by Rosa Sophia
***
While Kat was looking for something to wear and wondering what had happened to her own clothing, Phillip Maslin was pacing angrily across the living room. He stopped to lean against the edge of the wide stone fireplace, looking down into the pile of burnt ashes. During the winter, fires had raged there and his wife had stood beside it. Now she shied away from the fireplace as though it had become something utterly repulsive.
“I don’t want that woman in my house,” Phillip snapped. Julie was standing at the entrance to the living room, staring at the ground.
“Everything is fine,” she said timidly. “She just got lost in the woods, that’s all. She must have fallen. I don’t think she can remember anything.”
“I don’t care! She’s strange. Everything about her is unusual, even her clothes.”
“Please.” She cocked her head shyly like a little girl and wrapped her arms around herself. “Please, just let her stay until she remembers. Then we can take her home.”
“I have a better idea. I’ll put up a notice at Paul Waring’s store—‘young girl found. No memory. Blond hair…’”
“All right, Phillip. I’m going to go make us some lunch.”
When his wife had left the room, Mr. Maslin sat down in his favorite armchair and picked up the newspaper. He didn’t want to think about their guest. He wanted to forget she was there, because there was something about her that unnerved him. There was something about her eyes and the shape of her face. Something so familiar that it deeply chilled his heart.
***
Kat was wearing one of Julie’s housedresses when she walked out into the hallway, her gaze darting around in fright. There were pictures on the walls and one of them caught her eye. She remembered this picture. Her father had it once, stowed away in one of the bottom dresser drawers of his bedroom.
“I was five then,” he had told her. “One of my uncles was a photographer. He came down to visit us once and took my picture. Then he and Dad got in a big fight and he left. I think it was about Mama.”
Kat could remember seeing her father shake his head as he put away the picture. He had refused to tell her any more, insisting it wasn’t a story for children, especially not his own little girl.
When her father was killed, it was in the dead of winter. He had left for work and never came back. When his car was found, it was concluded that someone had tampered with it. The brake lines had been cut. But when the cops delivered the news that no evidence of a killer could be found, and that David Maslin’s own fingerprints proved that he had done it himself, Kat had locked herself in her parents’ bedroom and cradled her father’s aged photo while she wept for hours on end.
At sixteen years old, she lost her father and learned that he had taken his own life. Was it her fault? Had she disappointed him enough to make him want to die? His car had missed the bridge by several feet and had plummeted down a short bank and into the river beneath. Had he changed his mind at the last moment, reached desperately for the door handle? Kat had no way of knowing for sure.
She reached up and gently touched her father’s face, running her fingers over the photo that, at this time, appeared new and free of blemishes.
Back in her time…
The photo was old and creased.
Back in her time…
Things were a lot different.
Kat was having a hard time figuring out what was going on. What had taken her here? How in God’s name had she arrived in this different house, with these people? She thought desperately, hoping to arrive at some conclusion, hoping to discover something that would explain why she was here. Then she looked down at her hand. The jewel adorning it glimmered. She had found her answer.
***
Kat ran outside. If it had worked the first time, it would work again. She didn’t care about leaving her things behind. She just wanted to get home. She lifted her skirt and ran as fast she could, kicking her shoes off her feet. Heading for the line of trees, she raised her awareness to the ring on her finger.
The ring sparkled as she ran. Into the woods, into the woods, into the woods…
She tripped on purpose and landed flat on her face. This time it hurt a lot more than it had the first time and she waited a few moments before slowly lifting her head. Birds sang around her and sunlight moved over her immobile form. Had it worked?
“Hey!” The voice coming from behind her startled her. She pushed herself up into a seated position and turned her head. There was a boy running toward her from the yard. It was her father.
“Damn it,” she muttered. Under normal circumstances, she would have welcomed a visit from her father, but he was dead. Seeing him as a child perplexed her. She just wanted to go home, her father dead like he was supposed to be, and her life with Jake only at its beginning.
She sat there with her legs sprawled out and her dirty hands flat on the ground behind her until the little boy arrived.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He was curious, but Kat could tell that he was also afraid. She nodded and then pulled herself to her feet.
“I’m all right,” she said, as though she was trying to convince herself as well. She brushed off her dress, frowning. “I—I was hoping it would work.”
“What do you mean?” He turned and started to walk back toward the yard. Kat followed by his side, trying to ignore the pain in her skull.
“I was trying to get home.”
“Daddy said he doesn’t think you remember anything about where you came from.”
Kat looked up at the house and sighed. It was her house, all right, but it was her house stuck in a much different time. Or it was her who was stuck. She couldn’t tell, and tried to come to a conclusion. There was none.
“I remember some things,” she admitted. “But not enough to get me home.”
“Would you like to come to the creek with me?” the boy asked. “It’s nice down there.”
“Sure, David.”
