Across Eternity

by O'Roark, Elizabeth

  I’m going to be sick again. I drag in air, begging myself, begging the universe for help. Please. Not here. Not now. It comes up anyway, but the guards aren’t looking at me. Instead, they stare intently at a woman closer to them who is fading in and out—the same thing Henri insisted he saw me do.

  “Did you see that?” one asks. “Kick her and see if she’s awake. Just don’t kick her in the stomach.”

  The other grunts. “I’ll kick her wherever I please. There’s no hidden child nowhere to be found with this lot.”

  Hidden child.

  The words fall into my brain and doors there begin to open. Marie, the hidden child. I remember walking through Parc de la Turlure with her in 1918, wearing a dress so long it hit my ankles. We were looking for Marie’s mother, who disappeared there, just like my aunt did. I remember the pain of a needle plunging into my neck.

  The truth comes to me at last, so horrifying that I forget I am ill. I forget the guards and the women around me. Marie and I were taken captive, just like her mother and my aunt must have been.

  And Henri—he remains in 1938, waiting for me, assuming the worst.

  I’ve got to get back to him.

  3

  HENRI

  Sarah.

  She’s the first thing I think of each morning, the last when I go to sleep. Her space in the bed is cold, untouched. I press my face to her pillow but the scent is fading.

  Come back, I think. Please, please come back.

  But no matter how hard I wish for it, no matter how many times I beg God for a different outcome…the bed remains empty and the house remains silent. I no longer see how to get through the day.

  When she and Marie first left, I forced myself to go on, feigning optimism. I got Sarah’s forged passport, discussed honeymoons in Greece with a travel agent. Hours, then days, slipped by without her return, and that optimism became something else, something frenzied and irrational. I focused on ridiculous things, insisting all would be well. I bought her Christmas gifts, lavish items she’d have little use for on a farm. I worried our winters might be too cold for her and dug out enough of the basement to drive pipes beneath the slab—a new way of heating the floors some American architect has been perfecting.

  I worked, sun-up to sun-down, as if I could bring her home with the force of my efforts, but still there was nothing.

  Now all I can do is beg. My heart is outside of my body, beyond my control, and all I can do is beg the universe to return it to me.

  I eat bread and sausage for dinner, with heavy helpings of whiskey, saying a quiet prayer before I begin. Please God, bring her back to me. It can’t end like this. You have to let her return.

  After the third pour of whiskey my mind drifts. I think about the future. Living with Sarah in a flat in Paris, returning to the farm for holidays. I’ll take our sons out to the Bousonne Wood to get a Christmas tree. Will our daughters time travel? Will they shimmer, like she does?

  My eyes open and I’m alone in the empty house. I’d laugh at my foolishness if I were capable of it. Instead I fill my glass and drink fast, laying my head on the table when it’s empty. They’ve been gone over a month now. How will I stand it if they don’t return? Why didn’t I stop them?

  A memory suddenly pierces the fog in my head. Early in the fall, Sarah was ill, feverishly insisting she and Marie were trapped, telling me the stew was drugged. Is it possible she was traveling to me from 1918 then?

  I sit up, jaw open, wondering why I’m only remembering it now.

  “No,” I say aloud, sick at the thought. “No. It was just a fever.”

  But only the silence of the house whispers back.

  4

  SARAH

  It takes four days. Four days of cold sweats and vomiting until I finally wake one morning feeling well again, or at least more like myself. We sit at the long table and I, like the others, spoon gruel into my mouth, necessary because the guards are watching and that noise is unbearable without it. I switch my bowl with that of the woman beside me as soon as I can and try to think.

  I’ve tried to convey what’s happening to Henri, hoping he can warn us, but nothing seems to work. I don’t seem able to control what I tell him, and I doubt it would matter if I could. Marie wouldn’t listen. Marie would still come here and need someone to save her.

