“Why don’t I remember Mom helping with the CPR?” Kelsey whispered to her sister, who was fidgeting beside her.
“I didn’t either,” Melanie admitted. “So weird.”
“Over here! Over here!” Mr. Fletcher boomed in his TV weatherman voice. He even stopped the compressions to wave both his hands at them, and while he did, Christine immediately took over.
Maybe that was why. Lance looked the part of the hero, with his sodden clothes and hysterics, while their mom, composed and ordinary in a middle-aged mom way, blended in until she was nearly invisible. She stepped back as the paramedics assessed Jilly and started ventilating her, but she stayed there, hovering on the periphery, watching and listening with her hands clasped as if in prayer, until they had loaded the girl on an orange backboard, a C-collar in place, and wheeled the cot up to their ambulance. Vinnie hurried alongside them, her hand on Jilly’s cheek, quietly sobbing.
With the paramedics and cot gone, Kelsey had a clear view of her mom. She raised her eyes from the grass where Jilly had been lying and seemed to stare directly at her.
“Is Mom looking at us?” Kelsey asked, her breath catching in her throat.
“She is,” Melanie said. She motioned over her shoulder, where their fourteen- and twelve-year-old selves were standing directly behind them.
Their mom’s pale-blue eyes were windows into all the guilt and anguish she was feeling, and Kelsey understood why. But she also had tremendous love in her eyes. It was a look that told Kelsey that their mom would swim across the lake and back as many times as needed to save their lives, that she would sooner stop breathing than let one of them die. She was choosing them.
“Is Jilly going to be okay?” twelve-year-old Kelsey asked with a trembling lip, and their mom stepped across the distance to pull them both against her body. She held them and swayed as if they were much younger children. And when she glanced up to notice Beau and Stephen standing alone and in shock, their father distracted and adrift in his grief, she pulled them into the embrace too.
A SHEET OF YELLOW PAPER was lying on the floor under the bench when they got back to the closet. Did it appear out of thin air while we were gone? Or was it there all along, and we simply missed it? It was folded in half, and just by looking at it, Kelsey could tell it was probably not the response she had been hoping for.
Dear Girls,
So now you know my deepest regret and why we needed to leave Lake Indigo. My unfaithfulness to your father was so selfish and negligent that a child almost died as a result. For once, I am grateful for the gap in years between us so that I don’t have to face the immediacy of my sweet daughters learning this horrible truth. That will have to wait until another day in my future, when you are older and more experienced in all the ways people can hurt each other and let each other down. You are more experienced now, I assume? I’m sorry that I had to be the one to teach you this lesson.
I’m sorry also that I didn’t have the nerve to tell you this in person. It’s somehow easier for me to express myself in pen and paper, when you are nothing more than figments of my imagination. Strong, independent women, no doubt, who like to garden and read and maybe won’t be such harsh judges of my infidelity as the real versions of you I would have to sit down with one day and look in the eye. But no matter how harshly you judge me, rest assured you won’t be able to condemn me as much as I have already condemned myself.
There is no possible excuse for the hurtful choice I made. Loneliness? Too many years of self-denial? Fear of the days of drudgery blurring into each other and waking up one day to find I had taken no risks and left no tangible mark? I once might have claimed love as an excuse, but it seems like the paltry defense of a teenager, not a middle-aged woman who should know better.
Thank God Jilly is going to make a full recovery, I hear. But in my darkest moments, I think about how it could’ve gone so differently. It could have been either one of you. My recklessness could have endangered you, and that is the one thing I will never be able to forgive myself for.
I know you told me this might be our last communication inside this room, and you probably want me to give you some reassurance that I will follow the advice of your last letter. Although at this point, I can’t see myself deserving the divine intervention of angels from the future when I have been so careless with the lives of others, I want you to know that I will see my doctor and try to express the concerns you have for me on May 1, 2015. Not because I think I merit any special help after all of the mistakes I’ve made in my life so far, but because I love you girls so, and I’m hoping you will have the chance to forgive me one day.
