“Hamburger or hot dog?” Kit asked. “Coke or Tab?”
The old names made her smile. With the health consciousness of the twenty-first century, she hadn’t had a Coke or a hot dog in years. “Dog and a Coke.”
Kit got a hamburger and a Coke.
When their orders came, Olivia couldn’t help staring at it. By twenty-first-century norms, there was very little food on the plate. No side of coleslaw swimming in high calorie mayonnaise, no beans in brown sugar, no fried potatoes. She hadn’t noticed it until now, but people ate about half as much as they did in the modern, tech world. “And to burn it off, all we do is sit behind a computer,” she murmured.
“What did you say?” Kit asked.
She brought her attention back to the present. “I’d like mustard and pickle relish,” Olivia told the girl behind the counter. She would marry a young man from Richmond, move away, have two kids, go through a horrible divorce, then return to Summer Hill and eventually marry Dave Harrison and be very happy. “How is Dave?”
“Who?”
“Dave Harrison. Sings in the choir at church? Oh, sorry. I thought you two were together. I know he likes you a lot.”
“Does he? He hasn’t said anything to me. Besides, I have a boyfriend.”
“I know. He lives in Richmond. But later...” Olivia took a bite of her hot dog. “You know, you’re so good with people that you might try selling houses. I bet you’d be really good at it. I’d buy from you.”
The young woman took a step back from Olivia, looking at her as though she were crazy. “I, uh... I have to go check on supplies.” She practically ran from the room.
Olivia looked at Kit, waiting for him to ask her questions, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “You think she’d sell us some ice cream for Ace?”
“That girl would sell us the drugstore and leave town five minutes after she got the money.”
“And you’ve had experience in buying houses from her?”
She avoided his question. “Did you know that hot dogs are made of ground-up animal hooves?”
Kit looked at his burger for a moment and she could see the muscle working in his temple. He seemed to be trying to decide what to say next. Finally, he turned to her. “Tell me or not, but whatever you need help with, I’m with you.”
Olivia thought she’d never loved anyone so much in her life as she did this man in this moment. “I think of things as I see people.”
“Then we’ll have to go find them,” he said. “Since we’ve both worked seven days a week for a month now, I think we deserve some time off. Think the kids can feed themselves for a couple of days?”
“Ace and Letty, for sure. Give them a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and they’ll be fine. The other kids, I don’t know. Maybe Nina can babysit.”
They laughed together.
On the drive back to Tattwell, Olivia sat next to Kit—no seat belts in the car—and he put his arm around her shoulders. When they got back, he kissed her good-night, but he didn’t ask to go into her room with her. Behind him, she could see Ace’s little blond head above the covers. His last visit to the hospital to see his mother had been the worst yet. The child needed comfort, and Kit was his security blanket.
She went into her own room. The bed seemed big and lonely. If Kit had asked to spend the night with her, she would have said no. Maybe. That he didn’t ask bothered her.
She went to sleep right away, but she had nightmares. She saw burning houses, car wrecks, multiple funerals, and three suicides. When she awoke, she was in a pool of sweat—and her lower back was aching in a way it hadn’t done in years. It took her a moment to remember what caused that particular pain. She went to the bathroom and sure enough, she had started her period.
Instantly, tears came to her eyes. She was not pregnant. All of the horror that had happened wasn’t going to. If Kit left her now it wouldn’t be so traumatic. She wouldn’t have to go to an unwed mother’s home, give her child up for adoption—and for the rest of her life she would NOT feel that she deserved nothing good to happen to her.
She went back to bed and put her hands behind her head. This changed everything! Broadway was still open to her. Last year she’d been in a local play and she’d forgotten how much she loved being onstage. That the play had been put on by Kit so he could win her back didn’t count.
Freedom of choice was a wonderful thing, she thought. The entire world was open to her. Careers, travel, men, anything was possible.
Smiling, she tried to go back to sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, the dreams returned. Except they weren’t dreams. She was remembering things that had happened in her dear little town. She’d lived in it all her life and she’d always been involved with its people. As she grew older, people began to depend on her. After Alan died, after she sold everything to pay off the debts of Kevin and Hildy, she became a sort of matriarch for the entire town. “Go to Olivia. She’ll know what to do,” seemed to be a motto. Because of her position in town, she knew a lot of secrets.
When Letty and Ace threw open her door before daylight, she felt worse than she had when she went to bed. As with children throughout time, they wanted something new and different to occupy them.
“My kingdom for an iPad,” she mumbled. “DVDs and the latest movies to keep them all busy.”
Kit, in shorts and T-shirt, was standing in the doorway. “Who wants green pancakes?”
Squealing, the kids ran to him, and Olivia gave him a look of thanks. Twenty minutes later, she was downstairs and telling Ace he was named Harry Potter and Letty was Hermione and they were at wizard school. Everyone ate in silence as Olivia told the story.
After the dishes were washed and the oldest and youngest were gluing together pointed wizard hats and painting sticks to be magic wands, Kit told Livie that Nina would look after them so they could go out.
