Melanie sank into her chair. She’d been eagerly looking forward to having a frank conversation with someone about the surreal world behind the tapestry, but since it was finally happening, she felt wrong-footed and caught off guard. She knew that it partially had to do with the sting of hurt feelings she was still recovering from—Kelsey abandoning her inside the house to eavesdrop on their mom and her friends as well as disregarding their mom’s memory by simply taking over the master bedroom—but also because Melanie was no longer the sole person in possession of the secret. She was no longer the only one in control of how things would unfold and at what pace, and her sister’s “act first, ask questions later” approach seemed reckless. Clearly they were on the edge of something huge, something potentially dangerous and of cosmic significance, maybe, and definitely world-as-we-know-it changing. Some ground rules were in order.
“Probably a neighbor boy,” she said, trying to hide her irritation behind a bite of salmon since she hadn’t even been able to get a good look at the guy in question, while Kelsey had.
“He was pretty cute, and Mom was definitely crushing on him, but Mrs. Fletcher, not so much. I think she made up an excuse so they wouldn’t have to go to the bonfire, but you could tell Mom was disappointed.” Kelsey speared a spinach leaf on her fork. “Oh my gosh! That halter top and those platforms! Who knew she had such adorable clothes? I wonder what she did with them. I would’ve loved to wear them as a teenager.”
Melanie took a long swallow of her wine. Is that really the most pressing question Kelsey has? What happened to Mom’s seventies wardrobe? And who’s the cute mystery boy? Her head was spinning with more substantial questions: How did the closet work? What were its boundaries and limitations, and why did it work? She wondered if there was a danger of getting stuck in the past, a possibility of affecting the outcome of bygone events, and if so, if it could negatively—or positively—impact the future. What if we accidentally mess something up and make it so we were never born? Are the benefits of glimpsing Mom worth the risks of tampering with fate?
“I wish we could talk to her,” Kelsey said wistfully. “Find out all the things she never would have told us later in her life. Her sixteen-year-old self just seems so open. And happy.”
Melanie adjusted her chair to get out of the direct glare of the slowly setting sun. “Even if we could talk to her... how would that conversation go? ‘Hi, we’re your adult daughters from the future’? Like that wouldn’t freak her out at all.”
“Of course not. We’d have to pretend to be new neighbors or something, befriend her over time,” her sister said as though it was something she had already seriously considered. “But it’s a moot point, right? Because you’re absolutely positive we can’t interact? That they can’t see or hear us?”
“Kels, I’m not positive about anything. We’re both operating on the same limited information. But you saw the way they stared right through us and didn’t react. The conclusion there seems pretty self-evident.” She paused to swat at a mosquito, mentally tacking ‘Buy citronella candles’ on her to-do list. “And even though, admittedly, it would be really fun to talk to a young version of Mom, it’s probably a lot safer this way.”
“You mean so we can’t interfere in the past and screw something up. Like in Back to the Future.”
“Right.” At least, Melanie hoped that not being able to physically affect the alternate world would protect their mom and them. How much harm can passive observation do? But all of her scientific training felt monumentally useless in the face of a hidden closet capable of time travel. She sliced off the burnt edge of her salmon filet and dropped it discreetly from her plate. Sprocket, camped out between them under the table, gobbled it up within seconds.
“Yes, but what’s the point of being able to view the past if we’re not able to somehow change—did you just feed my dog table scraps?” Instead of the disapproval Melanie had expected, Kelsey looked amused.
“Maybe.” Melanie grinned sheepishly as Sprocket sat down close to her heels, licking his chops, her new faithful friend. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we catalog everything we know so far about the closet and how it works? I’ve been in there three times now.”
“I know! Lucky duck. You don’t need to rub it in,” Kelsey interjected sourly. Melanie had just filled her in on her two previous trips into the past.
“And each time I went in, Mom was a different age. The first time, she was about eight, the second time, thirteen, and just now, sixteen. So that means that either the time travel is moving in a relatively chronological fashion through Mom’s life, or it just randomly happened that way, and we could go in tomorrow and witness her as either a baby or a forty-year-old.”