Love,
Mom
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Did Mom drive Beau and Stephen to the hospital that night, or did Dad?” Kelsey asked, pushing her feet off the floor to rock the porch swing.
Melanie closed her eyes briefly and tried to remember. “Dad did, I think. He had just arrived for the weekend and hadn’t eaten any dinner yet, but when he mentioned that to Mom, she just gave him a look. She’d been keeping us busy baking chocolate chip cookies that afternoon, remember? Until we heard news that Jilly was breathing on her own again and had woken up.”
“Mom didn’t want to see Vinnie,” Kelsey said. “That’s why she had Dad drive them.” She broke a square of Hershey’s chocolate in half and popped it in her mouth.
They had raided the bonfire supplies and had the bag of marshmallows, the jar of Nutella, the box of graham crackers, and the chocolate bars between them on the swing. Like soldiers recovering from the shock of the battlefield, they needed something sugary to fortify them. It was three in the morning, and the lake was the color of grape jelly. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still a thick canopy of clouds.
“You’re probably right.” Melanie rubbed her forehead, thinking of Lavinia’s admission. I knew she probably wouldn’t ever be able to forgive me, but I wanted her to at least forgive herself. She felt cold, even though the night air was humid and in the seventies. The purple afghan had slipped off her bare shoulders, so she picked it back up and rearranged it across her lap. “I wonder if they ever talked again. I think we left the next week. It was almost the end of the season, anyway.”
She had cycled through all the negative emotions she was capable of and now felt mostly deadened. Yes, her mom might have been sleeping with Vinnie while her dad was away, but that wasn’t much of a surprise given what she and Kelsey had seen on their other trips into the time portal. Yes, her mom had probably been dissatisfied and bored with her role of wife and mother and reading specialist. Yes, her mom had a whole other existence separate from them that they had never been privy to. But what surprised her the most, what cut her to the quick, was the blame and loathing her mom had carried with her, probably up until her death.
You distracted me, just like at Harris Beach. You make me selfish and reckless, and I hate myself. I already have blood on my hands, her mom had practically shouted at Vinnie.
The two drowning incidences were a horrible, horrible coincidence that her mom had read meaning into that hadn’t been there. Harris Beach had been overcrowded, and the little boy’s death had been a tragic accident. It hadn’t been her fault. It hadn’t been Vinnie’s fault either. And Jilly’s near drowning also had nothing to do with them. Jilly was an excellent swimmer and had blown through all the swimming levels at the Fletchers’ country club, where she had taken private lessons. As much as it upset her to think where her mom and Vinnie had been at the time, Melanie didn’t find them negligent for stepping away. And she honestly didn’t think her mom sitting in her lawn chair, watching and hovering, would’ve changed Jilly’s outcome, anyway.
But her mom had seen herself and her entanglement with Vinnie as responsible for the accidents. Maybe she saw them as her punishment for her attraction to Vinnie or her punishment for her infidelity. But no matter how harshly you judge me, rest assured you won’t be able to condemn me as much as I have already condemned myself.
She had carried that culpability with her like Atlas with the weight of the world on her back and never set it down. It made Melanie want to cry, thinking of her good-hearted mom, continually censuring herself.
The weight of culpability was one she was all too familiar with. It was sitting on her shoulders right at that moment, no matter how hard she tried to shake it, the way she blamed herself for her inability to conceive and for not being able to keep her baby alive. She knew she needed to set it down and have mercy on herself the way her mom hadn’t been able to.
She leaned against the porch swing, and the rose bushes she and Ben had planted caught her eye. Speckled by raindrops, the blooms looked like they were covered in tiny diamonds. The orangey-peach of their baby’s roses made her think of something else orange, something that was nagging at her, but her exhausted brain couldn’t quite place it.
“Do you think we should try to write Mom a reply quickly?” Kelsey asked hopefully. She handed Melanie the rest of her chocolate bar. “I mean, she didn’t cause Jilly to drown. She saved her life. She deserves to know that, don’t you think? Aren’t you glad we went inside the portal and saw that?”