He stopped and turned. He looked at her with eyes that were nearly as blue as a violet flower petal.
“How did you know what my name is?”
“I—I uh, heard your father mention it,” she hazarded. David shrugged and continued walking.
“The creek’s down this way.”
***
The driveway up to the Maslin house was long and curved in the middle. It was a dirt drive and surrounded by tall, thick trees with seemingly impenetrable foliage. Flies and gnats flew around Kat’s head until she and David began to walk faster down the driveway. They stopped occasionally to pick black raspberries that grew in wide, generous spaces, their branches reaching out lazily.
Butterflies and dragonflies flitted past Kat and she couldn’t help but admire their beauty. The sun was filtering through the canopies of maple and mulberry trees and making bright spotlights that moved with each dance of the wind.
“How old are you, David?” Kat inquired as they stepped out at the end of the driveway.
“Eleven.” The tone of his voice made Kat think he was used to saying things on command. It was as though an instinct within him was insisting upon quick response as a defense mechanism.
She couldn’t imagine why her father would have this instinct. He’d never spoken much about his childhood. Every time he did, Kat’s mother would reach over and squeeze his hand. She might have known something, but she never gave her daughter a hint as to what it might be. Kat did the math and realized that if her father was eleven now, then it must be 1960, in which case her mother was twelve years old and currently living in Colorado.
Kat walked across the dirt road with David, taking each step with purpose and mindfulness, trying to see how real this reality was. The two of them passed over the area that would one day have a yellow line streaked through it and Kat wondered how far back in the middle of nowhere this place really was.
David asked her if she was okay again, and she insisted she was fine. There was something in his voice that was almost paternal, as though part o
f him already knew who she was.
Leave it to a kid to figure that one out, she thought, puzzled.
***
Kat made herself comfortable on a large rock and let her feet dangle in the shallow water. She and David were near the bridge she remembered driving across on the day she returned to her grandparents’ house. Now she watched as a young, timid version of her father reached his tiny hands into the water and scooped up a crayfish. He cried out when it pinched his finger, then dropped it and watched as the small creature scurried away. Then, as though he had been considering the same phrase for the past hour, he turned to Kat and spoke.
“How’d you get here?” He moved in the water, his feet stirring up silt. “I mean, really, how’d you get here? You do remember, I know it.”
“What makes you think that?” Kat straightened her dress, even though she didn’t really care and looked with disdain at the uncomfortable shoes Julie had lent her. They were sitting on the rock beside her, caked with mud from the bank.
“You look confused, but I know that when I forget big things, I get more scared than anything. I get mad at myself and frustrated. But you don’t look like that.” He cocked his head and ran his wet fingers through his hair. “If you had forgotten everything and you were in a place that was new, wouldn’t you be scared?”
“Yeah, I would be.”
“Then you do remember.”
Kat sighed heavily and looked up toward the sky.
“Do you promise to keep this a secret?” When she saw the certainty in his expression, she knew the answer before he spoke.
“Yes. I’ve had to keep secrets before.”
“I do remember where I came from,” Kat admitted. “I come from here. Only, this area looks different, I mean…”
“You live down the street?”
“No.” Kat smiled and kicked at the water, making it splash. “What I mean is…”
Suddenly, Kat realized something incredible. If she told David, her father, where she had come from, it would mean that later on in his life, he would remember her being there. Even if she didn’t tell him now that she was his daughter, he would eventually know anyway. After all, she didn’t look much different at twenty-four than she had as a teenager.
That would mean that all the time he’d spent nurturing her and taking care of her, until her sixteenth year, he would know that he had seen and spoken with his own daughter, Katherine, when he was only eleven years old.
Then again, considering that life tends to go in great big circles, had all of this happened already? When David Maslin had shown his daughter the old photograph he kept in his dresser, had he known that she had been there, by the creek in the summer of 1960?
“Katherine? Are you all right?”
Kat looked up and saw the little boy. She smiled. “Yes, I’m fine. What was I saying? And how did you know my name?”
“Mama told me. She said I should be nice to you because you can’t remember anything. At least, that’s what she thinks.” He hurriedly banished his happiness, as though it were dangerous to be cheerful.
“Anyway,” Kat continued. “I may as well start from the top.”
“Good idea.” David bent down to catch another crayfish. This time he picked a smaller one, a baby that was less likely to bite him. Then he went and sat down next to Katherine.
“I think it began with this ring.” Kat lifted up her hand and looked at the gold as it sparkled under the sun.
“That looks like Mama’s,” David commented.
“Maybe it is. I have these dreams about your mother. They’ve been going on for years. Things changed after I moved into my house—which is to say, well, your house.”
“Where was Mama? Did she live with you?”
Kat remembered the news of her grandmother’s death. What was she supposed to say? She fumbled for words and finally came up with the easiest solution.
