by Taylor Hobbs
“Oh no, we would never afford to have the family sit for a portrait painting,” Afonso said.
“No, not a painting.” Remy looked to Bieito for support. Hopefully it was just a generational miscommunication, but she was beginning to feel ridiculous having to explain to Bieito’s father what a photograph was. Were they making fun of her? Was it a joke?
“Bieito, what kind of phone do you have? I don’t have mine on me.” Instead of reaching into his pocket, Bieito looked just as confused as his father.
“Phone?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Remy said. “I know we’re isolated back here, but this has to be a prank.”
Bieito set his hands on Remy’s shoulders. “Take deep breaths, Remy. It is our fault we do not understand your words, but don’t worry, we will figure it out together.”
But Remy was not in the mood to be placated anymore. “Photos! Phone!” she said, like she was speaking to a toddler. Then she froze. Hypnotized, she turned around to look back at the village. No cars. No phones. Horses. Costumes, but not costumes? Losing track of time. Populated village. My village but not. What is this?
There were things in life that Remy accepted that most people would not be willing to wrap their heads around. She believed her wishes could actually make stuff happen, and that there was always a cost. She believed herself to be cursed. She was willing to believe there were some odd things about her village that she would need to eventually sort out. She believed that by some miracle, she could occasionally count on her foreign language skills to kick in when necessary.
What she was not prepared to deal with, however, was Bieito’s answer to her next question. “Bieito, what year is it?”
“What year is it?” he repeated. “Eighteen forty-six.”
Chapter Ten
Remy burst out laughing. Of course it was eighteen forty-six. What else would make sense? It made more sense than a theme wedding gone too far. Her giggles dissolved into full-blown hyperventilation. Bieito, not caring who saw, gathered Remy up in his arms and clutched her to him.
From a very faraway place, Remy heard Bieito order his father to fetch Remy something cool to drink. Then, he resumed murmuring sweet Spanish endearments into her ear, begging her to breathe and to tell him what was wrong.
Remy gasped for air, both her mind and body betraying her at the same time. She couldn’t get control of her lungs or the thoughts careening around as her brain tried to make sense of it all. As with Bieito’s cottage, when Remy tried too hard to analyze the village and any confusing events, her thoughts refused to connect. It was like trying to read Shakespeare while drunk. No matter how many times she went over the facts in her head, they slipped through the cracks like sand. It was futile to try and hold onto any sort of logic.
But she was determined to figure it out this time. And by focusing totally on her mental state, she released her physical body completely and let herself fall limp against Bieito, eyes unfocused. With her attention less divided, this strategy seemed to work, and allowed her to put all of her energy into figuring out what was happening to her.
I’ve apparently gone back in time. This is also not the first time. Either that, or I’ve completely lost my mind, this is a psychotic break, and none of these people are here. It is all just a figment of my imagination.
Remy decided she would much rather it be the first choice than the second, even as impossible as time travel might be.
Oh God, I might be stuck here forever. I haven’t had any control over when I come and go here, past and present. It just always sort of…happens. When I’m upset or feeling strongly about something. Does that influence on how and when I get back here? Have I ever done this before, somewhere else?
Plenty of weird things had happened to Remy, but she was firm in her belief that she had never time traveled before. What was the catalyst?
The village. It only happens when I’m alone in my village. Well, that didn’t bode well for her “it’s not a psychotic break” theory.
But why here, and now? Why this time? The village had been around for hundreds of years, yet brought Remy here to this particular snapshot in time. What was so important about these wonderful people? Her experiences had only gotten more powerful and sustained the longer she resided in her new property. What began as a chance meeting with Bieito on the beach for an hour had lengthened each time Remy had been “brought back.” Her fears and doubts had been soothed by time, wine, and company as the past drew her away from her everyday concerns. The longer she was back in the past, the less important her life in the present seemed. It was harder to remember small details about her normal life while she experienced the village in full glory.
Now that she was more attuned to her strange reality, Remy became aware of an underlying pull on her emotions. It was the same yearning that she ached to fulfill when she threw caution to the wind and bought the village. Something had been manipulating her. The choices Remy had been making since coming to Ortigueira had not been entirely her own.
A shiver went up her spine, and Remy’s thoughts were cut off by a blinding migraine that made her cry out in pain. White lights flashed behind her eyelids and she couldn’t feel her limbs anymore. Cool darkness washed over and released her from agony.
****
When Remy came to, she was buckled in to the front seat of a car. I don’t own a car. She blinked and squinted through the windshield, trying to discern where she was parked. The clock on the dashboard glowed, informing her that it was close to midnight.
I’m in the middle of the square. At the village. This is Anita’s rental car. Details started to come back to her, but they didn’t explain why she would have no memory of driving the car into her home. I thought I parked at the top of the drive?
Remy unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door, a musical dinging reminding her to remove the keys as well before getting out of the vehicle.