“Holy crap.” Kelsey’s face paled a shade. “You think it’s not just her childhood and teenage years? You think it goes up until her death? You think we’re in there? That we could see ourselves as children?”
“I honestly don’t know if it’s just Mom’s life.” Melanie gripped her wine glass. “Maybe it’s the entire life of the house. For all I know, it could go back to a hundred years ago when the house was first built and Great-Grandma Jane and Great-Grandpa Montclare were dancing the Lindy Hop. But I do think we can count on one thing for certain: the closet can only show us events that happened at the lake house. Mom was here only during the summers, so it can’t show us what happened to her the rest of the year. And she stopped coming fifteen years ago. Our last summer here.” She set the glass down without taking a drink.
Kelsey pulled her hair to one side and twisted it into a rope. She contemplated the lake, where the sun had spilled a thousand glittering gold coins across its surface. “I wouldn’t want to revisit that summer again.” She gave a small shiver.
Melanie agreed. She could still see the flash of Jilly’s hot-pink two-piece swimsuit as she jumped from the raft, the small girl’s rust-colored hair, then how one minute she simply wasn’t there. Beau had splashed and shouted to the shore, calling out to their moms, who had also been there one minute and gone the next. Finally, Mr. Fletcher had come outside because of the racket, and when he’d heard what had happened, he yelled at Stephen to call 911 and tore through the water as though it were a field of tall grass he couldn’t cut through fast enough. At last, Jilly’s body had emerged in his arms, but flimsy and as pale as a stone at the bottom of the lake. Her temple had been swollen and bruised. Melanie had never felt so helpless and afraid before in her fourteen years of life. She’d looked up to see her mom reappear then, tall and rooted to her spot on the sand, pressing her fist against her mouth in horror. Mrs. Fletcher was behind her, but Melanie couldn’t make out her face.
“Thank God Mr. Fletcher was there,” Kelsey murmured as she stood to collect her silverware and plate.
“Thank God he knew CPR,” Melanie added.
They carried bowls of strawberry shortcake to the dock, where they sat side by side on the bench. It was a tradition their dad had started, dessert on the dock. Usually, the three of them had eaten their bowls of ice cream or slices of zucchini bread out there while Mom had cleaned up and done the dishes inside. Their dad had tried to cajole her into joining them on several occasions, but she had always insisted that washing the dishes was better for her figure. Melanie remembered their dad’s abysmal imitation of the loon’s call—he’d sounded more like a cartoon ghost than the bird’s otherworldly, plaintive song. She listened for it, but the lake was silent except for the gentle lapping of waves. Sunday nights were the quietest nights at Lake Indigo.
“So what else do we know about the closet?” Kelsey asked around a mouthful of strawberry shortcake. “It doesn’t sound like much. Time may or may not move chronologically inside it. It probably just shows events at the lake house, although we can’t know for sure unless we try to leave the area once we’ve gone through the door, right? Like by hopping in someone’s car or something?”
The thought made Melanie’s abdomen clench. It wasn’t an experiment she thought sh
e would be brave enough to try. She had hardly been able to muster the courage to step outside on the grass, let alone leave Lake Indigo for another part of Wisconsin. What if we hitched a ride then couldn’t return to the lake house and it turned out to be our one portal back to the present day? Would we be stuck in the past as voiceless shadows forever? Would I never be able to return to my life with Ben?
“I think there’s plenty to explore here without hopping in someone’s car.” She scratched her wrist. A mosquito had gotten to her after all.
Kelsey grabbed Melanie’s hand. “Hey. What happened here?” She turned Melanie’s arm over so the purplish bruises from the inexperienced phlebotomist’s pokes were just visible in the waning light—a chain of violets.
