by Rodney Jones
“I can’t search the whole year?”
She shook her head. “You should be able to, but the bozo who set this up, Mr. I-have-a-PhD-in-library-sciences, screwed it up and then vanished. That was a month ago.” She rolled her eyes. “We’ve disabled the global search function because it was causing the network to crash. So anyway… fecal matter happens.”
I used the drop-down lists to choose August 22, the day Tess had left. An old-looking Rutland Herald front page appeared on the screen.
“And there you are. Good to go.” She gave me a quick, fake smile. “If you need anything more, I’ll be at the front desk.” She walked away.
I typed “Liz Wise” into the search field and got zero results. I tried just “Liz” but did no better with that. I then tried “Tess.” Nothing.
No biggie. That doesn’t mean diddly. She wouldn’t have run immediately to the paper’s office and zipped off a message, anyway. It probably took her a few days. So I searched the next three days, but I still found nothing.
A thought struck me. Maybe she hadn’t arrived there on the same day she’d left, or even the same month. It wasn’t as if someone had given us a time travel manual. If it had really worked, I had no idea where or when Tess would have landed.
I had to at least try. She was my best friend, whether she was with me or in another time or on another planet. I searched through the remainder of August. Finding nothing, I started on September, opening each day in sequence—nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Midway through the month, after thirty minutes of “nothings,” my patience arrived at its breaking point.
Okay, one more, and if I don’t find anything... I clicked on September 15, searched for Liz, then Tess, and low and behold, more nothing. The assistant came by to see how I was doing. I shook my head then showed her all I had accomplished—nothing.
“You know, you can link multiple key words, like this.” She demonstrated. “Then copy and paste them. It’s much quicker.”
“Oh, yeah.” I nodded as if everyone knew that, as if I had just wanted to do it the old-fashioned, take-forever way.
When she walked away again, I opened September 16, typed in the string of words, clicked Search, and got the usual nothing—a bit more efficiently perhaps but still nothing. I opened the seventeenth… nothing… the eighteenth—
“Oh my God,” I whispered. A match. One for Liz and one for Tess. I stared at the screen, strangely thrilled and terrified at the same time. My pulse quickened as I read.
Dear Liz,
Yes, I made it. I arrived here on the thirteenth. John’s trial starts in just a few days, so I need to get my rump back into the saddle and get going, as it will take nearly all of that time to get there. I’m nervous about the trial, nervous about everything, but so far, so good. I have a friend here in Rutland who knows where I’m from, which helps a lot.
I’m sorry. I don’t have much time now, but I promise I’ll write as frequently as possible. Please tell my mom that I’m okay. I’ll write to her soon. I’ll never forget you. I miss you, and love you.
Tess
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.” It had to be some other Liz, a different Tess, a different John, a different trial—an incredible, outrageous coincidence.
I read the letter again. It was her. It could only have been from her. I put a hand over my mouth to prevent myself from laughing or squealing.
I sent the page to the printer then continued searching until I found another ad posted on the thirtieth. It was a letter to her mom, explaining why she’d left and telling her in so many words that she loved her. And just below that was a message informing me that “Thanks to my gifts, John was acquitted and his uncle fully recovered.” She went on to say that John had purchased some land a few miles south of Rutland, and he was planning to build a house there. They were making plans for their wedding, which was to be on October 23.
“Jesus, she’s wasting no time,” I whispered.
I continued searching. I found an account of the wedding, so frugal and quaint, a description of the house, “a modest farm” near Rutland, just up the road from me, and then plans to build a second house next door for John’s aunt and uncle. From a mid-February paper, I learned that Tess was pregnant.
In an August paper, I learned she’d had a boy, Edwin Oliver Bartley, born on the sixth. In September of 1877, another baby arrived—Elizabeth Ann.
I sat there before that computer, taking deep breaths and sniffling, holding back a barrage of tears.
They grew corn and wheat and oats. Tess planted a garden and grew tomatoes, carrots, snap beans, peas, onions, garlic, and various herbs. They seemed to have every farm animal imaginable: cows, chickens, geese, pigs, goats, even turkeys. She wrote, “I miss flush toilets and electricity. Waiting patiently for the day. I miss pizza too, but I’m working on that one.” She shared stories from her and John’s adventures, train trips to faraway lands, such as New York, Burlington, Boston, Kennebunkport. She was thrilled when her friend Abigail married. “Her husband, Thomas, is such a cool dude.”
