Page 48 of Across Time

"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."