Why am I here? she wondered, looking around. It felt wrong. The square looked wrong. What was missing? Lights. There should be lights. And food. And a gazebo over here…
Remy gasped as it all came pouring back. The wedding was just here. It should still be here. The memories of Bieito were sharp, clearer than her previous encounters with him. The ghost of his embrace still wrapped around her arms, protecting her against the night’s chill. One minute she had been with him, and the next she was here. He had told her that it was eighteen forty-six. I went back in time.
But there had been something else, something important that she had been thinking about before the fairy tale night had been ripped away from her. It had been so hard to realize, she remembered that much. It was an epiphany within a dream, one she couldn’t remember when she woke up.
However, she felt grounded in the certainty that whatever she had experienced, it was real. Bieito was real, he just wasn’t here. Well, he was, in a sense, but not in this time. They were connected through the village. The village had brought them together.
A sense of deep loss and emptiness hit her, but she couldn’t determine if it was coming from within her or some external force. A tear rolled down her cheek, and it was accompanied by a scattering of raindrops falling from the sky. The village was crying with her.
Do you see? it seemed to say to her. Do you see how lonely it is?
Instead of relief at not being stuck in the past, Remy only thought, I need to go back. How do I get back?
Remy was being torn in two. Her current plans of an art school and trying to resurrect her career just didn’t seem as important any longer. The present only held a bitter ex-husband, an angry ex-best friend, an embarrassing career slump, and hemorrhaging finances. The only thing she loved about her current situation was the village.
Maybe the past is the real future for me. Maybe a simple, happy life was all that she needed. Her escape. The village was either her Miracle of Santiago, or her undoing, unraveling her mental state beyond repair.
Exhaustion dropped over her, and she needed to s
leep before doing any more theorizing. Without thinking twice, Remy turned and headed for the cottage. Home. Dark red skirts swirled around her ankles, the soft swishing the only sound that accompanied Remy as she made her way down the empty path. Wherever she had been pulled from—eighteen forty-six or some parallel universe of it—would still be celebrating the wedding in full swing.
Experimentally, Remy kicked up her feet just like she had when dancing with Bieito and danced her way to the cabin door. She pulled the handle, and a note on the door caught her eye. For a wild moment, she thought maybe Bieito had found a way to reach her. However, she felt more than foolish as she read the note, followed by a deeper sense of guilt.
Remy,
I have tried calling you many times over the last few days. Maggie informed me that you left her apartment three days ago and she has not heard from you since, either. We do not know what has happened to you. The police have been unable to find your rental car, but your friend Anita told us not to file a missing person’s report yet. She said you have a tendency to disappear, and that we should wait for you to contact us when you are ready. But please, please call me or Maggie when you have returned.
Your friend,
Sebastian
Remy hated to think she had put Sebastian or Maggie through any sort of ordeal. She reread the note and wondered how she could excuse her behavior. It had been selfish of her to make them worry…Wait, did he say a few days? How was that even possible? Remy had woken up at Maggie’s apartment that morning and driven back from Madrid to Ortigueira. Though it was the middle of the night, Remy was certain she had only been gone in the “other” time for a few hours.
She recalled how Anita yelled at her for disappearing for an extra day. She assumed she had lost time because of the alcohol, but there was no way she had disappeared for three days. Each time she went back to the “other” village, she lost crucial periods in her real life. As her trips got longer and the more time she spent away from the present, it was progressively more difficult for her to adjust.
There is always a cost, Remy reminded herself. It worked that way with wishes, why not with time travel? Am I aging faster here now? There were so many technical questions running through her head she needed a sci-fi geek to explain things to her. I need to move away from the ‘how’ and focus on the ‘why’.
But, before she could even begin to tackle that, she needed to call Sebastian and tell him that she was alive. Shit, I don’t have my purse or my phone, Remy realized. Everything was up in the car, which seemed miles away at the moment. I’ll call him in the morning. It’s too late now anyway, Remy thought, as she clutched Sebastian’s note and walked inside. At least my sleeping bag is still here.
As her eyes drifted closed, she suddenly remembered the drawing plans she had made with Maggie were still in the rental car, too, and it was almost enough to motivate her to get up. All of her dreams for the village, laid out on paper. The surrounding bare walls called to her to fix them and promised new life inside the cottage. She still had a lot of work to do in the present, and maybe she wasn’t quite ready to give it all up to live in the past just yet.
Please let me wake up in my own time, she thought, on top of her sleeping bag, still fully clothed. I need to sort out my mess on this end. I owe it to my friends, and I can’t afford to lose any more time.
If Jack and Anita still weren’t speaking to her, then that was probably for the best. She wouldn’t have to explain herself or her random disappearances, which was a relief. Instead, Remy just had to come up with a way to apologize to Sebastian and Maggie. It was very disconcerting being yanked back and forth, but at least she knew for certain that the present was real. She hoped.
Lying there, she missed Bieito with a starving longing.
She couldn’t control or even anticipate what was happening in the past, or if she would ever find her way back there.
