She smiled warmly. “Oh, yes. Theirs is one of Cape Elizabeth’s most treasured marriages. They were together always. He absolutely worshipped the ground she walked on until the day he died. We wouldn’t want to turn that one upside down.”
“Good heavens, no,” Bailey replied, and I kicked her under the table for making fun of the curator’s old-fashioned romanticism.
I, on the other hand, was deeply moved and affected by her words—for it appeared that if, indeed, there had been an indiscretion between Mrs. Danforth and the captain, he had spent the rest of his life trying to win back Evangeline’s trust and love, and she had forgiven him in the end. It was obvious from the photographs and letters. She did love him.
I felt that love beating strongly in my own heart.
Yet I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Mr. Williams.
“What about a lighthouse keeper named Mr. Williams?” Bailey asked—which had been the next question on the tip of my tongue. “We visited the Portland Head Light yesterday, but I don’t recall seeing that name. There was a large photograph of a man named Harvey who manned the light around that time.”
“That’s right,” the curator said. “Mr. Harvey was the keeper, but Mr. Williams was his nephew and the assistant lighthouse keeper. I believe there’s a photograph of Mr. Williams in one of the books at the Head Light Museum,” the curator added, “but there’s no mention of him in the displays.”
All at once, my blood began to race and my belly churned with nervous knots, because surely this proved that I knew things I shouldn’t have known.
Suddenly, more precise details from those final moments came hurtling back at me. It was no longer a vague recollection. I remembered every word of my conversation with Mr. Williams in the keeper’s cottage—how he had asked me to run away with him to New York and promised he would take care of me—and then the heated argument that occurred between him and my husband.
I had dashed onto the rocks to get away from them, and as the wave approached, my life had flashed before my eyes. I saw things and knew things I couldn’t possibly have known.
Good Lord.
Suddenly, the room was spinning.
I pulled off the gloves, bent forward in my chair and stuck my head between my knees.
“Are you okay?” Bailey asked, leaping from her chair to circle around the table. She knelt beside me and placed her hand on my back.
“Yes,” I said. “I just felt a bit dizzy, that’s all. I think I need some protein.”
“You didn’t eat much breakfast,” she commented.
Forming my lips into an O to breathe steadily in and out, I sat up again. The curator had gone to fetch me a glass of water. She moved the documents aside and set it down on the table in front of me.
“Thank you.” I picked it up and took a sip, then we thanked the curator for all her help. I asked if it would be all right for me to return another time, before I flew home, because I was certain I would have more questions. She said yes and walked us to the door.
A short while later, Bailey and I got into our rental car. She took the keys from me and started the engine, while I closed my eyes and tipped my head back.
“What’s going on?” she asked, as we pulled away from the curb. “You look gray, like you’re going to be sick.”
“I was pregnant,” I said, lifting my head, “on the rocks that day at the lighthouse.”
“What?”
I stopped, paused a moment to gather my thoughts into something a little more sensible and coherent, and began again. “What I mean to say is that Evangeline was pregnant on the day she was swept off the rocks, but she didn’t know it. No one did.”
“But she wasn’t swept off the rocks,” Bailey reminded me.
“I know that,” I replied, “because I went back in time, knew what was about to happen, and I saved myself. Or rather, she saved herself and got off the rocks before the wave hit. But just before that, she saw a life flash before her eyes, but it wasn’t her life. It was mine.”
Bailey’s eyebrows pulled together in a bewildered frown. “How do you know all this? From the dream? Or was there something you read just now?”
I shook my head. “It was the dream, if that’s what it was. I don’t know. But she sensed it, I guess, because I was in her head. And just before the wave hit the rocks, she realized she was carrying a son.”
“But how would she know that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. That part is still a mystery to me.”
“Only that part?” Bailey asked as she turned toward Portland Head Light so we could seek out the photograph of Mr. Williams.
o0o
“What do you think all this means?” Bailey asked as we pulled out of the parking lot after our visit to the Head Light Museum.
The attendant had been kind enough to direct us to a book in the gift shop which contained the photograph of Mr. Williams, who exactly matched my memory and the description I’d given Bailey. In the photograph, he was a young man, muscular and rugged-looking, posing with his uncle outside the front door of the little stone dwelling, which had later been replaced by the larger Victorian home that now stood in the same location. His arms were folded at his chest. He was not smiling.
I asked if they knew what had become of him. Evidently, a few months after Evangeline’s third child was born, he resigned from his position as assistant lighthouse keeper and left Cape Elizabeth. Unfortunately, there was no record of him after that. At least not at the lighthouse museum.
I wondered if he had ever crossed paths with Evangeline again.
“I don’t know what it means,” I replied to Bailey’s question as a deep melancholy settled into my heart. “But I wonder if I’m reincarnated from her, and that’s why I was able to reach her through the sundial. Maybe she had traveled the world to find it because I was in her head that morning on the rocks, and she saw the future through my eyes and knew everything I knew. Most importantly, she knew to hurry and get off the rocks.” I gazed out the window at the passing landscape. “It was just like what happened to me during my cycling accident—there was a burst of adrenaline—except that I saw an alternate reality, and she saw a future one. If she was anything like me, she wouldn’t have been able to let it go, and probably spent her life trying to find answers and figure out what it all meant.
