By the Bay (28 page)

Some of the young coast
guard men tried to date her, coming in the café particularly to see her, but though they were attractive enough, she couldn’
t
seem to get up the interest.

It was almost as though she were waiting for something else. Life was in suspension while she stood breathlessly expecting the next event.

So silly! Before she knew it she would be Auntie’s age and bemoaning the fact she’d never taken advantage of the real opportunities around her while she was waiting for something magical to happen.

Life wasn’t like that.  Look at Mother who was still lost back on the day of her young husband’s death, or at Auntie herself who had decided that dear old fat Uncle
Owen
was the love of her life.
While she was sitting here waiting for some prince to come, life would pass her by.

The trouble was, though, that it felt like that thing she was waiting for was more real than the young men at the café and the people walking the streets of her hometown.

Perhaps the situation was simpler. Maybe whatever imbalance within her mother had sent her off track had been passed down to her and she was fated to fall into her own madness.

In the future they might have better ways of treating mental illness, the stray thought struck her, and better medicines to help people like her mother. How awful if her mother had spent these years of misery enduring something that could be easily fixed a few years down the road!

Her laughter was bitter, caught in the wind and blown away where no one else would ever hear it. What did it matter? It wasn’t like she had a time machine to nip into the future and pick up a prescription to fix Mother’s problems.

She got home before dark and felt a sense of depression deepen around her as she went up the walk and into the cottage. Spring had come now and the outside world was more enticing than ever, but for safety’s sake she had to spend her evenings locked in the house.

They never used to even lock their doors, but these days with so many strangers in town and the possibilities of enemies creeping in from the sea,
they had developed other habits. Their neighbors
,
too
,
worried about them, two women living alone and one of them not very well. The
Stewart
s next door checked on them regularly and the police chief often drove by in the evening. Sometimes he even stopped in for a short visit.

Jillian wondered that she’d never realized before that
Roy
Ezell had been in love with her mother for a long time now. She guessed he realized she was too emotionally fragile to be approached with the affection he had to offer.

How sad. How very sad life could be!

Chapter
Forty

“The thing of it is,” Jillian, hearing her own voice, was still half asleep, “if you could give her medicine to make her better, could you also give her medicine that would make her sick
? Has he been drugging her to keep her from interfering with his plans?
It seems to me there are two sides to this.”

She sat straight up in her bed, wondering what in the world she’d been dreaming about. Then she realized her blankets and coverlet were heaped over her and she was way t
o
o warm. No wonder she was having nightmares.

Checking her bedside clock,
she
saw that it was 3:14.
If she didn’t get back to sleep, her day working at the restaurant would be a misery.

Pushing back all her coverings except for a single sheet, she fluffed her pillow and lay down again.

She couldn’t quite remember the dreams, but she could remember her own words. How silly! Why would anyone want to make Mom sick?

No doubt her concern about her mother, so much a part of her life, had caused the dream. She couldn’t resist getting up and going to make certain Christine was all right. Once she’d reassured herself she would be able to go back to sleep.

Christine lay quietly in her bed, moonlight coming in through the window to brighten her sleeping face. Jillian watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing. As a child, one of her greatest fears was that she would awaken to find Mom had stopped breathing. When you’d lost your father before you were even old enough to remember him, you lived in fear of that second loss that would leave you alone.

She tiptoed back to bed, where she couldn’t help thinking
that
if the enemy wanted to bomb them, this would be a good night with a large, full moon shining down on the bay.

Turning over and wishing for instant sleep with no middle-of-the-night worrying and anxieties, she closed her eyes and tried to slip
into unconsciousness.
Dreams? It was funny how sometimes the mind in sleep seemed to have a wisdom beyond waking reality. It remembered things the conscious mind had forgotten.

She dreamed again and memories that had faded, never having

existed except in that mind that lurked below consciousness, surfaced and she was in Philippe’s arms again, aboard his ship and headed across the waves to adventure. So happy to be with him
once more
, she only experienced a faint regret that they’d had so little time together. There had been places to go and things to see. In her sleep she sighed.

When she awakened, the memory of the dream lingered only long enough for her to rub sleep from her eyes and then, though she tried to grasp it once again, it was gone, wiped away so that only vague tracings were left, just enough to make her sick with longing for something that
could
never be hers.

“He said we would be sorry,” she said the words aloud and then wondered what they meant and who had said them.

The she heard the sound of a baby crying and frowned. There was no infant in her mother’s cottage, nor had there been since she herself was a child.