Could I have both? If Remy could figure out a way to control her travel, could she have everything she ever wanted? The village and the career in the present, but the love and acceptance she found in the past? Was it even possible?
She had never been able to reconcile her family dreams with her career aspirations, but what if it was because the two were never meant to coexist in the same time? The strangeness of the village, its removal from the laws of time and space, might just be the very miracle that she was waiting for from the Camino de Santiago.
Remy’s heart lurched in her chest as it filled with hope, before the negative side weighed in. What if I can’t control it? That would be even worse. Her life would be split in two, at the whim of forces outside of her control. She would be forced to live a half-life, unable to be secure in either of her realities.
The only factor she could be sure of was that the village had to remain the central part of this equation. Her fate and her life were inextricably tied to it now. The village would never be abandoned again.
Mind spinning with so many scenarios, Remy’s thoughts kept circling back around to Bieito. If I dream about him, will that take me back? The temptation to test it out was overwhelming, but the persistent urge to do the right thing and talk to Sebastian and Maggie first was still on Remy’s mind. If it worked, great, then she could go back to Bieito, but there were no guarantees when she might make it back into her own time again.
I can’t sleep yet. I can’t risk it. Not until I can control these time hops. Shaking off her fatigue, Remy got up and left the cottage.
I need something more to ground me to the present, she realized. Crumbling buildings and far-off dreams of reconstruction were not enough, the pull to be back with Bieito was too strong. If there was nothing for her to pull her back to the present, how would she go back and forth?
Fire and determination raced through her veins as she paced the streets of her village, seeing it both as it was and how it should be. The urgent need to do something great and impact the village at that very moment overpowered her, and a familiar itching started behind her eyes.
Remy stopped in her tracks, letting her eyes glaze over as she waited for the flash of inspiration that was about to pop into her mind. It was almost like preparing to sneeze. Think about it too hard, and the urge goes away, but the itching doesn’t stop. A very unsatisfactory result. The best thing to do was to wait quietly for the inspiration to take over on its own.
Don’t over think it. It had been so long—forever, it felt like—since Remy had felt the itch. Her sketch in the sand with Bieito was child’s play compared to the drowning visions that used to inspire her artwork back in New York. The tickle that teased her mind was so close to surfacing, and Remy could already tell that the picture would be the accumulation of patiently waiting for months for her skill to come back.
A minute passed, and then two, as Remy paced the dirt path outside the cottage. When her feet did an abrupt ninety-degree turn and started walking toward the main house, she didn’t fight it. Her arms swung free of their own accord, feet almost dancing as they had with Bieito just hours ago—or was it days? Remy’s mind floated free from her body as she released the iron grip of control.
Remy had missed this feeling with a painful ache. A deep exhaustion from trying to be rigidly in control all the time melted off her shoulders and she realized how much it affected her day to day happiness. She hadn’t been truly happy since she had painted her last collection. Sure, there were fleeting moments here and there, in the village and with Bieito and her friends, but there was something singular and special about the moments she spent with a brush in her hand, the real world closed off by canvas as she created her own.
Light as a feather, Remy climbed the front porch stairs to the main house and found the tool she was looking for—a can of black spray paint, used weeks ago to mark the other possibly dangerous areas inside.
Remy always used color, no matter how dark the theme of her paintings. She also only ever used acrylic paints that she mixed herself. The can in her hand, cold and industrial, was an artis
tic medium she had never considered before.
Its weight in her hand felt right, filled with the color of shadows, paint that appeared and disappeared in the blink of an eye, activated by the lightest touch of a finger. The tool of degenerates and rebels, gang bangers marking territory, or sending a message. However, spray paint had also launched the enigma that was Banksy, forcing people to see his perspective of the world in a way that everyone could connect with.
No, spray paint was not Remy’s typical choice for a painting, but neither was the side of a building. In a bold jump from canvas to one hundred-year-old walls, Remy decided to make her mark. The piece would have to be big and meaningful enough in order to pull her back here, a symbol of past and present merged. A metaphorical gateway.
She considered all of the possible walls for her mural and settled on the wall at the back of the main house. The one outside, underneath the window where she saw Bieito standing on the street before the wedding. There were some crumbling parts, but as a whole, the main part of the structure was smooth and intact.
As she raised her hand to start, Remy hesitated. It was one thing to be able to return to her art, it was quite another to return in such a large and new way. But the longer she stared at her life-size canvas, the greater the itching behind her eyes became, until her eyes watered in protest. The image was there, in her brain, and she just needed to let go of self-doubt and press her finger down.
The soft shhhhh of the can in the silent night made her fumble it in surprise. It was hard to see the black paint in the dark, but Remy could see the results clearly in her mind. She was painting blind, but her fingers and hand knew what to do, so she let herself go.
With bold strokes, she passed over large swaths of the wall, never letting go of the picture she held in her mind. She was painting the shadows, learning to create figures and emotions using the empty space that emerged from them. It was backward to what she usually did. She was looking to reveal the life using the shadows, not using the colors as a way to force life into her work.