At first Olivia thought he meant that they’d go somewhere and make love. But there was no way on earth that she was going to let him touch her. She wasn’t going to tempt destiny so that when he went away she was left behind carrying his child.
As for the marriage... If she wasn’t expecting a baby, there was no need to rush into that. Maybe she would go to Broadway and try it again. She’d see Kit when he returned.
He saw the way she pulled away from him. He didn’t comment but she felt him stiffen. “You said it helped with what you need to do if you see people. I thought we’d go to town and look.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said formally. Arrieta had said that she could only change things that related to her, to Olivia. But how far did that extend? In her little town, tragedies affected everyone. If she could help just one person, she’d feel she’d accomplished something great.
Besides, Olivia was not from the ME generation. She picked up a pen and a spiral notebook off the phone table and she was ready.
She directed Kit to drive her around the streets of Summer Hill as she thought about the owners. There were several people she hadn’t met, but she knew the majority of them.
There were few families that hadn’t been struck by that awful word tragedy. Some of them no one would know about until the next generation. A man abuses his children and they do it to theirs. A girl molested as a child goes berserk when she’s an adult.
There were accidents that could have been prevented, diseases that if detected earlier wouldn’t have killed.
Olivia and Kit rode in silence as she made notes. How could she prevent these coming catastrophes? She knew that as she was now, if she went to the authorities and reported rape, incest, abuse, she wouldn’t be believed. Her youth and inexperience would be against her.
Besides, she thought with a grimace, it was the times. In the 1970s if a woman accused a man of rape, she was put on trial. She had led him on, entrapped him. If she’d worn a low-cut blouse years before, she was considered a slut an
d the man was innocent. Olivia wanted to scream that every item in every store was packaged attractively but if you stole it, you were prosecuted. Why were women considered less than a stick of deodorant?
Kit reached across the seat, took her hand, and squeezed it. “If you want to talk, I’m here.”
“Thank you.” She pulled her hand away as she looked at the next house. The Nelsons, a lovely family. When little Lisa was fourteen years old, she would slit her wrists and die before she was found. In the school locker room, some girls had stolen her clothes, then let the boys in. Lisa didn’t think she could live with the shame. How did Olivia stop something that wouldn’t happen for years?
For the next three days, Olivia lived in a haze of trying to prevent the horrors that she knew would happen. She called people—using the annoying rotary dial phone—and wrote letters—with a typewriter, no less. Using every lie she could imagine, she said she had a dream, a premonition, she saw something, someone told her something. Whatever she could think of to warn people, she said it.
She was aware of the people around her at Tattwell, but only vaguely. Kit seemed to be taking care of them. He allowed the youngest pair to bother her twice a day to ask for more about what Letty was calling The Story of the Girl Wizard. She wanted to hear how smart Hermione was, and Ace wanted her to tell how brave Harry Potter was.
Uncle Freddy made them laugh when he said he wanted to be Voldemort, the personification of evil.
After only minutes, Kit ushered them all out and let Olivia get back to her phone and typewriter.
“But even if I do this, will it all be forgotten at the end of three weeks?” she said aloud, her head in her hands.
It was on the afternoon of the fourth day that she fell back in her chair and was ready to admit defeat. When she was an older woman, people listened to her, but when she was barely out of her teens, they dismissed her. She was hung up on, yelled at, called a liar. Three people reported her to the police. The sheriff called and cautioned her. He said that what people did in the privacy of their own homes was their business.
“It’s going to take forty years to show people that that’s not true,” she said.
“Then, Livie, you call me back in forty years and I’ll listen to what you have to say. Until then, leave the residents of Summer Hill alone.” The sheriff hung up.
In the end, Olivia ran away. She’d had days of trying to prevent disasters, tragedies, accidents, and crimes, but she didn’t seem to have made any progress.
She ran through the kitchen and out the back door. No one was about, but she didn’t wonder where they were. All she could see were the visions in her mind. Funerals, mothers crying, fathers in a rage, people in handcuffs, neglected children, abused children.
She often told people of the peacefulness of their dear little town, of the almost-nonexistent crime. But over the years many things had happened. When she looked back over that long expanse, there was time between the bad. Years would go by and nothing bad would happen. But now she saw it all. A lifetime of preventable misery was screaming through her mind.
But she couldn’t do anything about it!
The feeling of helplessness was sucking the energy out of her.
She ran through the garden and stopped at the big magnolia tree. Why had she been sent back in time if she had no power to change anything? Forget the big horrors, the wars and bombings. She couldn’t even prevent the suicide of a girl who was going to be bullied at school.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back against the old tree. Last year she’d ridden in a little red truck with her friend Casey past this tree. Olivia had told how Alan had lied and cheated, and how he’d taken away the business that Olivia had built. Casey was the wife of Tate who was going to be the son of five-year-old Letty. Olivia had talked to people who didn’t yet exist!
When she opened her eyes, Kit was standing there, a garden hoe over his shoulder. As always, he had on next to nothing.
