Waking in Time
Page 19
“Can they do that?”
“They did. Everything my father worked so hard for is gone. Other than a small bit of money I have stashed away, I’m destitute.”
“Will, that’s terrible.”
“I thought that I’d always be able to return to the farm if I had to, but it’s no longer mine. I’m alone with no means of support. I don’t know what I’ll do now.”
“We’ll figure something out. You’re not alone anymore.” I reach out and give his hand a quick squeeze.
A cold breeze blows the trees and a sprinkle of rain falls on us from the leaves above. By the time we reach Liz Waters, the shoulders of our sweatshirts are damp.
“Well, this is me.”
Will says nothing, just stares up at the Carillon Tower on the hill, his eyes dark with concern.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“What if one of us travels tonight?”
I understand his nervousness. I feel it every day. “When I was with my grandmother in the fifties, I forced myself to stay awake nearly every night. Then I’d nap a few hours after the sun came up. It worked, and I never traveled, but I was exhausted most of the time. I missed all my classes and ended up getting expelled.”
“I can do that. I can’t let you go, after you worked so hard to get my attention.” His mouth curls up at one corner and he playfully nips my chin with his thumb.
I’m relieved to see his softer side again. “I got your attention, huh? Is that how you knew I was out in the middle of the lake during the rainstorm?”
“I may have been watching you from afar,” he admits. “Your rowing skills were comical.”
“All right, so, we have a plan. Don’t go to sleep until dawn. Do you want to meet someplace around noon?”
“How about the bell tower?” He points to our nemesis.
“Perfect. I’ll see you then.” I notice a woman inside getting ready to lock the doors. “I’ve got to run.”
Will calls after me. “Abbi, please stay awake tonight. I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
I stop at the doors. “I promise.”
Will waves and turns toward the boathouse.
* * *
Back in my room I pull off my wet shoes. I’m exhausted, and all I want to do is sleep, but I promised I wouldn’t. This is going to be a long night.
A high-pitched clink sounds. I look around, but my roommate is snoozing peacefully with an eye mask covering half her face. Her hair is tied in rags all around her head. I’ve learned that her name is Mildred, which seems about right.
I hear the sound again. Something is hitting my window.
Scrambling over my bed, I peer down to the ground below and see a girl waving frantically. I point to myself. “Me?”
She nods and points to the seldom-used rear exit at my end of the wing.
I nod, slide into some slippers, and sneak down the back stairs. As I crack open the door on the ground floor, a girl with porcelain skin and delicate features smiles at me.
“You’re a doll.” She slips inside. Before the door closes, she turns and waves to someone hiding in the shadows. “We lost track of time and that wicked Miss Peabody has locked up this place like a virgin’s vault.”
I laugh at the expression. “Happy to help.”
The girl grins and I have this strange sensation that I’ve seen her before, but where? We head up the stairs side by side.
“Are you on fourth floor too?” I ask, racking my brain for clues as to who this girl could be.
“No. I’m on third.” She’s wearing a boxy coat with a wide fur lapel. Her light brown hair is in a short wavy bob. “What room are you in?”
“Forty-four eighteen.”
“This is my stop,” she says when we reach the third-floor landing. “Thanks again!”
“Of course. I’m usually up late and my roommate Mildred sleeps like the dead, so feel free to throw rocks at my window any time. I’m kind of a night owl.”
“Me too, obviously. But you have to room with Mildred Broadbent? I’m so sorry.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s such a tattletale. If your skirt isn’t the exact proper length or you’re a minute late, she’s sure to report you. But you probably know that better than I.”
“All I know about Mildred is that she spends more time on her hair than anyone I’ve ever met and she wears a sleep mask, so she looks like a creepy raccoon in the dark.”
The girl giggles and pushes open the door to her floor.
“By the way, I’m Abbi,” I whisper, hopeful I’ve found another friend in this new time.
“Swell to meet you. I’m Ruby.” And she disappears down the hall.
CHAPTER 15
Just before noon I wait for Will at the Carillon Tower. There is a concrete landing in front, a dirt path around it, and thick woods around three sides creating a cocoon of mystery. I still can’t believe I met Ruby last night. Instead of searching all day for records about her, I could have just gone down a flight of stairs and introduced myself. My world keeps getting more freakishly crazy. When I woke up this morning, I looked for her, but she was already gone. With Ruby only a floor away, it shouldn’t be too hard to connect with her again, but how will I ask about a baby? “Can I borrow some bobby pins? Oh, and by the way, ever given birth? And where have you hidden the kid?”
Will appears, cresting the hill, tall and lean with a casual gait. A cigarette is pinched between his lips, and his wispy bangs blow in the breeze.
He removes the cigarette and says with a bashful smile, “We made it.”
“Nice to see you too.” He’s the epitome of thirties college fashion in a sweater vest and collared shirt.
“So you think this might be the key to our… problems?” He gestures to the bell tower, thick and formidable.
“Hard to say, but it seems to be one of the constants.”
He cranes his neck and looks up the steep stone walls that rise several stories above us. “I don’t understand how ringing bells can cause us to travel through time.”
