Across Time: Across Time Book 1

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  He opens the door without even looking at me, grabs my crutches in the same manner.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I demand once he’s in the car.

  His jaw flexes and he stares straight ahead. “I told you I was in a hurry to get home.”

  “And what was that about anyway?” I ask. “You never leave the gate open.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, a touch of acid in his tone. “If it’s any consolation, you’ll apparently have plenty of time to throw yourself at the men in town during the village dance.”

  “Throw myself? I didn’t say two words to anyone but you!” I cry. “You were the one…” making fun of me in French. “Flirting,” I finish.

  His nostrils flare. "I saw the way you smiled at him. Don't deny it."

  "The priest?" I ask. "You are insane. I was being polite.”

  "You were more than merely polite, but I was talking about André," corrects Henri. "Is it your goal to win over a rich man for every decade? I suppose that’s one way to make sure you have a place to stay during your travels.”

  I press my palm to my forehead. “Are you serious right now? I wasn’t flirting and if I was going to marry someone in another time, it sure as hell wouldn’t be this one!”

  He ignores me. “You are not reading to Madame Perot again. I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

  I have no desire to read to Madame Perot, obviously, but he is not going to be the one who decides that for me. “Sorry, Henri,” I reply crisply, “but where I'm from women aren't property that gets commanded around."

  "No?" he asks. "Then why is it your boyfriend believes you should drop out of college and give up your dreams to move with him?"

  "That's different," I reply. "He's not forbidding me to do anything and he's not commanding me either."

  "No, he’s just acting like your goals and desires are not equal to his own,” Henri replies. “While I’m thinking about your safety.”

  “Well, I’m thinking about the fact that I’m an adult and can make my own decisions,” I retort. “And reading to Madame, or spending time with André, are both decisions I don’t need your help with.”

  Marie comes home briefly around lunch. There’s been no sign of Henri since we arrived back here this morning. I help her prepare the coq au vin, one pan going to the bible study class held at the church this evening and one pan to stay here. I’m browning the onions while she chops vegetables behind me.

  “I didn’t realize priests were so attractive,” I say casually. “I see now why your mass is so well-attended.”

  "Father Edouard?" she asks, shocked. "That's sacrilege."

  I laugh. "You don’t actually expect me to believe you haven’t noticed? Just because he’s a priest doesn’t mean he’s invisible.”

  She flushes. "It's inappropriate to look at him that way. He's chosen his path and we must respect his decision."

  She’s giving up too easily. I saw the way he looked at her. “I think he'd make a different decision readily if you gave him an opening."

  Her beautiful face clouds over. "He's a man of God. He'd view what we do as witchcraft."

  Perhaps I’m too willing to give up time travel, but Marie is very much the other extreme. It’s as if the idea is impossible to her.

  "Is being able to time travel really such a wonderful gift? I see how you use it mostly—to add to a shopping list? To fix a broken chicken coop before the animals get free? I can’t believe you’d lose the man you love in order to keep doing it."

  Her eyes flash as she glances over her shoulder at me. "It's not a gift. It's what I am, and unlike you, I do not plan to deceive the man I will marry. So, even if he were to decide he wanted to leave the church, I would still never choose him."

  Marie is long gone when Henri finally comes in. He says nothing to me until he’s gone into the bath to wash up and change clothes, and then he emerges with damp hair and a contrite expression that has me ready to forgive him before he’s said a word.

  “Come to the hay bale,” he says. “It’s almost sunset.”

  Correction: I’m almost ready to forgive him. “Hmm,” I muse, holding a finger to my lips, “that didn’t sound like an apology.”

  He gives me a small bow. “I’m deeply sorry I accused you of throwing yourself at André. I’m certain that if you choose to throw yourself at him, you’ll at least have the decency to do so in private.”

  I raise a brow. “That still doesn’t sound like an apology.”

  “It was,” he corrects. “I just paired it with an insult. Come on.”

