by Kim Hornsby
“You fell into the drink,” Ten Tooth said.
“No,” I interrupted. “He was unconscious in a rowboat when two men threw him over.” I needed them to know Caspian had a price on his head. “See the gash on his head? They did that.”
“I told you not to go ashore,” Ten Tooth said. “Yer a fool.”
It was then that Caspian finally locked eyes with me. What I saw in his face, changed the game and made my mouth drop open.
He knew me. It was the mid 1800’s and this version of Caspian knew me. It was then I saw the ring. The lion ring Caspian gave me when I first met him. That night we’d made a deal to help each other and in an act of faith had exchanged something. Caspian gave me his gold ring with a lion’s emblem, and I’d taken off a cheap costume bracelet with a gold ghost charm. And now he wore the ring on his right hand. I looked to my hands to see I did not wear the ring, something I had not taken off since we’d met.
“I believe I owe you my life,” he said extending his hand. “I’m Captain Cortez and this is my ship.”
I didn’t know what to say. Why was he pretending that he didn’t know me when I was sure he did? If, for some weird and wonderful and mystical reason, I’d gone back in time to the night Caspian was supposed to die and prevented that from happening, I didn’t want to be blamed for changing the course of the whole world.
“I’m Rachel Primrose.”
Chapter 11
I woke dry and warm in my Cove House bed. At least I believed it was Cove House from the smell of woodsmoke and the lavender pillow spray I’d taken to using. That and the fact that the sounds in this bedroom were very different from Floatville, where a hum of passing boats and cars kept the room from achieving total silence.
I sat up in bed. Nothing hurt. Hodor’s weight was against my legs.
“Bryndle?” my mother said from the side of the bed. “You’re awake.” She wasn’t in the bed but was standing beside the bed.
“What the hell?” I turned towards my mother even though I couldn’t see a damn thing and hoped she saw the confusion on my face. “I had the strangest dream.” I was too dazed to say anything snarky to her. I struggled to remember my last conscious moment.
Rachel took my hand and sat on the side of the bed, forcing me to scoot over a bit. “I was kind of worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been asleep for a long time.”
At what point did the dream begin? I remembered going to the beach with Hodor and trying to summon something about Caspian’s death, then falling into a trance-like state. “I was at the beach. It was night.”
“You were there this afternoon,” Rachel interrupted.
“Just listen, Mother,” I said. “The water was dark. Someone threw Caspian over the side of a boat. I swam the bay and found him. I took him to the ship and saved his life.”
Eve’s footsteps sounded outside my open bedroom door and she entered the room.
“Is she still saying that she saved Caspian’s life?” Eve came over to my bedside. “Bryn what happened on the beach?”
“Where did you find me?” I felt my clothes to realize I was still wearing the sweater I had on when I went to the beach. My jeans were off as well as my shoes. My sweater wasn’t wet or even damp.
“You were asleep in your bed,” Rachel said.
“Where are my jeans and boots?”
“I don’t know,” Eve said moving away from the bed. “In here,” she called from the bathroom. “Wet.”
Did I walk back here with wet jeans and boots, remove them in the bathroom, then get in bed without remembering anything? I felt for Hodor, who was dry and warm on the bed.
Eve returned and sat on the other side of the bed from Rachel. “I helped you go down to the beach and was waiting to hear if you wanted help getting back up. You’d been there an hour, so first, I phoned you. When you didn’t answer, I went to the beach and you were gone. Hodor too. We searched the house and when Rachel noticed your door open, she found you in bed.”
“You were asleep, like you’d come back to the house exhausted,” Rachel added. “I kept checking on you.”
“I must’ve gotten myself back up those cliffside stairs,” I whispered. “I don’t remember that. What time is it?” I wondered how much time I’d lost.
“It’s just after seven.”
“P.m.?” I wasn’t sure if I’d slept the day and night away.
“Affirmative,” Eve answered.
“Five hours,” I whispered. “What time did you find me in here, Mother?”