I was amazed at how quickly Tess’s life unfolded before me. I’d been there in the library for three hours and had gone through six years of her life. She had three children in that time, and a fourth was on the way. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I returned to the library for several days and followed year after year, decade after decade of Tess’s life. Her family grew to five. The kids went to school, got into all sorts of trouble, and then, one by one, they married. Aunt Lil and Uncle Ed died within a year of each other in 1892 and 1893. Tess wrote, “I had never known love like the love they had shown me. I will always miss them.”
Starting in 1898, Tess began including photos of her and her family among the ad spaces she bought. They were infrequent and, I suspected, costly. In one of the photos from 1904, I mistook one of her children for her then realized that the older lady in the grainy black-and-white image was actually Tess. She was still thinking of the friend she’d left in the future almost thirty years before. Thirty years. It took my breath away to think of it.
The following Friday, I returned again to the library. I was sifting through the Herald archives, doing my usual search, when I came to a gap. After spending an hour searching the later months of the 1942 daily editions and coming up empty, I began to suspect that I’d read her final message. I didn’t want to believe it. She’d offered no hints that it would be her last, so I kept on searching.
I wondered if she had finally forgotten about me. Perhaps she’d grown tired of the crazy, sixty-seven-year-old lopsided relationship. I struggled to keep my head above the pathetic feelings of rejection, reminding myself that while for me, she had only been gone a week, for her it had been decades.
I was about to give up when, in the October 6, 1943 edition, I got a match for Tess Bartley. It was not a message to me. Instead of the usual place among the ad pages at the back of the paper, the article was on page six.
I clapped a hand over my mouth as a squeaky croak left my throat. “Oh my God.” I couldn’t bring myself to look.
I didn’t close the file, didn’t log out, didn’t hesitate. I just left. I went to my car and sat there, staring out over the hood, a painful lump in my throat. I couldn’t keep it down forever, though. As if a dam had broken, the tears rushed out of me. I cried more than I’d ever cried in my life.
There I was, happy as a clam, reading along and watching her grow old, while not really considering that she was aging. It had been less than a week since I had last seen her, and in that time, I’d consumed her entire life. I should have paced myself, one message at a time, spread her life out to coincide with the passing of my own.
I bawled my heart out in that parking lot, convulsing with sobs, a flood of tears and mucus, a blubbering train wreck—the memories, the loss, the regrets, the pain, coming and going like waves crashing a wind-swe
pt beach.
Six years passed. I’d just gotten my MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier and was at my parents’ house in Wallingford, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my shiny new degree. After hanging around for a couple of days, I looked up some of my old friends. Steven had married and was still living in Dorset, helping his father run the horse farm. I was so close to calling him. I had the phone in my hand, ready to dial, but then I changed my mind.
Kyle Ackley was somewhere in Pennsylvania, a department manager for Hershey’s. Bill Hoyt was in the Southern State Correctional Facility. The only person I could find to hang with was Nicole Adams. She was married and living in Rutland. I asked her if she’d like to get together for lunch. She agreed to meet me at Ramunto’s. We talked about old times, and of course, the topic of Tess came up.
“I’ve never gotten over her bizarre disappearance. I miss her,” she said.
It was all about Tess from there on—the good times, the silly times, the borderline-insane times. I wondered what happened to the disagreements, the petty arguments, the jealousies, the nasty sarcasms. Those times, I guessed, just didn’t fit the myth.
Nicole and I promised each other we’d stay in touch then did our hugs and good-byes. As I got into my car to leave, an ocean of memories flooded my mind. I was sitting in the parking lot where Tess and I had exchanged our going-away gifts. Every little detail from that day was still fresh in my mind. I could almost see her sitting in the seat beside me, going through that crazy bag of pharmaceuticals. I began thinking about her life with John, trying to imagine her washing clothes by hand, plucking chickens, making biscuits and pancakes and pizza from scratch. And five kids. Oh, man.
I had never told anyone the truth about where Tess had gone, not even her mother. I visited Ann McKinnon from time to time. She always seemed so happy to see me, as if I somehow brought her closer to her missing daughter. But I never told her about the ads in the Rutland Herald. I felt sure the whole thing would freak her out.
The last time I had visited her was in July. Ann invited me out back for a glass of lemonade.
