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I hated leaving Winnie in the lurch. I couldn’t handle a conversation with her about why I was going; I would only get tangled up in lies. As I did with Joanna, I wrote her a note, leaving it on the table in the kitchen where she would see it first thing in the morning. I apologized for leaving so abruptly and thanked her for the job and for her kindness. I need to leave quickly, I wrote, but I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me. There was simply no way to give her more of an explanation. I told her I’d miss her and Poppy, and I would.
I hugged Poppy good-bye. She’d been “my dog” for only a few weeks, but I’d come to love her. I hoped Winnie would hire a housekeeper who would also take on Poppy’s care. Someone like me, only … less encumbered. Someone fully rooted in the here and now.
I packed my few belongings, including the framed picture of Joanna and me, into Hunter’s backpack, then set out to walk the mile to Joanna’s house. Between the streetlights and faint moonlight, I didn’t need to use my flashlight. I had almost an hour before I needed to step off and I carried more pain in my heart than I thought it could bear. Joanna’s fine, I told myself. She doesn’t need me. Joe will.
I stood on the sidewalk in front of Joanna’s house. None of the downstairs lights were on, at least not in the front of the house, but as I felt my way toward the backyard, I could see that the windows of Joanna’s room were filled with a dim light, more than her princess night-light would have produced. She was supposed to be well asleep by now, but I had the feeling she was either reading in bed or on her computer. I hoped she was deeply engrossed in whatever she was doing. The only lights burning other than Joanna’s were faint, somewhere in the interior of the house. I was safe.
The hazy moonlight reached the yard in irregularly shaped patches and I took small steps, remembering the shrubs and flower beds dotting the perimeter that I didn’t want to trip over or crash into. I scanned the distance ahead of me for the tree house, but couldn’t make it out at all. I dared to turn on the flashlight for a moment, just long enough to see that I was still quite a distance from it. Turning out my light, I continued picking my way across the lawn. When I thought I was near the tree house, I turned on the light again to cover the last few yards and locate the steps, then I quickly turned it off again. I stumbled a bit climbing the stairs without the light … or maybe it was my fear that made me lose my footing. Or the deep, deep sadness I was trying to hold at bay.
I reached the second-story deck and shined the light briefly at the hard ground far below. Sweat broke out across my back beneath my light jacket and the backpack. If only there was water down there! How was I going to get the courage to step off? I had to do it, though. There was no alternative. I glanced at my chronometer. I had ten minutes to stew about this. That was all.
I turned on my flashlight to quickly locate one of the deck chairs and turned it off again, setting it carefully on the deck as I moved the chair into place below the railing.
“Carly?”
I jumped at the sound of Joanna’s voice from the yard below. Damn it. “Joanna?” I asked, even though I knew perfectly well that was Joanna down there. I found the flashlight on the deck and shone it toward the ground. She put up an arm to cover her eyes.
“What are you doing up there?” she asked.
“I…” I couldn’t think of a thing to say to explain why I was in the tree house. All I knew was that I had to get her back in the house, someway, somehow, and I needed to do it quickly.
“Why are you here?” She left the circle of my flashlight and I heard her on the tree house stairs.
“Don’t come up here, honey,” I said, as her footsteps grew closer. “Please,” I pleaded. “Just go back in the house.”
“Dad said you were here last night, too,” she said as she reached the deck where I was standing. I could see a glint of moonlight in her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“I really need to be alone right now, Joanna,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know it seems odd that I’m up here, but I thought it would be a good place to come and think. Do you mind going back into the house?”
She didn’t budge. Her pale hair shimmered in the moonlight and I fought the urge to reach out and smooth my hand over it.
“You’re acting weird,” she said. She was close enough that I could smell that shampoo scent she always carried with her, and my heart began to break. I reached for her, unable to stop myself. Pulling her to me, I buried my face in her hair.
“I love you,” I said.
She stiffened beneath my arms, squirming away from my embrace. “I love you, too,” she said, “but I don’t get what’s going on.”
I looked at my chronometer.
Five minutes.
I was about to disappear right before my daughter’s eyes. I had to tell her something. Give her some sort of explanation.
I had to tell her the truth.
“Listen to me, Joanna,” I said, pressing my hands together. “This will be very hard for you to believe, but please try. Please just listen and try to understand what I tell you.”
“Tell me what?” She was growing frustrated.
“I’m your birth mother, sweetheart.” I reached out to touch her arm. “But it’s very compli—”
“What?” She said the word so quietly I barely heard her. She jerked her arm away from my touch. “My birth mother is dead.”
“Listen to me,” I pleaded again. “I only have a few minutes to explain. I’m your mother. I promise you that. But I came here from 1970. I’m time-traveling, which I know sounds impossible, but I really am. I was pregnant with you in 1970, but you had that problem with your heart when you were inside me and I—”
“Stop it!” She took a step away from me. She put her hands over her ears. “Stop saying—”
“Listen to me,” I said again. “Just listen. I found out I could have fetal surgery if I came to 2001 and that’s what I did. And then … it’s so complicated!” I blew out my breath in frustration. “I had to go back to 1970 for a few days and when I tried to return to 2001, I accidentally landed in 2013. I didn’t realize it at first. I thought it was still 2001 and I tried to find you in the hospital where I’d left you, but then I discovered it was 2013 and…” I choked up. “I was devastated,” I managed to say.