“Maybe it creates a rift in time. I tried to do some research at the library, but I couldn’t find anything. I don’t know how anything like that would work, but it seems we should at least check it out.”
“Perhaps there’s a secret chamber in there with a time machine waiting to be discovered,” he suggests, wiggling his eyebrows.
“With my luck I’d drive it the wrong direction and end up surrounded by cavemen,” I joke, thinking of movies I’ve seen, my only working knowledge of how time travel might work.
Will tries the door without luck and then leans his shoulder against it. “Locked up tight as a drum.”
“That’s a bummer.”
“Yes, indeed, a bummer.” Will tries out the expression, and I bite back a grin.
“Maybe we could pick the lock,” I suggest.
“Do you have a hairpin on you? That might do the trick.”
I shake my head. I was in too big of a hurry to worry about trying to pin my hair into an appropriate 1930s fashion. I settled for a low ponytail at the back of my neck. It’s ironic that my hairstyle looks plain and old-fashioned next to all these girls with their short sassy bobs. “But I can get you as many hairpins as you need. Want them now?”
“We probably shouldn’t pick the lock during the day.” He studies the door and takes another drag of his cigarette. “I believe it will take a little stealth on our part.”
“Then tonight?”
“Yes.”
We stand in silence. I kick at pebbles on the sidewalk and wonder if I should say goodbye until later and go back to my room. I’m relieved when Will asks, “How about a walk?”
We head toward Bascom Hill. The day is sunny and cool, but warming up fast, and I undo the buttons of my sweater. We walk silent
ly for a while, both in our own heads. There’s so much more to tell him, but for just a moment, I’m enjoying this feeling—letting myself pretend we’re two ordinary college kids on a beautiful spring day.
Finally I say, “I was thinking about the problem of your money last night.”
“You mean lack of it.” He gives me a sideways glance.
“Yes. But you said you still have some. I can help.”
“Oh, did you time travel with a satchel full of money?”
“No, but I know some things about the future that should help you make a few surefire investments.”
Will looks skeptical.
“For example, my best friend from high school, her grandfather worked for Polaroid. They were a big camera company, and later Apple computers are huge. I’ll write down the products that I know become super successful, like Nabisco and Oscar Mayer, and if you keep going forward, you can check to see if they exist yet and buy stock.”
“I know nothing about how to buy stocks, and since the market crash last year, I don’t figure it’s a smart idea.”
“The market will recover, eventually. You’re going to have to learn a ton of new things. The world changes. A lot.”
“Sounds tricky.” He tosses down his cigarette butt and steps on it. I wrinkle my nose and step sideways to avoid it. Right away, Will reaches under his vest and pulls out another.
I roll my eyes and go on. “I’ll help as much as I can, but you have to do this. If you get stuck in God knows what year and have nothing, how will you get by? Money makes life a lot easier, and trust me, the future is expensive.”
My problem is the reverse. How do I take money to the past? Each time I’ve traveled there’s been some cash on my nightstand or in my top dresser drawer, but how do I make sure I have enough in case of emergency? I can’t exactly use 1960 dollar bills in 1930.
Will strikes a match to light his new cigarette and draws on it like a seasoned chain smoker.
I wave my hand in front of my face. “And stop smoking. You’ll end up with lung cancer. Plus your breath smells like an ashtray.”
He frowns. “You sure are bossy. Are all women in the future as headstrong as you?”
I have to laugh. “I’m just trying to help. And in the future women are strong, they aren’t all ‘helpless, poor me,’ like so many women in this time.”
A smirk appears on his face. “You mean like last night when you were stranded out on the lake?”
“I did not cry ‘help me, save me!’ I would have figured something out eventually.” Except that I did have a major pity party. “But okay, yeah, that wasn’t my best move,” I admit. Will smiles down at me and seems to strike a silent deal—he snubs out his cigarette with the toe of his shoe.
“Swell. I’ll invest and pray to God I’m able to collect on it.” He sinks his hands deep into his pockets.
I rack my brain for more details that might help him. “The U.S. will enter World War II in the early 1940s.”
“Another world war?” He looks incredulous.
“Yeah. It’s a bad one, so do whatever you can to avoid getting drafted.”
Will lets out a worried sigh. He shouldn’t have to think about these things. Maybe I’m making things worse instead of better.
“You’re going to be okay. Hey, I remember learning that when the war happened, car companies did really well because they started building tanks and planes.”
“I hope your plan succeeds. I don’t have much, but I did squirrel away some money after my parents’ death.” His voice drops to a whisper when he says “death.”
“Oh, Will. It’s awful that you’ve had to deal with all of this.” I touch his arm.
He puts his hand over mine and simply says, “Thank you.”
When we reach State Street and walk toward the capitol building, I see that everything looks different. There are old-fashioned store marquees, green mailboxes on the corners, and elaborately styled streetlights with glass globes on top. “I can’t believe how everything is changed.”
“You and me both. Just a few years ago, there was still the occasional horse-drawn buggy. Now look at us dodging street cars and delivery trucks.”