Melanie nodded, her weariness making it difficult to move, let alone eat any more chocolate. “I really am. But something tells me that Mom won’t be back in the closet to get any more of our notes.”
“Maybe she won’t need to.” Kelsey raised her eyebrows, and her blue eyes were as wide and trusting as an infant’s. “What year do you think it is right now in her parallel time? Maybe it’s approaching the date of her doctor’s appointment, and we’ll be able to tell her in person that we forgive her and she should forgive herself.”
“Yes, maybe,” Melanie agreed reluctantly and patted her sister on the leg. “But we just might have to content ourselves with the idea that the time portal was Mom’s one last gift to us and she isn’t coming back. But even if our warning doesn’t prevent her death, at least we still had the chance to try. And she knows we tried. That we did everything in our power to help her.”
“Not everything in our power.” Kelsey’s brow creased as she stared into her lap. “If only there was some way for me to leave a note for my younger self. I could warn myself to cancel my fricking hair appointment and not leave Mom’s side for a second that day.”
“Oh, Kelsey.” Melanie reached out, grabbed her sister’s hand, and squeezed. Perhaps it was a trait that all the Montclare women inherited: intense self-blame for things that were wildly out of their control. “You are not responsible for Mom’s death. Do you understand me? It was a massive blood clot. It killed her within minutes. There was nothing you could have done. Can you repeat that after me? ‘I am not responsible.’”
“I am not responsible,” Kelsey repeated, but her expression still looked so doleful that Melanie gave her hand another harder squeeze.
“Well, that’s a start. But now you need to work on believing it.” She closed her eyes as Kelsey continued to rock the porch swing. It was only about an hour away from the time that she and Ben had planned to get up to leave for Ohio. Should I even bother trying to get some sleep? She thought about her mom, standing there on the wraparound porch, looking down at them and smiling broadly as they built the bonfire, her curls tied back and tamed with a pretty black ribbon. Suddenly, she jolted upright as if she were falling, startling Kelsey beside her.
“Oh my God, Kels! The orange toothbrush! The cardigan! The black ribbon! It was Mom.” The details were winging into place before her eyes.
“What are you talking about? Of course it was Mom who moved the toothbrush. I thought we had already decided that.”
Melanie leaned toward her sister. “Do you remember the night we saw ourselves as little kids in the nursery? The night of the party? Just as we came upstairs, someone was leaving our room. I assumed it was Grandma Dot because she was older, and we had just seen Mom downstairs. But even then, I thought it was kind of out of character that she was checking on us because she was never an affectionate grandma. And I was right. It wasn’t Grandma Dot. It was an older version of Mom. Time traveling. She was wearing the cream-colored cardigan from the closet, but I didn’t recognize it at first. And her hair was tied back in a black ribbon.”
Kelsey froze. “So that was the night your toothbrush got snatched? Then it reappeared—”
“The night we had our family bonfire. When you and I got locked out of the time portal because Mom was time traveling. She was going back in time to watch us sleep, Kelsey!”
Her head was filled with the memories of them fast asleep—with rosy cheeks, open mouths, and messy hair. Of all the places their mom could have been in that moment—at the boathouse, watching herself smoke with Vinnie, shadowing her husband or other party guests, even spending a little time with her deceased dad, she had chosen to sit with them in the stuffy, darkened room, to watch them peacefully inhaling and exhaling. And when she had returned to her present—Melanie remembered how content her mom had looked to be rejoining her family, even if her daughters were both ungrateful, moody adolescents instead of sweet, angelic babies. Did you guys save me any marshmallows? she had asked with a grin.
Oh, Mom, she thought, grinning as well. The clouds were thinning to reveal the sky was lightening into dawn. You considered us a moment worth reliving.
