A Betrayal of Time Read online

  Copyright 2015 Lucía Ashta.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Awaken to Peace Press.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously or are entirely fictional. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected].

  Cover design by Ebook Launch.

  Edited by Elsa Crites.

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  For Ray, who passed from this world before I could tell him how much I love him

  Within the fabric of time is the potential to be friend or foe, lover or betrayer.

  What time ultimately becomes is entirely up to you.

  Contents

  1. A Gaping Hole

  2. Death Denied

  3. The Question of When

  4. A World No Longer Hers

  5. The Chance of Becoming

  6. A Final Act

  7. Impossible Promises

  8. Another Man’s Treasure

  9. Broken Secrets

  10. Forgiveness

  11. Impermanence

  12. A Maiden Voyage

  13. Excitement over Nothing

  14. Tired of Waiting

  15. The Value of Instinct

  16. Tunnel Vision

  17. Ink-Scratched Dreams

  18. Signs of Spring

  19. The Prudent Misstep

  20. A Flutter of Butterfly Wings

  21. The One Thought

  22. The Death of Nothing

  Epilogue

  Make a difference

  Acknowledgments

  Read more by Lucía Ashta

  About the author

  A Gaping Hole

  The phonograph blared, and the chatter was even louder.

  “It’s your favorite song. Do you want to dance?”

  Ray had told her she wouldn’t like the parties. He had been to a couple before, and he hadn’t really enjoyed them, and Ray and Vivienne were so alike.

  But dance parties were all the kids their age talked about. Vivienne had been convinced she was missing out.

  She groaned and leaned her head into Ray’s shoulder, laughing. “I hate to admit it, but you were right.” She looked up at him, grinning. It was a routine they did often.

  “Oh yeah? How was I right? Tell me.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into him. She had to lean her head back to see the mischief in his eyes.

  “I can’t even hear myself think it’s so loud. And there are too many people. Every kid from school must be here.”

  She leaned her cheek against his heart. She couldn’t hear it, but she could feel the familiar rhythm that beat in tune with hers. “I like it better when it’s just us.”

  Ray breathed in the scent of her hair. Jasmine. He’d smelled her shampoo before, and it didn’t smell like flowers. But somehow, she always did. “I always like it better when it’s just us.”

  “Do you want to go?” Vivienne said.

  Ray pulled her back to look at her. “If you want to. But are you sure you want to leave? You worked really hard to get your parents to let you come. Are you sure you want to give that up?”

  She sighed. “I know. I can’t believe it.” She watched two new arrivals walk in through the front door: Johnny and Carl. They were in her social studies class. “But yes. I want to go. Maybe we can just hang out at my house.” Like they did most nights.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Can we walk really, really slowly?” The walk to her house wouldn’t take them long enough. She savored whatever moments they could steal away to be completely their own.

  “As long as I have you home by nine. You heard your mom.”

  Vivienne had, and she knew Ray was the only reason her parents had let her come to the party at all. He was the more responsible one, and her parents knew it.

  “Just let me run to the bathroom first. I don’t think I can make it home.”

  “I’ll be here,” Ray said and smiled. Vivienne smiled back, her eyes shining under the chandelier of the entryway. Ray would always be there. It had been that way as long as she could remember.

  Together they learned to walk, ride bikes, skate, and swim; they walked to their first day of kindergarten, hand in hand; and soon they would graduate from high school together. They had loved each other since before they knew what love was.

  Vivienne crossed the living room, threading between dancers that swung dangerously into her path and a group that burst into raucous laughter as she passed. With her hand on the knob to the bathroom door, she paused.

  She turned to look at Ray over her shoulder. She almost turned around and went back to him.

  There was no reason for it. She just felt like going to him right then. The longing was strong. She held him in her gaze, wondering, until he found her with his.

  Across the way his eyebrows arched and his eyes asked her if everything was okay. She hesitated a moment longer while her heart thudded and her hands turned clammy, but then she smiled again, reassuring him.

  Quickly, she slipped into the bathroom, shrugging the yearning for Ray away. She was being silly. She would only be in the bathroom a minute.

  Outside, Ray felt what she felt, and he moved toward the bathroom. It wasn’t unusual for him to want to be with her when she was away, and the urge now was pronounced.

  “Ray!” It was Carl. He clamped a hand down on Ray’s shoulder. “What’s up, man?”

  “Hi Carl. Sorry, I have to get to Viv now. We can catch up later.”

  “Aw man. You two. Always together. Are you going to neck in the bathroom?” Carl teased, getting a bark of a laugh out of Johnny.

  Ray didn’t answer, but gave Carl a tight smile and kept walking. Carl and Johnny sniggered behind him.

  “Viv?” Ray had his hand poised to knock on the bathroom door when the door moved.