“Mom!” Joanna shouted toward the house.
“No, don’t call!” I grabbed her arm, but quickly let go. “I had to try to find you and finally I did,” I said, hurrying on. “And Joanna? You know how I went to Washington to look for the name of my uncle on the Vietnam Memorial Wall? That wasn’t my uncle I was looking for. It was your father. Joe Sears.”
Joanna’s eyes glistened with tears and I knew they had nothing to do with “Joe Sears” or even with me. They had everything to do with the terror I was creating in her. Still, I had to continue.
“I thought he—your father, Joe—was killed in Vietnam, but at the wall I discovered that he’d lived. That he was a prisoner of war and would be coming home … and I realized I have to be there to help him. I have to go back to 1970 and wait for him to come home.”
“Oh my God!” She grabbed the deck railing. “You are insane!”
“I needed to find you to know you were all right, and you are,” I said. “You’re so much better than all right, and much as I love you and want to be in your life, I think Joe is going to—”
“Mom!” Joanna shouted again toward the house, her voice frantic. “Mom! Dad! Help!”
Oh, God. I was terrifying her. I looked toward the house. In one of the upstairs rooms, a light flashed on. “Shh, honey!” I said, glancing at the chronometer. Less than a minute. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know this is overwhelming. Just believe me when I say I love you. I’ll always love you.”
“Daddy, help!” she shouted again.
“Listen to me. I have to step off the deck—the railing—of the tree house. It’s—”
“What?”
I climbed onto the chair, squatting on the sea
t, holding on to the railing in front of me. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I know it sounds scary but it’s not. It’s all right. I’ve done this before.” Over water, I thought. I’ve done it before over water.
“Are you drunk?” Joanna asked. “Did you take some kind of drug? Please get off the chair!”
She reached for my arm and I shook it off. Someone turned on the rear deck light. I was crying now, barely able to see the time on the chronometer. Rising to my feet on the chair, I leaned over to clutch the railing as I lifted one foot, then the other onto the narrow length of wood.
“Stop!” Joanna shouted. She was crying hard, terrified. “I’m sorry I said you’re insane. I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Just come down, Carly! Please!”
“I love you,” I said, one more time, and as I stepped off I heard her scream.
“Mom!” she wailed.
But I knew I was not the mother she was calling for.
60
Nags Head
Cold. My body trembled with it and I couldn’t seem to move. Water filled my mouth. Salty. I swallowed, then began choking. I lay on my stomach, gasping for breath. Fighting for the strength to raise my head from the ground. No, not the ground. Sand. Water. The ocean? Yes! It roared in my ears. It washed over my body, pushing me forward a few inches, pulling me back. I coughed, struggling in the dark to get to my hands and knees. I crawled forward, away from the water, the straps of the backpack cutting into my shoulders. Winded after a few feet, I turned around and sat down, lowering myself to my elbows, my backpack the only thing keeping me from sinking onto my back with exhaustion. In front of me, moonlight speckled the sea and the white crown of the waves rushed toward me. What time was it? I lifted my hand to look at the chronometer. Four twenty-seven, but I could see that the second hand had stopped.
Myra! Had she put me in the water on purpose? My thinking began to clear. I’d asked her to let me land on the dunes. Instead, she’d nearly drowned me on the beach. I looked at the chronometer again. It had definitely stopped. I had no idea of the exact time.
Worse, I had no idea of the exact year.
I struggled to my feet. To my left, perhaps a quarter mile away, the familiar Nags Head pier caught the moonlight. I was less than a mile from home. I turned around, kicked off my soggy sneakers, then began walking on the cold damp sand toward the Unpainted Aristocracy.
And toward, I prayed, 1970.
61
HUNTER
John Paul had one of those stuffy fall colds that wouldn’t let him sleep. Patti had been up with him at ten and again at midnight, so now it was my turn to take care of him. Poor little guy. I sat with him in the bathroom, holding him on my knee as I ran a hot shower to fill the room with steam. Sitting up, he could breathe a little easier. I pressed my cheek to his head.
“How’re you doin’, big fella?” I asked.
He leaned tiredly against me in response, his breathing noisy as he tried to pull air into his stuffed little nose.
Sitting there in that weird space between awake and asleep, I had too much time to think. Tomorrow night would be the fourth portal I’d given Carly. The fourth of five. If she didn’t return then, she would have to wait until the final portal, nearly ten months from now. It would mean that her baby was still too sick to leave the hospital.
Or it would mean something had gone terribly, irrevocably wrong. That was the worry that kept me awake at night.
John Paul was finally asleep in my arms. Getting quietly to my feet, I left the sticky, hot bathroom and carried him down the hallway into his room, where I lowered him gently into the crib.
“Hunter?”
I turned at the whisper of my name from John Paul’s dark doorway. Carly stood there, barely visible, and I shut my eyes, offering a silent word of thanks to the universe. She was a day early, which made no sense, but at that moment, I didn’t care. She was home.
