Across Time: Across Time Book 1

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  He looks good, tan and a little thinner from the weeks in Nepal. I smile back, still nervous but also relieved. This isn’t some stranger. It’s Mark, who I’ve adored for two full years. And if my adoration is a bit more tempered than it was, perhaps that’s for the best. There’s always been a piece of me that felt like he could do better, but that piece of me is gone. He’s a good man, but if I was enough for Henri, I’m enough for anyone.

  I cross the street and his arms band tight around me, his mouth landing on mine. It’s the way he’s always kissed me, but it feels as if I’m experiencing it all from a distance, like an alien noting all the aspects of some strange human custom, perhaps wondering what possible purpose this joining of the mouths could have: the texture of his tongue against mine. Moisture on my lips. It’s not like kissing Henri. It doesn't make my limbs melt, it doesn’t make me forget where we are.

  I don’t want this, I hear a voice in my head saying, and it makes me panic, because this is what I have, and it’s what I’ve planned for. I want to become the version of me who thought Mark hung the moon, who truly believed this was the best path I could take, because I’m not sure where we stand if I’m no longer her.

  I pull away and he smiles down at me, pushing my hair back, leaving his palms on the sides of my face. “I'd forgotten how beautiful you are," he says softly. “I’ll try to behave for the next hour or two but it’s not going to be easy.”

  For the next hour or two. My chest tightens. I’ll deal with it when the time comes.

  We get a table at Café Flore. A drink or two will calm my nerves, I promise myself. It will put me back, mentally, in the year I belong.

  Mark flags down a waiter and orders himself bourbon. He starts to order me a margarita and I stop him and ask for a glass of Beaujolais instead.

  “Look at my little sophisticate after a summer in France,” he says. “I thought you’d never come around to drinking wine.” There’s a shade of condescension in the words. I guess there has been before, but it’s never bothered me until now.

  For the next hour we talk. I tell him the little I can about my time in France, which isn’t much, but mostly he talks about Nepal. The conversation is interesting, but it lacks something. We don’t banter, and the only time he laughs is when he’s recalling something funny that happened on his trip. No matter what we are discussing—whether it’s art or music or movies or the future—it all feels a little empty, like a conversation you have to pass the time while stuck in line.

  My roommate that summer in New York called us Ivy League Barbie and Ken, and I’m sure that’s exactly what we look like right now, a perfectly matched set of blondes in expensive clothes. But I’m not enjoying this, and I don’t know how to fix it. Mark is a lovely man, but Henri is like the cornerstone of a building and Mark is merely a decorative element on its exterior, pretty but ultimately meaningless.

  He squeezes my hand. “You seem different tonight. Is everything okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I lie, smiling at him across the table. “I think I’m still a little under the weather is all.”

  He leans forward to take my other hand. “Maybe it’s time we went back to the room?”

  My pulse rises. “No,” I reply too quickly. “I’m not tired at all.”

  He laughs. “I know you’re nervous about tonight. Don’t be, okay? It’s going to be good. I’ll take care of everything.”

  I slowly release a breath. I'd be nervous under the best of circumstances. I'd be nervous if there were no Henri, if I'd never gone back to 1938. But this is different. It’s not nerves. It’s an absolute unwillingness.

  “Mark,” I whisper, “I’m sorry. But it’s not happening tonight. I’m just not ready.”

  Just then a waiter bumps our table and Mark gives him a dirty look. “Watch it,” he snaps.

  It’s a tiny show of irritation, but it reminds me a bit of André, the way his kindness came easily to him when things were going well and abandoned him completely when it didn’t. I’ve never seen Mark when things aren’t going well for him, I realize. It’s probably the kind of thing I should become familiar with before this moves forward.

  He forces a smile. “It’s fine. Let’s just go to the room. Nothing has to happen.”

  We walk along the Seine to his hotel.

  I’m in Paris, wearing couture and walking along one of the most famous rivers in the world under a full moon with a man who thinks he wants to marry me. It’s my most ridiculous high school fantasy on steroids. And yet I’m longing for a different man and a different place entirely.

  “What a perfect night, huh?” he asks, grabbing my hand. “Look at that moon.”

  I do, and all I think when I see it is that it’s the same moon Henri is looking at in another time. I can’t bring myself to think of him in the past tense. The moon is as close to infinite as anything can be, neither past nor present, and I choose to believe somewhere Henri exists under its glow still. Will he think of me when he sees it?

  "Have you given any more thought to transferring?" Mark asks.

  I stumble a little, jolted from my thoughts and surprised by the question. "Mark, I've only got one year left. I want to graduate with my friends. And besides, I can't transfer from Penn this late in the game. It'd take a year just to get in anywhere."

  "So take a year off," he says, as if it's the simplest thing in the world. "You don't even have to work, or if you wanted to, I'm sure there's a gallery somewhere that would be all over a super-hot receptionist who majored in art history."

  The spark of irritation I felt flares into something else, something far greater than I remember ever feeling with him. "So you're suggesting that instead of graduating from an Ivy League college in one year, less than a year actually, I should give it up to become a receptionist somewhere?"