  But it wasn’t just the door that moved. “Viv,” Ray yelled, even as his leather-soled shoes fought to keep him from sliding on the wooden floor.

  Vivienne had been reaching to open the door to Ray. When the bathroom tilted, her hand slipped on the faux crystal doorknob and she hit her head on the wall, hard. “Ray” she called back, more softly than he. Her head throbbed dully.

  The ground shook again, although less this time.

  “Open the door now, Viv.” Vivienne registered fear in Ray’s voice. She lunged toward the door even as the bathroom wall she leaned on lurched. Her fingers slipped on the doorknob again, but she managed to grasp it anyway. She held on as if letting go were not an option, and she pulled herself up the sloping floor until she could turn it.

  The house pitched again.

  Terrified screams filtered through the now-open door, and Ray slid into the bathroom.

  Vivienne staggered toward Ray, hands outreached, when the house upended.

  Ray lunged for her, but he couldn’t reach her. Instead, he had to watch as the wall behind her crumpled and gave way, leaving a gaping hole where there had once been a butter-cream yellow wall with a window that overlooked the Miller’s rose garden.

  Ray and Vivienne’s calls for each other overlapped, unintelligible sounds on gasping breath. Their desperate reaches for each other were futile. Their eyes, wild with so much love and imminent loss, the last sight either one of them saw.

  Everything was black. The others’ screams were lost. The violent complaints of the house as i
t crunched and collapsed vanished.

  The house itself vanished.

  Vivienne was certain she was dead.

  Death Denied

  When Vivienne realized she wasn’t dead, she wished she were.

  Gradually, the darkness faded. She didn’t recognize anything around her. She lay on a grass field, her legs bent at awkward angles, but she didn’t think they were broken.

  She attempted to call out for Ray, but her voice failed her. She tried again, managing only a whisper. But even had she managed to yell, she knew the result of her effort before it came.

  For the first time in her life, she couldn’t feel Ray. The space where her heart, always so full, had been was now empty, as if she had lost it in her fall. Frantically, she turned her head, looking. Her hair ground into the grass until it reached dirt, but still she saw no sign of him.

  It was a loss greater than any physical one could be. She wished both her legs and arms were broken if only she could have Ray.

  But he was gone.

  Everything was gone.

  She closed her eyes, seeking the darkness again. She wished for it all to go away, hoping it was a mistake that she had woken at all, that she was on her way to the place where all dead people went, the place where she would find Ray.

  The sun beat on her face for hours until she surrendered to it and opened her eyes. Although she felt broken, her body was not. She thought that perhaps she should sit up, but then she found no reason to. She knew Ray was not there; what was the point of sitting up in a world devoid of Ray?

  Regardless, as the sun traveled across the sky, she eventually grew bored enough to sit up anyway. She straightened her legs and saw her saddle back shoes, the black still crisp, the white only slightly scuffed, still tightly tied, with pompoms hanging off the laces. They had been a gift for her seventeenth birthday.

  Her knees were scratched and bleeding, although the blood had already begun to dry. Her poodle skirt was a mess from the dirt of the field. Her mother would be upset with her; she had spent hours hunched over the sewing machine to create the added frills and detailed stitching.

  Vivienne lifted a hand to her head. It throbbed, but she decided it was wet dirt and not blood that caked her hair. She brushed the loose dirt off and retied the ribbon of her ponytail.

  On wobbly legs, she stood, shielding her eyes from the sun. She looked every which way around her. She had barely left Danville since her mother birthed her there, and she and Ray had walked every street in the town, at least once if not so many times that they had its details memorized.

  The houses around her were familiar, however different. The one to the left looked almost like the Sherman’s house, but the color was wrong and the house butted out with added rooms in the back where it shouldn’t have. Mrs. Willow’s house was across the street, and it looked right. Almost. There was something not quite the way it should be about the house.

  Vivienne remembered everything. She had been at Rosie Miller’s party with Ray when an earthquake hit. Ray had been trying to grab her when the house fell apart under her.

  Yet here she was. So where was he?

  Ignoring the dread that knew keenly of Ray’s absence, she indulged the hope that she would round the corner and find him. After all, if she was here, why shouldn’t he also be? Almost at a run, she reached the end of the field, only to find the one thing that could dash her hope just as quickly as it had formed.

  She collapsed to the ground, her legs curled to one side, the pink of her poodle skirt fanned out across them giving the scene an elegance it did not possess. There, marking the spot with the same finality as a gravestone, was a plaque.

  Carved from high quality granite the town ordered from a nearby quarry, it was the only way the townspeople knew to honor what felt profoundly like a dishonor, like an aberration. Nature had betrayed the citizens of Danville. They labored through the treachery acutely, but dared not speak on it louder than in whispers. Nature or God or Something had already lashed out at them, seemingly without reason. They dared not offend or give any cause for repercussions. Already, the people of Danville clutched onto what was left to them with an ungodly fear that it would be taken, without notice, without a chance for goodbyes.

