by Holly Hook
“I can prove everything to you. Isabel, do you have the hair clip? It should be in that coat. I think I handed it to you back in the Branch.”
Isabel takes off my coat and fumbles with the pocket. She hands me the glittering butterfly, which shines every color in the streetlight.
“This is going to feel weird,” I tell Monica. “You're going to see some weird things when you put this on. I guarantee it. Just wait a few seconds, and it'll be all over.”
She eyes the hair clip in Isabel's hands. “What's that?”
“It has my memories. Simon's memories, and Isabel's memories. When you put this on, you're going to receive them. You'll see everything we've been through and what really happened in the past. You'll see how your life is supposed to be.”
“Okay.” She takes the clip and for a moment, I'm scared she's going to drop it. “I'll try this, but if it doesn't do what you say, I'm heading back into the house and going to bed so I can forget this ever happened.”
“Deal,” I say
Will she forgive me when she sees what I've taken from her? What Isabel has taken from her?
“Hurry,” Isabel says. “I don't want my father to come out here and find me. He won't remember me as anything more than the girl who found him in that store, but I don't want to take any chances.”
Monica's mask is slipping and her chin trembles. She's scared. She's about to step through a doorway that I never wanted to take her through, but if I do things right, we'll set her life back tot he way it should be and this will be erased.
Monica affixes the butterfly to her hair. I help her get it in place. She's shaking, maybe with the hope that this life isn't what she should have to endure after all. I hope.
I hit the button for her. The light blinks.
Monica jumps and grabs onto the mailbox. She sags against the house and makes a face. Somewhere inside, Daniel yells if she's all right. Footsteps approach from inside. He's been watching after all.
“Hold on,” I say, taking her hand. She's being injected with my memories of her. With Simon's and with Isabel's. It's not easy. “It'll be over in a few seconds.”
The front door comes open and frames Daniel, her blond foster brother.
He stares at us all and his mouth falls open. “Monica,” he manages, taking her other arm. He glares at me. “What are you doing to her?”
Monica gasps. Straightens up. She faces me with recognition, with admiration, and with fear.
“Julia,” She manages. “Julia. I had no idea. Did this really all happen?”
“Yes.” I can't say anything else. The memories have to speak for themselves. My only wish right now is that she could have some of her old ones back. “I guess we're even now. We both know each other's secrets. You know, I always wanted to tell you about my time travel adventures, but I never got the chance.”
And I laugh. I'm always laughing when I'm nervous. I think of that, and I laugh some more.
Monica takes off the clip and admires it. Her expression has changed. She's...charged. Alive. Hopeful. “Nancy,” she breathes. “We were supposed to live with her. Not this...this...Oh, God...”
"What are you talking about?" Daniel asks. He's bewildered.
“We'll explain that part later,” I say. That's not in the memories that I gave to her. “Right now, we need to figure out how the heck to get Nancy back. Can we come in? If your foster dad will let us, that is?” I hand the clip back to Isabel, who tucks it into my coat.
Monica nods. She's all business now. The tension in the air has cleared now that both of our secrets are out. Fair's fair.
“Come in,” she says. “We have to be quick. He does have a limit of ten o clock for guests."
Chapter Nine
Monica lets us into the house.
“What's going on?” Daniel asks.
I wish I could tell him, but he has no part in this nightmare. It's best to leave him out. What kind of life would he have had without Isabel's father here, dominating the scene? I hope it's a better one than this. He doesn't seem any happier than Monica in this hell.
"It's nothing," Monica tells him. "We're just doing some studying for a history project. That's all."
"Then why did you keel over on the porch like that?"
Monica faces us. Isabel's shrinking back, trying to stay out of view in case her father comes this way. I move to stand in front of her.
"She stubbed her toe," I fill in.
It seems like a good enough answer. Daniel walks back into the kitchen.
I get a glimpse of the inside of the house. Nancy's paintings of ships are gone. Her bookshelves are gone. Instead, there are a pair of crossed swords hanging on the other side of a leather couch and a cabinet that contains several guns.
Some part of Isabel's father remembers who he is, after all.
An then he appears.
Isabel's father walks out of the kitchen. He holds a plate of spaghetti in one hand and a fork in the other. He's dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans. I stand closer to Isabel, blocking her from sight. He's still wearing that serious expression that I remember all too well on the ship.
“Hello,” he says. He speaks it in a way so that the e sounds like an a. “Who are you?”
Yes. He has an accent. He's only been speaking English for a short time.
“We're friends of Monica,” I say.
“They're my study partners from another school,” Monica says. “We're working on a project for Social Studies. If it's okay, may I have them over for about an hour or so we can get our homework done? It's a project on the Victorian era, so that's why they're in the costumes.”
Isabel's father stands up straight, with perfect, military posture. “I suppose,” he says, lifting one hand to his chin. “Remember, you must be finished by ten.”
“But what if our project goes longer than that?” Monica asks.
“Ten," he says. “I mean it. I do not want people here late." He stalks off into the kitchen. "Daniel. I ordered you to finish scrubbing the microwave. I can still see a few spots inside."