  He exhales heavily, pushing a hand through his hair. “I already said you don't have to work. You can stay at my place, hang out, and start at Columbia when your transfer comes through. It'll give you a whole year to plan a wedding. Women love that shit."

  I pull my hand away and turn to face him. "You could have gotten a job anywhere. If it's so important that we're in the same place, get a job in Philadelphia."

  He rolls his eyes. "Get real, Sarah," he says. "I just got hired by JP Morgan. I'm not moving to Philadelphia.”

  I stare at him, thinking Henri would never ask this of me. What did he say when I told him Mark had asked me to move? If what was best for the woman I loved was for her to stay where she was, the one thing I’d never do is ask her to give it up.

  I picture Henri’s face on the last night we were together. The longing I saw there, and his refusal to act on it. And again when he kissed me in the field that day…looking at me as if my presence was a miracle, as if I was all he’d ever wanted.

  I picture it, and am suddenly struck hard by a thought. What if the reason he kept silent wasn’t because he didn’t care enough, but because he cared so much that he wanted what was best for me, rather than what was best for him? What if he didn’t kiss me because things were going to change between us, but because he thought I’d chosen, on my own, to return to him? That I was there to give him the things he refused to ask for—my heart and a life that could be spent much more safely and comfortably in my own time.

  The thought makes my breath stop. God, I want it to be true. And the more I let the possibility crash through my brain, the more likely it seems.

  Mark sighs and steps close to me, placing his hands on my waist. “I’m sorry I said it like that. I just love you so much that I don’t want to be away from you, okay? But tonight is special. We don’t have to figure it all out now.”

  Exactly, says the old version of me. Just find a way to make this work. But there’s a new voice now, a louder one, that insists otherwise. I remove his hands and take a step backward.

  “I disagree. I think this is definitely a conversation we need to have right now.”

  I see irritation flicker across his face ag
ain. “Jesus, Sarah,” he says, pushing a hand through his hair. “Since when are you so argumentative? I want you in New York because I love you and I don’t want to be away from you. Why is that suddenly a crime?”

  “Pushing me to give up what I want isn’t love.”

  His mouth falls open. “I thought what you wanted was me.”

  I look at him, at his handsome, incredulous face. He’s right. He’s right to think that what I wanted was him, because for our entire relationship, he did matter more than anything else. Or maybe not him, but the life I saw with him—one where I could be a different person, a person I didn’t hate quite so much.

  Except, I realize suddenly: I’m already that person.

  I’m not sure when it changed. Maybe it was all those weeks watching Marie use her gifts to help her neighbors, to make all of our lives slightly better ones. Maybe it was finally admitting my role in Kit’s death, and seeing for the first time that my guilt is normal, and human, and a burden my mother should have shared.

  But mostly I think it was Henri. It was being seen by him as I am, and being loved for it.

  Mark doesn’t see me as I am, and whatever it is he thinks he cares for…it isn’t me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I changed this summer. And I think I might be in love with someone else.”

  Mark argues. He gets mad, and then upset, and after a minute or two of this the limousine pulls up and the driver steps out.

  “Madame Boudon thought you might be ready to leave.”

  Mark stares at him and then glares at me. “Who the fuck is Madame Boudon?”

  “Possibly my only living friend in this country,” I reply. I throw my arms around him, whispering one last apology in his ear, and then I climb into the back of the car and begin to weep.

  How stupid I was. How impossibly stupid I was.

  I'm in love with Henri in a way you never find twice.

  I don't merely lust for his pretty face and his full mouth and the broad shoulders I used to watch from afar. I adore him, and even if it means I’ll do nothing more than sit on the periphery of his life and exist near him, I’d agree. I will gladly milk cows and cook and hang the laundry and all of the other tasks I complained about so vehemently, just for the gift of his sudden smile, his surprised laugh.

  I’m still not certain Henri wants me there for good. I could return to 1938 to discover I misinterpreted everything he ever did and said. And even if he does want me, returning will be terrible in more ways than I can name. I won’t finish my degree. There will be rationing and hunger. I might die in the process, and he might too. And the next time I come to 1987, I’ll be an old woman, if I reach it at all.

  But in the end it comes down to a simple truth, one that matters more than all of the other truths: I don't want to exist in a world where he is not.

  27

  My mother is stiff when I call, and formal. She tells me how my brother is doing—Steven has long been the only subject we have in common. His wife just miscarried again, my mother says, adding that it’s sometimes for the best. There’s no doubt in my mind she’s thinking of me when she says it.

  “How was your trip to Paris?” she finally asks without interest.

  I glance around my suite, thinking how disgusted she would be if she could see me now. My mother thinks time travel is something I should be deeply ashamed of, and the ways I benefit from it disgust her. She’d see this suite as one of those ways.

  “I’m still here, actually. Mark and I broke up, so I’m planning to stay a while.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” she replies. “No offense, but I never understood why he was with you, aside from your looks, and pretty women are a dime a dozen.”

  It’s amazing to me that a few months ago I’d have agreed with her, and I’d have thought Mark dodged a bullet in getting clear of me.