“Maybe she had other visions, too—later on—and eventually realized that I had reached her through the sundial.” I looked at Bailey in the driver’s seat. “Because, think about it—if she didn’t die that day, her husband wouldn’t have been obsessed with time travel, and he would never have put the sundial on their lawn. But without the sundial, she would have died that morning, because I wouldn’t have gone back to be inside her head and warn her.” I raised my finger. “That’s why she made sure they went together and found the sundial. She did that for me. So that I could find a way back to save her from dying that day, so that she could live a full life, have a chance to forgive her husband, and give birth to John, the son she was carrying.”
Bailey drove us back to the inn, turned off the car engine, and we both unbuckled our seat belts. “It’s very complicated,” she said, “and there are a lot of maybes in your theory.”
“I know. It’s not exactly something I can prove.”
We got out of the car, shut the doors and started walking toward the veranda steps.
I stopped and touched Bailey’s arm. “Wait a second. You know how some people say we keep surrounding ourselves with the same souls from one life to the next, and we learn things from each other. Maybe my son John came back as Logan to somehow connect me with Chris and Sylvie, which is what lured me back here—to save his mother, and allow him to be born.”
Bailey considered that for a moment, and nodded. “What did Evangeline see, exactly? In her vision, when the wave was coming toward her?”
We slowly climbed the wide staircase. “She saw most of my life, but the last few images were of the rental car we’ve b
een driving this week, and the sundial, and me at the helm of a white sailboat.”
“But you don’t sail.” Bailey said.
“Not yet,” I replied. “But maybe I will someday. I’ve always wanted to learn.”
Chapter Forty-one
Bailey and I went to our rooms to change into our bathing suits, with the intention of meeting on the cushioned lounge chairs on the sea deck to decide what—if anything—I should or could be doing about all this.
I arrived before she did, sat down and kicked off my flip flops. I raised my sunglasses to the top of my head to dig through my beach bag for sunscreen. My fingers closed around the colorful seashell I had found on the beach a few days ago, and again I marveled at its beauty before resuming my search for the sunscreen.
When I finally found it, I made an attempt to squirt some onto my palm, but it was empty.
“Typical.” Stretching out on the chair, I lowered my sunglasses, and for a while, I sat in silence, gazing out at the ocean, watching the swells.
A part of me still believed I might be losing my mind and none of this was real. But I had Bailey as a witness and she didn’t seem to think I was crazy. She hadn’t tried to drag me to the hospital or have me committed. Did she believe it too? Or was she just humoring me until she could get me home, get in touch with my mother and call in professionals to deal with the issue?
Just then, I thought I heard the call of a seagull, but then I recognized Bailey’s voice and swung my legs to the deck floor to turn around.
She was clumsily running down the sloping lawn with her hand on the top of her giant, wide-brimmed pink sunhat, her beach bag flopping around while she struggled to keep the strap on her shoulder. I couldn’t help but chuckle, until she started to wave her arm wildly. I realized she was desperate to tell me something.
She was out of breath when she arrived. “I need to go to the gym more,” she said as she dropped her beach bag onto the deck floor and flopped into the chair next to me.
“You look like you have something important to say. Did you bring sunscreen?”
“I did,” she replied. “It’s the spray-on stuff. And yes, I thought of something important as I was coming down the stairs.” She huffed and puffed for a few seconds. “At least I think it’s important. Maybe it has nothing to do with anything.”
“What is it?” I asked.
She sat up cross-legged on the cushion. “Do you remember when we had lunch with Sylvie and Chris, and she talked about the things that were the same when she came back to this reality, versus other things that were different?”
“Yes.”
“She mentioned the hurricane that hit on the same day here in Maine as it had in her so-called alternate reality. Remember that?”
I nodded.
“She also mentioned a sailboat that washed ashore on her lawn in that reality, but not this one, and that they had to track down the owners. I don’t know why I’m making this connection or why I feel like it’s relevant, but Evangeline did envision you on a sailboat.”
I sat for a moment, staring at Bailey. “You’re right. I wonder if Sylvie can remember anything else about it. Do you think she’d freak out if I called her again?”
“I think she’d be interested to know what you’ve been up to since the last time you spoke. Assuming she’s still married to Chris after you went back and changed the past.” Bailey raised an eyebrow as she reached into her bag for the sunscreen. “Fingers crossed you didn’t mess that up.”
o0o
“I’m so sorry to bother you again, Sylvie,” I said when she answered the phone, “and thank you for taking my call. But first, can I ask—are you still married to Chris Jenson?”
“Of course,” she said with an uneasy laugh. “Why would you ask that? Oh, wait. Did you—?”
“Yes,” I replied matter-of-factly. “Assuming you’re referring to the sundial?”
She was silent on the other end of the line. “Where are you now?” she asked.
“I’m still at the Fraser House Inn,” I replied, “but we fly out the day after tomorrow. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. I still can’t believe it and part of me thinks I dreamed the whole thing.”
