A Betrayal of Time Read online

  To Vivienne, she and Ray had just been at the party, together as always. Evening had turned to night and then to day, and she had appeared in the field that had once been Rosie Miller’s house. She had awoken to this terrible reality, and now she could not shake free of the nightmare that it was. That knowing sunk into the pit of her stomach like a too-large boulder, weighing her down, taking up all the space her heart had once occupied.

  Mr. and Mrs. Whitter stood next to Vivienne as she cried for the shyest of seconds before Mrs. Whitter sunk to the armchair, nudging Vivienne over to share the seat. When Mrs. Whitter put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and pulled her into her chest, Vivienne lost all control. Ray’s father balanced on the armrest while he tried to comfort this girl who was the daughter he never had.

  Sounds came out of Vivienne that she had never heard before: wails and moans.

  She was terrified. Of it all. Of all that she had already realized and of all that she didn’t yet know. She was terrified by what had happened to her, by what had happened to everyone else at the party with her, and she was horribly terrified at the thought that she might never see Ray again. When she thought about Ray, she found that she couldn’t breathe.

  Vivienne gripped Ray’s mother as if she could replace her son, and Mrs. Whitter’s semblance of composure shattered. She collapsed into her son’s fiancée. Vivienne and Ray had intended to marry after high school graduation.

  Mother and child counterbalanced each other so that they did not fall. They did not hold each other up with strength, but with circumstance.

  Eventually, Ray’s father helped his wife up. She limped out of the parlor, her head shielded from the horrors of life, nestled in her husband’s shoulder, the world too unjust to confront alone.

  Ray’s brothers, teenagers when Vivienne saw them what felt like the day before, were adults with families of their own. Seeing that their father could cry, they cried too. Shoulders stooped, they followed their parents out the door.

  Vivienne’s grief and lack of answers didn’t slow down the questions, even once it became clear that the only thing she could feign to be convinced of was that she was here and that she was alive. Privately, she still entertained thoughts that she must, somehow, be dead, just like everyone else that was at the party.

  Why would she be the one to live? And if she had lived, why had Ray not lived along with her? Anyone wise enough to save her would have known that her life was not worth saving unless Ray could share it with her.

  Vivienne slumped into the flowered armchair in the parlor until her father began turning people away. He was sorry, but they should come back tomorrow. Vivienne was tired after her ordeal. Every time her father whispered about her ordeal as if she couldn’t hear him, he looked over his shoulder, at the impossibility of her, right there, slumped against the beaten armchair.

  She looked exactly as she did the day she died—or the day they thought she died—even if the armchair, and everything else, didn’t.

  Her bedroom was just as she had left it, only a few minor things put away or moved. Vivienne descended the stairs with a knot in her throat. She walked slowly, noticing every detail: the warm, polished wood of the banister, familiar in its curves from years of use; the wooden steps, bowed with wear; the light fixture in the stairwell, buzzing almost imperceptibly.

  Then the carpet at the landing, threadbare in places she hadn’t remembered it being. The sunshine streaming through the windows of the parlor and lighting up the two bottom stairs, just as it always had.

  She knew she was preserving the moments before she asked the question, although she knew it wouldn’t help; her brain had only one concern.

  Once she set foot in the parlor, she noticed her mother and father were there. Her father had called into the post office to say he wouldn’t be in to work, although it wasn’t necessary. Everyone he worked with already knew he wouldn’t be coming in, and they already knew why.

  Her mother had always been there to take care of her, and she was there now, with an apron on, though it wasn’t the lime green one she always wore.

  “Good morning, sweetheart,” her parents called out as a chorus, their eager faces leading the way to more embraces, even though they had hugged her more times than she thought possible the day before.

  The smell of pancakes and eggs drifted through the kitchen, and Vivienne followed her motioning parents to the breakfast table. It was the breakfast of special days. There was fresh-squeezed orange juice and milk, butter and toast, and maple syrup steaming in anticipation of the hot cakes.

  But Vivienne sat, in front of the good china and the silver utensils reserved for holidays, without a thought of food.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  “Yes, honey,” her dad said.

  “When is it?” Vivienne said.

  Her parents exchanged nervous glances. Her mother put the spatula down and came over to place her hand on Vivienne’s.

  “What do you mean, honey?” she said in her most soothing, motherly voice, although she knew all the while what Vivienne meant.

  Vivienne took only one tired breath. Her shoulders slumped again, already exhausted. “What year is it?”

  Father and mother exchanged looks again. Then they both sat down. They pulled their chairs close to their daughter’s and each held one of her hands.

  From this close, Vivienne could see the spots of age and the wrinkles she had ignored yesterday. Both her father and mother’s hair was graying. Still, it was their eyes that had changed the most. There were some things that couldn’t be erased. The loss of a child was one of those things.

  Her father petted her hand and looked at his wife. His ring finger was slightly swollen around the band that he never removed. His wife nodded. They had talked about this before, long into the late hours of the night, where hope and dreams were nearly indistinguishable from reality.