  I wish she would wake up so we could talk all this over. She is twitchier now that they are decreasing the drug, though she still won’t respond when I whisper her name. And I’m not sure she should wake up. They are looking for the hidden child. Maybe it’s best that she remains too drugged to give herself up until I figure out how we can escape...if I figure out how to escape.

  We won’t be able to time travel out of here—the noise keeps us all at half-strength and makes that kind of focus impossible—and walking out doesn’t look like an option either. I’ve only seen one door, and it’s both guarded and padlocked. Though the windows are blacked out, I can see the shadow of bars on the other side, which rules out jumping.

  What would Henri do in my position, surrounded by armed guards? He’d realize fighting back, outmanned like this, would be suicide, so he’d look for another way. He’d survey the information he had and create a new plan.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and consider the only thing I know so far: they hope one of us carries the hidden child of the prophecy. But they must realize by now that few, if any of us, are pregnant, so why haven’t they killed us yet? And they will have to kill us once they have what they want—you can’t set someone free if you’ve tortured her and she has the ability to go back in time to punish you for it.

  So, they want something more. What is it?

  I watch as a guard pulls a woman from her seat by her hair. They clearly aren’t trying to win us to their side, which means that whatever it is they want won’t require our cooperation. It’s something they plan to take.

  * * *

  That night, after the lights are out and the guard sleeps soundly in the chair at the end of the room, I allow myself to go, in my mind, to Henri. I want to remember how things were, remember all the things I need to get home to.

  He’s coming in after the hired help are gone for the day, exhausted, in need of a shave. The harvest is nearly done, thank God. I miss my fiancé. I want him to myself once more.

  I smile. “Go bathe,” I tell him. “I’ve made us dinner, and Marie didn’t even help. Which means it may be inedible, but that’s beside the point.”

  He pulls me to him, his hands gentle on my face. “You should be resting.” His mouth closes on mine. A sweet, chaste kiss. Not the kind I am hoping for. I feel the edge in him, the restraint, but I’ve never wanted restraint from him, and I especially don’t want it now, when we’ve had so little time alone.

  “Rest?” I ask. “Why on earth would I rest? You’re the one who’s been working night and day.”

  He pushes my hair back from my face. “You were so ill, Sarah. Your fever just broke this morning.” His lips press to my forehead. “Dieu. I’ve never been so terrified.”

  I still. What is he talking about? Yesterday I helped him in the fields, and then we sat on the small porch with a bottle of wine, bickering in that way we do—more foreplay than argument.

  “Fever?” I ask. “As I recall, last night you were offering me your ill-informed opinions about Matisse and I was soundly proving you wrong.”

  He steps back, holding a hand to my forehead. “No, love. We’ve never discussed Matisse. You’ve been ill, remember? For days and days. Out of your mind. Telling us someone was drugging you and Marie.” He shakes his head. “I wonder if you’re still ill.”

  I stare at him. I remember the past few days. I remember our bath, I remember the day we swam in the lake together, and the way he pulled me into a corner of the barn to kiss me as the hired hands drove away. I remember all of it and yet he does not.

  My eyes open. Marie lies beside me, staring at the wall without a glimmer of recognition. And slowly I realize what
is happening during these times I go back to visit Henri.

  I’m not merely remembering what existed. I’m rewriting it.

  Our amazing summer together, our fall. I’m papering over every perfect memory, and soon, he won’t remember any of those days as they actually were. He’ll instead recall this drugged version of me, spouting nonsense about things he’s sure haven’t happened.

  And perhaps that’s a version he won’t wait for after all.

  * * *

  I begin, the next day, to listen. Every time the guards walk past, I am cataloguing their words and their worries and their petty resentments, grabbing hold of anything that might one day prove useful, that might help me see a pattern.

  They each take shifts digging a hole down the hallway. I’ve heard the ringing of pickaxes since I regained consciousness, but no one seems to mention what it’s for. They’re too focused on bickering about whose day it is to dig.

