Across Eternity

by O'Roark, Elizabeth

  I hear them firing on the lock, and then screams as the fire catches them. Despite Iris’s spark, I still can’t time travel, not with that shrieking overhead. There’s only one solution left: to go up through the entrance in the pantry to the second floor. If there’s anything up there at all.

  I crawl along the floor to the kitchen, desperately trying to focus on that one goal. The smoke fills my brain and my lungs; my head grows light.

  Where was I going again? To Henri?

  Pantry, whispers some urgent voice.

  I finally reach the door. It’s locked.

  I lie down and close my eyes. Sarah, Henri asks, are you alright?

  He’s lying beside me, in our bed. I press my hands to my face, wishing I could explain, though it would make no sense to him. The door is locked, my head screams, and I don’t know how to get out.

  But suddenly I know what he’d tell me, if I could reach him. He’d ask me where the keys are. And I have all of Iris’s keys in my pocket.

  My eyes open. The room is black with smoke but I feel for the smallest of the keys and then my hands slide up the door until I find the lock. After three tries, just as I feel the heat of the fire approaching and I’m about to give up, it slides in and the handle turns. I crawl inside and reach for the ladder.

  Henri speaks to me, saying something urgent. I force my hands to grip the wooden rungs, one and then the next, one and then the next. The fire is inside the kitchen now, and licks at the ladder beneath me. The food on the shelves bursts into flame, sending fiery ash flying into my hair and face, singeing my dress. I throw myself onto the second floor just as the hem catches fire and roll to put it out. Flames are already climbing through the opening as I jump to my feet and look frantically for a way to escape.

  There is nowhere to go. No door. No one to beg for help.

  But there’s a window.

  I take a deep breath. I don’t know if this is going to work. But I have no more options and my aunt’s spark is singing inside me, making me feel as if I could fly if I put my mind to it.

  I run at the window, hard as I can, but in my mind I’m already thinking of Henri, of home. I picture the orchard, his lavish promises to buy me Versailles. I go to the night we planned for our honeymoon, and I think of waking beside him in the morning, all his miles of smooth skin, his contented murmur of pleasure at finding me there. The glass shatters and I’m in the air, plummeting toward the sidewalk. I can feel my body going light, but not fast enough.

  And then I hit the ground.

  13

  SARAH

  Heaven is a noisy place.

  There is constant chatter. There are beeping machines and shouting and always the sound of people talking over my head, their voices urgent and unhappy. Anorexic, they say. Attempted suicide.

  I’m feverish, sweaty and then shivering. I can’t reply, can’t even open my eyes. I know I need to fight to return to Henri, but I’m too empty. I’m below water, and there’s not enough energy inside me to climb to the surface. I fight it a little less each day. And then, at last, it stops. I’m empty, silent, my body slowly sinking toward the bottom of the ocean. And it’s a relief to land there at last.

  * * *

  My time under water seems to last forever. I wonder if this is the afterlife. I’ve lived through worse, but it’s all just empty.

  And then suddenly there is motion again, and light. I hear sounds, feel cool air on my skin, the pressure of a hand on mine. My eyes open, and I find myself in a sunlit yellow room that seems familiar. The woman sitting next to my bed seems familiar as well. My brain, still below the surface of the water a bit, tries to recall how I know her.

  Cecelia. It comes at last. The woman who saved me the last time I was in 1989. How am I still in Paris with her? Did I dream it all…leaving here, going to Henri?

  My mouth opens. My lips are dry, my tongue heavy. “What happened to me?” I ask. “Why am I here?”

  Her hand wraps around mine. “You jumped out of a window,” she says. She looks over her shoulder before leaning closer to whisper. “In 1918. Do you remember it?”

  I think about the fall from the window. My body going light, and the horrible, all-encompassing pain as I hit the sidewalk. I must have been jerked back to my own time, rather than Henri’s.

  “I don’t understand how I survived,” I whisper.

