Across Time: Across Time Book 1

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  "The doctor won't drive at night," he says, dropping beside me. "I'll go get him but it might take a while. Thirty minutes at most. But first, let me try to talk some sense into Marie.”

  He leaves the room and begins yelling at his sister in French, so quickly I can only grasp a few adjectives here and there—cruel, insane, thoughtless, selfish. The more urgent he grows, the more stubborn she becomes.

  I know he’s given up when I hear the door slam behind him.

  She comes to my side then with a bottle and a spoon. "Open wide," she says. "I don’t trust Doctor Nadeau to give you enough for the pain. He's quite stingy."

  The fact that I’m going to need a lot of pain medication just angers me more. First, because it never works for me the way it’s supposed to. Mostly, because I shouldn’t have to take it at all. I move my head away from her. "Would you trust him more if he could fix my ankle with a simple blink of the eye and refused?"

  She frowns. "I know what I'm doing does not make sense. I just have a feeling about these things sometimes, and I'm not often wrong. It's not so bad here with us, is it? You've been happy."

  “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.” It’s just so unlike her. Marie has been my ally for weeks, and now she’s actually making Henri seem like the pleasant, reasonable member of the household. "This isn't my home," I cry. "And I need to get back. Mark is expecting me."

  She shrugs. "Then you stay here eight weeks and return as if you've been gone two."

  I groan. "You know that doesn't work." I've done it before, on a smaller scale—reclaiming weeks you've already spent feels off, like jet lag that never quite goes away. My teeth grind as I force myself to appear cooperative. "Look, if you want me to stay, I’ll stay, but don't make me go for weeks and weeks in a cast. It's just cruel."

  She hesitates, as if she’s actually considering what I’ve said, and then shakes her head. "Non. We already know you don’t mind lying. And sometimes fate is cruel.” She pats my knee with a smile that is either sweet or psychotic, depending on the context. "Now, open wide or it will hurt a great deal when your ankle is set."

  A short while later the doctor arrives to pronounce what we already knew—I have one broken ankle, one sprained. He says it will likely take me six weeks to heal, and I once again consider the situation. I don’t want to stay here that long, but I could. I’d still be out of here by late July, which is weeks before I’m due to meet Mark in Paris, and means I’m not jumping backward on a broken ankle and risking a broken spine in its place.

  The doctor gives me pain medication but—true to form—it doesn’t make a dent.

  Henri stands in the doorway with his arms folded across his broad chest. He looks as if he could burn a hole through Marie, but she hardly seems to notice. She’s right at my bedside, pretending my ankle is her greatest concern.

  “I’m going to set the bone now,” the doctor warns. "This will hurt, but only for a moment."

  Marie grips my hand and I glare at her. "It doesn't need to hurt at all."

  The doctor twists something and I gasp, meeting Henri's gaze over the doctor's head. He’s flinching, brow damp with sweat though the room isn’t especially warm. This is harder on him than it is on me, I realize, just before the doctor twists again and the world goes black.

  12

  When I wake, the sun is out and I’m in Henri's bed, wearing a nightgown. I look around the room for my dress before I realize it's probably in tatters from that fall.

  Before I can begin worrying about poor Marie and the dress I've ruined, I remember that poor Marie has the power to go back and fix my ankle, yet refuses.

  A single crutch is leaning against a wall. It's too tall for me but I grab it and hobble out of the room. Henri sits at the kitchen table. His eyes go wide before he averts them. "You need a robe," he says, rising. "You can borrow Marie's."

  I look down. The nightgown covers twice as much skin as any school uniform I've ever owned. "You refused to give me clothes the day I arrived here and now you're acting like the sight of my neck and arms is too much for you."

  "The day you arrived I was too worried to notice much," he says, walking away.

  Which means he is noticing now? I hate the way something in my stomach goes soft and gooey at the idea of it.

  He returns a moment later and hands me the robe, which I dutifully wrap around myself. "Where's Marie?"