  Etched in stone were words Vivienne thought to be untrue, but the decisiveness of granite attempted to convince her otherwise.

  April 11, 1959

  God claimed the sons and daughters of Danville. Here, their bodies nourish the earth, but their souls are forever in Heaven, looking down upon us. R.I.P.

  A long list of names covered the rest of the marker. She recognized every single one of them. Toward the end, her heart thumped and then stopped beating all together. Ray Whitter. Vivienne Walshe.

  Mr. Wallace engraved the words. He shed extra tears on their names. He knew they belonged next to each other in stone if they could not be in life.

  Vivienne’s heart resumed its beating, but she never would have known it for the desperate shaking of her chest.

  As if the granite were Ray himself, she flung herself upon it. It was as big as he was with so many names. But unlike him, the stone was cold, deathly cold. Her tears ran into those of many others; the rain had tried to wash away the pain, but couldn’t.

  She stayed there, prostrate, until a car pulled up beside her.

  “Mr. Marner?” Vivienne said through the passenger side window. Mr. Marner’s hair was thinner and grayer than when she’d last seen him.

  She stared into the interior of the car, at the belly that hung over his belt, the bushy eyebrows, and the deep crinkles of worry etched around his eyes.

  Things were different. It seemed like everything was different.

  Still, this was Mr. Marner, and she was in Danville.

  Or maybe she wasn’t after all. Perhaps Mr. Marner was dead just as she was. She thought Heaven would have been better to Mr. Marner, but how would she know?

  “Mr. Marner?” Vivienne pulled back to take in the tan station wagon with faux wood-paneled sides. “Hey, Mr. Marner, what kind of car is this?”

  Mr. Marner opened his door and got out. He walked straight up to Vivienne, eyes wide. His breath was hot and stale; it fluttered the butterfly collar of her pressed white shirt.

  She inched back, her eyes wide like his.

  He leaned forward. She never imagined Mr. Marner would frighten her. She stepped back again, this time looking around her, finding no relief in the open space.

  Mr. Marner reached up a mottled hand and raised one finger. It was his index finger, the same finger that rang up her favorite strawberry milk shakes at the diner.

  But now it was the finger of judgment, or of dread or accusation. Whatever it was, it shook.

  Vivienne looked down, watching Mr. Marner’s finger cross the few inches that separated them. It moved agonizingly slowly, drawing out an already incomprehensible moment.

  Then, toward the end, the finger bolted forward.

  Mr. Marner poked Vivienne’s arm and immediately withdrew his finger. But he hovered it close to her, unsatisfied. Faster now, he poked her arm again, this time, beneath her elbow and the fabric of her summer sweater.

  “Ow.”

  But instead of apologizing, he squeezed her shoulders with both hands, running all ten fingers down her arms, massaging flesh as he went.

  “You’re hurting me, Mr. Marner.”

  He withdrew his hands and clasped them in front of his face as if he knew he would be calling on God in a moment.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he said over and again instead of breathing. Vivienne started to back away.

  “No!” He reached out and grabbed her. “You can’t go. Help!” he bellowed. “Somebody come. Help.” His shouts hurt her ears, but she slumped into his grasp.

  It didn’t take long for Somebody to appear, more than one of them.

  All the Somebodies made a spectacle of themselves until many more of them came, until Vivienne understood that something was very, very wrong,
and that she was at the epicenter of it all.

  The Question of When

  She was home again, sort of. She was certain of very little, but she was certain that she was exhausted. A seemingly interminable stream of parents and townspeople stopped by the house after she arrived, all asking the same questions for which she had no answers. All wanted to touch her through tear-blurred eyes and mixed emotions. All pulled their hands away after feeling her flesh, warm and solid, as if it burned them.

  Do you know where Johnny is? Have you seen him? Is my boy alive?

  What about Carl? Will he appear in the field too? Is there any chance of it?

  Are there more of you out there? Do you know what happened to our Rosie? Do you know where she is? I never believed that she was dead. I knew my baby wasn’t dead. She’s alive, isn’t she? I just know it.

  Then came the very worst of it: Mr. and Mrs. Whitter and Ray’s two younger brothers. Had Vivienne not already had a family, they would have taken her in. She had spent as much time at the Whitter house as she had at her own.

  Ray’s mother never got the questions that haunted her out, despite her earlier resolve. When Vivienne saw the Whitter family, any composure she had managed to scrap together dissolved. She shook against the armchair, looking small and frail, the sobs she’d held back rolling through her. She burrowed her face in her hands, feeling her loss all over again.