I restrained a hard, tight gasp.
“How long…has it been now?” I could hardly manage to ask, dreading the answer.
Mom sighed, a soft sound rife with sadness. “The car accident was twenty-four years ago, next month. I know, I can hardly believe they’ve been gone so long. I should have stayed in Landon after that. It’s funny, I had a feeling even then that I should stay but I didn’t want to take you and Camille away from your father. You two were so little.”
“This was 1990?” I whispered, rapidly calculating. “You weren’t around Dad that spring or summer?” Ruthann would have been born the next January, in 1991.
“No. You probably wouldn’t remember, but we stayed in Landon until that fall.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask but I couldn’t stop the question. “What about Ruthann?”
“Who, sweetie? I don’t think I heard you right.”
I disconnected the call and whimpered, “Stop the car…”
Camille veered to the shoulder just in time for me to clamber from the passenger seat and puke up stomach acid in a colorless ditch clogged with the knee-high remnants of dead weeds.
“It’s all right,” Camille kept saying, as though this phrase had the power to alleviate anything. I knew she was hanging on by the thinnest of threads, same as me, and so I did not beg her to shut up.
“Mom must think we’re crazy,” I whispered later, after we were back on the road. I sat huddled around my own midsection, focusing on each subsequent breath. “I kept asking all these questions I should have known the answers to. Oh God, Milla, Grandma and Aunt Ellen died in a car accident in 1990. Twenty-four years ago.”
My lips were numb, as if I’d been recently injected with an anesthetic. I felt like a cartoon version of myself, picturing a bubble filled with strings of jumbled words each time I spoke. Absurd, insensible words that could not possibly reflect reality.
“Ruthie wasn’t born,” I croaked for the hundredth time, clutching my ribcage. I was afraid my innards might start spilling out if I released hold too soon. “She wasn’t born. Does that mean she still exists where we came from? Is she still in the nineteenth century?”
“It means we have to figure this out as quickly as we can.” Cartoon bubbles floated from Camille’s mouth too; I wondered if she could see them. The day flashing past outside the car was windswept, flat gray in color. The foothills gave way to the plains of North Dakota, the land level as a tabletop in either direction, the ditches congested with endless cordons of dirty snow long since scraped from the roadway. Camille’s knuckles stood out like pearls beneath her skin as she gripped the steering wheel. She glanced my way and her eyes were electric with intensity, the only real sign of life on her face. “For whatever reason, you and I remember our original timeline. The right timeline, not this sick fucking offshoot, or whatever the fuck it is. The only advantage we have just now is that we remember what’s right.”
I tried to nod, my head jerking through the movement like a clunky wooden puppet’s. I tried not to think of what I’d screamed last night, about Fallon being the puppet master. I could not lose focus in such a way, not anymore. Camille was right; if we had any chance at all, it was because we remembered. Squeezing my torso with both arms, I whispered, “You’re right. We have to stay calm. It’s just so – oh God…”
“I know, Tish, I know. We have to keep picturing them how we remember or we’ll go crazy. I’ve been repeating their names in my head all morning. Millie Joelle, Brantley Malcolm, Henry Mathias, Lorissa Anne, James Boyd…” Her throat bobbed violently, like she was attempting to swallow an unsliced apple. “They’re still out there, I believe this. We have to save them. We can’t think otherwise.”
I sat slightly straighter, rallying my wits, ticking off what we knew on my fingers. “The Rawleys are gone. Case said there has never been a family by that name in Jalesville. Fallon’s message to Derrick suggested that he’d had a new, better idea about how to hurt us. And Fallon said…” I struggled to recall those seconds in the parking lot. “He said he hoped we’d remember and that she did. He must have meant Ruthann. So whatever he did, he did to her in the nineteenth century, which suggests she is still there in…” Again I searched my memory for Derrick’s words; he had helped us more than he may ever know and I hadn’t even thanked him. “In 1882. If only we could communicate with her somehow. We have to know what she knows. It’s critical.” I cupped the lower half of my face, staring out the window, envisioning my little sister. I begged, “Ruthie, oh God, hear us reaching out to you. Hear us.”
“He wiped out their family,” Camille mused softly. “Fallon, I mean, he wiped out the entire Rawley family. There’s only one way a person could achieve such a thing…”
“Fallon would need to have known the exact ancestor whose line of descendants led to the family we know in the twenty-first century,” I said, my thoughts at last flaring to something resembling life, able to problem-solve in the abstract. “Clark’s ancestor whose name is on the land deed is Grantley Rawley. Their family was the first to live on that homestead. Remember, Clark only knew the two brothers, Grantley and then the one who died young. Miles was his name.”
“Ruthie and Marshall might be there right now, with that family…”
“If we could warn them somehow…but how?”
Hours later, once we’d crossed the border into northern Minnesota, our conversation rolled back around to the fact that our mother and Blythe had never married. Overtaken by the odd surge of stimulation that accompanies extreme exhaustion, I drummed my fists on my thighs. “Mom didn’t know who
