Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  As she paced, pieces of the puzzle began popping up in her mind, the puzzle being, what in the hell had been going on in the last twelve hours? She started trying to find places to put the pieces. She went back to the beginning, before where she thought the beginning was and tried to trace her steps. She recalled the baby powder she rubbed on her body and feeling so good as she slipped into fresh clothes, her best maternity outfit, nylons, and red low heel pumps. She did her hair and makeup right. She remembered looking in the mirror and admiring herself as best she could over the huge balloon-ready-to-burst bulge. She recalled the time as suddenly being very late and having to race out the door to pick up Steven. It was so hot in that truck. That may be where it all started, she thought. The heat can do a lot of things to one’s mind. She remembered arriving late and still having to wait but not being patient, and the number 524 on the side of the building, as she had seen it a hundred or at least dozens of times before. She recalled looking at old Navy photos in the waiting area after getting tired and hot from waiting in the truck. That’s rather strange, she thought. Everything I’ve observed since that point has been old or outdated. She thought back a bit to the Marine Guard. No, he was normal. I lost it somewhere between there and the lab. Things were normal when I parked the truck but that was when the heat started getting to me.

  “She’ll be with you in just a moment, Ma’am.” Anne turned to see the nurse approaching. “You should sit back down, Ma’am. It’s not good for you to be walking around a whole lot yet.”

  “I’m too anxious to sit down. I feel just fine. Besides, I’m supposed to be getting exercise.”

  The nurse let out a sigh and returned to her desk.

  So, it was hot. Did I begin hallucinating and am I still hallucinating? Can someone hallucinate for this long? Did I pass out in the truck? Is what seems like many hours something I have created in my mind in ten minutes? How could I possibly hallucinate my trying to rationalize a possible hallucination?

  In the pacing, Anne found herself stopped at the nurses’ station, staring at a large wall calendar showing all 12 months of the year. At the top in big bold numerals were the numbers 1,9,4,3. NO! She screamed in her head. No! This is just part of the hallucination.

  She slowly backed away, stumbled back to where she had been sitting, and perched herself on the edge of the chair, her hands in her lap. For several moments she sat in a state of nothingness, her mind vacant of all thought, having reached a point of denial, the denial of her very existence. Then she began exploring her life, searching for anything tangible that she could grasp onto, anything she could identify as real.

  “Nothing is as it seems.” She remembered her father saying that to her as he pulled a quarter from behind her ear. “Trust only in your mind for your eyes will surely deceive you.” She reached down and picked up the Saturday Evening Post magazine she had been looking at earlier and recalled the remainder of her father’s wisdom. “Trust only in your eyes for your mind will surely deceive you.” JULY 1943 flashed at her from the magazine cover like a neon sign in the dark. She threw it down as if it burned her hand. Spinning around she spotted a newspaper she had noticed a few minutes earlier. DESPERATE BATTLE RAGES WITHIN 13 MILES OF CATANIA, glared at her in bold black letters. ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL WARN ITALY TO QUIT. She picked up the newspaper. NAPLES LEFT BLAZING INFERNO BY ALLIED BOMBER FORCE? Date! Where’s the date? Her eyes couldn’t focus past the headings on the shaking page.

  A panic attack! She’d never had a panic attack before but she had a good idea what it was and she felt it coming. She rushed back to the nurses’ station.

  “What’s today?” she blurted out to the nurse.

  The young nurse looked up at her. “Why, it’s Sunday, Ma’am, Sunday morning.”

  “What’s the date?” Anne demanded, a tightness growing in her stomach.

  “The eighteenth, July eighteenth. It’s right on the calendar there.”

  “I’m very confused right now,” she pleaded as her breathing became fast and shallow, “so please be patient with me. What year is this?”

  The young nurse looked at the calendar then back at Anne. “Nineteen-forty-three.”

  Anne knew her heart was racing. Everything around her was going dim and she could tell she was going to pass out but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She heard the nurse saying something else to her and then off in a fog she heard her yell for another nurse and then the fog closed in around her and she heard nothing.