  "Teaching. Or perhaps just hiding in town to avoid my wrath." He glances at the crutch I've leaned against the wall. "I'll have better ones for you by the end of the day. And we’ll switch rooms since you won’t be able to manage the stairs for a while. I’ll clear my things out once the crutches are made.”

  I shake my head. "You don't need to do that."

  He laughs, but there's more misery than joy in the sound. "Of course I do. You're stuck here now for weeks because of my sister. And also because of me. I goaded you into what happened last night.”

  I give him a half-smile. "You realize you're stuck with me for weeks now, right? That seems like punishment enough."

  "Yes, I suppose it’s a punishment for us both,” he replies. He’s smiling but just behind that smile I see something else: he’s worried. And I wish I knew why.

  That afternoon, Marie comes home both wary and unapologetic. She’s brought me chocolate.

  “You don’t think you can buy me off with a candy bar, do you?” I demand. “I live near the world’s largest chocolate manufacturer, but instead I’m here and I can't even move.”

  She shrugs and pushes the chocolate off to the side. "Henri is making you crutches. They're nearly done."

  "Henri should not have to make me crutches!” I climb to my feet, as if I plan to march off somewhere, except I can’t even stand without clinging to the table. “Jesus, Marie. Why are you doing this?"

  "I'm sorry," she says airily. "Some things don't make sense until after they’re done."

  I slap a hand to my forehead. All this time, Marie has been so mature, so logical. It’s as if she developed multiple personality disorder last night, and the personality that emerged is a freaking sociopath. All, undoubtedly, because she thinks if I remain here she’ll convince me to go with her to 1918. "This is never going to make sense. I need to get home. I told my mother I wasn’t going to jump again. If you keep me here, she’ll know when she sees me at the end of the summer. Please, please don’t do this.”

  She looks at me with sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Someday she’ll need you to use your gift, and when that day arrives, she’ll see her mistake.”

  I sigh heavily. She clearly doesn’t understand my mother, a woman who hasn’t viewed time travel as a gift for any of my twenty-one years and is therefore unlikely to so in the future.

  “If I'm not there soon, Mark is going to worry."

  "You can fix that."

  I huff out a breath in anger. "I don't want to have to fix things. Don't you see how complicated you're making all this?"

  She smiles. "Yes, and I apologize for that. Now what shall we make for dinner?"

  "We won't be making anything," I reply. "Not until you fix my ankle."

  She gives a one-shouldered shrug. "It's no matter. You weren't likely to be much help. I picked up some books in English for you at the library, by the way. They're in my bag."

  I can barely even reach her bag. I have to hobble toward it, clutching furniture to get there. I’m not even trying to make her feel guilty; between the one ankle in a cast and the other sprained, every movement is awkward at best and agonizing at worst.

  In the bag is Mansfield Park, my least favorite Jane Austen, and Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  "Tender is the Night is quite new,” says Marie, flouring the butcher block like she’s Betty Crocker. “I couldn't believe they had the English translation in our library."

  It's not new, I think, annoyed. Nor is it a translation. And if I didn't get the hype about The Great Gatsby, I seriously doubt I'll love Fitzgerald's least po
pular novel.

  I push myself out toward the stone porch, collapsing into the same chair I sat in a week ago, having tea. If I was a better person I’d appreciate the fact that I’m here in France with good weather and a gorgeous vineyard for a view. Instead I let my eyes shut, wishing I was anywhere else, wishing my ankles didn't hurt and the weather was mild. I find myself thinking of the night I laid on a blanket with Henri in the orchard—a pleasant breeze, moonlight flickering through the branches overhead, him with that ever-present smirk on his face. His response when I said I wasn’t sleeping with him out there: Well, that definitely removes some of the fun from the evening.