THE MONTCLARE INN WAS opening in two weeks, and Kelsey had invited everyone to stay at the bed-and-breakfast for the weekend to celebrate. Melanie and Ben’s flight had just come in that morning, and her dad, stepmom, and stepsiblings would be arriving in a few hours. It was May, a full month later than Kelsey had hoped, but unexpected electrical wiring problems in the new suites upstairs had delayed her. With her website up and running, a steady stream of online reservations had started coming in. She was proud to announce she was already booked for the rest of May, all of June, and even one week in July.
“Oh no! You went with the strawberry pineapple bread?” Josh asked, carrying a stack of china plates into the living room. He set them down on the coffee table. “I guess I’ll have to squeeze in a trip to the gym tonight.” He’d been happily doing a lot of the taste testing of Kelsey’s recipes but kept joking that he’d gained five pounds since they started dating. After one particularly delicious, postcoital breakfast in bed, he’d teased, “If you married me, K. K., I’d be the happiest, fattest man alive.”
“I see what you mean,” Ben said, reaching for a second piece. “It’s awesome, Kelsey. Is this homemade butter too? It’s so creamy.”
“It sure is,” she joked. “I milked the cows and churned it myself this morning. Just kidding. It’s from a farm over in Concord. They’re one of my main food vendors.”
“I don’t think so, Sprocket.” Josh pushed the plate away from the coffee table’s edge and away from the dog’s curious nose. “Sorry, buddy.”
Melanie hadn’t touched her slice of bread yet and had also declined a mimosa, which Kelsey had never known her sister to turn down. Is Melanie avoiding alcohol because she’s pregnant? The thought made Kelsey giddy. She scrutinized her sister for any other signs—a paunchy stomach, a tired-looking face, or larger breasts, but Melanie looked like her usual crisp, slim, pulled-together self. The only difference Kelsey could detect was a slightly more lovey-dovey behavior between her sister and Ben. They kept smiling and squeezing each other’s hands when they thought no one was looking. Will they be making an announcement later when Dad arrives? She could hardly wait.
Everything was almost as perfect as she’d imagined it, except for one glaring absence among them. In the days and weeks after their last trip into the time portal, Kelsey had remained cautiously optimistic about the past rewriting itself in her mom’s favor. Every phone call, every text, every unexpected knock on her door had made her heart pound with anticipation. But as the weeks turned into months, her anticipation had dulled, especially when she discovered one depressing morning that the time portal was no longer operational. Even the books and cardigan had disappeared from the bench. It
was just an empty, useless closet, no matter how many times she stepped into and out of it. Just as Melanie had suspected, fate had had other plans for their mom.
Still, Kelsey couldn’t help wondering where it had all gone wrong. Her memory didn’t seem to have changed at all to accommodate a different version of her mom’s death—as far as she could remember, and her dad and sister remembered, her mom had still died of a massive pulmonary embolism on May 8, 2015. Why weren’t the early ultrasound and blood thinners, assuming she went through with them as she promised, enough to save her? It seemed it was going to be an unexplained mystery that Kelsey was going to have to somehow learn to live with.
She sipped her mimosa and watched Melanie appraise everything in the living room, from the art nouveau etched glass lamps she’d found at an estate sale to the dried lavender wreath over the mantel to the plaid pet bed and basket of dog toys in front of the fireplace to the wooden sign that read “Every Family Has a Story... Welcome to Ours.” Beneath the sign were silver-framed wedding photographs of her great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and even her sister and Ben—each a unique marriage with their own love story. She wondered if one day her wedding photo with Josh would hang beside the others on the wall.
Kelsey felt her stomach clench and reluctantly admitted to herself how much she wanted her older sister’s approval. She loved the bed-and-breakfast, loved it more than she had ever loved anything else she had ever created or accomplished. She wanted Melanie to love it too.
“Your guests are going to adore this place, Kels-Bels,” Melanie said at last, her eyes and cheeks luminous. “It is so beautiful, and I love how you incorporated little details from our family. I think they’d all be so proud. I know I am.” She was biting her lower lip as if to prevent herself from crying. “And I know Mom would be too.”
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