Dothan, Alabama 2013
The next morning, Rowan left for work after a quick kiss goodbye and Ella sat at the kitchen table with a cooling cup of coffee. She could see his car back out of their apartment parking space from her vantage point in the kitchen. As she watched him drive out of sight, she had a sinking feeling that she wasn’t sure what to do with.
I’m getting married in ten days. Is this really going to be my life?
When the phone rang, she gratefully snatched it up to avoid settling down to write on her pile of freelance work.
“Hello?”
“Hi, sweetie, it’s your dad.” No matter how many times she told him that he didn’t need to identify himself, he always did. She’d given up telling him it was unnecessary.
“Hey, Dad,” she said. “Everything okay?” After a certain age—his, not hers—Ella found the health disclaimer helpful before she could proceed with any conversation with him. It was entirely possible for darling dad to have an hour long visit with her on the phone only to end it with ‘Oh, by the way, the doctor handed me some disturbing news the other day when I went it to see him.’ Ella liked to clear the decks immediately. If he was calling to impart bad news, she wanted it on the table straightaway.
“Everything’s just wonderful,” her dad said. “Suzie’s already packing for our trip to Dothan. I do not believe I have ever been to that part of Alabama.”
“Well, you’re in for a rare treat.”
“Really?”
“No, Dad. I’m joking. It’s Dothan, Alabama.”
“I have to admit to not totally understanding you sometimes, Ella,” her father said, chuckling nonetheless.
That goes double for the guy I’m about to marry, Ella surprised herself by thinking.
“So are you excited? Ten short days and you’re a married lady.”
“Yep. Very excited.”
“And your young man? Is he nervous?”
“Not really. He’s been down this path before.” Twice before if you count his first marriage and then the one to me back in Heidelberg a couple hundred years earlier.
“Oh, well, I’m sure it’ll feel like the first time when he comes home to you, my darling.”
Ella was positive she had told her father that she was living with Rowan but she decided to let it go. An ex-CIA operative, her father had shown increasing signs of forgetfulness as the years went by. She decided it wasn’t worth reminding him.
“When are you two getting in?” she asked, her eyes flickering to the calendar hanging on the kitchen walls. Their wedding date was marked in a big red circle. Ella tried to remember if she had done that or Rowan. Now that she looked at it, the circle looked jagged and kind of angry.
“We’ll get in two days before,” he said. “As planned. We’re booked at the Hampton Inn near you. You know the one?”
“Yep. So you’ll be here in a little over a week. That’s great. Listen, Dad, I’m really swamped this morning—what with all the wedding stuff coming down…”
“Oh, yes, don’t let me keep you,” he said. “Just wanted to call and say I love you and we can’t wait to meet Rowan.”
“I love you, too, Dad,” Ella said, feeling a sadness ignite in her chest and begin to slowly emanate through her body. She realized she suddenly had the terrible feeling that she was speaking to him for the last time. “So much.”
She spent the day writing for her clients and running errands. She noticed that every time she walked into the kitchen for something, the red circle on the calendar seemed to jump off the page at her. It was always the first thing she saw when she went in there.
She looked at her cellphone and was surprised to see a text from Rowan. Be home early today. That could mean any time before midnight, she thought, but she was pleased nonetheless.
She pulled open the refrigerator to see if there was anything in there with which to make a special dinner of some kind. As she looked at the half-frozen pork loin and the fresh Brussels sprouts, she couldn’t help but think about how hard it had been to eat properly in 1620. When she and Rowan had gone back to the seventeen hundreds—sounds so bizarre to say it, even now—the taste for packaged foods, sodas and blended coffees had strangely gone away.
True, most of their focus was on staying alive, but it always amazed her that she hadn’t missed her twenty-first century luxuries more. After they returned to their own time, she thought she would indulge in those things that were unattainable in their other life: endless hot baths, anything that plugged in that made her life better or more convenient, and especially the ease with which you could create an amazing meal.
In the kitchen at the convent in 1620 it took her all day to make and bake several loaves of bread. Now she reached into her freezer to look at the package of yeast rolls. You just tossed these babies, hard as snowballs, onto a cookie sheet and went and did something else with your time.
She hadn’t made Rowan a meal in the whole of the three months that they had been back. They practically lived on restaurant take-out and fast food. What does that mean?
But tonight would be different. Tonight she would use every one of the modern daily conveniences at her fingertips and create for her man—for the man who had volunteered to sacrifice his life for her at one point—wow, had she really forgotten that? She would make him a home-cooked meal and then remind him of who they were together.
The real Ella and Rowan. Those people who they were before their bodies were taken over by these automatons that just went through the motions of making love, working, eating. Rinse and repeat.