Isabel glances at me and shrugs. I know what she means. Her father was never this mean to her or her sister.
Isabel hangs my coat on the hook near the door and we head into Monica's room. It is, thankfully, still the same as it was before when Nancy was here. She still has her glow in the dark posters on the walls and she still has that bean bag chair in the corner. Her computer's already on, and it's open to a video of some cute puppies swarming a little kid and giving him kisses. Monica never used to her watch so many videos. She was usually studying or out seeing friends. Maybe her life with Isabel's father has forced her to take any escape she can.
“Okay,” Monica says. She faces me. There are tears in her eyes. “Why did this all happen?”
“Well, you saw how we changed history,” I say. “Somehow, that caused Nancy to not be here. I don't think us saving Isabel's ship caused that to happen, because Nancy was still here when Isabel dropped her father off.” I feel like I'm going to puke. Did us saving the Titanic, while we saved fifteen hundred lives, cause us to kill others? Did we cause the adoption of the lifeboat law to come in too late? We could have. If the Titanic didn't sink, no attention would have been brought to the lifeboat issue until another ship went down and killed others.
A ship one of Nancy's relatives would have been on?
It's my best guess.
“Monica, you're going to have to help us look some things up.” A bell starts to ring in the back of my mind, and my little voice screams a faint, distant name at me—the name of a ship. “I...I think I remember Nancy saying something about one of her ancestors serving on a ship in the first world war. That might be something we need to look at. She said it was a sister ship of the Titanic. Can you look up what that could have been?"
"Sure." Monica sniffles and faces her computer.
I even remember that the Titanic had a sister ship called the Olympic, but that name doesn't sound right to me. There mus
t have been a third one, because the Olympic lived long enough to be retired and wouldn't have killed Nancy's ancestor. I remember reading that in one of Nancy's books. But there couldn't have been too many ships built like the Titanic.
Monica turns off the video and gets onto a site called Wikipedia. I've never seen it before, but it looks like a household name here in Nancy's time. Or what used to be Nancy's time. “I'll look up sister ships of the Titanic,” she says. “There probably won't be many articles on the Titanic now. It's probably just a footnote.”
It seems weird. No one even knows about that ship anymore. It is just a footnote.
“Well,” Monica says, reading. She glances at her clock. It's nine forty-five. “It looks like there were three identical ships built by the White Star Line. One was the Titanic. It crashed into an iceberg on its maiden voyage, but the watertight compartments held, and it was towed to New York safely. Despite the problem at the start of its career, it went on to sail across the Atlantic for about twelve more years. During the First World War, it was commissioned by the British Navy, along with its sister ship, the Britannic.”
The Britannic. That must be the ship her ancestor served on.
“That sounds right,” I say. I look at Simon and his eyebrows lift. We're onto something. "It sank, didn't it?"
“The Titanic survived the war,” Monica reads. “It was retired in the mid twenties. But its sister whip, the Britannic, didn't. It was struck by a mine while it was carrying a lot of injured soldiers and sailors. It sank, killing about two hundred of them.” She swallows and is silent for a long time. “This article says there weren't enough lifeboats for all of the injured, and that's the reason many of them didn't escape. This was pretty much ignored at the time due to the war going on, but there weren't laws to require enough lifeboats until the nineteen twenties.”
I back away from the computer. The walls of Monica's room close in.
This has to be it.
We've killed Nancy's ancestor.
And in turn, we've killed Nancy.
A sob works its way up into my throat. She's gone. I've erased her by saving myself and my other family. What if I have to choose one or the other? Either my family dies, or Nancy dies and Monica remains miserable here.
Simon wraps his arms around me. “This is terrible," he says. "I'm so sorry. This doesn't make any sense. Well, it does, but it doesn't.”
“How many more mistakes are we going to make?” I ask. “Every time we fix one problem, ten more crop up. It's like it's never going to end. What else have we done? How many people are gone that are supposed to be alive today? Good people? People that should have families of their own?”
Simon shushes me. “He still out there," he says, meaning Isabel's father. “We will figure something out. We always do. All we need to do is go find Nancy's ancestor and save him.”
“But what will that cause?”
Isabel straightens up. “I know where there's a rift to the first world war. I still have all of my Timeless memories, unlike the two of you. We can do it."
“But what will it cause?” I ask. I have the feeling Isabel is trying to make up for this fiasco here in Nancy's time. “You saw how sick Time was getting. We'll probably make it even worse if we do something else like that. Maybe I do have to choose.”
“We shouldn't,” Simon says. “Time might be sick, but we're all okay.”
“A-hem,” Monica says. “Nancy should be here. Maybe Time is sick because of that.”
It's so strange, hearing Monica talk about Time like this when she used to have no clue what was really going on. It's like two of my words have crashed into one.
“You're right,” I say. “I...I just don't know what to do.”
"We can get back to the Hub and think about it,” Simon says. He adjusts his coat. “Isabel—where's Julia's coat? We can't forget the clip.”
“I hung it up by the doorway.”
“Okay,” he says.
