingrid had threatened him with divorce, baby Adam was permanently attached to
one of her breasts and Finn was more than delighted to escape to the theater in
the evenings. By early summer, they had settled in to a pattern of permanent
parental exhaustion.
    “Why don’t you save one of these for Finn?” she muttered as
Adam chuckled up at her. Was this how the raped and pillaged coped after a
viking invasion? Ingrid had never actually contemplated the aftermath before,
but when she unwrapped what Finn described as another car-crash diaper, she was
inclined to swear viciously. Strom was off floating in his spaceship somewhere
in the heavens, while she was stuck on Earth with dirty diapers.
    “I wish I could send him one,” she cooed to the baby, “a
great, big, dirty hello from his son. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
    Adam chuckled again. She still hadn’t figured out a way of
getting a message to Strom, but she would, somehow.
    Adam’s small pudgy fingers reached for her research notes,
crumpling the edge of one page. “Naughty baba, give that to mommy.”
    Ingrid smoothed out the precious page and then it hit her.
Her book, the one she hadn’t written yet, was sitting on Strom’s bookshelf
somewhere in the future. All she had to do was write it. She lifted Adam up
until they were face to face. “Work with me on this, Adam. Give mommy one hour
a day, so