* * * * *
"I hear you're leaving us?" My professor leaned across his desk and passed me the final paper that completed my senior requirements for graduation. "What did they offer you out there in Oregon that we didn't?"
I looked down at my paper. It was called The Mythologization of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd: An Historical Perspective.
"Space," I said. I knew my professor well enough to tell him the truth.
"Ah," Dr. Bill said, folding his hands and putting his fingers to his lips. "A Ph.D. is a long row to hoe, but that paper is a good start. Just make sure you don't stray too far into the realm of speculation. Then you'll have something that should be in the literature department, instead of history."
"I think I can handle it," I said, "though I confess there were times while writing this that I wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't."
"If we didn't love history so much, none of us would be here. We all get our heads so far into the past that sometimes we forget where we are. Don't let graduate school take over your life. Don't forget that you live in the here and now."
"Yes, Dr. Bill," I said.
Could he read my mind or what? It was four years since I'd returned to the twentieth century: four years of love and tears, and an enormous amount of work. Mom had pushed me towards getting back in school. That first quarter, I signed up at the local community college to continue those classes I'd started on before we'd driven to Wales. I'd found evening classes, early morning classes, independent study classes, and ones that coincided with the kids' naps. Over the years we'd bumped along pretty well, and with David in preschool and Anna in second grade, this last semester at the university had been a much more stable proposition for me.
If only Elisa could have been part of it too. My sister had been more stubborn than either Mom or I had thought possible. She flat-out refused to accept that I'd been to Wales, and that David was not Trev's child. That she'd been distracted and harassed preparing for her own marriage during Christmas break four years ago, I could understand, but as the years had passed, we'd slid into a mutual non-discussion pact. I didn't mention Wales, and she didn't close her ears to my voice. And I'd sworn on a stack of Bibles never to mention it to Ted, her husband.
But the reason I was leaving Pennsylvania was that I no longer could live so close to the place where Wales started. At first, I drove to the spot every day, maybe multiple times a day, as long as I had both Anna and David in the car with me. Yet, in snow, rain, or sun, the road never became what it had been. Often, I'd park beside the road, get out of the car, and walk all over the hill, poking into the dirt and sometimes even shouting Llywelyn's name. But he never answered, and the road never opened for me into that black abyss that had brought us to Wales in the first place.
What I could never come to terms with was why it had happened. If I was meant, as Llywelyn thought, to come to Wales, to save his life and bear his child, why was I back in Pennsylvania? If I was meant to save Llywelyn's life and his dynasty, why did he still die on that snowy hillside in 1282? None of it made sense.
Except for the very real existence of David, I wouldn't have believed it had happened at all-as if it was a year-long dream which I only awoke from in my mother's garden. I hoped that by leaving Pennsylvania, Llywelyn would haunt me less. I intended to continue my research on Wales, to become an historian, but I needed to stop living in the past. I needed to get away to an entirely different place, and face the fact that this was the only life I was going to get.
As I watched David grow, I could see his father in him. Even at four, he was a driven child, a perfectionist, always wanting to climb higher, run faster-push himself harder than any child I knew-and most adults, for that matter. And maybe that's where the answer lay-maybe I needed to raise my son to be the man he needed to be, and hope that who he was would transcend space and time, if that time ever came.
But I couldn't tell David who his father was. It wouldn't do to raise a boy who thought he was the Prince of Wales. In the twentieth century, that job belonged to another man, in another country, a world and a lifetime away. Even Anna appeared to have no memory of Wales at all. Now that she was in school, she refused to speak a word of Welsh, as if punishing me for taking her away from all that she loved.
No. It's best that we leave.
And yet, I still lay in bed at night, and wept for him. Wales lost him, I lost him, at the very point when his triumph was within his grasp. Still, I heard the hope under the despair, and dreamed of what might have been and what could still be. Someday. Hope for me; hope for him.
Walk with me, under star-strewn skies,
Your hand warm in mine.
Until the dawn, I'll dream of you,
Good night, my love. Good night.
Until that sun wakes you, and you turn to find me beside you once again, I wish you dreams of peace. Good night, my love. Good night.
The End
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Continue the story of Meg, Llywelyn, Anna, and David with Footsteps in Time, the next book in the After Cilmeri series, available wherever books are sold.
Sample: Footsteps in Time