Where was her house? Where was the bed in which she’d fallen asleep? She must have fallen asleep, but her memory was so unreliable these days that she couldn’t even remember going to bed. She couldn’t get past the moment when she’d buckled herself up in the car and was about to head to the storage unit. Did she make it there?
Her tires kicked up dust from the parched ground as she raced past the trailers on her way out, panic flooding into her chest like water into drowning lungs. She had to find her children.
A cobblestone path with perfectly manicured juniper bushes led to a red door that had been painted and repainted too many times to count. It was chipped and peeling, ready for another coat, and when Maria pulled it wide it opened to silence. The sound of her footsteps bounced from the floor to the walls and back to her ears as she rushed through the corridor, and by the time she reached the windowless door of room 204, a thousand reasons not to open it ran through her mind.
“Excuse me,” she said in the moment of silence that followed her entrance, the moment before stifled laughter spread through the crowd like a virulent infection. The faces looking back at her could have been stolen from her junior high yearbook, with their teased-up bangs, frosted lips, and shaded blue eyelids. “I’m looking for my daughter,” Maria continued. “Charlotte Forssmann. She’s in Mrs. Nelson’s kindergarten class.”
The woman poised at the front of the class with chalk in hand was not a woman accustomed to interruptions. Her words, as rigid as her spine, were curt and concise, and with the snap of her fingers, silence descended upon the classroom. “You’re in the wrong building,” she said. “This is the junior high school.”
“But this used to be the pre-K and kindergarten building. Or, I guess, it will be in the future.” Words tumbled out of Maria’s mouth faster than she could control them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your class.”
As her thoughts scattered into a jumbled heap around her, the teacher wound her way through the desks and was halfway to the door before Maria’s gut told her to flee. Her legs felt like stones, though, and she couldn’t force herself to move. She knew the truth, that her daughter wasn’t there, but hope wouldn’t yield to logic.
“Chapter three,” the teacher said, with barely a glance back at the students. “And not a word until I get back.”
“I’m sorry about the interruption,” Maria mumbled, following the woman’s gaze to the clownish tennis shoes on her feet that had been stained green from the countless rounds her father had made of their lawn behind the old push mower. Intuition kept nudging her to run, but as an arm slipped around her shoulders, she stepped obediently through the empty corridors of a building she had frequented with such regularity over the past two years she could navigate it with her eyes shut. The woman at the front desk of the main office greeted them with a smile that disappeared the moment she spotted Maria’s escort.
“Mrs. Gaston,” she said, her posture straightening as if she’d been called to attention. “What can I do for you?”
“This young lady found her way into my classroom today. Can you please help her reach her parents?”
“That’s not necessary,” Maria stammered. She was struggling against a snare, a trap that should have been an easy escape, but the more she fought the tighter it squeezed.
“Would you prefer we call the police?”
“For what?”
“It’s called truancy. When you leave school without permission, it’s called truancy, and it is illegal.” The teacher nodded her head toward the woman behind the desk. “Amy here is going to call Bienville High School to see if any of their students are unaccounted for, and then maybe we can figure out who you are. I hear there’s a problem over there with some of the students skipping class and smoking marijuana.”
Maria clung to her silence as the sound of Will’s laughter bombarded her from all corners of the room. He was one of the few people who would appreciate the irony of it all. Maria was almost forty years old and had never once smoked pot, never skipped out on a class, never snuck out for a cigarette with friends. How had these become her crimes?
“My name’s Maria Forssmann,” she said, in a long exhale that presaged defeat. “And I don’t go to high school here. I know I must look like a seventeen-year-old girl and that I couldn’t possibly have a five-year-old daughter, but I assure you this is not what you think it is.”
“You don’t look older than fifteen to me.”
Amy placed the receiver back into its cradle with quiet hands, as if the noise might send Mrs. Gaston into a frenzy. “No one’s missing from the high school,” she said. “And they didn’t recognize her name as one of their students.”
“Please,” Maria said, inching toward the door. “This is just a misunderstanding. And I really don’t see the need to get my parents involved. If you’ll just let me get in my car and go, I promise I won’t bother you again.”
Mrs. Gaston pulled herself from the edge of the desk, her narrow body blocking Maria’s path to the exit. It was a deliberate gesture, and though Maria outweighed the woman by at least ten pounds, there was no getting by her without a struggle. “I don’t have time for this,” the teacher said. “I have a classroom full of eighth graders waiting for me, so the sooner you give me your parents’ phone number, the sooner you can go.”
“I’m sorry,” Maria replied. “I can’t.”
Call the police.
The words echoed in her mind even after Maria shoved her way past the teacher and watched her fall to the floor in front of the desk. She sprinted through the halls while footsteps, whether real or imagined, pounded behind her. There was no time for rest or reason, and when her father’s shoes flew from her feet she skidded down the corridors in her socks, sprinting through a maze of hallways until she reached a door on the far side of a dead end. The handle crashed into the wall when she swung it open.
