TWENTY

 

Her dad was standing by the door when she came in. She hadn’t thought about the fact that she didn’t have any of her art supplies and that she was barefoot.

Not her usual sketching mode.

She wondered if he would call her on it, but he just looked her over, suspicion in his eyes.

“You’re back,” he said. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just have to shower and get ready for work before I leave to pick up Tiff. I’m really sorry about this morning, Dad.”

And she was sorry. Her mother’s disappearances would be legendary if her dad actually talked about them. Instead, Jenny had heard about them from Morgan, who told her that her mother had been complicated, that she had needed more time alone than most people, and that she wasn’t always “considerate” about letting Jenny’s dad know where she was going or how long she’d be gone. It made Jenny ashamed now.

Her dad smiled, but it was a cover for the worry in his eyes. “Just let me know where you’re headed next time, okay? If something happened to you, I wouldn’t even know where to start looking.”

“I will, Dad. I promise.” She kissed his cheek and ran up the stairs to get ready for work.

A half hour later, she was dressed in clean shorts and a layer of tanks in mismatched stripes and florals. She grabbed her crocheted bag and then stopped, the blank screen of her laptop staring out at her. She really wanted to look at the pictures she’d taken at the retreat center. She’d meant to do it this morning so she could check in with Ben, but her time with Nikolai, her need to see him and be sure he was real, had eclipsed everything else.

She tossed her bag on the bed, pulled out a sturdier tote, then closed her laptop and stuffed it inside with her phone, keys, wallet, and lip balm. She would try to look at the pictures at work. She was scheduled in the cafe, and Samuel never minded her computer there as long as she kept it in the back and business was slow enough that she could spare the time. She’d studied for tests and completed term papers in between filling orders for lattes and hot chocolates. She could find time for a little Photoshop.

Decision made and bag stocked, she left her room and skipped down the stairs. She made sure to stop in the kitchen to say goodbye to her dad. He was going to a town planning meeting that night but still wanted her to text when she got home. Her earlier lapse had cost her some of his trust.

She picked up Tiffany, happy to let her carry their conversation. Jenny tried to look like she was paying attention, but all she could think about was Nikolai and everything he’d told her. It still wasn’t easy to believe everything that was happening. To believe that the Nikolai who lived next door was the same Nikolai who occupied her dreams.

But they were identical. That much was fact. And he knew stuff about her—about the dreams that seemed like something more and the clockmaker’s grandson and the girl named Maria—that he couldn’t know unless he was telling the truth.

More than that, Jenny felt like she’d known him. Like he completed her in some fundamental way. Not in a weird, I’m-a-helpless-female-who’s-nobody-without-you kind of way. Just that she’d been more alone than she had realized. Had been drifting through her days and nights, wondering why someone who had so much could feel so lost.

And that was the other thing—when he’d talked about past lives and how people who suffered sometimes carried that trauma with them into the next life, it had made sense. Had made her ask questions she hadn’t even thought to ask.

Was it really just her visions that set her apart? Made her feel different? Wasn’t it true, if she were honest with herself, that it was more than that? That she’d always felt out of place? Not quite present in her own skin?

And if so, Nikolai’s explanation and her own dreams of Maria explained a lot more than their strange, compelling connection.

“Jen? You with me?” Tiffany voice pulled her from her thoughts.

“What?” She looked over at Tiffany, sitting in the passenger side of the car. “Oh, yeah! Totally. I’m with you.”

Tiffany gave her a knowing smile. “Come on, don’t bullshit me.”

“I’m not!” Jenny protested.

“Then what did I just say?”

“Uh … ” Jenny searched her memory. “You were talking about your mom and how she took off with the car again and how you wished Samuel hadn’t scheduled you to work the registers today.”

Tiffany shook her head. “That was, like, five minutes ago. You so weren’t listening.”

Jenny laughed. “Okay, you got me. I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

“It’s not even important,” Tiffany said. “But whatever you’re thinking about obviously is. So spill it!”