“Nothing,” Melanie said, tugging her hand away. “I just had to have some blood drawn, and the tech treated me like a pincushion.” She could see the concern written plainly across Kelsey’s face, and it made her chest ache in that familiar way. She knew if her sister prodded her even just a bit more, she’d be tempted to unload it all—the months of trying, the infertility treatments, the miscarriage, the distance that had grown between her and Ben. How would Kelsey react? Would she be hurt that I kept her in the dark for so long? Though they had never been the type of sisters who shared every detail of their lives, that seemed like a particularly big lie of omission for all those times when Kelsey had asked her during their monthly phone calls, “So what’s going on?”
Would Kelsey expect me to relive the experience detail by awful detail? Or even worse, would she try to minimize my suffering as Rose, the one friend I confided in, did? “Oh, Melanie, I’m so sorry, sweetie. But thank goodness you were only in your first trimester,” Rose had said then gone on to share a heartbreaking story about a friend of a friend who had lost her baby boy at thirty-seven weeks, which had only made Melanie feel guilty for her comparably smaller loss and weak for the tremendous grief she was still feeling.
For as long as she could remember, Melanie had always been what Kelsey had expected her to be—no, required her to be: strong and capable. She was the one who pried a bee off the palm of Kelsey’s hand when the stinger got stuck, the one who helped her with her middle school global studies projects when their dad was too busy with a case, the person who drove to her aid at midnight when Kelsey got into a fender bender. And later, she was the one who helped Dad with the funeral arrangements, the daughter who acted as the family spokesperson at the wake and burial, and the one who saw to it that the donations made on their mom’s behalf got to the proper charities. Never mind that Melanie was also a devastated wreck.
So what would Kelsey think if she found out that my strength is all an act? That I am in fact powerless and a failure on the most basic level? She couldn’t bear the thought of being demoted in her sister’s eyes and becoming an object of pity instead of a source of strength. Kelsey would never look to her sister for help or advice again, and at the moment, Melanie needed that.
No, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her sister, not yet, at least. They had enough to deal with as it was—first the repairs on the house then the unimaginable portal into the past where the shimmering memory of their mom still lived and breathed. The house was most important. That was why Melanie had flown to Wisconsin in the first place, not to wallow in her troubles.
“Melanie, is something wrong?” Kelsey asked. She set her bowl down on the bench with a clatter.
Melanie took a deep breath. “No, I’m okay.” With twilight closing in on them, the lake turning a rich shade of plum, and three hundred miles separating her from the grief she was trying to shake free of, she could almost believe it. “I do have something else I think we should add to our list of what we know about the closet, though,” she said as a new thought occurred to her. “I think Mom knew about it.”
She tried to explain to Kelsey what she had remembered earlier—their mom’s insistence that their dad not take down the Tree of Life tapestry to have it cleaned and stored away. As a child, she’d thought that meant their mom wanted Melanie to have the beloved tapestry in her bedroom, but now she suspected it had more to do with what the wall hanging was hiding. “She must have known the hidden door was behind it,” Melanie concluded. “And if she thought it was just an ordinary closet, she wouldn’t have cared if anyone found out about it. So she must have known you could travel back in time in it.”
Kelsey cocked her head to one side. It was getting so dark that she was nothing more than a silhouette and a voice. “That would explain why her cardigan was in the closet. Not the cigarettes, though. It’s weird enough to think of Mom sneaking around behind our backs, smoking, let alone time traveling into the past.” She inhaled sharply. “Hey! If Mom was using the closet, too, do you think we could somehow communicate with her? Like leave her little notes on the bench? Maybe she could write us back.”
Melanie’s abdomen gave another tighter clench. She had seen enough science fiction movies to know that changing just one small detail in the past—a sixteen-year-old reading a letter written by her future daughters, for example—could massively alter the present in unexpected, detrimental ways. Quantum physicists called it the butterfly effect. Though the thought of what Kelsey was suggesting terrified her, it also tugged at something she’d buried deep down years ago: a daughter’s wish to talk to her mother just one last time. But at what cost?
“Maybe,” she said slowly. “But I think we need to be smart about this and not rush into anything we can’t take back.”
