Linda lifted the blanket off herself. "But it's only about ten degrees out."
"Yeah," Stephen admitted, still smiling. "Wear a heavy coat and a couple of sweaters then. Do you want to come along, or no?"
"No, I think I'll stay here," she said. "Where it's warm."
Stephen laughed. "Listen to you. The car is heated you know. And we're going to the parking garage. We'll probably be outside a grand total of two minutes."
Linda shook her head. "No, I have some things I need to do here."
"Okay," Stephen said, moving away from the door. "See you in a couple of hours, then."
"Don't let them eat any of that junk while they're there," she called out after him.
Linda spent a couple of days thinking about what Lauren had said: "Things are going to change." She constantly wondered which things and how much. After a few days, though, she forgot about it, focusing instead on how nice it was to see Lauren again. In all of her lucid dreams, Lauren stayed the same, looking exactly as she did as a college senior, more than twenty years ago. Linda wondered if she appeared the same way in her dreams where Lauren appeared, not having aged a day since 1979, or if a mirror in the dream plane would reveal the ravages of two decades on her face.
Everyone had waited for mayhem to occur during the whole "1999" scenario, and when it was over, January 1, 2000 was just another day. Possibly she was reading into it too much. Anyway, wouldn't Lauren have the ability to incarnate into any dimension, possibly any time?
She could go backward or forward. Linda, on the other hand, was still fixed in this plane, where she would try to make the best for herself and her family.
Two weeks later, after January had turned into February, and some of the severely cold and snowy weather broke, Stephen came home from work one evening carrying a stringed shopping bag with a telltale apple on one side. When he saw Linda, he raised his eyebrows twice like a silent movie hero character and grinned crookedly. He hung up his overcoat in the foyer closet and asked "Where's my princess?" as he called out her name.
Linda tried to lean forward and look inside the bag, but Stephen kept swinging it away from her. "What have you done?" she asked him, as he ventured further into the house. It was a quiet, uneventful Tuesday until then. Matthew had just come home from his friend's house and now lay sprawled on the entertainment room rug killing space creatures on a Playstation game. Linda was going to reheat some spaghetti that Inge had made earlier.