I alternated pacing the porch and the living room while I waited for Liz to return from work. Eventually when my legs got tired, I sat on the hard bench at the base of the staircase. Through the screen door, I watched low grey clouds overlap the clear blue sky and listened to the swell of shushing leaves in the wind as a storm approached.
Liz walked in the door as Ruth finished setting the dining room table. I wanted to drag her straight to the scrapbook to show her Clara's photograph, but I got the impression we were expected to join everyone for dinner. There were two other boarders: a young teacher with cat-eye glasses, and Mrs. Barry's nephew, a middle-aged man who sat down with a sigh, unbuttoned the cuffs of his white shirt and communicated for the rest of the meal in disinterested slow blinks.
"My nephew is here to keep an eye on me," Mrs. Barry explained with an eye roll and a wink when she introduced me to them.
Dishes of cold sliced ham, corn on the cob and potato salad were passed around while I sat wringing my sweaty hands and nervously shifting in my chair. If Rose had actually gone to 1886, could she get back on her own? Was it an accident or did she know what she was doing? Had she done it before? Should I wait around for her to come back or try to go back to 1886 to get her?
"I heard that the Coast Guard will call off the search after twenty-four hours," Ruth said. "So sad." The rest of the table murmured and shook their heads in agreement. Liz's eyes caught mine and then returned to her plate. Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them back. I was holding on to hope that the Coast Guard wouldn't find her anyway.
Near the end of the meal, a breeze cut through the stuffy dining room, lifting the curtains and tinkling the crystals hanging from the chandelier. Rain began to splatter on the porch and everyone stood and scattered to close the windows throughout the house.
I caught Liz as she was headed up the stairs.
"I have to show you something," I whispered, knowing excitement was written all over my face.
"Now? I want to change and-"
"Yeah, now. Please."
The scrapbook was still on the table in the living room and I fumbled through the pages while Liz pulled the windows down, cutting off the air circulation and the earthy smell of rain.
"I've seen this before. Mrs. Barry loves to talk about this old hotel."
"I think I found her. Look." Liz chewed her nails as she read the article. "So what are the odds that the actual Clara Bartlett washed up alive on the banks of the St. Clair River? My grand-... Rose looks just like her. Could it be her?"
"Could be," Liz said with indifference, before she turned away and walked to the staircase. She beat me to our room, shut the door in my face and locked it.
"Hey!" I said through the door.
"I'm changing. Wait a minute."
After a few minutes the lock clicked again. I knocked gently and opened the door. Liz was sitting at the desk rifling through the pages of one of her journals.
"So, what should I do?" I asked.
"Whatever you think," she said coolly.
"Should I wait for her to come back?"
She stopped flicking through the book and traced her finger down one page.
"No. You should go get her. If they think she's some rich guy's daughter, she could be sent back to the city anytime. And she won't have any say in it. If she says she's not Clara Bartlett, they'll assume her poor little female brain has been traumatized."
I was just getting the hang of 1953. There was no way I could make it in a time over one-hundred years before mine. And with an actual task to complete, besides tracking down and messing around with a guy who couldn't get a girl within twenty miles to date him because he was a known shithead? I couldn't do it.
"Can you come with me?" I asked in a near-whisper.
"No." She tapped at the book on the desk and finally looked up at me. "I've already been back to 1886, around the date you're looking at. I can't go twice. There are no do-overs. In a regular life and in this life."
"What if you go before the days you were already there and stay?"
Liz's blue eyes lit up. "Oh, I never thought of- just kidding. Then you get kicked back. Like that day I was at the soda shop with you. I didn't leave on purpose, I wasn't paying enough attention to the time."
"Kicked back to when?"
"You can get kicked back to your origin or skip ahead to the next time you haven't been to or really any point in time you haven't been. It's scary. That time I jumped forward a few days, so I skipped over the days I'd already been to and showed up in the same spot in the soda shop a week from now, in the middle of the night." That's why I have all these. She flipped the pages of her journal. "I write down every date I've been to so I can keep track and I can try to avoid getting caught and sent to another time unexpectedly."
"Why have you been to 1886?"
"I was doing someone a favor." She was rapidly tapping her toes against the hardwood floor and gripping the seat of the chair like she was keeping her feet from propelling her into flight. "I know a couple others like us. We help each other out."
"There are more of us," I muttered. So there's an "us". How many? And why? "How do I get to her? I can't go through the pool. I'm sure there's no pool in that spot over a hundred years ago. How will I find her?"
A roll of thunder shook the walls. Through the window, I watched the rain drench the world outside and form currents in the street.
Eighteen eighty-six. What did that even mean? Spring water baths to soothe and cure your ailments. Electricity? Maybe. Could I even speak to anyone without giving myself away? Would I be able to do anything- open a door, pick up a pen, lift Rose up and throw her over my shoulder if I had to? Would everything become more difficult the further back I traveled?
"There's no way I can do this!"
"Have you only travelled through the city pool?" Liz was pacing between the beds, picking at her cuticles.
"Yeah. So I can't- this isn't going to work, is it?!" I threw my hands in the air and collapsed on the bed.
"Okay. Stop. You can probably get there through the pool. I saw you come out of the pool when it was drained and it was basically a gross puddle. Buy you also need to be able to come back. What is it about the pool? The water? The chlorine smell? How do you feel when you're there?"
"Relaxed." I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. "It happens when I'm underwater. Wait! It happened once in the lake. But I wasn't trying. I got sent back to my origin, I guess? But it wouldn't be because I'd already been to that date in 1953."
"You can get kicked back kind of randomly, if you let your guard down. It's the water then. You probably don't need the pool. Rose went through the water, too, so that makes sense."