  “Viv, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s 1979.”

  A World No Longer Hers

  1980

  Vivienne wasn’t surprised when her parents said they needed to speak with her. They had been acting strange the last few days, talking softly until she came into the room, and then talking louder than normal about inane topics.

  Vivienne sank into her preferred armchair, and her parents sat, straighter than usual, in the love seat next to her. Her mother picked imaginary lint off the sofa. Her father wrung his hands without noticing.

  Her mother avoided looking at her dad; she didn’t want to be the one to begin. They had been so careful with Vivienne since she returned. They worried about her fragile nerves and the risk of depression.

  Secretly, they also worried that she could disappear at any moment, just as unpredictably as she had reappeared in the first place.

  “Viv,” her father began hesitantly, with a sideways glance at his wife, who continued to ignore him. “I’m concerned about you.”

  Vivienne’s mother finally looked up. “We are concerned about you.”

  They waited, but their daughter had nothing to say. What was there to say? Vivienne had discovered that the rules of life didn’t exist in the way she thought they did. There was little of consequence she could say after that. Anything she said could be true, or it might not, even the so-called impregnable truths.

  No one was supposed to be able to disappear and reappear twenty years later in the same spot, virtually unchanged. What kind of life was she supposed to lead after being the one that did? The one that violated all physical truths merely by existing in a world that was no longer hers.

  Mother scooted closer to the edge of the sofa. The hem of her skirt hung loose off the couch cushions, revealing legs that looked older, burdened by the weight of life and the passing of time. She placed a hand on Vivienne’s knee, softly, as if Vivienne were possibly not there at all. Vivienne barely felt it.

  “Sweetie, you can’t keep doing this.”

  Vivienne’s father nodded his agreement. “It’s been almost a year since you … returned to
us. For months, you cried most days. We understood. Then you became angry, and we also understood. But this,” she gestured toward Vivienne, “we don’t understand. This worries us. Very much.

  “You don’t see anybody unless you have to. You don’t visit with friends. You don’t socialize with anyone your age.”

  “That’s because everyone my age is dead.” Vivienne said calmly, too calmly.

  Her father scooted to the end of the couch, still clutching his hands in front of him, his pants flaring to blend with the skirting on the sofa. “You cannot waste your life away just sitting here, doing nothing.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Because, honey,” her mother said, “you are still alive. Your life was given back to you. You can’t waste it.”

  “It’s mine to waste if I want to, isn’t it?” Irrational anger boiled within Vivienne, always close to the surface lately.

  Her father looked sad, sadder than Vivienne had seen him in a long time. “Yes, it is yours to waste.” He leaned back into the couch and sighed. “But sweetheart, why would you want to?”

  Vivienne spun Ray’s class ring around her finger, over and over, the silver inside it well shined. Her mother squeezed her knee. “Please, honey. You are our daughter. By some miracle, you have come back to us. Please, please make the most of it, of this precious gift, of your life.”

  Vivienne spun Ray’s ring even faster.

  “Viv.” Her father waited until she met his eyes, recognized the gleam in them. “Ray wouldn’t want you to waste your life. He loved you as much as I love your mother, and I know how I would feel if your mother wasted her life away. Ray would feel the same. He adored you.

  “Live for Ray if you won’t live for yourself. Live for the both of you. That’s what he would want. I’m certain of it.” A single tear slid down her father’s cheek. Once his daughter returned and he began crying, he couldn’t seem to contain the bittersweet emotions of having her back.

  Vivienne’s eyes unfocused, losing the gray blue irises of her father, thinking about what he had said.

  She didn’t have to think for long to know what he said was true.

  The Chance of Becoming

  Vivienne Walshe had never considered leaving Danville before. She and Ray would marry, have a family, and be happy in their small town, just as their parents and grandparents had done before them. That was how it worked in 1959. No one she knew then aspired to leave.

  But 1980 was different. Leaving Danville was now an option for people her age, or at least for people that looked to be her age. It was difficult for Vivienne to determine her age when she was born in 1942, but her body was that of an eighteen year old. There were some things that had no precedent, and this was one of them.

  Her father arranged it with the high school principal to make a quiet exception to the rules in her case, since none of them applied to her anyway. The principal was the same from when Vivienne and Ray were about to graduate, before the event—previously, it had been the earthquake; since Vivienne’s return, the townspeople could not deny it was something different altogether, something potentially more sinister, or at the very least inexplicable.

  Unceremoniously, Vivienne became a high school graduate twenty-one years later than she anticipated. The date on her diploma and her appearance made her appear legitimate. That and a story that her birth certificate had been misplaced (and the omission that her parents had misplaced it intentionally) were enough to secure her entrance to a nearby university. Vivienne liked that it was only a two-hour drive away, yet still far enough away to attempt to put the event behind her. She still couldn’t walk past Ray’s house without bursting into tears.

  It was an important step for her, and it was just as big of one for her parents. But they were all ready for it. They all needed change. And a co-ed university, which had been for boys only in 1959, would undoubtedly bring it.