  Chapter 10

  Sunday ~ July 18, 1943

  “Well ya sure making a pig of yourself,” Anne heard a woman say as she dragged herself out of a restless sleep. Memories of another strange dream faded quickly as she tried to relate the meaning of being a pig.

  “Ya sure has a pretty little face,” the voice continued. It was then that Anne realized that she was fully awake and that the voice was coming from the other bed.

  “How abouts we switches sides, you little piglet?” Anne blinked her eyes open to find herself staring at a rather robust woman, her gown pulled down to her waist, and her milk-swollen breasts in full display. She was negotiating a baby from one breast to the other. After achieving a meeting of mouth and nipple, she cooed, “There ya go,” and began humming some unrecognizable tune.

  After a time, the woman looked up and caught Anne staring at her. She didn’t act startled or attempt to cover herself, but continued nursing. “Well, good morning,” she demanded of Anne in a West Virginia out calling the hogs to dinner style. Anne briefly turned her eyes away and then looked back, blushing slightly. “How’s ya feeling this morning? You hads a busy night,” the woman continued, dropping her timbre to a normal level.

  “Yes, I guess so.” Anne felt the urge for Elizabeth Anne again. “When will they bring me my baby? Do I have to do something?”

  The woman stood, the baby still suckling her breast, adjusted the gown then sat back down. “Normally they just comes in and wakes ya up whether ya wants to be or not and tells ya to sticks a tit in its mouth. After ya’s little event a few hours back, I thinks they’s a tad reluctant to wakes ya yet.”

  “Event? What event?”

  “Don’t ya remember? Ya wents out looking for ya’s baby and collapsed. Yeah. They carried you back in here likes ya’s a rag doll. Ya really had that young nurse all shook up. She’s new, ya knows.”

  By this time Anne was sitting up, cautiously though, and was waiting for the strange pains and sensations throughout her body to settle. The woman was running on about the new nurse, but Anne was lost in her own thoughts, trying to remember the “Event” as the woman called it. She looked behind her. The black cloth-covered window was just as she saw it in the middle of the night. She began mentally retracing her steps, remembering more black clothed or curtained windows, posters and magazines... a magazine dated nineteen-forty-three and a calendar also dated nineteen-forty-three. She felt her heart race again and her stomach tighten, but she controlled it, taking several deep, calculated breaths.

  “...to ya last night?”

  Anne suddenly realized the woman was asking her a question. “Huh? I’m sorry.”

  “I said, what happened to ya last night?”

  “Oh! I don’t know.” Be careful, Anne, or you’ll end up in the funny ward. “I guess I just wasn’t as strong as I thought I was.”

  “Yeah, some womens has gots to be careful. Not me though. Hell, I was out plowing the fields the day after my first was born. I’s a strong woman. This is my seventh child, my fourth boy. My husband makes me come to the hospital this time. He said it twus abouts time we done it right. But this hospital won’t lets me go home till next week. Hell, I could out works every damn one of thems nurses and doctors right now and with my baby on my hip. Yes-sir-ee!”

  Anne smiled at her language then asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Gertie Thigpen. And this here is Samuel Cooper Thigpen. And yours is Anne Waring. I heard the nurses talking when they broughts ya in.”
>
  “Nice to meet you, Gertie. When was Samuel born?” Anne decided to make small talk while trying to come up with a way of asking the burning question, “What year is this?” without displaying her insanity.

  “Day for yesterday.”

  “Oh, Thursday.”

  “No, Miss Annie. Friday. Boy, yas really out of it. Today is Sunday ya knows.”

  Anne’s appointment with Doctor Rose was Friday, July 17; of that she was very certain and that was just yesterday. “Yes, I guess you’re right,” she replied while trying to sort it out in her head. “I’ve had my days really mixed up lately. Why, I sometimes even forget what year it is.” She waited for any response hoping for an opening, anything that could help her decide whether or not she should just ask to be transferred to the nut ward.

  “Yeah, I knows whatcha mean.” Suddenly she looked down at the baby, and helped him regain the suction. “Shucks little one, you’re just like your daddy. He sometimes needs help finding it too.” She looked up to find Anne staring at her and laughed. “You should has seen my second child, my first girl. She could holds on in a hurricane and with no hands. Sometimes my tits would get so sore my husband couldn’t even touch them. Yes-sir-ee! I’ve never had a sucker like her.”