  Marie’s coq-au-vin is too difficult to transport to our normal picnic spot, so we just grab odds and ends for dinner instead. By the time our meal is complete, the sun has set. He pushes our things off to the side and leans back against the hay bale.

  "Close your eyes," he says.

  I do as he says, leaning back just as he did. It's silent, and suddenly I'm aware of things I wasn't the moment before. Perhaps things I was trying hard to ignore: the heat of Henri beside me, the rise and fall of his chest moving his sleeve against my bare arm with each breath.

  "What do you smell?" he asks.

  I smell him—soap and freshly cut grass.

  "Cow dung," I reply. "Is that not the only possible answer?"

  He elbows me. "Keep trying. There are other things too."

  "I smell your soap," I admit. I love the smell of his soap. I wonder if it still exists in my time. If it does, I will buy it just to remember him.

  "I smell you as well," he answers. "When you arrived it was one of the first things I noticed about you, your smell. Like roses and sage and summer. I thought it was your soap, but I smell it even now.”

  “Is that why you held me at gunpoint?” I tease.

  “No,” he replies. “But it might be why I failed to shoot you on the spot. Let’s pray that when the Germans come they haven’t just bathed.”

  I laugh, but as I take in his perfect face and his broad smile, something cracks inside me at the same time. He is so many things, too many things. He can’t die in the war, can he? Thirty million soldiers did, but it feels as if he deserves some special protection they didn’t receive. I guess this is how every woman alive feels when her husband or son goes to war, except he’s not my husband and he’s not my son and I shouldn’t care quite as much as I do.

  "If your mother had known about the war,” I tell him, “she’d have begged you to escape, you know.”

  He raises a brow. “Shall I leave some sort of welcome basket for the Nazis then, when I hand them my farm?”

  “Better than handing them your sister.”

  “I can’t hit her over the head with a club to make her leave,” he says. “Despite what you think of me, I have my limits.”

  I close my eyes, willing myself to stop feeling upset. I can’t make them do what they should and it might not make a difference anyway, but I can’t stop wishing things were different.

  “I’d agree to let you hit her over the head, just this once.”

  “You worry an awful lot about my sister for someone who never mentions her own,” he replies.

  I don’t want to talk about my sister. At the moment I don’t want to talk about anything. "We aren't close," I reply. "And my childhood isn't full of happy memories like yours. So there's not much to say."

  His index finger glides, for a single breath, over the back of my hand. "Not everything you tell me needs to be happy, you know. Just give me one good memory, and one bad."

  I swallow. I have to reach back pretty far to get to the good memories of Kit, and even those are laced with bad. "When we were little, we used to go swimming. We'd pretend we were mermaids and we'd lay on top of the water and compete to see who had better mermaid hair."

  "What's mermaid hair?"

  I laugh. "I don't even know. Long, and very wet. You'd get it good and soaked and then just kind of let it splay out over the surface of the water. Kit won," I say, my laugh smaller. "Every time."
It’s something I haven’t let myself think of in years. And it’s not a good memory. Telling him now doesn’t make me happy. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

  He reaches out to pull a lock of hair free from this morning’s updo. "She had more beautiful hair than you?" he asks, brow furrowed. “That’s hard to imagine.”

  It’s the closest he’s ever come to paying me a compliment. I would like to point that out but hold back. "Our hair was identical, actually. Pale blonde, never got a real haircut."

  "If your hair was identical, then how do you know she won?"

  I shake my head. "I don't know. She just did. She always won everything." I begin picking up the remnants of our dinner. "We should go. Marie will be home soon."

  His hand wraps gently around my wrist. "Now give me a bad memory."

  I glance up at him. His face is earnest, but he has no idea what he's asking.

  "Let's just leave it at the mermaid hair," I reply. "My bad isn't like other people's bad."

  His hand is still on my wrist, keeping us connected when I want nothing more than to pull away and curl up somewhere.

  "I don't care how bad it is," he says, sounding irritated. "I just want it to be something real."