“Emily Forssmann,” she gasped between pants. “I’m looking for Emily Forssmann.”
There was nothing but silence staring back at her. No snickers from students or reprimands from teachers, just an empty room in a forgotten corridor of a school with stacks of abandoned and broken chairs littering the floor. Her children weren’t there, and though she’d known that before she’d opened the door, the absence was more devastating than Maria could have imagined. Even the band of teachers that rounded the corner and barreled toward her like a seething lynch mob couldn’t force her mind back into action. Her fight, her will to go on, sank to the floor beside her, and they sat like perfect bedfellows with nothing left to do but surrender.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“MARIA!”
The militant voice that called her to attention came from the largest of her escorts back to the main office. He was a gym teacher, by the looks of him, with a whistle slung around his neck and the whitest sneakers Maria had ever seen. She curled her toes to hide the dingy, white socks on her feet, wondering what had happened to her father’s grass-stained tennis shoes. The Bienville police were on their way. “You answer me when I ask you a question.”
“I’m sorry,” Maria said, plucking her thoughts from the fog that blanketed her mind. Escape was futile. Strategies to wake herself up had occupied every second of the day, and all she’d managed to do was get picked up by the police. Maybe there was no waking up from this.
Maria shook the thought away as the door opened and Mrs. Gaston emerged with two uniformed officers. They seemed disappointed when their eyes landed on Maria. She couldn’t have been what they’d envisioned when they’d gotten a call about an unruly, drug-addled teen wreaking havoc at the junior high school.
The officer in charge was a tall man, the kind of tall that would make a boy hunch in his youth, but if that was ever his affliction, he had outgrown it. He carried himself well.
“That office in the corner there,” he said. “Can we use it for some privacy?”
When the secretary unlocked the door, Maria shuffled in and took a seat in a stiff-ba
cked, weathered chair that sat on the wrong side of an ornately carved wooden desk. It was the principal’s office, but the man who filled that role was gone for the day. Maria wondered how many kids that chair had seen, how many prayers and promises it had heard. It was her first trip to the principal’s office.
“Maria, is it?” The tall officer slid onto the high-backed leather chair that sat behind the desk and nodded at her. The chair fit him like a glove. “I’m Officer Reynolds and this is my partner, Officer Hamby.” He motioned to the man standing behind her, guarding the door.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she mumbled, and tucked a stray hair behind her ear, before she ran her tongue over her unbrushed teeth and crossed her arms over the grease-stained sweatshirt she’d forgotten she was wearing. It hadn’t crossed her mind to worry about appearances that morning when she fled from her mother, or to think about what she might do if her plan didn’t work, but as she tried to see herself through the officer’s eyes, she wished she’d spent more time on her hygiene.
“Mrs. Gaston gave us her account of what happened today,” he continued, “and before she presses charges for assault, she’d like to talk to your parents.”
“Assault?”
“You knocked down a sixty-year-old woman.” The officer grinned at his partner, who coughed through a poorly disguised laugh. “What did you think was going to happen? And we’ll need to get a drug test, which I’m guessing will be positive?”
“I’m not on drugs,” Maria whispered, though she doubted either man heard her words. She was a seventeen-year-old runaway, dressed like a bum, with an outrageous story that would be enough to convince any sane person that she was either delusional or on drugs.
It was Sylvia’s story. It was the same one she’d listened to on the last day of her patient’s life, the story she refused to believe. But maybe Sylvia was right. Maybe people really did come back from the future.
“We’re also going to need your parents’ phone number.”
The officer leaned forward and rested his lanky arms on the lavishly carved desk in a gesture so like Detective Andrews’s that Maria could almost see him sitting before her, with the calluses on his massive hands and the constricting collar around his beefy neck.
“Walt Andrews,” she said, glancing from one officer to the other. “Is there a detective at your station named Walt Andrews?”
They watched her in silence for a moment, the officer at the door shifting his weight from one foot to the other, before they both shook their heads no. Of course Walt wouldn’t be there. He was busy preparing for a war in the Middle East. He had medals to earn and children to raise, and he wouldn’t be finding his way to Bienville for at least another decade, maybe two.
“We’re going to need that phone number,” Officer Reynolds said, rapping his knuckles on the top of the wooden desk and breaking the stillness that had settled between them.
“Please,” Maria replied. “I’m fine. I promise. I really just want to go home.”
Home. Even as she said the word, she knew there was no home for her there. Her home was twenty years in the future, and any Bienville address she gave to that officer wouldn’t even show up on a map. There was no other home for her but the one in Alabama, where her parents were undoubtedly awaiting their daughter’s return.
“I can’t let you go until you give me that number,” he said. “Or I can get it when I run the plates on the blue Toyota out front. I’m guessing that was your parking job in the tow-away zone?”
At Maria’s silence, he slid a piece of notebook paper and a pen across the desk. She hesitated before she picked up the pen, trying to find the words to a story that would take her to her husband and children and make this all a distant memory. If only she knew how to make that story take shape. She scribbled down the names of her parents and their phone number instead and slid it back across the table to the officer.