"Every time I've come here, she was somewhere near the pool. I used memories of my grandpa's to get here, so how do I get to 1886?" I quickly sat up. "Wait, why does the water thing make sense? Is this genetic?"
"There's probably a genetic component, yeah." She sat on her bed across from me and brought her legs into a hug. "You travel when you're relaxed in the water. The first few times it happened to me, I was scared of something. I think it's an escape. For me, anyway."
I started twisting my grandma's ring around my finger, caught myself and clenched my hands into tight fists to stop. "Oh, and this ring," I said, holding my hand up. "It was hers and I need to be wearing it to get here."
She shrugged dismissively. "You don't need it to get here. But it reminds you of her, so it probably helps."
The fact that the band remained on my finger was somewhat comforting, but I watched it intently as if it might disappear before my eyes. The rain stopped and Liz opened the window. When she turned around, her blue eyes caught mine and her mouth flattened into a grimace.
"Can you get out of here for a while? I'll figure out a way to help you, but I can't think when you're looking at me like a starving puppy."
"Okay!" I jumped to my feet. "You will help me, then? I'll do whatever you need. Should I be doing something?" I asked eagerly.
"You can try to figure out why Rose would travel to 1886. It seems accidental, but who knows?"
"Okay," I agreed. I stared past the delicate lace panels hanging straight and still in the open window, down to the street. A blue car rolled by, the music coming from its radio rose and fell away.
"Somewhere else, Vanessa. Think about it somewhere else. Your nervous energy is killing me." Her eyes widened in exasperation and she pointed at the door.
"Sorry. I'm going."
"Don't go to Pete," she warned.
His name was a slap in the face. A harsh reminder of how I got myself in this situation.
"Ugh. I won't," I grumbled, shutting the door behind me.
I walked on the shoulder of the road that ran alongside the south bank of the LaSalle River. It was the kind of summer evening that seemed like a distant planet. The sky was greyish yellow and the world was saturated. The only sound was the loud buzzing of cicadas in the trees and I felt like the only person alive.
I reached a baseball field, where a few boys played an unorganized game, taking turns at bat, then grabbing a glove and loping back out into the field, all while chattering at each other, hurling insults and encouragement in squawky pre-pubescent voices. Past the field was the cemetery where my grandma was buried. Not yet, of course. But I found myself on the gravel path winding through the cemetery anyway. Near the spot where I remembered watching my grandma's casket lowered into the ground, there was a stone nestled in the grass marking her grandmother and grandfather. Judith Brindamour. 1867- 1949. Benjamin Brindamour. 1866- 1938. They were alive in 1886.
How could I be only four generations removed from a time that seemed so, so long ago? Who were these people? I lived because they had lived and yet I knew nothing about them.
What did I even know about my grandmother? She had a son and a daughter and five grandchildren. She played card games with her friends, volunteered at church fish fries and knitted nubby scarves and mittens. She tended a flower garden in her backyard and made pies and liked to read funny anecdotes from the Reader's Digest out loud.
Before that? She graduated high school in 1953. She taught synchronized swimming. She flirted with a clueless Walter Brooks until he asked her out as a result of a sudden existential crisis. She lived her whole life in two different houses on the same street. Her father and his father "worked on ships", whatever that meant. She died when I was seven years old and that was all I knew about her and those who came before her. I had no idea what might have pulled Rose to 1886.
I remembered coming across a section devoted to the history of Palmer at the library once, with old maps and shelves of yearbooks and books about local history, so I decided the library was my next stop. I crossed the bridge and climbed the steps of the tan brick building next to the city hall. But the library, my only source of information in a world without WiFi, was closed.
Exasperated, I started walking and didn't stop until I reached the edge of town, which came sooner than I expected. There weren't many layers to Palmer in 1953. I was used to the older, farmhouse style homes in the center of town, then a few blocks of ranches and split level houses, and finally a layer of cookie cutter subdivisions. But in the 50s, the newly-built ranches, like Bobby and Theresa Colton's, defined the outer edge of town.
I hesitated for a minute and stared down the main road out of town. The thickening trees, drone of insect sounds and changing colors of the sky took me to Pete's spot in the country and the sunset we promised to remember forever. Less than two days later, I stood at the end of a sidewalk, clenched my fists and wished I could forget. But instead of the image fading away, it intensified. I quietly cursed into the heavy evening air, turned around and strode back into town.
Eventually I reached the riverfront park, dropped onto an empty bench and peeled off my sweaty ballet flats. My skin prickled as a light breeze coming off of the water cooled and dried the sweat lingering on my limbs.
If I ever make it back, I thought, I will never, ever wear anything but sneakers.
A man crouched on the boardwalk baiting his fishing line suddenly glanced up at me. I gave him a conciliatory smile and he returned to his work. Had I been thinking out loud? I was so spaced out that maybe I had been talking to myself.
Another younger man leaned against a piling, staring out at the glassy grey-green water that was darkening by the minute as the sun went down. His long, boney arms were crossed and his stance reminded me of the repositionable paper skeleton we used to hang on our front door at Halloween, until Jason repeatedly rearranged the hands so the skeleton was picking his nose or grabbing his coccyx, and my mom threw it out. I knew it was Walter when I heard the strangled sound of suppressed sobs echoing in his throat; the sound of a trapped bubble of air rising to the surface. He coughed, pressed a hanky to his face and began walking down the boardwalk toward me.
I stiffened, even though I knew he wouldn't see me. His deep-set eyes appeared even more sunken and shadowed and his shoulders slumped. He caught me watching him and looked directly at me with a polite, but miserable half-smile. I returned his sad smile while I cried on the inside.