  My temper finally frays too thin. I’m so tired of the implication that I’m fake somehow simply because I want to keep some things to myself. My mother thinks I'm evil for being what I am, and he thinks I'm evil for trying to pretend I'm anything else, and the fact that I can never win exhausts me.

  "Fine, you want real?" I ask. My voice is hard. "Here you go: Kit had to have her tonsils out and my mother stayed in the hospital with her. And when she finally came home, I told her I hated her and wished she had stayed away. She was just a little girl, and I was awful to her. There’s your bad memory.”

  He tips his head. “I doubt you were some kind of demon child who said and did terrible things to the innocent. Something must have prompted it.”

  I swallow. “I don’t have some pretty excuse for it. I was jealous. That’s it.”

  “Why?”

  I stare at my lap, at the tiny roses dotting the dress I changed into after mass. In truth, it was a lifetime of slights both great and small that led to my jealousy, but it’s too much detail for the question he’s asking, so I choose the most relevant.

  “When I was seven I got meningitis, which is usually fatal. I was in a hospital about an hour from home for two weeks and my parents didn't come see me once. My mom told me afterward that all she felt when the doctor called to say I'd pulled through was disappointment. Seeing how different things were for Kit…" My voice breaks and I stop talking, shocked that even now, all these years later, I’m still upset. I rise and grab the crutches, desperately needing privacy. I've never told anyone that story and I have no idea why I shared it now, but I just want to be alone.

  He's in front of me before I've even raised my head. "Where are you going?"

  I glance away, feeling overwrought and humiliated by my disclosure. "Inside."

  He pulls my crutches away from me, throwing them behind him. "Hey!" I shout. "What the—"

  He pulls me hard against his chest, arms bound around me so tightly I can barely breathe, my nose pressed to his sternum.

  "I'm sorry," he whispers. “I’m so sorry it was like that for you.”

  There’s a lump in my throat. I have no idea why something that happened ages ago has me upset now, but I’m torn between wanting to be alone until this feeling goes away and wanting to stay right where I am, my head to his warm chest, breathing him in, feeling his heart beat against my cheekbone.

  "I didn't tell you that story so you'd feel sorry for me.”

  "You told me because you were mad," he says.

  One arm still pulls me close, but the other is on my chin now, forcing me to look him in the eye, and suddenly it feels like I can’t get a full breath. I feel too much…and I think it has as much to do with him as it does the sister I lost. Because I am going to lose him too, whether it’s because I’m leaving or because of the war that looms. I’m back where I’ve been too many times in my life, desperately wishing there was a bargain I could strike with God when I know it won’t work.

  "I’m sorry I pushed you so hard,” he says. “I just think you've got secrets that will poison you if you keep holding on to them the way you are."

  “What about your secrets?” I ask, my voice cracking. “Marie still has no idea why you came back. And if she did, she wouldn’t insist on staying here, which she shouldn’t because you—" My voice breaks. "You are going to die here if you don't explain to her what's really going on."

  He holds my gaze. "I didn't think you cared."

  Tears roll down my face. "I don't. I don't care at all."

  We hear the sound of bike tires over gravel and step apart. Marie is walking her bike into the barn, but he continues to hold me there, as if he’s trying to capture something before it passes.

  "Oh," says Marie. He’s finally let me go but her eyes are wide, taking the two of us in. "Were you crying? Is everything okay?"

  Henri hands me my crutches and I propel myself forward, passing her on my way to the house. "I'm just tired," I reply. "But everything is fine."

  I'm lying, again, of course. I’m lying about so many things to so many people I don't even know what the truth is anymore.

  18

  Kit hits the water with an unimpressively small splash.

  It’s our favorite game these days, swinging on the rope to see who will land farther. I hold my breath, waiting for her golden head to emerge, and when it finally does she is laughing. Her little arms paddle furiously, propelling her back to where the water is shallow enough to stand.