Walking across the room to the hall, I pressed my finger to my lips to keep her quiet. I shut the door behind me, then wrapped my arms around her. She was damp, her hair sticky with salt, her clothes cold beneath my arms. Had I messed up her landing site?
“I’m so relieved,” I said, and only then realized she had no baby with her. Maybe she’d already put her in the crib that had been waiting for her for weeks. I stepped back. “Where is she?” I asked, worried. “Where’s your baby?”
She pressed her hand to her mouth as if holding in a cry. “It’s a long, long story,” she said. “Just tell me the date, Hunter. Tell me what year it is.”
“Nineteen seventy.”
“Thank God,” she said, her body sagging with relief. “Let’s wake Patti up and I’ll tell you everything.”
62
CARLY
“This is simply unbelievable,” Patti said, when I’d told them about my time in 2013. We sat in the living room, talking by lamplight. I’d changed into dry clothes—old jeans and a sweatshirt I hadn’t seen in months—and I sat curled up on the sofa, hugging my knees against my chest. I couldn’t get warm. I felt shredded in a million pieces, happy to be home with my family, but aching with the knowledge that I would never see my daughter again. Her framed picture rested on the coffee table in front of me. Patti and Hunter hadn’t reacted to it quite the way I’d expected. Patti simply said that Joanna looked like pictures of our mother at that age, and Hunter barely glanced at the photograph. He was too upset with himself that he’d “screwed up,” as he said, and I’d been unable to return to my infant Joanna. He was horrified at the position he’d put me in, although I tried to reassure him that I didn’t blame him. I knew I hadn’t quite eased his guilt. Time travel was, if anything, an inexact science.
“Let’s focus on the fact that Joe’s coming home,” Patti said, trying to lift Hunter’s and my somber moods. “It’s such a miracle! We have to figure out how to tell the government to change his status, don’t we? They have him as dead. We have to tell them to—”
I shook my head.
“Don’t tamper,” Hunter and I said at the same time.
“I’ve done enough tampering already,” I said wearily. “Now we just have to wait. He’ll be home, and he’s going to need our help.” We had to get through two and a half years before Joe would be free. It was agonizing to think about what he was going through right now while the three of us sat, safe and secure, in the house. “I should go back to work,” I said, without enthusiasm. “I should move back to Raleigh to see if I can get my old PT job back.” I closed my eyes, suddenly exhausted. It was too much to think about right now.
Patti moved from her seat near the fireplace to the sofa. She sat next to me, her arm around my shoulders. “I know it must have killed you to leave her,” she said, nodding toward the photograph. “To leave Joanna. But I’m so glad you didn’t stay there.” She pressed her temple to mine. “I know that’s really selfish of me, but I couldn’t stand it if you never came back and we had no idea what happened to you.”
I looked at the photograph on the coffee table. “She printed that picture for me.” I smiled to myself, remembering how I’d had to coerce Joanna into making the print. I studied her twelve-year-old face, trying to accept the fact that she would not even exist for another thirty-one years.
“You’re home,” Patti said. “That’s all that matters.”
I gave her a weak smile, the best I could manage. Patti would never be able to understand that yes, I was home, but I wasn’t the same Carly I’d been before. I would never be that woman again. The new Carly came with a huge hole in her heart. I would most likely go on to be a good physical therapist, a loving wife, a supportive sister and sister-in-law. Perhaps I’d even have more children down the road. But no matter what the decades held for me, I knew this one truth: I would grieve my daughter for the rest of my life.
63
February 1973
Travis Air Force Base, California
I waited on the tarmac with a thousand other people. Some of them waved small American flags and WELCO
ME HOME and GOD BLESS YOU! signs, and on the roof of the building behind us, several men held an enormous sign that read THANKS! WELCOME HOME! Most of the people were simply proud and excited Americans, overjoyed that our POWs were finally coming home. But some of them were like me: family members who couldn’t wait to wrap their arms around their husbands and fathers. We had our own small roped-off area as we waited excitedly for the plane to arrive from the Philippines. I stood with my hands folded in front of me, biting my lip, my entire body shivering with anticipation in the still, gray air.
I heard chatter from some of the other family members around me. Many of them had gotten to know each other during the years their men had been imprisoned. They’d supported one another. Become friends. Had regular calls from the army or air force or navy with reports on the efforts to release the prisoners.
I didn’t know the other families, though. I never received those calls from the army. My case was unique. My husband had been dead to everyone, and I’d lived the last few years in a state of suspended animation, knowing what no one else knew: Joe Sears was alive. Occasionally I’d worry, wondering if that park ranger had been wrong and Joe really had been killed in Pleiku. Maybe his name really did belong on the wall that had yet to be dreamed up, much less built. But I believed she was right. I felt a connection to Joe; he was alive. Some might have said I was fantasizing, but who was to say what was possible? I’d traveled through time. To me now, everything seemed possible.
I’d been in the kitchen of our Nags Head house alone when the call finally came, and I managed to walk three steps to a chair before my knees gave out. I faked shock and surprise when the caller told me about the clerical error that had labeled Joe as “deceased.” I faked surprise, but I didn’t have to fake my joyful tears.
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