“I’m not going to give you all of the details, David. You’ll find out on your own.” He wouldn’t find out, of course. He wouldn’t live long enough. “As I was saying, I moved in. Part of my dream involved this ring and then I found it on the second floor, near your mother’s bedroom. The next day, I went on a picnic. I fell asleep, I think.”
Kat felt her heart beating faster and her face growing flush. The fear was coming back. “I remember hearing thunder. There was a lot of lightning. I couldn’t find my picnic basket. I don’t know what happened to it.” David watched her, listening raptly and barely paying any attention to the crayfish in his hand. “I ran from the storm,” Kat told him. “I wasn’t sure how far out in the woods I had gone. I guess I didn’t mention it, but I was in the woods behind your house. I kept running and then I tripped and landed face down on the ground. When I looked up and kept walking toward home, I found that I wasn’t home anymore. It was the same house and the same yard, but instead of my fiancé, there was you and your family.”
“You’re not married?” David asked. For some reason, he didn’t seem particularly amazed by her story. He was very interested, but his childish innocence was keeping him from disbelief. Kat supposed that it was easy to stay innocent out here, where the nearest neighbor was probably about a half a mile down the road.
“I don’t know when we’ll get married,” Kat replied. “We’ve been engaged for a while.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jake.” Kat laughed. “I’m surprised you enjoy listening to this kind of thing. Boys usually think stuff like this is gross or something.”
“There are worse things.” David shrugged. He did that a lot.
“I guess you’re right about that.”
A few long minutes passed as David let the crayfish walk from hand to hand. Then he let it go and looked back at Katherine.
“What time do you come from? You did time travel, right?”
“Time travel. It sounds even stranger when you say it like that. But before I got here, it was the year 2005. Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Promise.”
“I’m still not sure if any of this is real. I could have some mental problem. There could be something wrong with me. This might be my imagination, even you.”
“You mean, I might not be real?”
“If I’m sick in the head, I guess you wouldn’t be.” Kat looked at the boy, who looked back at her, then stared worriedly into the water.
“I’m real,” he said insistently. “I am.”
“It just doesn’t seem normal that I could have time traveled. It’s weird. That stuff doesn’t happen.”
“Well.” David stood up and jumped across to another rock. “I wonder if Jesus’s followers thought it was weird when he came back from the dead?”
“You’ve got a point there, kid.” She stood, and picked up her shoes. “I have to wash these off before we go back.”
“Do they let girls run around in the mud and get their shoes dirty where you come from?” the boy asked.
“I’m sure somewhere back in civilization, no matter what year it is, girls get their shoes muddy all the time.”
“This is civilization.”
“I’m not sure about that. I think your father lives in his own little world, where girls aren’t allowed to get anything dirty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Katherine?”
“I’d rather not explain. And by the way, you can call me Kat.”
Kat washed her shoes off in the creek, and they started back to the house. Then a motor roared somewhere behind them. David perked up and turned, standing on his tiptoes so he could just about see over the bridge. An old Chevy moved into view, a green one that in the year 2005 could’ve been found at the Antique Cruise Nights at the local ice cream shop. When the vehicle came across the bridge, turned right and then left into the Maslin’s’ driveway, David loosened up and started walking again. Kat followed.
“It’s Sleeper’s friend, Jacob Haisley,” he explained.
“Who’s Sleeper?”
“Mama�
��s brother. He lives with us. You probably wouldn’t have met him or my grandmother yet. They both keep to their own rooms most of the time, especially Sleeper.”
“Why?”
“Grandma’s getting pretty old and she and Daddy don’t let Sleeper out of the house.”
“What?” Kat asked skeptically.
“Grandma says that Sleeper’s an abom-in—an abomination. She says he was punished by God because he’s blind and that he doesn’t deserve to be seen.”
“That’s sick!” Kat exclaimed. David’s eyes grew wide with disbelief.
“Never talk like that in front of them,” he told her as he paused beside the road. “Daddy and Grandma don’t like it when I talk back. I try not to talk at all.”
***
Jacob Haisley climbed out of his car and headed up to the house with a bounce in his step. He had just come back from the city and was carrying a small box in his hand, one that he intended to give to his best friend.
Jacob lived a life that Frank envied. He came to visit Tinicum from New York as much as he could. He had said, over and over, “Let me take you away from here. You can live in the city with me and I’ll find you a nice woman, just like Scarlet.” He always laughed when he said that, because the truth was, Scarlet was an escort who worked at one of the high-class joints he frequented. Jacob was her best customer.
His friend never liked the idea of having such a woman. He just wanted someone who would love him enough to make him eggs in the morning and read him Oliver Twist before bed. He didn’t know how to find that woman, because he didn’t know how to leave the Maslin estate without stirring up trouble. Jacob swore to him that one day, he would get him out of there, even if it took his entire life’s savings.