  I’m smiling, remembering it, when my body lightens, and a breeze rustles around me. My eyes fly open suddenly to find that my arms are translucent. Half here and half gone. I force myself back into the terrible present, my heart beating hard. If I hadn’t stopped myself, I’d have landed somewhere on my bad ankles, the cast left behind with my clothes. So it’s absolutely critical that it not happen again, but what’s shocking is that it happened at all. I haven’t accidentally time traveled since I was young—twelve or thirteen, perhaps—and I can’t believe it nearly happened now.

  And happened when I was thinking about Henri, of all things.

  Tender is the Night deserves to be Fitzgerald’s least popular novel. If I thought all Americans were as annoying as his characters, I’d avoid the country entirely. I’m forcing myself to read it when Henri comes out to the porch with the crutches in one hand and two small glasses of wine in the other, one of which he hands to me.

  “My sister said you were churlish this afternoon and need loosening up."

  I groan, loudly. Churlish? Really? "Did you suggest she might be churlish too if she had a life-threatening injury I refused to fix?"

  His mouth turns up at one corner. "Life-threatening? Is that what we’re calling a broken ankle now?”

  “Maybe it’s not my life that’s in peril,” I reply, glancing inside at Marie while I take a sip off the glass he's handed me. I don’t even like wine, but I need something to take the edge off my anger. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if my ankle isn’t healed when it’s supposed to be.”

  He takes the seat across from mine. “What precisely do you need to rush home for?”

  I sigh. I’m sure the truth will only confirm what he already thinks about me—that I’m a liar, a fraud. Whatever. “My pretend internship is ending on August 12th—I said it to buy myself extra time here just in case—Mark is supposed to be meeting me in Paris right after that and I might not even be there.”

  He takes a sip of his wine. “I still don’t understand why you felt you had to lie to such an extreme,” he says. “Especially to your mother. She already doesn’t approve of you, so why keep trying?”

  I’m not sure if I’m frustrated by his lack of understanding, or if I just don’t like that there’s some truth to what he’s saying. “Because I still have a chance of fixing this,” I reply. “I’m trying not to use my gift, and once I stop…she’ll know. She’ll be able to tell. And then maybe…” I don’t complete the sentence because it’s too goddamn pathetic to be said aloud. “I don’t know.”

  “Your parents won’t be suspicious when you go through the entire summer without calling them?”

  I flush. That I can’t make my parents care still feels like a personal failing, no matter what I tell myself. “My father left when I was twelve and I never heard from him again,” I reply stiffly. He contacted Steven, but never me. More proof that I was flawed and that what I did was unforgivable. “And my mother…well, she’d prefer not to hear from me. When I call, she just tries to get off the phone anyway.”

  He's watching me again, and before he’s even opened his mouth, I know I’ll regret having told him so much. It’s more than I’ve ever said to Mark, and I have no idea why I suddenly decided to be so regrettably open about my family.

  “Is she really worth all this, then?” he asks. “All the lies, just trying to earn her respect? She doesn’t sound like much of a mother.”

  But she’s all I have, I want to say. It’s not true, of course. I have Mark. I have my brother. But that’s different. Mark has no idea what I am, and Steven only has the vaguest understanding of it. It’s my mother who knows, who was raised among time travelers and truly realizes how much harm it can do. Persuading her that I’m not evil might allow me to persuade myself.

  “Her respect is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”

  His nod is small and in his eyes I see what looks an awful lot like pity. I wanted him to agree with me and it scares me that he doesn’t. Maybe there’s absolutely nothing I can do to win her over—no job, degree or spouse capable of fixing it. Perhaps even giving up my ability won’t be enough, because what I want even more than her respect is her love, and there might be something inside me that just makes that impossible.

  He runs a hand through his hair and releases a heavy sigh. "I’m sorry. I know this isn’t how you would choose to spend a summer.”

  For the first time in hours, I manage to feel bad for someone other than myself. I know he feels guilty about what happened and I’m not going to make him feel worse. "It’s not that," I reply. "I'm just going crazy, sitting here like this all day. But the crutches will help. Thank you for those.”

  He’s lost in thought for a moment and then glances at me. "Do you ride?"

  "Horses?"