“Tom and Anne Bethe?” The paper crinkled in the officer’s hands. “Did I pronounce that correctly? Be-thee?”
“Bay-ta,” Maria said. “It’s pronounced like B-E-T-A.”
“I see. And you are…” He glanced at the notes he’d gathered from his interview with Mrs. Gaston. “Maria Forssmann? Is that correct?”
It was a moment that stretched into endlessness, the absolute stillness that goes along with being caught in a lie. But it wasn’t a lie for Maria. It was her being stripped of her identity. It was the loss of her home, the loss of her husband and two daughters, the loss of a son she never got to meet.
“No,” she whispered. “Not yet.”
She watched in silence as Officer Reynolds dialed her parents’ phone number, wishing she’d paid more attention to Sylvia’s warnings. Don’t go to the storage unit. Stay away from Rachel. Had she gone to the storage unit? She’d been on her way, but did she ever get there? Had she stayed away from Rachel?
“May I speak with Mr. or Mrs. Bethe, please …
“Mrs. Bethe, this is Officer Reynolds from the Bienville, Mississippi, police department. I have your daughter Maria here with me …
“Yes, ma’am, she’s fine …
“I’m sure you were very worried, but she’s fine …
“She drove herself …
“Well, we’re not sure yet, but she’s in a bit of trouble … She had an encounter with one of the teachers at the junior high school here, and there might be some assault charges filed …
“Yes, ma’am …
“I understand, but I’m sure it’s your daughter. Dark hair, brown eyes, blue Toyota with Alabama plates. She gave us your name and phone number …
“No, ma’am. I didn’t realize she’d driven all the way from the middle of Alabama. She hasn’t been very forthcoming with us …
“No, she didn’t mention an AP test …
“Well, to be honest, we’re a bit worried about drug use. She gave us a false name and has been talking about her daughters, who she seems to think should be here …
“I see …
“Yes, ma’am. That does sound concerning …
“It might not be a bad idea to have her checked out at the ER when we’re done here, but the teacher she knocked down would like to talk to you before she decides if she’s going to press charges …
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll put her on the line, and then we’ll go from there …
“You’re welcome …
“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
A red light flashed from the base of the phone when Officer Reynolds pressed the Hold button, his attention focused on the officer standing behind Maria. “Could you tell Mrs. Gaston that Maria’s mother is on line one for her?” He waited for the door to click shut, for them to be alone, before he continued. “Maria Bethe,” he said. “High school senior. Straight As. Class president. Never been to detention. No drug use. No police record. Scheduled to take an AP calculus test in Pine Creek, Alabama, and somehow ends up in Bienville, Mississippi.”
She let his words wash over her. While it was true she had once been that girl, too many years had passed for Maria to remember her, and there was nothing she could say to make sense of the situation for either of them.
“Your mom told me to tell you that she loves you,” he added, before he leaned back in the chair and sighed. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I had a better answer for you, but I really don’t know. I guess I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The officer rose from the high-backed leather chair, his height even more impressive than she’d remembered, and with two strides was by her side. Whatever words he had for her were drowned out by the voice that broke through the intercom.
“Officer Reynolds,” it cracked through the speaker. “Mrs. Gaston would like to come in and talk to Maria.”
“Send her in,” he replied, his eyes following Maria as she rose from the chair before Mrs. Gaston pushed the door open.
“You don’t know how fortunate you a
re to have such kind and caring parents.” The teacher’s words landed solidly on Maria’s shoulders, and she sliced her hand through the air when Maria opened her mouth to respond. “I don’t want to hear a word from you,” she said. “If it wasn’t for your mother, I would be charging you with assault. Try to remember that, next time you decide to run off on some wild escapade.”
Maria listened to the woman’s fading footsteps as she retreated from the room. They echoed with satisfaction.
“Come on,” the officer said, pressing his hand into her back and guiding her toward the door. “I’ll let your parents know they can pick you up from the station.”
Less than four hours later, Maria sat unmoving beside her mother as they coasted up Interstate 65, her father trailing behind in the blue Toyota. Every movement she made threatened to be an invitation to conversation, so Maria sat motionless in the passenger’s seat and let her mother’s words drift away unreciprocated.
You could have gotten yourself killed out there.
Dad and I were worried sick.
Don’t ever pull a stunt like this again.
She was running out of ideas, out of places to go, and as her hands drifted back to her belly, searching for the son whose life had yet to become his own, she could almost feel him slipping away.
Did Sylvia make it home? The woman who’d visited her in her dreams had been a different version of the woman who’d killed herself two days earlier. Maria could almost feel the blood running down her arms from the gashes in her throbbing wrists as Sylvia watched her from the periphery of that nightmare. She’d already killed herself by the time she showed up in Maria’s dreams. Maybe she was trying to show Maria the way home.
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