We pass a travel agency with a poster in the window advertising honeymoon trips to Niagara Falls. I stop for a closer look.
“What is it?” Will asks, following my gaze.
“Reminds me of my grandma, Sharon. She loved to travel.” I look back at him. “She was my roommate when I landed in 1951.”
“Egads! Are you certain?”
I nod. “In my time she’d recently passed away, so it was amazing being with her. But when I left her, she was so upset. Her mother had just died, and she had discovered some upsetting news. We were on a mission, but then I traveled and abandoned her.”
“What was the mission?”
“She’d learned that she had a sibling she never knew about—a baby her mother had before Sharon was born. I was going to help her find out what happened.”
“So now she has to solve the mystery without you.”
“That’s just it. I know for a fact she doesn’t solve it. Remember,” I point at myself, “I’m from the future. And you want to hear something even more bizarre?”
He nods.
“Last night I think I met Sharon’s mother, Ruby.”
Will stops short and stares at me. “You met the woman who just died?”
I nod. The whole thing is crazy.
“Your grandmother’s mother. That’s unbelievable. That makes her your what, great-grandmother? What did you say to her?”
“Not much. I helped her sneak in after curfew. She’d been off with some guy. I didn’t realize who she was until the very last second.”
Will shakes his head, still digesting the situation. “What are you going to do? Ask her what she’s done with the baby?”
“Maybe she hasn’t had it yet. I don’t know.”
“You think she’s… with child now?” He practically blushes saying the words. Apparently pregnant is a dirty word in this time.
I shrug. “She didn’t look it, but I only saw her for a minute, and I wasn’t exactly checking her out. Maybe she hasn’t met the father yet.”
Will shakes his head. “If she’s sneaking in from some late-night tryst, I assure you, she has.”
“You don’t know that.” I want to give Ruby the benefit of the doubt.
“This whole situation is unbelievably strange.”
A couple turns the corner in front of Rennebohms, their hands linked, looking all gooey-eyed at each other.
I lean over and whisper in Will’s ear, “I think it just got stranger.”
“Why is that?” he asks, his face close to mine.
The girl spots me. Her face lights up, and she rushes over. “Oh my goodness, it’s Abbi, isn’t it?”
“Yes! It’s great to see you, Ruby!” I can’t believe she’s here. “This is my friend, Will.” I turn to him, hinting with my eyebrows. But I am shocked to see that Will already seems to know them.
“Holy smokes! Hey old pal, how’ve you been?” Will asks, heartily shaking the hand of Ruby’s date
“You know each other?” I ask, dumbfounded.
“Sure do. I met Ruby and Walter… a while back.”
Walter? As in my great-grandfather? My jaw drops. He’s right in front of me, looking young and handsome with the same bushy eyebrows and with Ruby at his side. Will was right—she has met the father.
They’re all staring, waiting for me to say something. “It’s nice to meet you, Walter,” I finally manage.
“Likewise,” he says. “Will is responsible for introducing Ruby and me. He and I sat together in a physics class, and during a crowded lecture, this gentleman here gave up his seat for this little lady, and she’s been sitting next to me ever since.” Walte
r beams at Ruby.
I turn to Will, who nods. “It’s true. I couldn’t let the poor gal just stand there, and I thought Walter might need a little nudge in the right direction.”
Walter claps Will on the back, and Ruby laughs and says, “He sure did!”
My mind is reeling… Will introduced my great-grandparents to each other.
“And Walter, Abbi is the sweet gal who let me in last night,” Ruby says. “He and I lost track of time and I missed curfew,” she adds with a blush. “Abbi is a true lifesaver.”
Will chokes, and the sound turns into a hacking smoker’s cough. I give him another hearty whack on the back.
“In that case, you must let me treat you to a soda.” Walter motions to the drugstore soda fountain through the window.
“You don’t need to do that. I was glad to help,” I say.
“I insist. Allow me to treat you and Will. You’ve both done us a kindness.”
“He won’t stop until you let him have his way,” Ruby says, clutching his arm. “It’s much easier to go along.”
“All right, I’d love one.” What the heck? I’m going to hang out with my great-grandparents. Surreal. I glance at Will.
He grins back. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
Walter holds the door to the drugstore and we enter. Out of his earshot, I tug on Will’s shirtsleeve and whisper, “He’s my great-grandfather!”
Will laughs softly and shakes his head.
The smell of fresh coffee and grilled food fills the air. We slide into a booth, Ruby and Walter on one side, so close their arms are touching. Will keeps a respectable distance between us on our side. We each order a different fountain drink. This experience is like the precursor to the coffee shops of my time when I’d go to Starbucks with friends and drink flavored coffees. Our drinks show up in tall glasses with long straws. Mine is a cherry phosphate. Will’s is a root beer float. I can’t stop staring at Ruby and Walter, so young and full of life. They glance at me, a little uncomfortable with my steady gaze. “I’m sorry, you both just seem so in love.”
They smile at each other and my rudeness is forgotten. I take a mental snapshot of this scene with my great-grandparents and hope to remember this moment always.