by Leila Sales
“Who would have possibly believed such a story?” I asked with a laugh. “You’re an excellent swimmer, and anyway, why would the three of us have been so silly and blind as to wander into the river at night?”
“Not blind,” Kitty said, “just unaccustomed to the blackout.”
My laughter died instantly. I remembered now how dark Bristol got during the Blitz at night. How any light would just serve to alert the Luftwaffe to the location of the city, to turn our town into a sitting target.
Some people really had been hit by cars whose drivers couldn’t see them, they really had broken ankles by walking straight into invisible curbs or trees, and they really had walked off the edge of the dock and into the River Avon. I’d forgotten about this, because I hadn’t known any of those people personally, and, considering the more screamingly obvious threats of bombs and fires, the dangers of the blackout seemed much less dramatic.
But apparently everyone who’d known me had thought that I was one of those people. Now I understood what those obituaries meant when they referred to a blackout incident.
“So that’s what your parents and my mum and everyone thought happened to us?” I asked Kitty now.
“They must have done. Of course our bodies were never found in the river, but that wouldn’t have meant anything. Considering what else was going on at that time, trawling the river for proof of our drowning was nobody’s top priority—except perhaps our families’.”
“So anyone who might have come to rescue you just believed that you were dead,” I said.
“Yes. Sadly I’m not much of a swimmer these days. My body doesn’t work quite the way it used to.”
“I guess that’s why you’re not swimming in the Miglio di Manarola right now,” I said.
“Oh, is that today? I don’t know how I forgot. I used to swim in the sea every morning here. But”—she shrugged her birdlike shoulders—“things change.”
I felt a brief pang of sadness, that Kitty and I would never again play mermaids together in the water, as we’d once done. Even if she could still swim, did eighty-six-year-olds even like playing mermaids?
But it didn’t matter, really. What mattered was that we were together. And even if we weren’t mermaids anymore, we would be something else.
“We escaped nearly eight weeks after you time traveled,” Kitty went on. “I’d honestly thought I was going to go mad from isolation, but then we got lucky. A bomb exploded just down the road from where we were being held.”
“That doesn’t sound lucky!” I said.
“Well, it was, because in the chaos surrounding the attack, your father and I fled. We didn’t know where we were, and we certainly didn’t know where we were going, but we ran into the night and hoped for the best. The next day we worked out that we were in Wales, near Port Talbot. You know almost all the railway signs had been removed, or replaced with incorrect signs, to mislead any spies. If you didn’t already know where you were—which we didn’t—it was quite the struggle to work it out.”
“So once you knew where you were,” I said, “did you go home? Did you see your parents? And Justine and Thomas? What did they say? Who had been taking care of them? Had my mum come home?”
Kitty was shaking her head. “We couldn’t go back to Bristol. It wasn’t safe for us.”
She explained that because their death statements had already been issued, everyone would have asked questions if they’d turned up alive. And the military would have been petrified that Kitty and my dad might tell people what had happened to them. She said that if they’d gone home, they would at best be taken away again, and at worst be killed. It wouldn’t have just been unsafe for Kitty and Dad; it would have been unsafe for our whole families if they knew the truth. So Kitty never saw her parents again. They died in an air raid a few months later.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “It’s been years, of course. Decades. But I still miss them.” She cleared her throat. “Fortunately I had your father to take care of me.”
“If you couldn’t go home, where did you go?” I asked.
“We managed to secure passage on a boat to Ireland.”
“Why? What was in Ireland?” I asked.
“It was a neutral nation,” Kitty explained. “It had sided with neither the Allied Forces nor the Axis Powers, so it seemed the safest place for us. Certainly safer than anywhere in England or Wales. We rented a flat in Cork, and your father found a job as a custodian to pay our bills, and we told everyone I was his daughter.”
“A custodian?” I giggled. I’d rarely known my father to clean anything.
Kitty giggled a little, too, and even though she looked so old, her laughter sounded the same as I remembered. “He was a far better experimental physicist than he was a custodian, I’ll tell you that! But there was a war on. We did what we must. He went by the name Robert Blair, and we told everyone that I was his daughter, Catherine Blair, and my mum had passed away. After a while, those just became our names, and our identities.”
“If you pretend to be someone for long enough, then it doesn’t even feel like pretending anymore,” I said.
“Quite right. Your father never stopped studying time travel, though. Both because he had already devoted so much of his life to it, and also because he deeply, deeply hoped that he would be able to find out where you had gone.”
“He never did figure out how time travel worked, though, did he?” I said. “All those years and close calls, and he never figured it out.”
“No,” Kitty agreed. “He didn’t.” She coughed into a handkerchief, then looked back up at me. “But I did.”
Chapter 36
I stared at Kitty. Silently, she stared back. “You figured out the secrets of time travel?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How on earth did you do that?! Kitty—you know how time travel works?”