Jenny considered her options as she waited for the light to change. She could keep up the wall that she’d been constructing for as long as she could remember or she could do what she really wanted to do—tell Tiffany about Nikolai.

Not all of it, of course. Not yet.

But the other stuff. The stuff about Nikolai and how he made her feel.

“Well,” she started, thinking of the easiest way to say it. “I met someone.”

“You met someone?” Tiffany looked at her with fresh interest. “Wait a minute … You met someone? Who?”

“Just … you know. A guy.”

“Well, yeah. Duh. I figured. Tell me the rest. Like where did you meet him and stuff?”

Jenny tried not to panic. She hadn’t thought this through. Didn’t know what to say. But she was in it now. She’d just have to improvise.

“He lives next door actually. In that old house?”

“The one that’s abandoned?” Tiffany asked, her forehead crinkling while she tried to figure it out.

“Well, it wasn’t technically abandoned,” Jenny corrected her. “The guy who bought it just hadn’t done anything with it. But he’s there now.”

“How old is this guy?” Tiffany asked.

Jenny thought about it. “I’d guess around twenty.”

“Twenty? And he owns a house?”

“Yeah, I think he inherited it or something,” Jenny said, feeling stupid for not knowing. She had no idea how Nikolai had come to be at the Farnsworth house. No idea, even, if he really owned it. And how does that work, when you travel through time? Do you keep your money? Can you take it to the exchange window at a bank and turn in your rubles for dollars?

The questions piled up in her mind. She put them aside, trying to remember them for later.

“Anyway,” she continued, pulling into the parking lot behind Books. “It’s no big deal. He’s just a guy. I don’t even know him that well yet.”

Liar, she thought. You know him better than anyone. And he knows you.

 

* * *

 

Jenny worked the cafe alone while Tiffany was in the front with Ben’s mom. Apparently, Clare Daulton had worked in a clothing boutique in the last town she and Ben had lived in. She was a fast learner, already quicker on the register than Tiffany.

Jenny made sure everything was well stocked in the cafe, the tables and counters clean, before she opened up her laptop in the back kitchen room. She set the computer on a metal rolling table and pulled up a stool, checking out front to make sure there were no customers while the photos uploaded from her phone to her laptop.

Then she sat down and opened the pictures in Photoshop.

She started with the first one she’d taken of the stained glass at the retreat center. The quality was crappy, which was to be expected. The camera on her phone wasn’t nearly as good as her dad’s Nikon. Plus, the sun was setting and the picture was dark. The image in the window looked like nothing but blobs of abstract color.

She brightened the shot. The colors became brilliant red, green, and blue jewels, but the picture still wasn’t anything she could define.

Next, she tried sharpening the image, adjusting the contrast while she was at it. Zooming in, she thought she saw a face in the stained glass, but it was still a long way from anything helpful.

She leaned back in the chair, letting out a frustrated sigh. She was sitting there, trying to figure out what to do next, when she heard the laughter coming from the cafe.

Jumping up, she hurried to the front, slowing a little when she saw Amber, Gary, and Heather standing there.

“Oh, hey!” Jenny said. “What can I get you guys?”

Amber glanced at the chalkboard that listed all the drinks and baked goods the cafe had available. “Um … I’d like a large coffee with a side of freakishly weird. You should be able to handle that, right?” She tipped her head, her smile flinty and cold.

Jenny felt the heat rush to her face and didn’t know if it was from embarrassment or anger. Probably both. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that even Tiffany thought Amber was a moron.

“You’re hilarious,” she said. “So just the coffee, then?”

Amber’s eyes hardened. “Yeah, just the coffee.”

Jenny heard them laughing and whispering while she made the coffee. She was glad her back was turned. She really didn’t want to know.

She gave Amber the coffee. Amber dug around in her coin purse for change, came up short, and took fifty cents from the cup marked tips on the counter. Jenny let it go. She just wanted them out of there, something she realized wasn’t going to happen when they took up residence at one of the small tables against the wall.

