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Their journey from 2022 to the Battle of Gettysburg began in dreams. Somehow, sleep gave way to cosmic clusters of universes born then multiplied, a pillow their space capsule at many times the speed of light. A couple of high school graduates found themselves float into deep voids between fired synapses. They stopped then started, popped then faded, arrived and departed the way a radio dial scrolls back and forth through static in search of the right frequency, caught for a moment, then just as quickly lost.
Time traveling these realms in his sleep that winter was not Jordi's plan after graduating high school a semester early, but one January morning he texted his best friend Carmen urgently, who rolled over in bed to read it with a yawn. "CarmeeLynn, we have to talk. Bring Patch." Carmen didn't let anyone use her given name except her parents or Jordi, and whenever he did, something was up.
When the pandemic exploded their junior years at their separate high schools, both knew the world they grew up in was gone. They called it "the before time". Carmen took the vaccine she knew wouldn't work just to shut up her mother and everyone at school. Jordi didn't. He enjoyed the attention from people who hated him anyway. It all made junior year such a nightmare, Jordi and Carmen decided to load up spring, summer and fall 2021 with remote classes and get the hell out as fast as they could. Both graduated a semester early in December, Jordi from Cleveland public schools, Carmen from suburban Lorain County. When the virus roared right back their last semester of fall 2021, masks and vaccines be damned, neither was surprised except at the immense, all encompassing scale of neurotic madness school had become. It was discussed and debated via text, of course, then decided in the sand at Huntington Beach in Bay Village that summer 2021, a final moment in the before time, Lake Erie ripples at their ankles. "They'll make us swim with masks," Jordi laughed that day. He and Carmen never saw each other wearing a mask, and would keep it that way.
"It's snowing, might be a while," Carmen texted back. Then she reached for Patch, the tiny teddy bear she cuddled so much as a baby it grew holes which Grandma Moran had to sew up the winter she died, when little CarmeeLynn was 5 years old. Now, Carmen found she needed Patch, just like before, just like with Grandma. A hole on its back, another on the neck, its pudgy nose, all the places a baby squeezed, Patch's patches were purple, cut from the hanky Grandma used to dry her granddaughter's tears from birth, more tears than a baby should ever cry. Thanks to the pandemic years, the tears were coming back.
Carmen's parents' marriage was a giant Midwest suburban American mistake. No one remembered why Mike Thompson married Linda Moran, just that they met in a karaoke bar in some strip mall in North Olmsted when Mike sang a rousing post-9/11 rendition of how he was Proud To Be An American Where At Least He Knows He's Free, and Linda was soon pregnant. Mike was an insurance salesman, always filled with tall tales. Depending on the day of the week and the potential sale, Mike Thompson's west side Cleveland story was Irish, or Scottish, or Scotch-Irish, English, Welsh, maybe some Dutch or even, gasp, Ukrainian if the potential client seemed ethnic enough. Mostly, he pretended to be "southern", despite being from Medina County Ohio, often claimed Mayflower Pilgrim lineage, especially at Thanksgiving, listened to "country" music. Played cornhole. Drove the obligatory pick up truck which never hauled anything. It was all an act, so Mike Thompson could sell insurance by looking suitably red, white and blue. He sold just enough insurance Linda thought him "rich".
Linda ran from her vaguely ethnic background toward Mike's blank slate and fake wealth like a moth to flame. She worked at a local church, a faceless pop up denomination common along the empty roads of Lorain County, whose pastor fancied himself a megachurch millionaire someday. The wedding was hasty, marked chiefly by Linda's father a week later tripping to his death at age 74 in the bathroom of the postage stamp post war ranch in the Cleveland suburb of Parma where Linda grew up. Alone now with a granddaughter on the way, Grandma Moran sold the house in Parma and moved into the in-law suite of the newlyweds' Avon Lake McMansion just before CarmeeLynn was born.