  In the common room I no longer hide in the far corner but instead sit nearest the guards’ desk, the most dangerous point in the room. I’m bumped, pushed from my chair, hit in the head. The guards seem to resent us for their roles here, as if they’re the victims. They take a sick pleasure from the casual harm they wreak, and inside me I discover this small seed of rage in my chest, something that laid dormant until now. Every day it seems to grow a little more. Every day I become a little more like them: I’d take a sick pleasure in harming them if I could too.

  Especially Gustave.

  He only strikes me occasionally, and sometimes yanks my hair as he passes, but it’s more in the way of a mean boy with a crush—I can live with that. But the other times, when he pushes his meaty fingers through my hair, lets them trail over my hip or chest as I pass...those times leave me feeling a type of rage that scares me.

  Today he slides his hand inside my neckline to grab my breast. I force myself not to react, but fury seems to radiate out from that place of anger until I can feel it in every limb, in each finger and toe.

  “You’d better not let him see you do that,” warns the other guard.

  He removes his hand, and I feel sick with relief. “Monsieur Coron?” asks Gustave. “He won’t be here until the end of the week.”

  “And when he hears that only one of them has woken, he’ll be in a foul mood, so don’t make it worse, eh?”

  “Do you suppose once he’s made his choice, he’ll let us make ours?” Gustave asks, lifting my hem with his foot. He laughs. “Unlike him, I require nothing special of the women who bear my children other than the ability to lie still.”

  All the breath is pushed from my chest. This is why no one is trying to win us over. Monsieur Coron, or whoever he’s working for, is not interested in gaining powerful allies. He’s interested in creating them—infants he can shape and mold to his liking. It explains why we are all young. I’ve got no doubt about what happened to the older women who arrived, like Marie’s mother. I’ve got no doubt about what they’ll do with us too, eventually.

  I’ve got to get us out of here. Henri, I beg silently, help me. Show me how to escape. My eyes open and I’m still in the common room, still surrounded by women with dead eyes. Still completely on my own.

  5

  SARAH

  That evening, Marie’s fingers begin to jerk. When she wakes the next day, for only a moment, there is a startled awareness in her eyes. It fades away to nothing before I can capture it. She’s waking, and whether that’s a good thing or bad, it’s vital that it happens without the guards noticing, and that it happens before this Monsieur Coron, whoever he is, arrives.

  That night at dinner, when the guards aren’t looking, I knock the spoon out of Marie’s hand. It falls to the floor, and she blinks before lowering her face to the bowl, to lap up its contents like a cat. “No, Marie,” I whisper, pushing a roll in front of her. “Eat this.”

  She knocks it away and the sound, as it falls to the floor, attracts the notice of a guard.

  When he moves past us, I try again. “Marie, it’s Amelie,” I whisper. “We’re trapped in 1918. Remember? You need to wake up. You have to stop eating.”

  There is still no response. I glance at the guards who stand at the end of the table and then I reach for her tray.

  A hand belonging to the woman beside her comes down to stop its movement.

  “Are you insane?” she hisses. “Stop before the guards notice you.”

  I freeze, more startled than scared. It’s been so long since I’ve heard a female voice that I’d almost forgotten it was possible. I allow myself a quick glance at the owner of that hand and voice and find the woman I saw the week before—the one who flickers in and out, the way I do. And she is absolutely clear-eyed. My heart begins to beat a little faster at the idea that I’m not in this alone. Between the two of us, surely, we can come up with a plan.

  My mouth opens and she shakes her head. “Not here.”

  Only the dormitory offers a chance of being left alone long enough to talk, and it’s late when she appears beside my bed. “My name is Katrin,” she says. She’s speaking French but her accent is strong. Swedish, perhaps. “We don’t have long, but you must be careful. They’re looking for descendants of the first families—so you can’t let them know you’re awake.”