She paused again. “I think we should meet in person. I have a couple more patients, then I’m done for the day. Can we meet for a drink at 5:00?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, giving Bailey a quick nod. “Where?”
“How about the same pub where we met last time? I’m sure you can understand why I can’t come there. I don’t want to go near the sundial ever again.”
“I get it,” I said. “Do you mind if I bring Bailey?”
“Not at all. I’ll bring Chris.”
We hung up and I sat back down on the lounge chair to bring Bailey up to speed.
o0o
The four of us met at The Old Stone Keep, ordered a pitcher of draft, and sat at one of the booths at the back. Sylvie listened to every detail of my story with fascination, nodding her head constantly, and I was relieved to feel as if I were not alone—that someone else had experienced many of the same sensations as well as the bafflement I was currently experiencing.
She confirmed that the dizzy spells, tingling fingertips, and pins and needles were all consistent with what she had experienced each time she woke up in a new reality. But she was amazed that I had gone back more than a century to another woman’s lifetime, not my own.
I told her and Chris as much as I could, then I brought the conversation back around to the reason I had called her in the first place—to ask about the sailboat she had mentioned the last time we met. The one that had been washed up onto her lawn.
“Yes,” she said, leaning back and fingering the handle of her beer mug. “That happened in the alternate reality where you had your cycling accident, after the hurricane hit. I don’t think I mentioned this before, but I was living at the Fraser House, which, in that reality, belonged to me, not Angela. It wasn’t a hotel. Anyway, everyone on the coast was advised to evacuate because of storm surges, so I spent the night in Portland with my grandmother. When I came home, I was surprised to find a sailboat on my back lawn. It was quite a sight, as you can imagine, tossed up on the grass like a bathtub toy.”
“Holy cow,” Bailey said.
“What’s interesting,” Sylvie continued, “was that it knocked over the sundial, which we had to pick up and set back into position. It was no easy task, mind you, because it’s very heavy. Sometimes I wonder if I might never had made it back to this life if it had been smashed to bits.” She shared a look with Chris.
I sat back, shaking my head in disbelief as I listened to her story. “So who owned the sailboat? Where did she come from?”
“There was no one onboard,” Sylvie explained, “so we had to call the yacht club and report it. I told them the name of the boat and they tracked down the owners, who sent a crew to remove her from my lawn and return her to the club.”
“Who owned her?” I asked a second time.
Sylvie let out a breath as she pinched the bridge of her nose, searching her memory for the details. “Let me see. It was an older couple from Chicago. They were very apologetic on the phone and told me they’d left Cape Elizabeth in a hurry to attend a funeral, and had left their boat moored outside their summer house at Kettle Cove. Obviously they had no idea there was a hurricane coming, or they would have taken her ashore.”
“I feel like I need to track them down,” I said. “Do you remember their names?”
Sylvie strained to remember. “Peterson, I think? And I might be able to remember the name of the boat.” She turned to Chris. “God, what was it?” She was quiet for a moment, then at last, she looked back at me. “It was Evangeline.”
My lips parted. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I’m positive.”
“Did you know that Captain Fraser’s wife’s name was Evangeline?”
“You’re kidding,” Chris said.
Sylvie�
�s eyebrows drew together with shock and disbelief. “No, I didn’t know that. Like I said, I only visited the inn that one time, and I don’t think Angela ever mentioned Mrs. Fraser’s first name. That’s unbelievable. It can’t be a coincidence.”
I took a sip of beer. “I’m starting to wonder if there are no such things as coincidences, because this keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“I wonder if the boat even exists in this reality,” Bailey put in. “Because like you said, so many things are completely different.”
“Like Logan,” I mentioned with regret and a feeling of sadness and longing I couldn’t seem to escape.
We were all quiet for a moment.
“So where do we go from here?” Bailey asked me. “Obviously, we need to find out if that boat exists, because there has to be some connection. It’s just too fluky.”
“The Peterson’s were members of the Portland Yacht Club,” Sylvie told us. “That’s a good place to start.”
Bailey and I finished our drinks and I placed some cash on the table. “I hope you guys don’t mind if we skip out. I want to drive over there now.”
“Of course not,” she replied as we slid out of the booth and reached for our sweaters and purses. “But please, will you let me know what you find out? Call me anytime. Here’s my personal cell number.” She jotted it down on a napkin and handed it to me.
I was pleased that she no longer considered me a threat to her marriage. She actually seemed eager to talk to me again.
“I will.” I folded the napkin and slid it into the outside pocket of my purse. “And I can’t thank you enough, Sylvie. Truly. Bye Chris.”
With that, Bailey and I walked out and googled directions to the Portland Yacht Club.
Chapter Forty-two
We arrived at the club fifteen minutes later, found a place to park, and discreetly wandered around the docks, making an effort to look as if we fit in, while searching the names on all the boats. There were none called Evangeline, so we decided to be bold and venture into the clubhouse to speak to the manager, who turned out to be a handsome middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair.
The Color of Forever Page 17