  Despite everything, Anne laughed. She’d never met anyone like Gertie before, unashamed and uneducated, but worldly in her own South Carolina dirt farm manner.

  Gertie appeared to end the conversation. She was again busy cooing softly to her baby while he returned with almost inaudible sucking noises. Anne took the opportunity to explore the room, what little of the room there was. Although she had never before been a hospital patient, Anne had the opportunity, when she was a young girl, to visit her Aunt Catherine right after her cousin was born, and years later as a teen, to visit her best friend’s mother who had a breast removed. The hospitals in Boston were much nicer than this. This one didn’t even have a television. She thought about that for a moment. Didn’t all hospital rooms have televisions? She scanned the room for other modern conveniences, but there were none. Her best friend’s mother had to rent a television, she remembered. She looked at the bed. It had some adjustments but they were all manual, not electric. There were two overhead lights and another light, with a pull chain, behind each bed. She looked again at Gertie.

  “Seven children! My, but you have a big family, Gertie,” Anne said.

  “Yes, Ma’am. Well, I only has six now. My first-born died of polio abouts eight years ago. He would have been fifteen next month. Now Sarah is my oldest. She just turned thirteen. A young womans almosts. Gots herself a boy friend already too, but Danny don’t likes him much. Danny’s my husband. He don’t likes most guys who looks at his Sarah.”

  “So your boy that died, you said that was eight years ago. That must have been in nineteen...”

  “Thirty-five, yes siree. We mades it through all that depression and stuffs exceptin my little Danny Junior gots the polio. I remembers it just likes yesterday.” Gertie’s voice got very quiet. “May the seventh, nineteen thirty-five. I cried for weeks. The azaleas were in bloom and my baby dies. I can’t look at an azalea now without crying.”

  Gertie kept on talking about her boy’s last remaining days, but Anne fell deep within herself. She lay back down on the bed. She wanted to curl up into a ball, but she didn’t. If she gave in to the urge to retreat to the fetal position, she would never be able to uncurl, never be able to return to normal. She was fighting with herself to hold onto her sanity. Am I real? She asked herself. First I must know if I’m real.

  “Mrs. Waring.” A nurse touched Ann’s shoulder. “Mrs. Waring, its time to feed your baby.”

  Anne felt numb. She knew Elizabeth Anne was coming because she could hear her crying in the hall. She didn’t know how, but she knew that was her baby crying. The door opened and the crying got louder. She could feel a reaction inside her body, a tingling in her breasts. It was a feeling she’d never had before, but she was still too numb to move until the nurse touched her shoulder and startled her into awareness.

  “We held off as long as we could, to let you rest, but she has to be fed.”

  Anne rolled over and sat up, and the nurse placed Elizabeth Anne in her arms. Her head cleared in an instant. The nurses helped her get her gown situated. She was very self-conscious at first, and then, remembering Gertie, she held her breath and tried to allow nature to take its course. Elizabeth continued crying while Anne attempted to force a nipple into her mouth.

  “Express yourself.” One of the nurses suggested.

  “What?” Anne replied.

  “Express yourself, you know, milk yourself. Get the milk started.”

  “Prime the pumps, girl,” Gertie advised from across the room.

  Anne looked up at the two nurses. The younger, quiet one, blushed and looked away. The older one looked on. Anne squeezed at her breast, as she imagined it should be done. Elizabeth continued crying. Anne’s breasts were beginning to ache but nothing was coming out.

  “Like this,” the older nurse said. She demonstrated on herself through her uniform. “Pull all the way to the base of the nipple.”

  Anne watched then tried it. After several failed attempts, a spurt came out. A couple more times and a squirt of milk struck the nurse’s arm. Anne turned red.

  The nurse acted as though it was nothing and said, “Great, now your baby.” The nurse helped her and immediately Elizabeth stopped crying.

  This is real, Anne thought. This is truly real. I can’t be dreaming this.