  “I don’t plan to,” I reply, “but I’m not from one of the first families so maybe it won’t matter.”

  Her brow furrows. “Of course you are. How else do you think you woke early?”

  I shrug. “I was sort of in two places at the same time, after we arrived. I think maybe the drug was diluted for me.”

  She stills. “Two places at once?” she whispers. She leans closer, staring at my face as if she’s trying to read something there. “But that’s my gift.”

  Not much of a gift, I think, as she continues.

  “You aren’t from 1918.” Her eyes are wide now, astonished. “If you have my gift, you must be my descendant. A daughter or granddaughter, perhaps.”

  I’m not sure how she’s leapt to what seems, in my estimation, a fantastic conclusion. “Just because we can both sort of be in two places at once doesn’t mean we’re related. It’s just an…aberration.”

  “It’s the gift of all daughters of Adelaide,” she says, brow furrowed. “And our gifts aren’t meant to be special on their own…we are like puzzle pieces. We only make sense in combination. But surely you know this.”

  I shake my head. Everything I’ve learned about time travel came from the blank-faced girl in the cot next to mine. “My mother didn’t time travel. I really don’t know much about it. But I’m definitely not from a first family,” I insist. “And I have no idea who Adelaide is.”

  She stares at me as if I might be making a joke and seems to finally conclude that I’m not.

  “Adelaide was one of the four girls who left the island,” she explains. “The start of the first families—four families, four gifts. And your gift could only come from one source. Me.”

  She’s gripping my hand as if this is all very important, but everything she’s saying is impossible. Yes, if this is her time, she could conceivably be my grandmother or great-grandmother…except I know my grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, or at least know of them. “I can trace my family back on both sides to the Civil War.”

  “What children know of their history is what their parents choose to tell them, and for you to exist must mean that I will have a child.”

  I want her to be wrong, and yet I feel wheels in my head turning—things I’ve wondered about my entire life, like the fact that I look somewhat like my mother, but nothing like my father. And while my father was not cruel, he was also never involved, and once he left, I never heard from him again. He continued to call my brother Steven, though, and paid Steven’s tuition. I always assumed it was because he blamed me for Kit’s death, and perhaps that was true, but maybe it was more than that: maybe it was because he knew, or realized somewhere along the line, that I was not his daughter.

  But if Ka
trin’s right, and she doesn’t escape, it means the child she’ll give birth to will be…Coron’s.

  My stomach tightens. “Maybe someone else is out there with your gift and you don’t know it.”

  She shakes her head. “There’s no other explanation, though we both wish it were true. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the child I will have is Coron’s. But you’re wrong. I’m going to escape, so it can’t be his.”

  “Escape how?”

  “The infirmary is our only option. Each Sunday night they leave to take the corpses out. It’s the only time the door is unlocked, aside from when the cook goes out to shop. If we convince them we’re dead, we can time travel from the outside.”

  My mouth opens to voice a thousand objections: we would not be stiff and cold like corpses, first of all. And what if we get outside and we’re too drugged to jump? Or they do something to us before they leave to ensure we can’t jump?

  She speaks before I can suggest a single one.

  “If the plan fails in any way,” she says, “it means we’ll probably be buried alive.”

  “So, it’s the nuclear option.”

  “Nuclear?” she asks. “I don’t know this word.”

  I wave it away. “I’m just saying…we only do it if all else fails.”

  “Unless you’re able to jump back and warn yourself, all else has already failed,” she says. “Have you tried? I have, but it hasn’t worked.”

  “I can’t,” I reply. “I don’t seem able to get the words out, and I doubt it would do any good if I could. I came with my friend and I know she won’t listen no matter how hard I warn her.” There is no warning that could keep Marie from making the journey she did. And the fact that she is here at all is my fault. I’m the one who told her where her mother went, when Henri begged me not to. How might their lives have gone if I hadn’t listened to my sister, if I hadn’t ever ventured back to 1938 in the first place?