Page 19 of Across Time

"Not just fight. Hide food. Hide money. They are going to take everything."

He nods, a weight on his shoulders that wasn’t there when the evening began. It hits me hard for the first time, just how much danger he's in. Many of those graves in Normandy belonged to American and British soldiers, but so many of them belong to the French as well, and I can’t save him. Their future is already written, already in the past. It's not that Henri might die during World War II. It's that he might already be dead.

But Marie, at least, is likely to survive. And might avoid a great deal of suffering if she could just be reasoned with.

“What would persuade you to leave?” I ask her quietly, desperately.

“If I knew for certain about my mother,” she replies. “Then I might consider it.”

The gauntlet is thrown down. I refused to go back to see her mother when it was simply about satisfying her curiosity, but this is different. How can I possibly say no when it could change the course of the next decade for her?

My stomach begins to churn. It’s time for me to return home and put my days of jumping behind me for good, but it looks like that isn’t going to happen just yet.

“Then I’ll go,” I tell Marie. “I’ll go talk to your mother and find out where she went.”

"No," says Henri harshly. "You won't."

Marie turns her wide eyes from me to him. "How can you say that?” she demands. “Don't you want to know?"

He runs a hand through his thick hair and grips it hard. "What I want is for my mother to not realize, through a series of questions, that her death is imminent," he says. "And what is supposed to happen when you get your answer? You try to follow her, put yourself into the precise situation far more experienced travelers haven’t survived? Wherever she’s been, she’s been there too long. She won’t be able to travel forward to us.”

"I just need to know where she went,” Marie pleads. “I’m not saying I’ll follow her.”

"Amelie is not going," says Henri. "I forbid it."

Wrong words, Henri.

I smile at him. “I’d like to see you try to stop me.”

10

Madame Durand disappeared just after Marie’s birthday, so Marie has decided I should appear right around that point.

"My birthday was November 12th, and my mother had just given me the most beautiful coat—aubergine with fur cuffs. If I'm wearing that coat, it means you haven’t gone back too far,” she says. “Henri will be away at school, so if he's here, you've not gone far enough.” She gives me a few other landmarks, but they are less reliable, based on the state of a weathervane, a broken door—so I hope I'm not going to be forced to use them.

She's so excited about my trip she can hardly contain herself, whereas I feel mostly dread. Traveling back by years is not hard—you just count, like jumping squares in hopscotch—but landing in a particular week requires more specificity, and that is not my strong suit.

Actually, I’m not sure I have a strong suit where my gift is concerned.

I time my departure fairly early in the morning, so that if I land in the right place I'll be there to see Marie leave for school in the coat. I walk to the barn with Marie and, to my surprise, Henri comes too.

He looks as if he might not have slept, and he definitely hasn’t shaved. I imagine placing my palm over his rough jaw and telling him to go back to bed, imagine the feel of my lips brushing his skin as I say it, and then I blush, shocked at where my mind goes at the strangest times.

"I wish you wouldn’t do this," he says gravely, shoulders slumped.

"I won’t let her know what's coming," I whisper. "I swear it." My plan is to introduce myself as a friend of Marie's from the distant future, one with whom Marie has discussed the circle of light, and explain that my aunt disappeared searching for it, and I'm hoping to track her last days.

He holds my gaze. "Be safe," he says. He actually looks like he means it.

I force a smile. “I guess that’s better than a few weeks ago, when you were planning to shoot me.”

I close my eyes, needing to shut out Henri's worried face and Marie's hopeful one in order to focus. In my head I look back, the way I might if I was just remembering the past. There are small hints when you are about to travel—a slight breeze over the skin, a weightlessness—I feel those hints now, and I allow them to come. The breeze is barely noticeable, and then it picks up as my body grows lighter and lighter. With the rush of wind and darkness closing in, I can feel time around me, almost like a rope I cling to. My body wants to fly forward, toward home, but instead I force myself backward, estimating the way I might if I were measuring a small distance in my yard. I go slowly, given the need for accuracy, counting by months rather than years, and when I reach what I believe is November of 1935 I take a deep breath and land on the other side of the barn, up to my knees in snow.

Marie never mentioned snow, and surely snow in early November would be memorable? I can’t see the broken weathervane from here so I creep through the barn’s back door, jerking to a stop when I see Henri in the distance, standing beside their car. He's younger, dressed in much finer clothes than I’ve seen him in. He looks like a handsome prince, one of those carefree rich boys who attend Eton and worry about nothing more than sports and girls and gambling. Except there is utter grief on his face.

I’ve arrived after their mother is gone, I realize. A part of me wants to continue to watch this version of him, so handsome and stricken and lost as he stares blankly at the fields, but it’s dangerous, and my legs are growing numb. I close my eyes once more and move further back, this time creeping along—moving by inches, rather than feet.

When I land the snow is gone, but it is still chilly. The weathervane and the shed door are broken, because Henri is not home to fix them. This may not be the week she left, but it’s probably as good as I’m going to get. I grab the horse blanket off the hook and huddle in the barn’s corner, waiting for Marie to leave on her way to school. I’m tired. It’s not the obliterating exhaustion of traveling from my own time, but it’s worse than I should feel having gone back only a few years. I’m contemplating curling up in the hay for a minute when Marie finally appears, looking very young and happy, wearing the new aubergine coat she told me about. I wait one more minute, and then I cross the yard and knock on the door, saying a silent prayer that Madame Durand likes strangers a little more than her son.