She went to the calendar, picked up a pink Sharpie and drew a heart around the wedding date. It doesn’t have to be like this, she told herself. Whatever boll weevil of discontent that has infected us, I refuse to let it change who we are together. As she punctured the pork loin with peeled garlic cloves, drizzled it with olive oil, seasoned it and then tucked it away for Rowan’s return, she thought: maybe it’s Dothan? Could it be we’re in the wrong place? She turned on the oven before running upstairs to shower and dress for her returning hero.
Rowan wasn’t sure what the problem was but he knew he was part of it. And his mother sure wasn’t helping. He left the florist with an armful of roses and checked his cellphone for the time. Just a little after six. He drove to the wine shop and picked up two bottles of Pinot Noir he knew Ella preferred. That was one of the things he had liked about Heidelberg: No one hassled him about preferring to drink beer over wine. He sighed. Not that Ella cared. She wasn’t like that, needing him to be a certain way. God forbid trying to mold him or make him be different. His mother’s anxiety seemed to come from the fact that that’s what she did with his dad. If you’re knee-deep in the make-over project of your spouse, you probably can’t see any other way of relating.
He set the wine bottles on the seat next to the roses. Ella wasn’t perfect but the last thing she’d ever do was try to change him. He grinned ruefully remembering a few times she had tried to circumvent him, but she had never tried to make him be somebody else. In fact, he always had the distinct impression that Ella liked him because he was the way he was. With that thought, his mood elevated from the aftermath of the bad weekend home to Atlanta and their tentative attempts not to step on any wounds or create new ones. Rowan pulled into the parking spot out front of their apartment, gathered up his purchases and fumbled for the key to the apartment. The door swung open as soon as he put the key in.
Ella stood in front of him, breathless and practically naked. She wore a black see-through blouse that barely covered the fact that she was wearing no panties, or if she was wearing them, they were very, very tiny. He took a breath and stumbled across the threshold, struggling to close the door behind him as quickly as possible.
“Good God, Ella,” he said, dumping his armful of wine and roses onto the chair by the door. “People are still coming home from work.” He watched her face fall a bit and her hands move to cover her chest as if she felt suddenly vulnerable. He didn’t let the moment escalate but reached for her and pulled her to him, feeling the flimsy material in his hands give way as if it would dissolve on contact. He was already hard as he pressed her to him, his hands going instinctively to cup her bottom and lift her to him. She sucked in a small breath and wrapped her arms around his neck, pushing her full breasts up. He boosted her further up onto his hips until his mouth met the tip of her breast. He covered it and sucked until he could feel her squirming with anticipation.
“Dinner will be ready in a minute,” she gasped, wrapping her legs around his hips.
“Oh, like hell it will,” he said turning and depositing her on the couch. He took just the barest of moments to enjoy the sight of her beneath him, naked and wanting him, her eyes misty with desire, before yanking off his clothes and falling upon her to feast on his favorite dish of all.
That night, for the first time in months, they talked with real excitement about their coming wedding. After dinner, they slipped into the master bathtub to talk and scheme, to plan and dream.
“Remember the convent?” Ella murmured. “And Greta?”
“I’ll never forget,” he murmured to the back of her neck as he held her in front of him between his legs. The flickering votive candles lined the bathtub and provided the only light in the room. Ella sipped from her wine glass but Rowan’s sat untouched on the wide flat rim of the tub.
“How can two people be so happy and yet so miserable?”
“I know.”
“Maybe our problem is we don’t know how to be happy. I mean, unless we’re cold or exhausted or bleeding.”
Rowan laughed and kissed her neck.
“I’d hate to think that’s the case,” he said. “I like comfort.”
“Me, too. Especially soap, you know? I think that’s what I missed the most.”
“For me, it was the food variety. I just can’t eat the same damn thing day in and day out.”
“You did, though.”
“You do what you have to.”
“I guess so.”
“Rowan,” she said tentatively.
“Hmm?” Rowan was feeling more at peace and mellow than he could remember feeling in months.
“I am so sorry about how things played out with your mother.”
Rowan was aware that this wasn’t actually an apology. He noted that Ella wasn’t taking responsibility for how things turned out. She was just sorry that the situation was the way it was.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” he said. There must have been something unconvincing in his voice because she turned around and looked at him. The humidity in the closed room had made her hair curl around her face. She looked even prettier, if that was possible. He worked to keep his face blank.
“We need to not let outside forces throw us off kilter with each other.”
“Outside forces?”
“Maybe that’s not the right phrase,” she said, pulling away now and pushing the bubbles up so they hid her breasts. “I mean, we need to be a united front.”
“All these battle terms,” he murmured, reaching for his wine glass.
“I don’t mean it like that,” she said. “It’s just that, of all the things we have had to deal with in our relationship, we’ve never really had anything drive a wedge between us before, you know?”
“And that’s what you see my mother doing?”