  “Nor I,” she says. “You’ll decide later on that you must have begun to time travel before your body fully took the impact of the fall, and that you had some extra energy to help you heal.” My aunt’s spark is what she’s referring to. I wonder if I ever shared with her how I acquired it. “As it was, though, you were found in very bad shape. You broke more bones than you didn’t break, including your skull.”

  “Marie,” I whisper. “Did she get home?”

  Cecelia nods, with a small smile. “Thanks to you, yes. Katrin did as well.”

  “How do you—” I begin to ask, and then I realize she knows about Katrin because, as always, at some point in her past I told her about it.

  And in the past, Henri waits. I’ve got to get home to him.

  I start trying to sit up and she presses her hand to my shoulder. “Not yet,” she says. “You’ve been in a medically induced coma for quite a while now. Let the doctors assess you before you try to move. Please.”

  “A coma? How long have I been out?”

  She hesitates. “You were found on March first,” she says gently. “Today is September fifth.”

  September.

  I’ve been gone, then, for ten months. Poor Henri must be worried sick. So worried I can hardly stand to imagine it. I don’t have to return to September of 1939, I think, my heart beating harder. I could go to March instead. The babies would be safe, and I could spare him some of the pain.

  Except it goes against everything I believe in. No matter how bad those months were for him, they’re his, not mine, and they’re behind us now. But I’ve got to get to him as soon as I can. I sit up, ignoring her hand, ignoring the way my body protests the movement. “I’ve got to get back to Henri.”

  “Stop,” she commands. “Please…stop. Just listen to me.”

  I stare at her, and my eyes well with frustrated tears. I want Henri. I crave him. “I miss him so much I feel physically ill from it,” I whisper. “So, say what you need to say and let me go.”

  “He’s not there,” she blurts out.

  I suck in a breath. In all these months I spent trying to live, trying to get back home to him, it never occurred to me that it was his survival I might need to worry about. “What do you mean, he’s not there? Is Henri… Did something happen to him while I was gone?”

  She shakes her head. “He will be whole and healthy when you return. He’s fighting right now. The Saar Offensive, a brief battle that will end badly for the French.”

  I press my hands to my face. “He’s fighting? They were supposed to go to the United States. I made Marie promise. I—” I can’t believe how wrong it’s all gone.

  “Life got in the way,” she says softly, her face sad for a moment before she blinks it away. “He’ll be home soon, but you’re in no shape to go anywhere at the moment, and besides that…I’ve intervened again,” she says. “You really shouldn’t go back until October twelfth, which is when you originally went.”

  My eyes well once more. I can’t believe I’m finally capable of returning to him and she expects me to wait. “How could it matter?” I ask, wrenching the IV from my arm. “I can’t just sit here for five weeks. Surely you understand that.”

  There’s worry in her face, and her mouth opens to argue, then closes. “He won’t return from the front until September twenty-fifth. Stay here that long at least. You need physical therapy anyway. In your current condition, anything could happen when you jump.”

  I can’t argue with her logic, and perhaps I should be grateful for what she’s done, or for the mere fact that I survived when so many did not. But right now, I need to see Henri.r />
  For so many reasons, but this one most of all: it feels like there’s something she’s not telling me.

  * * *

  The doctor pronounces my recovery a miracle. “You’re very lucky to be alive,” he says. Cecelia sits on the other side of me, holding my hand. “You healed beyond anything I imagined possible, given the extent of your injuries,” he adds, yet I hear a but coming. A warning of some kind.

  “Yes,” I say, sick with worry as I wait.

  “I regret to say that we couldn’t fix everything,” he says. “You suffered a great deal of internal damage. The scar tissue…makes it unlikely that you will ever have children.”

  It’s not what I thought he was going to say and I wish, somehow, I’d been prepared for it. I fall back against the pillows. I think of last fall, when Henri and I watched Charlotte and Lucien…how I’d been able to see us as parents. How badly I hungered for it, out of nowhere.