“I’d offer you a beer, but I don’t have any,” she said.
I hadn’t expected a beer. I was pretty sure Ann hadn’t had a drink since Tess left.
We sat there under the glow of a sunset, retelling old Tess stories and making up new ones, as if she were simply away on vacation or something.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she went off to some exotic land with that guy she met… a beautiful little island in the Pacific,” I said.
“Yeah, palm trees and blue water.” Ann took a sip of lemonade then smiled. “What was his name?”
“John Samuel Bartley.”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s a pirate’s name.”
Someday, I would tell her the truth. I had to… for Tess.
Tess had shared her entire life with me, all the high points and some of the lows, with all the in-between stuff left up to my imagination. I’d always painted her as happy in my mind. I had a complete image of her life in my head, from the beginning to the end. Well, almost the end. I’d never gone that far. But it was time.
I went to the library, got on a computer, and brought up the Herald’s archives. I went straight to the October 6, 1943 edition and typed her name in the search field.
Tess, Mrs. S. Bartley, born November 4, 1991, to Mr. and Mrs. Dylan J. McKinnon.
Mrs. Bartley passed away on the evening of September 30, 1943, at the age of 84. She died peacefully in her home, surrounded by her family. Tess was survived by her husband of sixty-six years, Mr. John S. Bartley, and five children—
I smiled at the thought of John sneaking in Tess’s real birthdate. The obituary went on to list the children by name, along with their husbands or wives. Next, it listed her twenty-three grandchildren and twenty-one great-grandchildren.
Her twenty-first great-grandchild, Sarah Lynn Wise, was born less than an hour before her passing.
“What?” I read it again. “Sarah Lynn Wise?” That had to be the wildest coincidence ever. My grandmother’s name was Sarah.
I sent the screen to the printer then hurried out the door. From the sidewalk out front, I dug out my phone and called my grandmother.
“Grandma?”
“Kate?” She’d never once recognized my voice over the phone.
“It’s Liz.” I paced the twenty feet between the front steps of the library and the street.
“Well, bless my heart. What’s the news from my college grad? Have you found a job yet?”
“No, but I have a question for you, Grandma.” I stepped off the sidewalk and stood before an empty bench under the shade of a paper birch.
“Oh?”
“What was your mom’s maiden name?”
“She was a Bartley, hon. And her mother was a McShirley,” she added.
A shiver passed up my spine. I lowered my butt to the bench. “And what about her father’s mother? Do you know what her maiden name was?”
“Hmm.” There was a long pause. “I’m getting lost here. I don’t remember her name, Liz. I know I have it written down somewhere, but off the top of my head—”
“Do you recall her first name?”
“Oh, yes. It was Tess. I’ve always liked the name Tess. Let’s see, she’d be your great-great… great-grandmother, wouldn’t she?”
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about the author
Rodney Jones—a past resident of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Florida, New York, and Vermont—now resides in Indiana, where he whiles away his days pecking at a laptop, riding his ten-speed up the Cardinal Greenway, taking long walks with his daughter, or backpacking and wilderness camping.
His list of past occupations reads like his list of past residences, though his life-long ambition was to be an artist until he discovered a latent affinity for writing.
“In art,” Rodney says, “I was constantly being asked to explain images constructed from a palette of emotions and ideas, which usually required complex narratives to convey their meaning, if there even was a meaning. In writing, the words are creating the images, images are telling a story, the story is evoking feelings. I like it. There’s nothing to explain.”
Rodney’s interests include art, science, politics, whiskey and chocolate, music, gardening, and travel.
other books by rodney jones
The Sun, the Moon, and Maybe the Trains
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Did you love All the Butterflies in the World? Then you should read Canvas Bound by Laura M. Kolar!
Sixteen-year-old Libby Tanner’s art comes to life. Her painted skies turn from day to night, leaves rustle on trees, and sometimes, a mystery boy appears.
While attending England’s Aldridge Art Academy, Libby meets charming Brent Henderson, a performing arts student who showers her with attention. But his rival, gorgeous Dean James, is the one who occupies her mind, even though he’s very much attached to his current girlfriend.
Libby soon learns there’s more to both Brent and Dean than she ever imagined. In order to save her future and the boy who’s captured her heart, she must unlock the secrets behind her art by entering the most dangerous place of all… the world within her paintings.
But once she steps into the canvas, she risks being trapped forever.
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