“Give me a break, Rowan! She came right out and told me that she doesn’t want us to marry. She didn’t make that clear to you?”
Rowan had to admit she did. “They won’t be a part of our lives,” he said. “Hardly at all.”
That seemed to satisfy her. “And maybe over the years,” she said, hopefully, putting a hand out on his knee, “she’ll get used to me.”
“I guess it can’t all be perfect,” he said, lifting a strand from her neck and rubbing his thumb against her throat.
“Is it just me, Rowan?”
He frowned. “Is what just you, babe?”
“How you’ve been lately. I mean, is it work? You just don’t seem happy.”
“Funny you should say that,” he said, reaching for her and turning her around so she fit up next to him again. He pulled her hair back and wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. “That’s just what my Captain said to me this morning.”
The next day was Saturday. After a loving start to their weekend, Rowan was up and showered and out of the apartment running errands and hitting the gym. Ella was especially glad for their bathtub conversation. Not only had they reconnected in a strong way but it was a relief to know she wasn’t the sole reason for Rowan’s moodiness.
Ella grabbed a quick breakfast, then dressed for her yoga class, feeling more on track and centered than she had in weeks. She blew a kiss to the calendar on her way out the door. In seven days she would officially be Mrs. Rowan Pierce (again.) How her life would change after that, she wasn’t sure, but she believed—she had to believe—that the event would alter her life in some very significant way.
After the yoga class, she spent a pleasant hour strolling the aisles of her local Whole Foods (who would have guessed that Dothan would have one!) and then returned to the apartment with more makings for another memorable meal with her sexy husband-to-be. Her arms full of the grocery bags, she struggled with the front door and felt a wave of pique that Rowan had missed her so little that he hadn’t been waiting to unlock the door. She shook off the twinge as irrational and called to him as she entered the apartment. He came out of the kitchen, his hand holding their landline phone to his ear. He frowned at her as if to say: do you have to be so noisy? Or maybe she imagined that.
“Yeah, Mom, I know,” he said. “We’ve been over this.”
With a sick feeling developing in her stomach, Ella parked the bags on the kitchen table and dropped her purse on a chair. She heard the front door open and then close as Rowan left the apartment to finish his conversation in private.
It was a quiet evening. Although Ella felt the chicken stuffed with forty cloves of garlic had been a rousing success, she felt that Rowan had eaten it mechanically, almost as if not tasting it. She prayed Carol’s call was simply unsettling him and that his reaction was not the result of some ultimatum or new strategy on her part to split them up. Ella was amazed at how effective the old bat’s methods seemed to be working—even from a distance of four hundred miles away.
Rowan and Ella did the dishes together until Ella recognized that she was babbling about any inane topic that came to her head—and he wasn’t really listening anyway. While she hoped watching television together would be a good segue to getting them snuggling on the couch and eventually kissing, she soon discovered that Rowan was more interested in interacting with the remote control than her.
“Are you not finding what you want?” she asked, taking a sip of her wine.
“Why do you ask?” he said, staring at the TV as he aimed the remote control.
“Because you’ve done nothing but change the channels for thirty minutes. Is there nothing good on tonight?”
“Was there something you wanted to see?” he said, still compulsively changing the channels.
“You know I don’t watch TV.” She was starting to lose patience with his mood.
He began to toggle back and forth between a basketball game and a show on the discovery of a tomb full of mummies somewhere in Egypt. Ella watched both with minimal interest. She felt her anger rising at how effectively Carol, with one phone call, had ruined their weekend and destroyed their fragile connection with each other.
Were they really that fragile? Was this thing between them really able to withstand murdering German warlords and plague but not disapproving mothers?
She finished her wine and stood up. “Think I’ll head up,” she said, hesitating to give him a chance.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “G’nite.”
With fear and loathing in her heart for a middle aged woman happily munching on caramel popcorn and watching her evening soap operas in Atlanta, Georgia, Ella went upstairs, alone, to bed.
One week minus twelve hours and counting.
It is an inviolate rule of the universe that just when you have the most important thing to do in your life—like get married, or safely deliver your first child—all freelance clients will immediately bombard you with more work than they’d ever given you before.
Ella sat at her computer terminal, mildly grateful that Rowan was working late again tonight, and tried to imagine how she would get all the annual reports, website continuity, and corporate brochures done before five o’clock in two days. Because at that time, she knew she would be required to cease any and all semblance to a working freelance copywriter and become that confounding and mysterious of all creatures—a woman on the cusp of her wedding day with her in-laws on her doorstep.
In less than forty-eight hours, Carol and Lowell would arrive in Dothan for the rehearsal dinner. While Rowan had only work friends and his parents and siblings—including two sisters Ella had yet to meet—Ella just had her father and stepmother. She was sure her lack of connections and friends was another black mark against her as far as Carol Pierce was concerned.