  I want Henri to be a father. And it’s something he wants for himself. Now I’m going to return after nearly a year’s disappearance, gaunt, not entirely myself, and tell him I can never give that to him.

  “You can always adopt,” the doctor says. He begins describing some new process that involves a donor egg and an implanted embryo. Except in 1939, everything he’s saying will sound like science fiction.

  I know Henri would never complain. But it’s one more way I’m returning to him damaged. When I left, I could give him a family and now I can’t. When I left, I was optimistic, hopeful, a little naïve, but now I’ve seen too many things. People have died because of me.

  I wonder if he’ll feel the same when he learns.

  * * *

  That afternoon I’m taken by wheelchair to a gym just down the hall. My therapist’s name is Guy. I force myself to smile as we are introduced, but there’s a piece of me that feels unsettled, something I don’t quite understand.

  “You rich Americans are keeping us in business,” he says, nodding behind him at a man using a walker to cross the room. “Rob,” he calls over his shoulder, “come meet our new guest.”

  My jaw drops. The American to whom he referred is Rob Chapman, a singer whose poster still probably hangs beside my bed back home. He’s even better looking in real life than I realized, but there it is again—that slightly unsettled feeling—as he hobbles over to us.

  I glance over my shoulder, unnerved to be in such a large, open room. No one has threatened me, but I don’t feel safe here.

  “You’re the other American, huh?” he asks. “The girl who fell off a building—that’s you—and the guy whose motorcycle hit a brick wall—that’s me. The two of us are giving our countrymen a bad name, but it will make a nice story for our grandchildren.”

  I smile, but it’s rusty and uncertain. What I really want to do is roll back to my room and lock the door. “I’m engaged, but feel free to tell your grandchildren.”

  “Engaged?” he asks. He gives me his most charming smile. “How engaged exactly?”

  I’ve spent so long looking over my shoulder that I can’t seem to stop. He’s flirting but I only perceive a threat, and I want Henri. I want to be home. I swallow. “Very engaged,” I reply. “Excuse me.”

  I try to maneuver the chair but I can’t get away. “Hey, hang on there,” says Guy. “We haven’t even worked out yet.”

  I can’t breathe. He’s holding my chair and I’m not sure what will happen if I try to walk. Even in captivity, I don’t think I ever felt quite this powerless, which is illogical. But that familiar rage pulses in my chest, and if I had a knife I’d make him very sorry. “Let go of my chair!” I snap. “Let go of the fucking chair!”

  His eyes widen and he steps backward, holding both hands up as if surrendering.

  I suck in air, feel the pinch of tears. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I…just got out of a really bad place.”

  Rob gives me a tiny, tense nod. “Is there someone I can call for you?” he asks gently. “Your boyfriend? Who will make you feel safe right now?”

  I try to control my breathing. Henri, I think, but he’s not here. “Cecelia,” I whisper. “Or one of her bodyguards.”

  In under a minute, Philippe stands in the room, with his stern, impassive, wonderfully familiar face. “I’m here, Mademoiselle Durand,” he says calmly. “No one will get near you without your permission.”

  After a moment, I’m collected enough to begin. Guy treats me as if I might shatter at any moment, and I realize he might be right, when suddenly Cecelia rushes through the doors looking frantic.

  She comes to where I stand, supporting my weight on parallel bars, and her hand goes to my face. “You never told me how bad it was,” she says. Her eyes fill. “But it must have been quite bad.”

  I nod, and tears begin to run down my face. “Yes,” I finally reply. My head falls to her shoulder. “It was.”

  She takes me back to my room and sits with me, distressed about what happened in the gym. I’m distressed too, but for other reasons. Something is wrong with me. I’ve got so much fear, and anger, I don’t even know what to do with myself. Yet I suffered so much less than Katrin did...I wonder how she managed.

  “You told me Katrin escaped successfully and got home,” I say. That knot in my gut tightens. “But was she…okay?”

  Cecelia’s eyes focus on my hand, still in her grip. “She never quite recovered, it seems. She stayed alive for her son, nothing more.”