“About four hours ago.” Rachel sounded concerned. “I didn’t want to wake you, but we were just getting ready to do it.”
Eve said. “You can be a heavy sleeper and I didn’t think it was entirely unusual. I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“I had a weird dream.” My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, my mouth was dry. “I need water,” I said.
Eve went to get a glass of water and when she returned, told me that I must’ve returned from the beach, built a fire, and gone to bed.
“I built a fire in this fireplace?” I nodded across the room. No wonder I smelled woodsmoke. “I’m not supposed to light one on my own and I know that.”
“Well, you did, and the house didn’t burn down,” Eve said. “What happened on the beach? You look like you do after an inhabitation.”
I didn’t know what happened in the last few hours but proceeded to tell them everything I did know, speaking as if I’d been in a trance. “The last thing I remember is Caspian telling his men he was taking me to shore. I was given brandy, I think. A sailor named Ten Tooth came with us.” I recalled the sloshing of the night’s waves against the side of the dinghy as Ten Tooth rowed us in, Caspian and I huddled together for warmth. “Caspian told Ten Tooth he knew me and the sailor looked like he didn’t approve. I don’t remember when we got to the beach.”
Eve had settled on the bed and was patting Hodor. “A premonition?”
“Yes, but I was in it.” My words even scared me.
“I don’t think she got in bed on her own,” Rachel added as if she was trying to piece together the strangeness of the afternoon. “When I came looking for her, the first thing I saw was a fire in the fireplace and then I looked over and thought I saw the shape of someone standing beside Bryndle’s bed. It wasn’t her there because when I turned on the light, she was in bed, asleep with no one else in the room except Hodor. He was on the bed with her.”
“Did he look like Caspian?” My mind was racing with all the strange possibilities of what might have occurred over the hours I couldn’t account for. “I know this sounds absolutely cray cray but what if Caspian rowed me into the beach from the ship and brought me upstairs?” I didn’t know where I was going with this. If saving Caspian’s life was a premonition, then how did I figure into this strange scenario? I wasn’t alive back then. And this house wouldn’t have been the same in those days. How did Caspian cross over from the 1800’s, to Cove House in 2019? I couldn’t piece together what had happened and my head hurt even more with the strange thoughts racing around inside my brain. “Is the fire out now?”
“Yes,” Eve said.
Caspian had a particular way of making a fire. I’d noticed his method on that first night we’d stayed up talking until morning. “Eve? Can you check the fire? Is it all burned down to ash or can you see if the wood looks like a log cabin formation?”
Eve moved to the other side of the room. “It’s not all ash.”
I swung my legs to the side of the bed, wanting to go look myself. “Is there anything to suggest the structure of the fire?” I held my breath in anticipation.
“It looks like it might have been four sides, four thick sticks high,” Eve said.
Caspian had brought me back from the beach and built a fire.
***
The night’s investigation was postponed. I was exhausted and troubled by my afternoon’s field trip to a ship in the 1850’s. Instead, I
asked Eve to bring me a dinner tray (I’d missed lunch and my tummy was growling like a grizzly) and spent the evening nursing a whopper of a headache and confused about what had happened today. I wanted to stay in my room for another reason. I hoped Caspian would reappear. As I tinkered away on my laptop, a thought came to me that had a freezing chill run up my spine.
“Remember me,” Caspian had said.
He’d said that ten days ago, the meaning not clear then. And if my dream at the hotel was a visit from Caspian, like I now believed, he might have said those words because he was not sure if he’d ever return to me. Tonight, they had new meaning.
If Caspian knew me before I came to Cove House as a child to do a reading, had it been because I’d somehow saved his life a century ago? Then, when Rachel and an eight-year-old child arrived, and Caspian heard my mother’s name, did he think Rachel was the one who saved his life back then? She looked a lot like I do now. This was all so confusing and made my already jumbled and painful head want to empty out and think mundane thoughts like what to have for breakfast.
