“It’s the weirdest thing.” Her voice was low and soft, like someone in the process of revealing dire news. She let this sink in for a heartbeat. “But I feel like I know you better than I should. Like, I remember things about you. Did you just mean Lydia, my daughter?”
I was at a loss; my mouth was too dry for words.
She crinkled her eyes, conveying confusion rather than alarm. I reflected that Tina was not a woman easily shaken. She was practical and down-to-earth and I teetered on a knife blade; did I dare trust her with what I knew?
“I heard about what happened at Eddie’s last night,” she went on, sinking to a seat on the middle step, putting our faces at about the same level; I remained standing in the hallway. “About you freaking out on Justin Miller and throwing your glass.” Her lips took on a small, ironic tilt, not quite a smile. “Don’t get me wrong, I actually think it’s hilarious. Those regulars need a little shot of adrenaline now and then, along with their booze. But it’s not that. It’s what you said to him. What did you mean that nothing ‘here’ was right? That no one knew what was right?”
Shit.
I had underestimated the speed of small-town gossip.
And I had absolutely no idea how to answer.
Tina was undeterred, making no attempt to disguise her desire to know more. She searched my eyes. “You may not believe me when I say this, but what you said to Justin reminded me of something. A dream I used to have, back when I was a teenager. I would dream about Mathias, these horrible recurring dreams where he was trapped somewhere just beyond my sight. He’d be crying for me to find him, begging me, and I’d be running all over the place, screaming his name. It scared the shit out of me.”
My knees gave way almost politely; I sank to a crouch, folding my hands and bringing them to my lips.
Tina whispered, “And he’d be sobbing in those dreams, just a little boy, telling me that none of this was right. He was trapped somewhere and it wasn’t right.” Her eyes stabbed at me. “This means something to you, doesn’t it?”
I nodded, a jerking, puppet-like movement.
Tina leaned closer, clutching her knees. “What does it mean?”
I swallowed, summoning my voice. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I would, I promise you,” she insisted. Tina was the same age as Jilly, and while I’d never known Tina to experience extrasensory perception in the way of Aunt Jilly’s Notions, she was possessed of an uncanny sense of intuition. Despite their age difference, Tina and Mathias had always been close; she was the sister in whom he confided. Further, if any of my sisters-in-law was able to believe such an extreme explanation, it was Tina.
I bent my forehead to my knuckles, gaining strength, before lifting my face to confront her adamant gaze. “I know what I’m asking you to accept seems crazy. I really do. But I’ve known you a long time, Tina, and I trust you to trust me.” I drew a calming breath and stepped from the high dive. “In the Landon I just came from, you are my sister-in-law. You have been for many years. Mathias is my husband and we have five children.”
Tina absorbed this without expression and my lungs compressed. At last she sat straight and I could nearly hear the thoughts winging across her mind. She murmured, “God, this is so weird. I swear I knew this already, Camille. I’ve known this for a long time.” Urgency overtook her features and she leaned forward. “Where is Matty trapped? Do you know?”
I could have crumpled flat to the floor with relief; she had taken a chance and believed me. “Oh God, Tina, I don’t know. I’m trying to find out. The only other person who remembers what’s right is my sister, Tish. The last time I saw Mathias he was singing at The Spoke. We’d gone out to Montana with the kids, to visit my sisters…”
“Wait.” Tina could not let this slide. “Your sisters? As in, more than one?”
“I have two sisters, Tish and Ruthann. Somehow Ruthie was never born in this timeline.”
Diana called from the kitchen, “Tina, come grab this tray. You girls will work up an appetite digging through all that junk!”
We stared at one another for a beat of weighty silence.
“I’ll be right back!” Tina said. “Don’t vanish!”
Two hours later Tina and I were dusty and dirt-smudged, our hair adorned with sticky bits of cobweb. Working together, we dug through trunks, suitcases, drawers, shoeboxes. We upset probably over a century of spider habitation. And as we unearthed junk, we talked. Or, I talked and Tina listened, inserting an occasional question or request for greater clarification. I detailed as clear a description as I could, omitting nothing, no longer caring if it was right or not. Much like Aunt Jilly, the more I revealed, the more Tina insisted she had guessed something was wrong – off, as she put it – long ago.
“So, some people and events are the same as you remember, but others different,” she mused at one point. “I suppose it figures. Everything makes a ripple of its own, things we don’t normally take a second to consider. A single choice has a thousand possible outcomes. We can’t begin to imagine. It’s fucking mind-numbing.”
“It seems like most things have followed a path similar to what was intended. By that I mean what I remember as ‘right,’” I explained, wiping both palms on my thighs, leaving grime smears on my jeans. “Nearly everyone who used to live in Landon still does, and the town is almost exactly like