Great.

Sighing, she made a show of wiping down the counters, trying to maintain an expression of calm disinterest while she waited for them to leave. She could feel their eyes on her while she cleaned, heard Amber whispering and Gary’s vacant guffaw. She was about two seconds from totally going off on them when Tiffany walked purposefully into the cafe, marching right for Amber’s table.

“Hey, Tiff! I didn’t know you were—”

Amber stopped in mid-sentence as Tiffany picked up her coffee cup, still mostly full, and twisted around to dump it in the trash.

“What the—” Amber started, her mouth hanging open in shock.

Tiffany stood over their table, her face calm while a storm brewed in her eyes. “You can leave now. By which I mean, get out.”

Amber laughed a little. “You can’t make us leave. You don’t own the place. God! We were just having a little fun. You should really lighten up, Tiff.”

“I might not be able to make you leave, but the owner of this place can and he won’t let you come back. You should go before I get him. He doesn’t like people who harass his employees.”

Jenny watched, fascinated and shocked. She’d known Tiffany wasn’t crazy about Amber and the others, but they were friends. Jenny had always assumed their history was more important than any distance that had grown between them.

Amber and Tiffany stared each other down for a minute before Gary shifted nervously in his seat. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. This place is lame anyway.”

Amber held Tiffany’s gaze a few seconds before she stood. “Yeah, you’re right. This place sucks. And so do the people who work here.”

Gary and Heather followed her out of the cafe. Tiffany watched them make their way to the front of the store. She didn’t turn to look at Jenny until she was sure they were gone.

“You okay?” she asked.

Jenny nodded. “You didn’t have to do that. I was fine.”

Tiffany shrugged. “I know, but I was looking for an excuse to get rid of them anyway. This one was better than most.” Tiffany came toward her. “And you know they’re idiots, right? Morons? Dumbasses?”

Jenny laughed. “I’ve gotten that impression.”

“Well, then, you have to consider the source, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said, smiling.

“Hey, are there any muffins left from yesterday?” Tiffany asked, stepping behind the counter. “I’m on break but I’m so totally broke.”

“I think there are some in the back,” Jenny said, rinsing out the rag. Samuel didn’t like them selling anything that hadn’t been made that day, so the unsold stuff was fair game for the employees to take home or eat the next day.

“Cool.”

Tiffany headed to the kitchen while Jenny laid the rag over the faucet to dry.

“Hey! What’s this?” Tiffany called out.

It took Jenny a second to realize what Tiffany meant. Jenny had left her laptop open, the pictures from the retreat center still on the screen where she’d left them when Amber had come in.

She hurried to the back. “It’s nothing. Just some pictures. I’m trying to make them clearer, that’s all.”

She tried to close the laptop, but Tiffany stopped her. “Wait a minute! I might be able to help.”

“It’s okay. It’s … it’s no big deal. I was just playing around.”

“Jen! Stop. Let me … ” Tiffany tried to see around her, but Jenny was blocking her view. “All you have to do is,” she reached around Jenny and pressed something on the computer, “this.”

Jenny glanced down at the image on the screen, the picture now clear. “Wait a minute. How did you do that?”

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. The image was backwards. You just had to use Flip Horizontal.”

Jenny leaned in, soaking up the image. “What’s Flip Horizontal?”

She used Photoshop to help her dad create Before & After reports for his clients, but it was basic stuff. She’d never used anything called Flip Horizontal.

“You use it when you have a backward picture,” Tiffany explained. “Like in a mirror or something.”

“In a mirror … ” Jenny muttered, finally understanding.

Stained glass images weren’t meant to be viewed from outside a building. They were meant to be viewed from inside it. No wonder the pictures hadn’t make sense.

“These are crazy.” Tiffany bit into a muffin, eyeing the image over Jenny’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Jenny said quietly, studying the first frame. “Where is that Flip Horizontal key?”