  He laughs a little. Of course he means horses. "Yes. I could take you riding. You just have to promise you can keep your seat."

  "I grew up on a farm. I can keep my seat."

  "You said you could milk a cow too, as I recall,” he counters. “But tomorrow then, we will ride, though only after Marie-Therese is gone. I wouldn't want to give her the impression that you’re enjoying this."

  We both glance inside at her, still humming and working on her pie. I never thought I’d see the day when Henri and I were united against something. And I definitely never thought that thing would be Marie.

  13

  The next morning after Marie has left for the school, Henri returns to the house, handing me a small pair of trousers and a shirt he's dug out of the trunks in the attic. Once I've struggled to pull the pants over the cast, I hobble to the door where Fleur, the calmer of their two horses, awaits.

  I lean the crutches against the door as he comes to lift me into the saddle. "Are you sure you're up to this?” I ask. “As I recall, you said I was heavier than I looked."

  "And as I recall," he says, lifting me high in the air, seemingly without effort, "you said you thought I was strong."

  His hands, firm and gentle at once, stay in place until he’s certain I’m stable, though his proximity makes me feel far more unstable than the weight of the cast. I swear I can feel the press of his fingers through my clothes, and it makes my breath come short. “I’m okay,” I say.

  He releases me and jumps onto Napoleon—so named, he says, because as a foal he was “little but mean”—and heads toward the vineyard, trusting me to follow.

  The vines are lush and green, dotted with tiny purple clusters. I’ve never been in a vineyard before, and it’s beautiful, yet my eyes want to lock on Henri instead—on his broad shoulders ahead of me, or on the nape of his neck, where the hair is shaved close and would feel rough to the touch. Like his jaw might, this late in the day.

  I picture pressing my mouth there for a moment and flush when I catch my own thoughts. I’ve been away from Mark too long, is all. I force my eyes back to the vines.

  “So the wine we’ve been drinking,” I say, “did you make that?”

  He shakes his head. “Mostly, no. We have a few Beaujolais vines here, but we’re too far north for them to grow well. On the nights when we’ve had a good wine, I can assure you it wasn’t ours.”

  I shrug. “I don’t really like wine anyway, so I can’t tell the difference.”

  He glances at me with a furrowed brow. “You don’t like it?” he asks, as if he
thinks he misheard me.

  I like daquiris and margaritas, which are essentially slushies for adults, and that’s about it. Mark teases me about my unsophisticated palate, but I hadn’t even turned twenty-one until the month before I left, so it’s not as if I’ve had a lot of exposure to anything but beer at this point in my life.

  “I’m starting to get used to it.” I look around. “So what are these if they’re not the Beaujolais?”

  “Champagne. You’re in the champagne region of France. Didn’t you know?”

  I guess that explains all the champagne bottle-souvenirs in town when I arrived. I give him a rueful smile. “I didn’t read up much before I came. The only thing I wanted to know was when the Germans would arrive.”

  He looks at his vines and his smile fades. “As much as I wanted to study architecture, I love all of this too. It would be hard to watch the Germans destroy it.”

  I follow his gaze, looking out over the acres of green in the bright sun. “The Germans like champagne too, so I can’t see why they’d ruin it. But when they come…” I swallow. “I hope you don’t plan to try to fight them for it.”

  He laughs. “You’re not serious? You really think I’m just going to hand my home over to them?”

  If I’d given it any thought before I spoke, I probably wouldn’t have suggested it. That’s not who he is. “No, but you should. You know why Paris falls so quickly once it all begins? Because they’re completely outmanned, and they’ve got to choose between total destruction or possibly surviving the war and preserving the city. There is absolutely no chance they can prevail, and there’s no chance you can either. Your single gun won’t last you an hour against a couple dozen well-armed Nazis.”

  “That’s not the point,” he mutters. “It’s the principle of the matter.”

  “Your principle will get you killed.”

  He glances at me with a small smile. “A horseback ride through a French vineyard and all you can do is scold. What a lucky man Mark is.”