“How come none of the Timeless have come for us yet?” I ask. “Or come for Isabel's father? What if Time's so sick that it can no longer tell them what to do, and people are ending up in the wrong time everywhere?”
“It could be,” Simon says.
“Nancy,” I repeat. "How do we get her back and survive it?"
“Yes. Her. But we can fix that. We can do something to make sure the lifeboat laws get enacted in time, and we'll pretty much solve that problem.” I can sense him scrambling. He doesn't quite know what to do, either, but he's trying hard to be the savior here.
“We're just going to have to go back and try something,” I say. “Maybe we can go back and tell people in 1912, that, you know, we had a narrow miss, and we could have all died since there weren't enough lifeboats on the ship. It also took forever for them to get us help and get us towed, you know. We can always say that the ship would have sunk with us aboard if it had scraped the iceberg in a slightly different way.” I can't think. I sound so stupid and I'm struggling to hold back tears.
“But are they going to listen to a bunch of peasants?” Isabel asks. “Someone with money or power will need to say that.”
She's right. In 1912, my class was expected to do what it was told. There's little chance of that. “So what do we do?”
“First, we need to get out of here,” Simon says. “We might even be able to take Isabel's father with us, so he's you know, out of here and not bothering Monica anymore.”
“I like that idea,” Monica says. “But where will Daniel and I end up when he's gone? They're not going to let us stay in this house. He owns it.”
I hate that thought. This is Nancy's space, not his. “I don't know,” I say. “But it must be better than here.” Footsteps approach and stop. Isabel's father is waiting for us to leave. He's impatient. Maybe he wants to yell at Monica and Daniel to do more chores. Or worse.
Monica gets up from her chair and hugs me.
“I had no idea,” she says. “Julia, I'm going to miss you. I did miss you, even though I didn't know it. I miss Nancy. Now that I have these memories back, I just can't live like this.”
"We'll fix it,” I promise, even though I'm not sure I can keep it. “Whatever we have to do, we'll make sure Nancy is back here.”
Monica hugs me tighter. “You're not going to sacrifice yourself, are you? Don't do that. Promise me that you won't.”
“I won't." Is that a vow I'm going to break, too?
“We'd better go,” Simon says. He stands by Monica's door.
"I agree,” Isabel adds. I can hear the discomfort in her voice. She wants away from her father. “But what about?”
I know what she means. She doesn't want to say it out loud. I'm surprised Monica hasn't tried to kill her for this. Isabel brought her father into this mess, after all. Monica's life might not have been great without him, but it shouldn't have been this terrible.
“We'll worry about it later,” I say. “We can always come back once Frank is taken care of. Once we have him out of the way, we'll be free to go back and change whatever we need to.”
“I'll walk you to the door,” Monica says.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I'll be okay,” she says. “It's not like this man has ever, you know, hit us or anything. He's just a jerk. Yells at us constantly to get everything perfect.” She doesn't sound like she's being truthful about the hitting part and I bristle. I want to kill Isabel's father. I want to take one of those swords off the wall and slice him to pieces.
Monica opens her bedroom door and leads us out. The four of us pile into the hallway. Isabel starts to walk for the coat hook, but stops short.
In fact, we all do.
Isabel's father stands there. He's holding Arnelia's clip in his hands, cradling it like a lost treasure.
Isabel curses.
He's seen this device before, on the head of the girl who found him in the store. He must have. He knows it's important.
And he's already raising it to his head.
“Stop!” I yell, lunging for him.
It's too late. Isabel's father snaps it onto his head, touches it, and grimaces. He's receiving the same memories that I did, the same ones Simon and Isabel had. He's seeing exactly who he is and what his daughter now thinks of him. He's getting part of his identity back.
No wonder he didn't bother us. He recognized Isabel after all and knows she has the key to helping him remember his life. Maybe he's been waiting for her to come back all along. I know that feeling.
He faces us and takes the clip off his head. He's regaining it all. There's knowing look in his eyes. He glares at his daughter.
“Isabel,” he demands. He says something to her in German, something heated and stretched and full of pain. I don't need to know the language to know what he means. Why have you turned against me? I'm your father.
Isabel chokes down a sob and backs away.
He steps forward and reverts to English as if he's not sure she understood. “Why?”
“I...” She bursts into tears. “You are a monster!”
I stand in front of her. I've got to shield her from this nightmare.
“You.” He points right at me and Simon. “The two of you told her that I deserved to die. You turned her against me!”
“I didn't do anything.” I ball my fists. "You did that yourself.”
He stomps away from us, tossing the hair clip down on the floor. I run over and snatch it. We can't go without it. Monica presses against the wall and even Daniel has come out of his room—what used to be my room—to see what's going on.
“We need to go,” I say, stating the obvious.
I hear the cabinet opening with a bang. Monica gasps.
She grabs both my arms and eyes me, terrified. “Run,” she says. “That's where he keeps his guns.”
Chapter Ten
The four of us scramble out of the house.
I seize the butterfly and hold it against my chest. Its wings poke into me, but they don't cut. They can't. If they could, we wouldn't be in this mess right now.