  The start of fall semester seemed too far away to offer the relief Vivienne needed, so she enrolled in summer session. It would be a good way to ease into an environment so different from her own, where she prayed no one would recognize the name Vivienne Walshe.

  With her two new trunks loaded in the back of the family car, her father shifted the car into first. Predictably, the car’s undercarriage scraped against the driveway as it met the street; it was not enough for her father to bother leveling the driveway junction, but it was enough to make Vivienne cringe every time.

  She had already said her goodbyes to the Whitters. Still, as they passed their house, Vivienne sat up straight and stared, trying to prolong the time it took them to drive past the simple brick house with its wrap-around porch that contained so many of her happy memories. It was a better receptacle of them than she was, with its objective view, free from the tinge of sadness. There, Ray’s laughter was still just laughter; it was he being happy and carefree with her, imagining a future that always included her.

  She leaned her forehead against the window and willed herself to memorize every detail, to freeze the Whitter house in her mind.

  But of course, she was being silly. She had memorized the minutia of the house long ago.

  When they drove past the field where the Millers’ house used to be, her father slowed the car, just as he always did. All three heads in the car swiveled to look at the site. It looked so innocent, so harmless.

  Marnie Miller was there today, where her home and joy used to be. The Millers lived a few blocks away now, in old Mr. Cason’s house. Still, none of the occupants of the car was surprised to see her there, on her knees, in the middle of the field—perhaps praying, perhaps not—but certainly waiting.

  There was always someone there now, since Vivienne returned.

  The family members of the lost ones sometimes went alone, at times together. Sometimes they brought flowers or mementos, other times they didn’t.

  But always, always, they waited. They waited for the impossible to happen even without any sign that it would. Because now they had proof that it could.

  Vivienne breathed normally again once they drove past the sign that welcomed visitors to Danville, when trees lined the road instead of houses and the shops of main street. Outside of town she could be free of the stares that trailed her everywhere. She could leave behind the curious looks, as well as the relieved, resentful, and heart-broken ones. Beyond the borders of Danville, she had the chance of becoming someone more than a girl with a terrible story.

  The media wasn’t camped out in town anymore. It grew tired of the story of the lost ones and the one that had returned as the months passed and nothing else changed. Reporters came to town only occasionally now, when they thought an editor might buy a follow-up story to the headline sensation. Vivienne never granted journalists the interviews they requested, but that didn’t stop them from trying or from pursuing her with their telescopic lenses.

  With Danville behind them, relief flooded Vivienne’s chest, more refreshing than the breeze that whipped in through lowered windows.

  But the sheen in her eyes took much longer to dry. Vivienne felt the plaque with all those names—so many names—stretching toward her, the tenacious and far-reaching hold of the dead, long after the Danville sign faded into the distance.

  A Final Act

  1989

  Vivienne had been back to Danville many times since her first semester at the university. Still, her reaction was the same every time she pulled into her hometown. No matter how much her life seemed to change, some things never would.

  She slowed her hatchback at the field of the Millers’ absent house. It was rarer to see family there now, waiting for a loved one to appear, but it still happened. Today, there was no one. The field was stark in the cold, its usually blooming wild flowers dormant or gone. The plaque that still bore her name as one of the dead shimmered with frost.

  When Vivienne passed the Whitter’s house, she was alarmed that her hands still shook at the wheel. Her breath grew short. Her heart longed painfully and unbearably
for Ray, even after all these years. It was almost reason enough never to return to Danville.

  It was always that way.

  But this time, she had to come back. Her father called late last night. When she didn’t pick up at home, he dialed the other number he knew from memory.

  Her assistant picked up the phone at the lab. He recognized Vivienne’s father right away; he also recognized the worry in his voice.

  Vivienne’s assistant knocked on the door to her office. The usual finger came up while she trained her eyes on the thought she needed to complete on paper before she chanced forgetting it. It might be the one piece she was missing.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Vivienne, but I don’t think this can wait,” Kyle said.

  Vivienne looked up. Kyle had never insisted before.

  “It’s your father.”

  Vivienne’s stomach dropped while she walked toward the desk that held the phone. She snapped the receiver up. “Dad, is mom okay?”

  “Hi honey.” He sounded tired, more so than usual. “It’s late. What are you still doing at the lab?”

  She was doing what she was always doing: searching for the solution to her time travel conundrum, searching for her way to Ray. Her father knew that.

  “Dad, is everything all right? Is mom okay?”

  The depth of the sigh on the other end of the line was worse than an answer.

  “You’d better come tomorrow, in the morning if you can. I think—“ he staggered on the words he was about to say, “she’s about to go.”

  Vivienne didn’t say anything for a long while, and neither did her dad. Words and tears welled in their throats, blocking any nonsense they might have said to comfort each other.

  Vivienne flicked her nail along the corner of a sticker affixed to the front of the phone. It was faded and peeling, but still performed its duty. It announced that it was the property of the Science Department, Graduate Studies. Vivienne didn’t read it. She barely saw it as she stared without focus.