  “We’ll check back with you in a while. There are diapers and pins here, water and cloths there and towels on the bottom. Drop the dirty diapers or whatever in this bucket. We’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Thank you,” Anne said and the two nurses left the room.

  “He-he, nothing likes the first time. I still remembers mine. Yep, Danny was runnin’ around likes a headless chicken. He weren’t doin’ a thing, but he sure was makin a racket about it. Heck, he could go outs to da barn, stick his arm in the back side of Bertha, the milk cow, grab that new calf by the hooves and drag it out. But when I gived him the baby to hold you’d think I hands him a hands full of cracked eggs. He-he, it was so funny. ”

  Gertie saw that Anne was staring at her with her mouth wide open.

  “He-he, you ain’t been on many farms have you, girl?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “That’s something you have to do ifin the cow has problems. If the calf is crooked or something it could kills them both. Well, he could do thats without the blink of an eye. But when I was birthing little Danny, Jr., I thoughts Danny was going to keel over. Thanks to the good lord I had enough sense to tells him to go gets the neighbor lady. Probably about the only sense I had back then. I was only sixteen years old whens little Danny was born. We wasn’t even married a year. Now that I thinks about it some, I guess it was pretty smart. My folks were having a rough time and Danny’s daddy died and left him the farm all paid for and everything soes when the depression hits we did okay. Oh gee wiz, Miss Anne, I’s just jabbering on and you just getting your baby and all. I’ll just be quiet soes you can be alone with her.”

  Anne had begun to cry. She kept her head down, watching Elizabeth, hoping Gertie didn’t notice. She was afraid her crying would turn into uncontrollable sobs, something she had a tendency to do when things started going completely out of her control. She knew for certain now where she was. She wanted Steven but was beginning to have doubts that Steven existed. She had no purse or wallet or anything else to prove to anyone or herself who she was.

  She lay on her side, her back facing Gertie, and resituated Elizabeth Anne so she could continue nursing. The tears began to flow. I’m Annabelle Carol Waring. My maiden name is Annabelle Carol Hair. I’m 24 years old. If my life as I remember it is all wrong, then who am I? If my life is all wrong, then I’m not who I think I am. How do I find out who I really am? Anne sobbed for some time, then made a concerted effort to bring
it under control. But I’m a mother. That’s definitely real. But who is the father? Am I married? She looked at the ring on her hand. She remembered receiving it from Steven, in her church in Boston, four years ago, or was it someone else, somewhere else, and some other time?

  I have a college degree, honors in history, nearly a master’s. I closely studied the World Wars, and Korea and Vietnam. I know battles, dates and times, and how and why. That guy at the barracks, Chief Savage, said we were at war because of Pearl Harbor. I know that, but what about Korea or Vietnam? Do I remember some things correctly and make up all kinds of other things? World War II battles. I know... knew them all. Some said I had a photographic memory. Who said that? My dad. Robert Hair. My mother. Rebecca Hair. My husband. Steven Waring. My mother died and left us alone. I was angry with her. I remember that. I was thirteen years old. She was struck by a car. It was a white convertible, in Boston, in the summer. Tall sailing ships were there for the 200th birthday of America. Nineteen seventy-six. But this is Nineteen Forty-three. It has to be a lie. Everything in my head must be a lie. But not everything. I must remember some things correctly. I wonder if I remember past things correctly and just make up the future? Let’s see. This is July. What has happened up to now? Come on, think, it’s only been four years. Four years since what? Am I making up my college, my education? I have my master’s in nuclear physics. But how can I? Has it even been invented yet, or is it in the process of being invented as I lay here? Or is it? How could it? How could I make up something that’s going to happen? Therefore it isn’t going to really happen and is a figment of my obviously over active imagination. Maybe I’m psychic. Maybe I foretell the future. Maybe I have visions of future lives like some have visions of past lives, like Shirley MacLaine. Does that mean that I’m going to die before 1963 so that I may be born again, and that in that life my mother will die when I’m thirteen? Since she was, or will be, twenty when I’m born, or reborn, that means she was born in 1943. My future mother could be a baby right now.