But she didn’t feel lust for his beautiful body. What she felt was anger. All of this was his fault. Her life with Alan was because Kit had left her alone and pregnant. She had come back in time with the idea of having a life with Christopher Montgomery. But she wasn’t pregnant, so there was no need to have to spend her life with him. She was utterly and totally free!
She knew that what she was feeling, all her anger and frustration, was on her face.
When Kit first saw her standing there, he smiled, but one look at her glower and he put on what Olivia called his “diplomat face.” It was a mask he hid behind so no one would know what he was thinking—but Olivia did. Today the mask covered his extreme disapproval.
“Let me know when my Olivia is back.” It was the voice he’d someday use with trumped-up dignitaries who he wanted to put in their place.
Olivia broke. Like a glass vial full of some nasty, smoky, green poison, she snapped.
She didn’t say a word, just ran at him with all her force.
Surprised, Kit tossed the hoe to the side and caught her just as her head hit his torso.
He grunted as she nearly knocked the breath out of him.
“It’s all your fault!” Yelling, she began hitting him with her fists on his bare chest. “You did it all! You left me when I was carrying your baby. You—”
He grabbed her shoulders to hold her out to look at her. “Are you—?”
She swung her right arm with all her might and hit him in the jaw. When she saw blood on his lip, she was pleased. She’d certainly shed enough blood for him! “This morning I found out that I’m not, but I was back in 1970. And I was alone! You saw me at the theater in New York, but you said nothing. I had to go away to Florida to have our baby. Estelle raised her. When our daughter finally met us, it was horrible.”
Olivia stepped back from him and put her hands over her face. “She hated us. Our daughter had a good life—Estelle and Henry were good to her—but she couldn’t bear the sight of us. Of you and me. She didn’t know she was adopted until late, and she didn’t understand why we had given her up. Why we didn’t want her.”
Olivia began to cry. “I told you I loved you but you left. I thought you were scared. You told no one where you were going, not even your father.”
She looked up at Kit and saw that his face was white under his tan and his lip was bloody. “Oh, go away. How can you understand what I’m going through? You’re just...” Her mouth hardened. “You’re just a worthless boy.”
Kit’s jaw muscle was working, but he gave no other sign that he was reacting to her words. “As you wish,” he said, then gave a bit of a bow. He put his shoulders back in that way that meant he wasn’t going to talk about the subject anymore, then he started walking away from her.
Olivia picked up a round rock from the ground. It looked like one of the stones the children had collected from the creek. Unlike when she was with Elise, her throwing arm was in good shape. She pulled back like a pitcher and let go. The rock hit him hard on his perfectly toned rear end. “I hope Gaddafi finds out who you are and shoots you.” She turned away toward the house.
Kit caught her before she had gone two feet. He grabbed her shoulders, put his nose to hers, and glared. “What do you know?”
She twisted out of his grip. “I tell you I was pregnant and gave our child up for adoption and that means nothing to you? But the mention of a Middle East dictator gets your attention? Go to hell!” She started back to the house.
Kit stepped in front of her. “Cut out the melodrama and tell me what you know and who told you.”
She moved around him.
“Olivia!”
Halting, she looked at him. “Don’t use your diplomat voice on me! I’m not some third world despot who will be overthrown next week. This—” She motioned to his all-over tan. “This is to make you look more Arabic. The military, specifically some guy you said was wider than he was tall—you
called him a cartoon bear—is going to pick you up in just over two weeks. They’ll give you twenty minutes to pack and leave. And you do it! To hell with us and your family. You only cared about Muammar Gaddafi.”
When Kit opened his mouth to speak, Olivia knew what he was going to say. He was going to tell her that she was saying the name wrong. Always the perfectionist! She leaned toward him, her face red with anger. “Don’t you dare say it!”
But he had no idea what she meant. “Actually, his name is—”
She put her hands over her ears and screamed so loud the peacock screeched and the children came running.
“Go!” Kit ordered them, and the kids and the bird obeyed. When they were alone again, he looked back at Olivia. “You must tell me what this is about. Do I talk in my sleep? Is that how you know about...about my mission?”
Her arms were stiff at her side, her hands in fists. “No! You tell me when we finally get married—over forty years from now. But by that time I’m so beaten down by life that I would marry Gaddafi if it meant escaping my stepson and his wife.”
Kit’s face was losing the hard, unbending look that he would perfect as he aged. “Did you agree to marry me now because you thought you were expecting our child?”
“Yes!” she said. “I did. I thought I had no other choice in this unenlightened era when a single mother is considered—at best—an object of pity. This time is hardly better than the Puritans’.”
“Thought,” he said softly. “Past tense.”
“Yes. Past. Done. I now know I have choices. I have freedom. I don’t have to marry vain little Alan Trumbull just to get his kid because I lost mine. I don’t have to see our daughter’s eyes when we tell her we’re the parents who...” The energy her rage had given her was vanishing. “Who gave her up.”
“Come with me.” Kit’s his voice was soft and gentle. “I want to show you something.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you. I hate you! You lied to me. You left me.”