She sighed and looked at the source material for the annual report. Maybe Carol was right. What did it say about a person to have so little in the way of friends or people who loved you in the world? Ella glanced out the window of the upstairs den where she worked. Of all the things she had done in her life—learning languages, polishing her skills for the endless roster of new jobs she felt compelled to try on—making new friends had not ranked very highly. What friends she did have were scattered around the world and in some cases, she thought, the centuries.
She opened the Internet browser to a social media site and wondered, briefly, about issuing an all-points invitation to anyone who was free Saturday night and wanted to spend it in Dothan, Alabama, at her wedding. Sighing heavily, she clicked out of the webpage and went back to work. If she didn’t have the prospect of what was sure to be the most stressful weekend of her life ahead of her, she would have enjoyed the quiet industry that the evening promised. She loved engrossing work at her computer and could get lost in it for hours, emerging finally like a coma-victim dazed and hungry.
Thinking of the satisfaction her work gave her made her think of Rowan and his current frustration with his job. From what little she was able to deduce, it appeared that he was bored. How facing down and interacting with deadly killers on a daily basis could be boring was a mystery to her, but then that was one of things she loved about Rowan. He wasn’t obvious at all. In fact, she didn’t think she would ever be able to totally figure him out. And a very big part of her liked that just fine.
When the phone call came in the middle of the night, Ella’s first thought was that it must be Suzie calling to say her father had fallen or had a stroke. She fumbled for her cellphone on the bedside table, her heart pounding in alarm. The fact that she even thought it might be Suzie made Ella realize she had been waiting for this call for months now. It made her see that for months now she had been feeling like something was coming. Before she even said hello into the phone, she knew in her heart that this was that something.
“Ella?”
Instead of her stepmother’s sing-songy, high-pitched voice, Ella heard the low, hoarse tones of Madelyn Pritchard, her best friend from college. Maddie was living in Cairo preparing to marry her fiancé, a relentlessly handsome man named Gagan Gupta.
“Maddie?”
“Oh, my God, Ella, I am so sorry to wake you and I know I did but I just had to talk to you.”
Ella rubbed her eyes and looked at Rowan’s side of the bed to see that he still wasn’t home yet. It was only a little after one. She was relieved to be able to speak without disturbing him.
“What’s the matter?” she said. Her friend, usually so cool and collected, sounded agitated. “Is Gagan okay?”
“Yes, he’s fine. It’s me, Ella. I’m in a tiny bit of trouble here.” At this point, Ella heard her friend break down into heartrending sobs. Ella sat up straight and became fully awake.
“Sweetie, what is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
“I need you, Ella,” Maddie said, her voice strangled with trying to speak through her tears. “I know you were coming out in a couple of months. Is there…is there any way you can get here sooner?”
Ella tried to make a fast calculation in her head of what her calendar looked like. It was June and she and Rowan had planned on going to Cairo in late September. He already had the vacation time approved.
“Well, yes, sure,” Ella said uncertainly. “You mean…August? Or next month?” As soon as Ella heard the answering weeping on the line she knew that soon meant now. It meant yesterday.
“Maddie, what’s happened? Have you been arrested? Do you need a lawyer?”
“No, El, I need you and I know I haven’t the right to screw up your life like this.”
It occurred to Ella that Maddie had forgotten that Ella was to be married this coming weekend. Ella cleared her throat to speak. Surely, she could fly out after the weekend?
“He’s started…he’s started…h-h-hitting me,” Maddie said.
“Who? Gagan?” Stupid question. Who else?
“Y-y-yes and I am so alone here, Ella. I can’t tell my folks.”
“Get on an airplane right this minute,” Ella said fiercely. “Get out of there now.”
“I can’t, Ella!” Maddie said, nearly wailing. “You don’t know what it’s like. I was lucky to be able to make this phone call! He watches me night and day or has his wretched mother and sisters do it. I’m a prisoner here. Please, for the love of God, come as soon as you can. They wouldn’t dare to try to stop you.”
“I will, Maddie,” Ella found herself saying as she climbed out of bed. “Of course. I’ll be on the first plane to Cairo tomorrow. I’m coming, sweetie, just hang on.”
“Do not tell Rowan, please Ella. Gagan said if I embarrassed him by involving the authorities in any way, he would kill me. Promise me, Ella.”
“Yes, yes alright, although what I’ll tell him to explain why I’m leaving…”
“Thank God for you, Ella,” Maddie said, crying again. “Thank God for you.”
When Ella finally hung up she sat for a moment holding the cellphone and staring into space. Her wedding was in less than four days. Her in-laws, who already hated her, were due in in two. And her gorgeous hunk of already-seriously annoyed US Marshal was about to be left stunned and slack-jawed at the altar.