Instead, I put on some soft music and closed my eyes. Eventually, Eve came to collect my dinner tray and I asked her to listen to my new and improved but highly strange theory. “I need to bounce ideas off you, if you have thirty minutes.”
“Sure,” she said with fake enthusiasm.
“I know you want to get back to Jimmy, but I need your good brain right now, Evie.”
“No secrets from you,” she said. “Let me just text him that I’ll be down within the hour.”
Eve was newly in love and I didn’t want to keep her from Jimmy but I did want someone to talk to and she had always been my listener about all this freaky ghost stuff. Rachel was the direct opposite of that, and I didn’t want her coming in to hear any of this just because I was desperate for a listener.
“Somehow, on the beach today, I went back in time and saved Caspian. That’s one theory,” I said. “Or, I remembered that I actually did save Caspian by going back in time at some other point in my life. But, for the second theory, I must’ve done it as a grown adult with knowledge of Caspian because I knew he was in the rowboat and knew what he looked like. I didn’t just enter the water not knowing who I was trying to save. When I grabbed his hair underwater, I knew it was Caspian’s long dark hair.”
“He looks exactly the same now as he did twenty years ago, right?”
“Right. But in this scenario, I’m an adult. I saw my grown hands when I was giving CPR. I didn’t learn CPR until high school so whatever this was today, it happened when I grew up. Or it happened today.” I was leaning towards the theory that I saved his life today by going back in time but if that were true, why had Caspian said, ‘remember me’ a week ago if I hadn’t saved his life yet and needed to remember just that?
“Are you hoping Caspian turns up tonight and you can ask him?”
“Understatement of the century,” I said. “I am desperate for him to come through to answer my questions. I’m going to stay up all night trying to summon him.”
“I like the version where you are on the beach this afternoon, trying to see what happened all those years ago and actually enter a premonition where you are able to save Caspian’s life.” Eve sounded so matter of fact, I wondered how she could talk about this weirdness with a normal voice. “Then, he rowed you into shore to deposit you back on dry land, but on the beach, you passed out as you entered 2019, and he became the modern-day Caspian ghost. He carried you up to the house which by now had turned into the Cove House of today with a coffee maker in the kitchen. Then, Caspian put you to bed.”
“But I was sure he knew me on the ship. Absolutely sure. He was shocked to see me standing on the deck of his ship.” I took a deep breath hoping for clarity that did not come. “So you’re saying that when we reached the beach, we broke through from the 1850’s to now?” Hodor sensed my unease and stood to move towards me. I had to get ready for big, wet, sloppy kisses by putting my hands up to shield my face. “S’OK, Hodor,” I said, gently pushing his muzzle away from my cheek. “Mommy’s going crazy and taking a ghost with her.”
Eve laughed out loud. “Ask Caspian when he returns what happened. I have a hunch he has secrets he hasn’t told you yet.”
I did too.
Eve’s theory was bizarre, that was clear, but I had another question that had been bugging me. “I’m not sure if I should have let him die or not. Even though I prevented Caspian from dying today, it had to have changed everything in the world after that. Also,” I said sheepishly, “I told him my name was Rachel Primrose. I’m not sure why that popped out of my mouth.” I hadn’t divulged that bit of information to Rachel earlier. “So, when Caspian met my mother twenty years ago, he must’ve thought it was the same person who’d saved his life. He must’ve been shocked.” My eyebrows had been furrowed for so long, they now hurt.
“Go on,” Eve said.
“Then, he realized that Rachel had no freaky-ass hocus-pocus abilities and figured out it was me who was the witch, per se. But I hadn’t grown up yet. So why hasn’t he told me that he remembers me from that night on the ship?”
“Maybe he can’t because he either doesn’t remember the incident, it hadn’t happened yet, or he’s not supposed to tell you.” Eve’s voice went way up at the end in a question.
“He said ‘remember me.’ Then, he disappeared, and I haven’t seen him since, except for a strange dream-like moment in the hotel. And, today, I believe he brought me back to this bed and built the fire.”
