Page 78 of Across Time

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.