“Yes,” she said again. Delicately she took a sip of water.
“So?” I poked her arm. “How does it work?”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you.”
“Oh, come on.” I nudged her with my shoulder, but perhaps harder than I should have, and I saw her wince. I’d briefly forgotten how old Kitty was. I’d remembered only that she was Kitty.
“No,” she said again.
“Oh, come on, you know I won’t tell anybody. When have I ever not kept a secret for you?” I asked.
“That’s not it. I trust you completely. But I won’t tell you how time travel works. Not because you shouldn’t know, but because I don’t believe that people should know. There’s a reason why time travel isn’t part of our everyday experience. It’s dangerous.”
She told me that it’s one thing when a portal appears randomly. That’s a natural act, like a volcanic eruption or an earthquake. But when humans create portals of their own, it would be like creating an earthquake just to further your own goals. It’s disturbing the natural order of things.
She went on, “I can understand why Intelligence suspected that your father understood time travel and was just refusing to tell them how it worked. If he had known, I imagine he would have kept that secret from them.”
“So you understand how time travel works, but you’ve never actually done it yourself,” I said.
“Correct.”
Which meant that I was still the only person I knew—maybe the only person in the whole world—to have leapt through the years. “You used to want to,” I reminded her. “You used to want to go on an adventure.”
“And I have done,” Kitty said. “I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve met fascinating people everywhere I’ve gone. I’ve fallen in love—more than once—and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and experienced nearly nine decades of innovation. I’ve led a life filled with adventure. I didn’t need to time trav
el to do that.”
Kitty told me that as the years passed, Dad brought her in on his research more and more. When she was at school in Ireland and he was working, it was a casual apprenticeship, similar to the sort of chores she did for him while they were held captive in Wales. But after the war ended, he became increasingly insistent that Kitty learn everything he knew.
“‘I am so close,’ he kept saying—for years he said how close he was,” Kitty said. “And eventually, when he was around sixty years old, he admitted to me that he was concerned he might die before he had worked it all out, and he needed to be certain that I knew everything he knew, so that I could take over his work if the need arose.”
“And did you need to?” I asked, my chest tight.
“Yes. Your father passed away in 1962. From natural causes, Lottie—a heart attack. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “You don’t need to be sorry. I already knew he’d died. And actually, I’m happy. I’m so happy to hear that he died from a heart attack and not from the war, that he lived more than twenty years longer than I thought he had. And that he could kind of be your dad for all that time.”
“He was,” Kitty confirmed. “I was very lucky to have him. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”
“You would have figured it out,” I told her. “If you’d been a ten-year-old girl all alone in the world, I promise, you would have figured it out. And I think he was lucky to have you, too. He didn’t have any of his kids or his wife or anyone anymore. Really he just had you.”
“And I believe that’s why he chose me to be his apprentice, the repository for all his research. Or maybe he saw an innate problem-solving talent in me and wanted to cultivate that. I don’t know. But he told me that he needed me to continue his work. That it was extremely important. Because . . .”
She coughed again, for longer this time. I held out her glass of water, but she waved it away.
“Do you remember your father’s saying about coincidences?” Kitty asked once her throat was clear.
“Of course. ‘When something seems like an unbelievable coincidence, then consider that it might not be a coincidence.’”
Kitty beamed at me. “Exactly. Well, that’s what your father thought was the explanation for the portal that you went through.”
“He thought it was an unbelievable coincidence?” I said.
“He thought that it was not, in fact, a coincidence.”
“Like, it was too convenient for a portal to open up at the exact time that I needed to escape?”
Now that I’d said it, I realized that my dad had a point there. Most people went their whole lives without ever seeing a portal. How incredibly low were the odds that I would not only see one—but that I would see it three seconds before a bullet hit me?
“But if it was so convenient,” I said slowly, “then why couldn’t you come through the portal with me? Why would it be such a great coincidence for me, and such a useless one for you? That doesn’t seem fair. It’s never, ever seemed fair.”
“It didn’t seem fair to me at first, either,” Kitty said. “I was glad you got out, but I was jealous that you got to time travel when you hadn’t even wanted it, really, and I had. I didn’t understand why you hadn’t taken me with you—or sometimes, why I hadn’t gone instead of you. There were times—especially when I was a teenager, living undercover in a strange country, hiding my identity—when I felt angry with you for abandoning me.”
“I’m so sorry,” I told her. “I have been sorry this whole time. I wish I’d brought you with me.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Not anymore. I needed to stay there, in that facility, with your father. I needed to live by his side for the next twenty-two years. I needed to learn everything he had to teach me about time travel. Because eventually he came up with a theory: that the reason why a portal appeared in the exact time and place where you needed it was because either he or I, at some point in the future, would create it for you.”