Tiffany reached for the keyboard, showing Jenny how to access the command.

Jenny opened the rest of the pictures, flipping them the same way, brightening and sharpening as she went along. After saving them, she clicked on the first one again, too intent on the images to care that Tiffany was there, watching over her shoulder.

The first picture was still pretty grainy, but now Jenny could actually make out figures. Six of them, all sitting in a circle. In the background was a tree. Nothing earth-shattering. Just a bunch of people in a circle.

She looked for more details.

They wore robes similar to those worn by the center’s monks. In the stained glass image, the hoods were pulled up, concealing the features of the people who wore them so she couldn’t tell if they were men or women.

Jenny minimized the photo, pulling up the next one.

Almost exactly like the first, the second scene depicted the same figures in the same location. The tree was still there in the background on the right, but the angle was different this time. She could see that they all were looking at something in the center of the circle. Jenny zoomed in until she could see that the object of their attention was a book.

But not just an ordinary book.

The book was made of silver, and shards of brilliant gold glass streamed from it like light. There was something else about it, something that teased her memory. She zoomed in on it even more, playing with the contrast to see if she could read the writing on the front cover, a fragment of knowledge in the back of her mind, like a word on the tip of her tongue.

She sharpened the contrast one last time, worried that she’d gone so far she was just making it worse, when two words became clear on the cover: of Time.

But it wasn’t just the words that stopped her cold, fingers hovering over the keyboard. It was their placement on the book, at the end of what looked like a sentence, that shook something loose from her memory.

She saw it in another context. A book, this one not silver but deep blue, its title just peeking out from behind her mother’s fingers as she stood next to Morgan on their college campus. A title with the words “of Time” at its end.

She’d always assumed it was a textbook.

“This can’t be right,” she whispered.

“What can’t be right?”

Jenny twisted in the chair. She’d forgotten Tiffany was there.

“This book … it reminds me of a book my mom’s holding in an old picture.”

“Well, a book is a book, right?” Tiffany asked. “I mean, just because it looks like the same one doesn’t mean it is.”

“Yeah … ” But dread had settled in the pit of Jenny’s stomach. She thought back to the conversations she’d had with Morgan about her mother. What had Morgan told her, really, other than anecdotal stuff—that her mother had liked pizza with ham and pineapple, that peonies were her favorite flower, that she loved the Doors?

What had she told her that painted any kind of factual picture of her mother’s life? That they’d been roommates at Marist College and had stayed best friends until her mother’s death. That her mother had loved to paint and that her favorite smell was the air right before a summer rain. That her own parents had died when she was a senior in high school.

That was about it.

Jenny pushed aside the questions cropping up in her mind to focus on the next picture.

It was different from the other two. The robed figures were moving—flying?—through a night sky. It was an eerie, beautiful image, even captured with her phone camera. The glass was a deep indigo. The stars in the sky were iridescent—silver with sparks of blue and purple and crimson.

“Jenny … ” Tiffany’s voice was questioning.

Jenny shook her head, pulling up the second-to-last picture. The monks were back on the ground, but in a field filled with long, golden grass that almost seemed to be swaying in a breeze. She could make out what looked to be a forest looming in the distance.

She pulled up the last photo, and this time she recognized the location.

It looked exactly the way it had when she and Ben had snuck onto the grounds for a closer look. Exactly the way it had every day of her life if she turned her eyes to the mountain, the church-like building seeming to hang from the cliff in midair, almost suspended in the clouds.

The retreat center.

Jenny resized the images so they would fit on the screen at the same time. Then she lined them up in order, the way she’d taken them. Tiffany was silent behind her as she studied the images, her mind a whirlwind of confusion.

“What is all this, Jenny?” Tiffany finally asked from behind her.

Jenny considered the question. Considered making something up to avoid telling Tiffany the truth. Instead, she turned the stool to face her.

“How much time do you have?”