  “I was the one who ended it. And it might surprise you to learn that some men don’t object to women with magical gifts,” I reply, “particularly ones that can fix mistakes and guarantee unlimited wealth.”

  She doesn’t like that. In my mother’s silence I hear the sound of a snake as it retracts, preparing to lash out. “So you’ve found someone new then,” she replies. “Try telling him you killed your own sister and see if he’s still so enamored of your gift then.”

  I’ve heard these words, or some version of them, many times before. Normally they can silence me like nothing else, but today they don’t.

  “I think you mean we,” I reply. “We killed Kit, the two of us. Me, an innocent 11-year old who had no idea I was going to time travel and you, Kit’s mother, who knew I might start time jumping any day but still entrusted her care to me instead of watching her yourself. So we, and I’m being generous with that.”

  “How dare you blame that on me?” she asks. “You were jealous and you allowed it to happen.” Her voice wobbles, rasps. I’ve never heard her cry once since Kit died. Never heard even a second of vulnerability. For a moment I feel guilty: why make her share the burden of Kit’s death? If blaming it on me is what allows her to continue living, I should let her have it.

  I open my mouth to apologize, to take back what I said. “I’m—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

  “If you’d died when you got meningitis, I’d still have my daughter.” She’s weeping.

  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, if I said there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t still wish I had a mother who approved, or at least didn’t despise me. But it doesn’t hurt the way it once would have.

  “Actually, you’d have two,” I reply just before I hang up the phone. “And now you have none.”

  Two days later, three weeks on the dot since I returned to my own time, I'm ready to leave it again. This time, I hope, for good.

  Cecelia made yet another spa appointment for me after I broke up with Mark, which made me realize she was never trying to get me ready for a life with him in the first place. She somehow knew, or at least hoped, that my life would end up back with Henri.

  I hope she’s right.

  "I'm not sure what to do with all this stuff," I tell Louis on my last day. When I failed to buy myself a new wardrobe at Chanel, clothes began to arrive. More clothes than I could wear in a year, along with shoes and purses and toiletries.

  "It is yours," he tells me. "Madame Boudon says she will keep them until you return to visit us again."

  “I’m…I’m not planning to come back.”

  He bows his head. “We’ll keep them just in case you change your mind.”

  I take one last look around my suite. It’s been like a dream, but I have another dream, one that is so much more compelling. Saying goodbye to my own time is far easier than I ever thought it might be.

  28

  This time when I jump from the woods near 11 Rue Ste Genevieve, I know exactly what I hope to find on the other side. I picture eyes the color of the forest at dusk and the slow curve of a smile meant only for me. And as everything begins to blacken around me, there is no panic. There is only relief.

  I could try to land the day I left, but I choose not to. I have no right to steal days from them that they lived without me, although I suppose this is what I’ll be doing from now on. But who knows what might have happened while I was gone? Marie could have won over her priest or discovered the prophecy is about her. She might have decided to move to the south of France like I asked.

  Even if what’s changed hurts me—if Henri is now with Claudette, for instance—it would be wrong for me to erase those weeks from their existence, rewrite it all with me present for them, just because I wish it was so. So I proceed carefully, skipping through decades and then years and then months and finally counting days until I’m fairly confident I’m exactly where I want to be—August 22, 1938, three weeks after I left.

  I land in the hay again, of course, and land badly, but the heaviness of the journey is already settling on me and there’s no time to waste. I bolt from the stall, grabbing the
blanket that hangs on a peg to the left. I wrap it around me, and though sleep has begun its siren’s call, I keep pushing forward. I knew I missed Henri, but I had no idea how much until this moment, until he’s so very close and I have a few conscious minutes at most to lay eyes on him.

  I rush into the yard just as he is climbing out of the truck. He sees me and for a moment only stares, as if I’m a ghost. That same longing is there, but uncertainty also. I have no time for his uncertainty, however, so I run, or try to anyway, stumbling over the long blanket at my feet, hair flying.

  I throw my arms around his neck and feel his heart thudding beneath my ear. My eyes flutter and the fatigue settles over me like a weight I can no longer push away. I tip my head up toward him. "I’m back,” I whisper, as I sink into oblivion. “I made it back.”

  29

  I wake in the room next to Marie’s, which is flooded with morning sun. A chair sits next to the bed, with a blanket tossed over the arm and a dog-eared book on the table beside it.

  My limbs are as heavy as ever when I rise, and the simple act of climbing out of bed feels like it requires more strength than I might have, but the breeze coming through the window is refreshing, not sweltering, and I’m motivated to get downstairs in a way I wasn’t the first time I arrived. In spite of the journey and the days I’ve probably spent sleeping, a quick glance in the cracked mirror on the wall confirms I still haven’t lost the sheen of my spa day. I’m ready to begin my life here...as long as Henri wants that too.

  I hear the sound of feet racing up the stairs just as I’ve pulled the white dress over my head, and suddenly Marie comes running in. “I thought I heard you moving around!” she cries, throwing her arms around me. “At last! I want to hear everything, but first things first. You’ll eat while I draw you a bath, and then—”