I wanted to make a flow chart, a drawing, or a spreadsheet of all this because it was hard to keep track of but then I wouldn’t be able to see it. “I remembered him. I remembered meeting him in 1850. So why isn’t he here?”
“Maybe once you remembered him, he was able to pass on.” Eve had just voiced my biggest fear.
Was Caspian gone? Had I banished him forever by doing what he’d asked me to do? I didn’t need to find his bones. Asking that of me was only to help me remember the ship, that night, the bay. “He’s gone,” I said. “Oh, my God, Eve! I did what he needed and now he’s gone.” Our final moments together and I was unconscious.
My heart broke and spilled all over the bed, in realizing what I’d done by going to the beach and trying to summon Caspian today.
Chapter 12
The next morning, I woke with a skull that felt like my burning brain was bursting to get out. I groaned out loud, then felt a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s just me, Bryndle,” my mother said from the other side of the bed. “I slept in here. You were crying.”
Then I remembered. I’d lost Caspian by remembering him. But that’s what he’d wanted of me.
Hot tears rushed to fill my sore eyes and I covered my mouth to keep a sob from escaping. I’d gone to sleep in a cloud of grief, mourning the loss of my sweet Caspian. The man who’d had such a profound effect on me in such a short time.
Not until last night had I realized how strong my feelings for him were. And now he was gone. I’d helped him cross over, which is what I do for spirits. Had I known it would feel like this with Caspian, I’d never have gone to the beach to try to find him.
I sat up in bed, determined to not cry again. Rachel hugged me from behind, like a real mother.
“Do you still think he’s gone for good?” she whispered against my shoulder.
“Yes. I know it.” Rachel patted my back and just as I expected her to tell me to pull up my big girl panties and move on, she said something quite out of character. “You two had something special.”
I didn’t want to hear that we made a nice-looking couple or that Caspian’s eyes followed me wherever I moved in the room. “Please, Mother.”
“You had an understanding, something implied between you.”
I wanted her to stop talking but I had questions about the first day we met Caspian with Belinda McMahon. “When you first saw Caspian, twenty years ago, did it seem like he recognized you?”
&nbs
p; “I’m not sure.”
“Think hard. Did he recognize you or maybe did he recognize your name?”
Rachel took a deep breath and let it out. “I do remember he looked shocked at my name because I asked him why the surprise. Did he know another Primrose? Our ancestors were from around here.”
I sat up and turned, even though I couldn’t see my mother. “You never told me that. Our Primrose ancestors were from Oregon?”
“Yes, more towards Portland, I believe. Grandma would know.” Rachel said this like it might not matter to anyone.
I made a mental note to ask my grandmother next time we talked. “I thought the Primroses were all from Eastern Washington.”
“Some were, but your grandmother’s mother, Sarah Primrose was from Portland.”
I continued. “If he recognized the name Primrose, or Rachel Primrose, what did Caspian say that day?”
“He said yes, he had known someone named Primrose a long time ago. Belinda gave him the strangest look.”
My mind tried to process this new information my mother doled out. Caspian knew it wasn’t my mother who saved him. I wonder if he suspected it was me, but I wasn’t old enough yet to look like the female doctor he’d row back to the beach. Or, if he believed the woman who saved him was a relation to my mother and me.
Nothing changed the fact that Caspian was gone and so was the ring he’d given me. Regardless of what happened when we rowed in and touched down on the 2019 beach, I did not have the ring on my finger and my wrist did not suddenly have a ghost bracelet around it. It was like we’d never exchanged that jewelry months ago to solidify our deal to help each other. Had the ring disappeared when my end of the deal was done? No one but me could even see it.
I was tempted to stay in bed all day and cry, but Hodor needed to go outside and I had to buck up for my dog’s sake. Rachel had flopped back down on the bed and I knew she’d shut her eyes to go back to sleep. She’d done her motherly duty with a hug and information about ancestors and must’ve been exhausted from all the effort.