I felt like time stopped around us.
“What are you saying?” I whispered. “That the portal wasn’t random at all?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re telling me that somebody created it, at some point in the future, and sent it back there to rescue me.”
“Yes.”
“And that somebody . . . that was you?”
“Yes,” said Kitty again. “That was me.”
Chapter 37
I was sobbing in Kitty’s arms. “Thank you,” I wept into her shoulder. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Lottie, my darling, you don’t need to cry. You don’t even need to thank me. Rescuing you was the guiding reason for almost everything I’ve done over the years. I should be thanking you for somehow tracking me down and showing me that my life’s work paid off. That I really did save you.”
Still my tears kept coming. “I just felt so guilty,” I told her. “Ever since I got to America, I’ve carried around this guilt, because I left you to die. And then when I saw that postcard, and I realized that you didn’t die, that it wasn’t my fault—I felt a million pounds lighter. And now, to learn that you couldn’t even have come with me in the first place, because if you had then neither of us would have gotten out . . .”
I shook my head. It was too enormous. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
“What if something had gone wrong, though?” I asked. “Like, what if my dad died before he was able to teach you everything he knew? What if you’d just never been able to figure out how to create the portal that I needed?”
“I worried about that,” Kitty said. “By the time I finally created your portal, it was 2002. For years I’d feared that some terrible accident would befall me before I had the opportunity to complete my work.
“But your father never worried. He believed that time is . . . well, this is hard to explain to pretty much anyone who’s not a theoretical physicist. But he believed—and I do, too—that time is not a straight line where first this happens and then the next thing happens and then the next. He believed that since the portal did show up for you in 1940, that meant that at some point in the future, somebody had already created it.”
I was distracted enough by trying to understand this that my tears had stopped. “I don’t get it,” I said. “I mean, I sort of do, but when I try to focus in on exactly how it would work, it seems to crumble into little pieces.”
“I’ve had more than seventy years longer than you to puzzle this one out,” Kitty pointed out gently. “It doesn’t need to make sense right away. I’m going to give you some of my research. Not all of it, but a few of the key pieces. I’m sure most of it will seem nonsensical at this point, but you can hold on to it. And maybe once you’ve graduated from college, or graduate school, or whatever it is you go on to do, you’ll find some value in my notes.”
She stood and walked slowly across the room to a credenza with silver candlesticks and china plates displayed behind its glass front. She bent over, deliberately, painfully.
“Can I help you?” I asked, already on my feet.
“No, no, that’s fine. Goodness, I should be able to get around my own house by myself !” Finally she opened the cabinet doors below the glass front, and instead of seeing more dining room supplies, I saw that the bottom of the credenza was a filing cabinet stuffed with papers. Kitty started pulling out files. “You can have this one,” she said, “and this one. . . . Oh, you’ll definitely want this. . . . Now, where did I put the notes from the Paris meeting? . . .”
“Are you sure you want me to have all of this?” I asked, watching the piles of papers grow at her feet.
“I’m certainly not going to do anything else with it. My research on time travel stopped in 2002. Once I’d created your portal, my work was complete.”
“Is it okay if I s
how all this to someone else?” I asked. “My friend Jake is really interested in all this stuff. He’s the only person who knows where I really came from.”
“Certainly.” Kitty stopped pulling files and looked at me. “Jake. . . . Now, is he a friend who’s a boy, or a boyfriend?”
“Kitty,” I said in a withering tone. “Seriously?”
She laughed. “Do you remember when we had that crush on one of Justine’s boyfriends? What was his name? The tall one, with the long eyelashes.”
I started laughing, too. “Henry! Henry Lee.”
“Oh, of course! How could I forget Henry Lee? And I dared you to write him a love letter.”
“And I dared you to kiss him,” I said.
“And then Justine threw her shoes at us!”
“She had terrible aim,” I said.
“I wonder whatever happened to Henry Lee,” Kitty mused.
“Who knows. That was the last time I ever saw him. I don’t think he came around to call on Justine after all that.”
“It’s magical,” Kitty said, “to have someone who remembers the same things I do.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s even more magical than time travel.”
I piled Kitty’s files onto her coffee table, and then she took me out the back door of her house, so I could see the garden she kept there: flowers of all colors, and small lemon and orange trees. Butterflies darted among the plants, and the air smelled sweet and fresh.
“Since when do you garden?” I asked.
“Since I settled in Manarola. I spent so many years of my life on the run, or exploring the world, wandering from place to place. Once I had a home of my own, I wanted to make it feel permanent.”
As I smelled her flowers, she told me that she’d moved here in 1987 because it seemed beautiful, remote, and, most importantly, safe—someplace no one would ever expect her to be. She was never confident that the British government had stopped looking for her. She never stopped worrying that if they were to find her, they would try to silence her.