Kelsey paused thoughtfully, and a bullfrog croaked its bass-drum belch. “You’re probably right. At this point, I don’t even know what I’d want to say to Mom, anyway. It’s just so strange to think about her—good old regular Mom—keeping this bombshell of a secret from everyone. I mean, would she tuck us into bed then sneak back into your room for a jaunt into the 1970s to see her old high school flame? It just makes me wonder: Did we know anything about her at all?”
For once, they were on the same wavelength because Melanie had been wondering the same thing. She thought back to the eulogy she’d given at her mom’s funeral and the portrait she had painted of Christine Montclare Kingstad—the supportive mother, the thoughtful wife, the caring reading specialist, and the avid reader. Several people had complimented her on the “lovely tribute” she’d made to her mom, but now she had doubts about whether she’d truly done her mom justice. Isn’t a daughter’s perspective on her mother’s life always a little myopic?
“I think,” she said, “that this is finally our chance to find out.”
MELANIE’S PHONE RANG in her back pocket as she spread a ten-pound bag of potting soil in the window box the next morning. She peeled off her dirt-stained gardening gloves to answer it, knowing who it was without even consulting the screen: Ben. They’d mostly been communicating by texts because of the spotty reception for over a week. It was the longest they’d ever gone without a proper phone conversation to catch up. Even when Ben was on his annual camping trips with his brothers, they tended to talk once or twice if the guys stopped at a convenience store to pick up supplies.
“Hey,” he greeted her, a smile in his voice. “Good morning, babe.”
“Good morning,” she said with a grin. Though Ben was one hour ahead in Ohio, of course he knew she was an early riser. She suspected he was probably calling her on his drive to work at the Edgewater Pharmacy. “Stuck in traffic?”
“Oh, can’t complain. We’re clipping along at a pretty steady pace of five miles per hour. I’ve had the same view of that gentleman’s club billboard you hate for the last ten minutes now.”
“The Rhinestone Rhino?” she said with a groan. “Do you want me to describe my view?” She stepped carefully around the black plastic flats of impatiens on the grass and turned to face the lake. “The sky is gorgeous and completely cloudless, almost like someone hung out a baby-blue sheet on the line too long and it got a little sun bleached. The lake’s a grayish silver and very calm, only a few ripples from t
he waves and a passing kayaker. The trees still have that springy ‘new leaf’ look, so fresh and green that you can’t help already feeling a little sad for the coming fall.”
Ben let out a long, appreciative sigh. “I wish I were there with you.” But before she could acknowledge that comment, he added, “Your reception sounds a little better. Do you have full bars?”
She pulled her phone away from her ear and glanced at it. “I do. I guess the side of the house is where we need to have our conversations from now on. I’m planting flowers in my mom’s window boxes. Pink-and-white impatiens, her favorite.”
“That sounds great. You should snap a picture and send it to me when you’re done. You know, our front walkway is looking a little lonely with our tulips and daffodils wilting. Maybe when you get back, we can plant a border of impatiens along it and get some hanging baskets for the front porch.”
“Sure,” Melanie said and squatted down to examine the flowers. She picked a dead bloom off one of them. As much as she loved him for his continued cheerfulness and his ability to take an interest in anything she showed an enthusiasm for, sometimes she wished he would stop trying so hard and say what he really felt. It would almost be refreshing to hear him tell her off for once for abandoning him or that he was exasperated with her for her failure to scrape herself up off the floor and move on, as he had done. Because surely he was thinking those things, and she didn’t blame him.
“The basement contractor is coming today.” Melanie described the flood damage to him and how she and Kelsey had had differing opinions about which company to hire. She filled him in on the projects she’d been undertaking—painting and cleaning the house from top to bottom—and how their realtor, Charlene, wanted to list the Victorian as soon as the basement was finished and hold a big open house. Then she told him about Kelsey’s overnight stay and how cute Sprocket was and how they’d eaten their meals out on the porch and their dessert on the dock. She told him everything, basically, except for the preposterous news about the hidden closet capable of time travel and how she’d been wandering around her mom’s childhood in her free time.
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