Her name was as big a trainwreck as her parents' marriage. A pointless sludge of made-up weirdness, CarmeeLynn dropped onto the baby from her parents' first and last attempt to work together, on anything. Throughout the pregnancy, the argument raged. Dad liked cars, Mom liked the three syllable thing, long "e" sounds, especially spelled with two e's, Dad would accept names with "y" in them, ending in "n", better yet, two of them. Easy to pronounce as possessive, the apostrophe then "s" and whatnot. The first broken furniture in the house was a kitchen chair hurled the night a fight over the baby's name erupted so viciously it sent Linda into labor. All the while, Grandma laid low and prepared the nursery, fully aware she would be the one raising this child.
From the day the baby was born, Grandma had to rock CarmeeLynn to sleep amidst the howling chaos of her parents fighting. Every single day and night, punches thrown, plates and vases smashed, loud music to annoy the other, loud television, loud parties in the basement, slammed car doors, beer bottles tossed, boxes thrown down stairs, fists through drywall. Carmen's only memories of the first years of her life as CarmeeLynn were of Grandma and that purple hanky. It all trained the little girl to doze off no matter what was going on around her. Sleep the only escape, her crib became a protective cave, then her bed. The teddy bear came along on her first birthday and took the brunt of the baby's fears, squeezed all night, carried all day, curled up with, crushed into tear drenched pillows. When holes appeared in the bear, Grandma cut squares from her purple hanky to sew it up.
"What should we call this little patched up guy?" Grandma asked CarmeeLynn the blustery snowy night she tucked her in with the newly sewn up bear.
"Patch!" her granddaughter announced. Grandma died softly in her sleep that very night. The funeral was barely attended. Little CarmeeLynn didn't even know her grandmother was gone, just that she wasn't around anymore. Alone in the unrelenting hell of her parents' marriage for the first time, she dried her tears now with the bear, especially its patches, as sleepy remembrance finally confirmed what her parents were too cowardly to tell her.
That winter, CarmeeLynn's sleep changed. Cold and snow out her window, all the child could dream of was Grandma. It seemed Grandma came to her when she fell asleep, to hold her again on her lap, but this time, Patch was there. So, she carried Patch everywhere, because it helped her sleep anywhere, like Grandma did. In the car, at church, in the swing set in the backyard, anytime she held Patch it was not long before she'd drift away, to conjure a peace in dreams that her waking life never afforded. She even took Patch to the first day of class at kindergarten, where during the first nap time she met a kid named Jordi unable to sleep on the mat next to her.
If CarmeeLynn's parents knew she'd become best friends with a Puerto Rican kid who'd rename her in Catholic kindergarten, they'd never have sent her there. Jordi's mother was half African American, half Mexican, his father full Puerto Rican, some Cuban mixed in on Jordi's paternal grandmother's side, somehow. Jordi's Cuban-ish grandma died when he was very little, too, so his only memory of her was how she used to watch old reruns of I Love Lucy on television when she babysat. Jordi knew there was some Cuban blood back there only because Grandma used to point at Desi Arnaz in black and white on daytime TV to proudly declare to baby Jordi, "You'll look like him someday!"
They gave Jordi Perez his Catalan name, after his paternal grandfather, the first to come to the mainland, with Jordi's father as a teenager. Soon as he could, Jordi's dad owned a run down convenient storefront in Cleveland's Clark Fulton neighborhood of Puerto Ricans, where first Germans, then Czechs, then Italians built previous immigrant eras. Jordi grew up in the three room apartment above the bodega across from St. Rocco's Catholic Church on Fulton Road, an only child, too. Mom made food for the bodega Dad ran all day, everyday. His parents did their best to shield Jordi from city life early on, by sending him to the Catholic elementary school in the suburbs, where he met the girl who always fell right to sleep at nap time, whose name he'd heard once that first day, but couldn't quite recall.
"Is your name Carmen?" Jordi asked the shy girl with the patched up bear. She loved it, and it stuck. It changed her. Carmen came alive, CarmeeLynn died off, like shedding a skin, and it was Jordi who brought Carmen to life. Overnight, a scared little baby girl became a confident precocious kid, so different from before. She smiled now, giggled at things, played, as if play at home had never occurred. She stayed after school as much as possible from that point on, because that's where this new girl Carmen lived, and Jordi. Over time, Carmen told Jordi all about her Grandma, and how thinking of her, through Patch, helped her sleep. By 3rd grade, thanks to Jordi, Patch could stay home, perched on her bedside table. Just in case.
