Mom and Aunt Jilly – and Clint, later that first night, once he was home and able to hear the story – did not know what to think of Sunday night’s unabridged disclosure of information. The shock we’d dumped over their heads like so many tons of scalding water had yet to settle. Aunt Jilly was the most receptive and I thanked all the powers that be for her open-mindedness; at least that detail had not been altered.
“Tell us everything,” she insisted.
And we had.
When we spoke of how she was happily wed to Justin Miller in the life we remembered, Aunt Jilly issued a strangled cry, the sound of a sliced throat. She pressed the side of one fist to her pale lips and began sobbing.
“Oh my God.” Mom went to her side and bracketed her shoulders. “Jillian, it’s like your dreams.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded, kneeling before my aunt, resting my touch on her kneecaps. For long moments she could do nothing but weep; when she lifted her face from behind her palms, her blue eyes blazed with awareness. I tightened my hold on her knees.
She whispered. “I thought…I thought I was crazy. Not long after Chris died, I started having dreams about Justin. And later, about our family. It was so real. So very real.”
“Where is Justin now? Is he in Landon?”
Aunt Jilly nodded, tears seeping down her cheeks.
Mom answered for her. “Dodge sold the filling station before he left Landon. Justin lives in town but works as a mechanic over in Bemidji. He’s still married to Aubrey. They’ve been married since high school.”
“In this other life, Justin and I have children, don’t we?” Aunt Jilly whispered.
“Yes, you have two girls and a boy, plus Clint.” I studied her stunned, expressive eyes. “This only confirms what we know, that our real lives are not this one. Not this timeline. This is some horrible offshoot that we have to reverse. Your intuition has obviously been trying to tell you that, through your dreams.”
Other revelations proved just as torturous.
Grandma and Aunt Ellen’s car accident.
Ruthann’s absence.
The nonexistence of Blythe, Matthew, and Nathaniel; in this life, Blythe’s step-grandfather, Rich Mayes, a longtime employee at Shore Leave, had no grandchildren, nor had Rich worked at the cafe since before Grandma and Aunt Ellen died.
Even Shore Leave itself was altered, a deserted shell of the warm, bustling heart of the little town we remembered.
Mom and Aunt Jilly refused to stop asking questions, begging for every detail.
And Camille and I had questions of our own. We learned that the Carter family, headed by Bull and Diana, continued to own and operate White Oaks Lodge, as they had for the past century-plus. Their children still numbered four, three daughters and a son; the daughters remained in Landon while Mathias resided in a suburb of Minneapolis. In this life, he had never returned home after college, instead remaining in the city to work a corporate job. Mom and Aunt Jilly didn’t know his wife’s name but the fact remained that Mathias was not only married, he was a father.
“Of course he is.” Camille bore the expression of someone being eviscerated; I could hardly bear to look at her. “He’s wanted babies of his own since he was a little boy.”
Even held in my tightest grasp later that night, she could not stop shaking. I feared her bones would break.
While unable to sleep at night, Camille and I were all but unconscious for most of the daylight hours of Monday and Tuesday. Steeped in pain, we had yet to form any sort of attack plan and temporarily relented to exhaustion. Working together, Mom and Aunt Jilly hauled boxes and trunks from the attic and from Gran’s closet – dear Gran had passed away around the same time as we remembered, late in the summer of 2003. They proceeded to unearth family photographs, legal documents, letters; anything to provide some scrap of a clue about the past. None of us had any idea what we expected to find but the act of searching provided a welcome sensation of accomplishing something, alleviating a fraction of the vulnerability.
Just before midnight last night, Camille had slipped from our twin bed and crept downstairs, wraithlike in a pale nightshirt with her hair hanging loose. When she failed to return I followed, finding her sitting on her heels alongside a small trunk. I realized her intent just before she found the photograph she sought – the old, black and white image of Malcolm Carter and his horse, Aces. The photo, taken in 1876, and which she’d truly discovered many years ago, while pregnant with Millie Jo, had set off a series of events leading her to Mathias. Poised on the staircase above I kept a respectful distance, not wanting to disturb her, watching as she brought the photograph to her face in the dimness of the living room, bending over it like a flower stalk caught in a harsh wind.
At last I could bear her sadness no longer and joined her on the living room carpet, crouching beside her in front of the sagging couch that hadn’t been moved since the mid-1950s.
“I