  I hesitate. In the back of my mind, I’ve hoped that perhaps I’m descended from other children Katrin had later on. “She only had the one child?” I ask, my voice a whisper.

  “Yes,” she says gently. “His name was Alexander.”

  Which means Coron is my grandfather, a quarter of my DNA. The man responsible for Henri’s mother’s death. The reason he had to leave Oxford and give up his entire life.

  She squeezes my hand. “I know what you’re thinking right now, but don’t,” she says. “Your genetics only tell a small part of your story.”

  Except I’m seeing what’s inside me and that rage, that cruelty...it’s not small. I thought, once I escaped captivity, that I could leave that rage behind, but it’s as if Coron and Iris are still inside me somewhere, begging to be set free. I wanted to kill that therapist today. The desire pulsed in my chest, so overwhelming it was all I could feel until the dust settled. I need to know why. I need to know how it could have happened, and why my family has lied about it my entire life.

  After Cecelia leaves, I place the call. I haven’t spoken to my mother in over a year—not since that ugly phone call a summer ago when she told me she wished I’d never been born. I have no expectation that she will want to hear from me, but I don’t really care.

  "Mom? It’s Sarah.”

  The other end of the line is silent. “Oh,” she finally says, with a weary, disappointed sigh—the same kind she gave every time I called, every time I asked for something. Whether it was permission to sit at the table or permission to leave it, a suggestion I might come home to visit or a suggestion it was time I should go, her reaction was always this—disgust and exhaustion, as if I was once again asking too much.

  In that weary, disappointed sigh, I’m reminded all over again why I chose to cut her off, and I don’t feel the need to slowly build up to the purpose of this call. “I met your sister.”

  I hear a muted gasp on the other end of the line. “Iris?” she asks after a moment, her voice barely audible. For once, I’ve managed to surprise her. “She’s alive?”

  “No,” I reply. “But I learned some interesting things before I killed her.”

  She laughs—a short, dismissive bark. “As if I’d believe that. Are you under the impression that would upset me even if I did?”

  “I couldn’t care less if you’re upset,” I reply. “But I now know that Peter Stewart wasn’t my father, and I’d like the truth.”

  The other end of the line is silent. Angry silence, I’m sure. It’s the only kind my mother knows. “I don’t know wh
at you’re talking about,” she finally says, her voice imperious once more, “but I’m hanging up.”

  I anticipated this part. She thinks she’s immune to the consequences of her actions, and that I’ve got nothing to hold over her. But I know her Achilles heel: my brother. She’d rather die than let him know what she truly is.

  “I’ll tell Steven. And I’ll take a paternity test to prove it to him, so don’t think you can lie to him the way you have been to me my entire life.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  I laugh. “Wouldn’t I? I stabbed your sister in the chest. You think telling Steven the truth would be hard for me?”

  Air hisses through her teeth. “You really want to know what you are?” she asks. “Fine. I’ll tell you. You are how God punished me for being a part of that family. Your father...he took advantage of me, the night before my wedding. All because of what Iris did to his mother. And I’ve had to endure you and the pain you’ve brought into my life ever since. You’re just as evil as he is. So now you know. Never call this number again.”

  She hangs up, and I hold the phone to my chest, feeling worse than I did before. So much ugliness had to exist to create me. How could anything but ugliness result?

  14

  HENRI

  We are three miles over the German border when my commander asks for volunteers to scout ahead.

  The battle has been brutal already. Venturing forward is a risk only an insane man would take. Or one with nothing to lose. These days, I often believe I’m both.

  I start to rise and Maurice—a friend from Saint Antoine—grabs my sleeve. “What the hell are you doing?” he hisses. “You have people who need you back home.”

  He’s right, but my responsibilities are now a burden that feels unimaginably heavy. “We’re all going to die in this war anyway,” I reply as I stand. “Now or next year.”

  The men still seated look at me as if I’m a hero, when in truth it’s cowardice. God help me, but I’d welcome the end.