Page 50 of Across Time

I hear Kit land in the water but the world has turned dark and air seems to rush around me. I have no idea what’s happening, or how to make it stop. I land hard in the kitchen, naked and dripping water. My mother stands there, talking on the phone. Her eyes widen and I panic, as if I’ve been caught in a terrible lie. I scramble into a ball, waiting for the sting of my mother’s hand, for her raised voice, wishing desperately I was back in the lake…

And then I am. I’m back in the lake.

And I'm alone. Kit is gone and I’m completely alone.

The world is silent, empty.

And I begin to scream just to fill it back up with something.

* * *

"Amelie," pleads a voice. "Wake up. You're dreaming."

My eyes open. Henri is sitting on the edge of the bed beside me, his hands gently shaking my shoulders.

My sister is dead. When will I wake and not be surprised by this? My sister is dead and it’s still my fault, all of it. And this secret I’ve kept for nearly a decade suddenly feels too heavy to carry on my own anymore. I don’t feel capable of lying about it anyway—not to him.

“My sister is dead,” I whisper. “I should have told you.” I roll to my side and begin to cry. He sits with me, his hand on my shoulder.

"It was just a dream," he says gently. "Just a nightmare."

What’s he going to think of me when he knows the truth? I came here not because I was brave but because I was such a damn coward I couldn’t continue to face my sister in dreams. Such a coward I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Henri I’m the reason she drowned.

I take a shuddering breath. "No,” I whisper. “It wasn’t. My sister is dead. She kept coming into my dreams, telling me to find Marie.”

He pushes the hair from my face. His jaw is open, confusion and doubt in his eyes. “I don’t understand. She died…recently?”

I look away. “No, she died when I was eleven. It was my fault. I was supposed to be watching her, but I time traveled by accident and she drowned.”

Instead of pulling away, he sinks to the floor so we are face-to-face. He looks horrified, and sad, and then he pulls me against his chest and holds me there, tightly. I’m frozen, relishing the feel of him and the steady thump-thump-thump of his heart while I wait for the other shoe to drop, for what I’m telling him to sink in: my sister is dead and it’s all on my hands.

“If you time traveled by accident, how does that possibly make this your fault?” he asks.

There are ways to spin almost anything to make yourself sound blameless, but I am definitely not that. Just ask anyone in my home town.

“When Kit died, my mother let people think I did it because I was jealous. And she was right. I was. It happened because I was jealous. That’s why I time traveled.”

He pulls back just enough to see my face. “An accident is an accident,” he says. “Regardless of the reason it happened.”

“My mother doesn’t see it that way,” I whisper.

His brow furrows. “Your mother was the adult. And she should have known that at such a young age time travel is out of your control. She made a poor choice, and continues to make a poor choice, by telling you you’re to blame.”

I want to believe him. I do. But there’s a decade of recrimination behind me, insisting I shouldn’t get off so easy. "But if I hadn’t time-traveled, it wouldn’t have happened.”

His face is inches from mine. He gives me a sad smile as he pushes the hair off my face. “My mother blamed herself when my father died,” he says quietly. “She went to visit him where he was posted, arranged a weekend pass for him. His regiment deployed while he was there, so he got sent to another one going to Caporetto, which is where he died. Would he have been killed anyway? Probably. But my mother felt as if his death rested on her head…just as I feel her death rests on mine.”

I meet his eyes for the first time since the conversation began. “How could your mother’s death be your fault? You weren’t even here.”

He stares at his hands, now entwined with mine. “If I hadn’t gone away to Oxford, I might have convinced her not to leave. And if I die in this war you claim is coming, Marie will find a way to blame herself. She will be convinced there was something she could have done.” His eyes search mine, darker, urging me to understand. “So if some of the guilt must rest on your head, if you refuse to see that you were an innocent little girl given a task that was beyond you, so be it. But you need to know that it doesn’t make you evil. It just means you’re human. Each of us is presented with infinite choices, and we never know whether they were wrong or right ones until it’s too late.”

I nod, swallowing around this lump in my throat. What he’s said…it doesn’t relieve my guilt, but it normalizes it. It gives me a single moment or two in which I can believe it’s possible I’m not a monster, not something inherently evil and cursed. Maybe, like his mother, I’m just someone who made the wrong choice.

"Thank you,” I whisper.

He rises from the side of the bed and I have to resist the impulse to reach for his arm.

"You'll be okay?" he asks.