  When she's finally near me she flips onto her back and floats, pulling her hair up so it is flat along the water's surface. "Look at my hair," she says. "Do I look like a mermaid?"

  Yes. No. There's a small bite of unhappiness inside me as I decide on an answer. Kit is adorable, everyone's favorite. I can't blame them for it, really—she’s my favorite too. But at the same time I can’t help the small sting of envy I feel toward her. Why couldn’t any of it be shared, all the love and attention that gets sent her way?

  "Yes," I reply, swallowing down my envy.

  She dives under water and heads for the shore again while I paddle listlessly, sulking over thoughts Kit will never understand. She grabs the rope again and begins to swing, pushing herself off the tree again and again, trying to gain momentum.

  It isn’t her fault. I could be the only child and I still wouldn’t be the favorite. But sometimes it feels as if she’s stolen what she has from me. If Kit and Steven didn’t exist, I might be able to convince myself the problem was my mother. But they do, which leaves no doubt that the problem is me. I never saw it more clearly than when my mother stayed with Kit at the hospital as summer began. Such a small thing, but even now the sadness I felt wells in my throat, clogs it.

  Kit continues to swing, going higher and higher, but her joy suddenly makes me mad.

  "If you go too far, I'm not coming after you!" I shout and she sticks her tongue out at me, knowing good and well that I'll come for her if she can't swim back on her own.

  I cleaned the house top-to-bottom on the day they came home from the hospital. I had visions of my mother smiling, looking pleased, or maybe proud of me, for once, but even an hour after they arrived, she still hadn’t noticed. She didn’t even seem to notice me.

  I picked up, I finally whispered, and that’s when she looked at me with her flat eyes and her mouth a thin, bitter line.

  “You know what would be more helpful?” she asked. “If just once you would not stand there looking like a beaten dog.”

  Maybe she was right to be irritated. It’s not as if I’d cleaned the house out of an honest desire to help. I did it merely hoping for a single crumb of the attention she showered on Kit.

  Now, watching Kit swing on the rope, I wonder why I bothered. Why did I try to make her happy when
nothing I do ever makes her happy? I shouldn’t have. I should have just asked why she hates me so much, why she never visited me in the hospital. I picture it hard, hard enough that it feels real.

  I hear Kit land in the water but the world has turned dark and air seems to rush around me. I have no idea what’s happening, or how to make it stop. I land hard in the kitchen, naked and dripping water. My mother stands there, talking on the phone. Her eyes widen and I panic, as if I’ve been caught in a terrible lie. I scramble into a ball, waiting for the sting of my mother’s hand, for her raised voice, wishing desperately I was back in the lake…

  And then I am. I’m back in the lake.

  And I'm alone. Kit is gone and I’m completely alone.

  The world is silent, empty.

  And I begin to scream just to fill it back up with something.

  "Amelie," pleads a voice. "Wake up. You're dreaming."

  My eyes open. Henri is sitting on the edge of the bed beside me, his hands gently shaking my shoulders.

  My sister is dead. When will I wake and not be surprised by this? My sister is dead and it’s still my fault, all of it. And this secret I’ve kept for nearly a decade suddenly feels too heavy to carry on my own anymore. I don’t feel capable of lying about it anyway—not to him.

  “My sister is dead,” I whisper. “I should have told you.” I roll to my side and begin to cry. He sits with me, his hand on my shoulder.

  "It was just a dream," he says gently. "Just a nightmare."

  What’s he going to think of me when he knows the truth? I came here not because I was brave but because I was such a damn coward I couldn’t continue to face my sister in dreams. Such a coward I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Henri I’m the reason she drowned.

  I take a shuddering breath. "No,” I whisper. “It wasn’t. My sister is dead. She kept coming into my dreams, telling me to find Marie.”

  He pushes the hair from my face. His jaw is open, confusion and doubt in his eyes. “I don’t understand. She died…recently?”

  I look away. “No, she died when I was eleven. It was my fault. I was supposed to be watching her, but I time traveled by accident and she drowned.”