The Art of Stealing Time

going to hear about you—”

“There is nothing wrong with the name of our school!” Mom Two protested, then put her hand over the phone again. “I must go, Gwen. Have a safe journey, and blessings go with you. Stay away from red-suited women!”

The phone clicked and slowly I lowered it from my ear, wondering why I had a growing sense of unease. Why did they have a student with them if they had closed the school for the summer? Why didn’t my mother get on the phone to say good-bye one last time? It wasn’t like her to at least not yell something while Mom Two was talking to me. And was some woman really following me, as they said? If so, why? The moms had never given me an answer to that question. I had a faint idea that perhaps this mysterious woman might be an attempt by them to distract me from something that they didn’t want me to know.

I started to put my phone away, shook my head at my fancies, and despite that, typed out a message for my mother. Who is Mrs. Vanilla?

Who, dear? came the answering text.

Mrs. Vanilla. Mom Two says you have a student with you named Mrs. Vanilla.

Yes. She is our student. Don’t worry. She wanted to come with us.

“Oh, like that’s not going to make me worried as hell,” I muttered as soon as the text appeared on my phone’s screen. I thought briefly of calling my mother, but I had a nasty suspicion she would not answer the phone. She tended to shy away from confrontation if she could help it, leaving Mom Two to do the dirty work.

Where are you? Why would I worry about you having a student? What is going on?

There may be a bit of a fuss, but don’t pay it any mind, my mother texted back. Fear started to grow in the pit of my stomach. What the hell were they up to now? Disregard any mention of kidnapping. She wanted us to save her. It was the only thing we could do.

And that pushed me over the edge. I dialed my mother’s cell number, sure that she wasn’t going to answer, and was more than a little surprised when her breathless voice said almost immediately, “Gwenny, I just told you not to worry, didn’t I? And now here you are worrying. Don’t deny it. I can tell you are. Turn right, dear. No, the other right!”

I looked wildly to my right (and left, because long acquaintance with my mother had taught me that she had difficulty telling directions). “What? Why should I turn right?”

“Not you, dear. That was for Alice. Oh, my. No, no, dear, don’t get onto the main roads. Don’t you remember that show on the telly we saw last month?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They have those spiked things they lay in the road.”

Spiked things? What spiked things? What was she—? With a horrible presentiment, I suddenly knew. They were on the run from the police.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked, my voice rising loudly at the end of the sentence, enough that everyone around me stared. I turned in my plastic seat so that I half faced the wall behind me, dipping my head down so I could speak sternly, but more quietly, into my phone. “Mother, are you, at this moment, running from the police?”

“Alice, dear, not so fast around corners,” my mother said in a near shriek. “Poor Mrs. Vanilla is on the floor.”

“MOTHER!”

“Oh, hello, Gwenny. How was your flight home?”

I took a deep breath, but it didn’t go any way toward calming what were quickly becoming frazzled nerves, so I took five or six additional breaths.

“Are you hyperventilating?” the man nearest me asked, lowering his newspaper to look at me in obvious concern. “Do you want a paper bag?”

“No, thank you, it’s just my mother driving me crazy as usual,” I said through gritted teeth, and swiveled around even farther in my chair until I was almost off it entirely.

“Mother,” I said in a low, mean tone of voice that under normal circumstances I would never think of using to her. “What. Is. Happening?”

“Lost ’em!” a triumphant Mom Two said in the background. I slumped sideways in despair, and promptly fell off the chair. By the time I reassured the newspaper man that I was fine, and not in danger of passing out, my mother had hung up her phone.

I moved over to the corner of the waiting area, found a relatively empty spot, and facing away from the room, called her back. “Tell me you didn’t kidnap some old woman and are not at this very moment running from the mortal police.”

“We did not kidnap some old woman and are not at this very moment running from the mortal police,” she said promptly.

I waited for the count of three. “Is that true?”

“No, of course it isn’t. But you asked me to say it, so I did.”

Gently, so as not to brain myself, I thumped my forehead against the wall. “Mom, you do remember that it was only six months ago that I was arrested by the Watch because they thought I was you, don’t you?”

“Yes, but they let you out because you aren’t me.”

“They let me out because I had an alibi. They still think I’m you, or at least that blond Watch guy does.” The memory of him had haunted me at odd moments during the last two days.

“What blond Watch man?”

“The one who stopped the lawyer from killing me.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “The one you agreed to sell magic to, remember?”

“Of course I remember the lawyer,” she said in a scolding voice. Faintly, oh so faintly, I heard the sound of a police siren coming from my phone. I slumped against the cool wall, closing my eyes for a moment. “He wasn’t a very nice man, but we needed the money, and it’s been decades since anyone from the Watch was interested in us.”

“Centuries,” Mom Two said loudly. “Eighteen-something. Seventies, was it, Mags?”

I was so close to going home. Even now, I could see the plane being serviced by various technical people. In just an hour or two, it would be in the sky, heading toward the States. I could be on that plane.

“No, it had to be longer than that,” Mom argued. “Because they tried to make me sit for one of those sepia- toned photographs, but I kept moving just enough that it turned out blurry. It had to be the 1820s.”

I had the ticket right there. I could be on that plane, leaving my troubles behind me.

“They didn’t have cameras in the 1820s,” Mom Two told her, and behind their voices, the sirens grew louder.

Life would be sane again. No more would I find myself being killed, in the afterlife, or suddenly (and inexplicably) resurrected.

“Daguerreotype! I think that’s the name for it. Gwen, do you remember if that’s what they did?”

I eyed my phone. Just the touch of one finger on its screen, and I could hang up. My mother probably wouldn’t even notice I’d done so for at least several minutes. Then, carefree, I could blithely go on with my life, leaving my mothers to cope with whatever they’d done with theirs.

I turned around so the wall was to my back and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor, my forehead resting on my knees. I couldn’t leave them. Not if they had gotten into yet another tight place. There wasn’t even any pretense I could make about having a choice. They were my mothers, and I loved them. They had a knack for getting into trouble and a disregard for pretty much all forms of common sense, but I loved them, and I couldn’t leave them. Not this way. Not when the Watch so clearly had us in their sights.

“Sooner or later they’re going to follow me to you, and put two and two together,” I told my mother.

“I don’t think daguerreotypes came out around until the 1840s— What was that, Gwenny?”

“The Watch. They may be confused about our identities now, but they’re not stupid. At least the blond guy isn’t. I told him I wasn’t you, and he believed me. They’re going to find you, and then they’ll put you in jail.”

“But, dear, we haven’t done anything wrong!”

“You were selling magic to a mortal! That’s so incredibly illegal!”

“But we didn’t actually sell anything to that man. Or to the lawyer. We just said we would.”