“I’ll see to the baby.” She recognized the voice as that of Aunt
Florence
and yet different. She sound so young, like a girl only half-grown and she was very close by in the same room. Jillian blinked and saw a baby’s crib over by the window and a girl leaning over it, clucking soothingly with such concentration that she didn’t seem to realize anyone else was in the
re
.

Jillian heard sounds of a disturbance in another room and, though she would have liked to stay and see the woman who looked like Aunt
Florence
and the baby who was maybe her, she was in a dream and had to follow in the direction in which the vision directed.

Clad only in her nightgown, her feet bare, she followed the sound of raised voices. Someone sounded angry, enraged even, his voice going on and on in a tirade.

The sounds were coming from the
living
room and as she glided into the room, she was only vaguely aware that the furnishings were different, but there wasn’t time to take that in. Two men were shouting at each other, though one of them was doing most of the shouting, the other was simply looking stunned.

Nobody seemed to notice her, hovering as she was in the shadows on the edge of the room. The shouting man, who had red hair and a freckled complexion much like her own, dropped his tone to an icy whisper that was even more frightening. The man he was facing could have been  his twin.

Both were young, probably in their early twenties and Jillian had the strange, bewildering feeling that she should know them. Then she saw that the threatening man held a gun in his hands that was pointed at the other man.

“It’s not like
I want to kill you,” the man with the gun told the other. “I don’t want to kill any
one
. But sometimes it’s only right. You and your family can’t stand in the way of what’s best for others. That baby crying in the other room, she will wreck everything if she’s allowed to grow up. She made it not happen. We never even got started and think of all the good we
could
have done.”

Somehow this was vaguely familiar to Jillian in some mad way. She’d heard this all before but it was distant as a book she’d read or a dream she’d dreamed long ago. Instinctively she knew he was
wrong.

“Davis
?” a woman’s lighter voice called from the kitchen and a woman even younger than herself ran into the room, halting when she saw the man with the gun. She looked confusedly from one man to the other.

It was Jillian’s mother, younger than she could ever remember seeing her. For a moment, she was mesmerized at the sight of the vibrant young woman with her shining eyes and soft  skin. This was Mom before her father’s death.

Oh! She didn’t know how it could be, but she reco
gnized
that she was witness to the moments leading up to that disaster, though she was as frozen and unable to act as she’d been in her dream.

The gun wobbled in the man’s hand. Apparently it was true that he really didn’t want to shoot.

Suddenly the baby’s screams grew louder and Jillian realized that Auntie, the babe in her arms
,
had come unwittingly into the room. “What’s going on . . .” Aunt
Florence
’s voice broke off as she saw the two men and her sister.

None of them seemed to see Jillian.

The man swung around and pointed the gun at the baby, but before he could shoot, Christine rushed past her husband, landing on
the intruder
like a cat with all its claws out. She was so much the smaller and without a weapon, but
she was fighting for her child with primitive desperation.

Her husband was only seconds slower. He pulled her aside and flung her to safety, struggling with the other man for the gun. Jillian heard it fire and saw one man, she didn’t know which, slump to the floor.

“Davis!” her mother screamed, running to the man who was bleeding on the floor and kneeling at his side. Her hysterical screams went on and on. The baby wailed desperately and Aunt
Florence
began to moan in despair.

The dying man looked past them all, finally seeing Jillian standing in the shadows. His face contorted in a kind of grin. “I said you would be sorry. You
’ve
lost each other forever. When you stopped our project, time unwound. The two of you never met.”

The other man, apparently unharmed though very white in the face, pulled his wife up from the
dying man
. “Dearest,” he said. “I’m all right. I’m not injured.”

With a glad cry, she ran into his arms and Jillian alone saw the body vanish from the living room floor, going back
,
she thought
,
to wherever it had come from.

“
A robber
,” her father was explaining to his wife and her sister as he took the baby into his arms. He turned around. “I thought he was dead, but I guess he was just playing possum because he’s taken off for sure.” He picked up the abandoned weapon as though about to search for his attacker and Jillian felt the scene around her fading.

Epilogue

It had been a challenging day, as usual. Trying to get a classroom of sixteen-year-olds interested in studying the war between the states when their brothers, cousins, and fathers were currently soldiers in Europe or the Pacific wasn’t easy even though she loved her job and felt a personal connection to each student.

Sometimes it was just hard to make them see how fascinating the study of history could be with its stories of the lives of people like themselves in other times. They were so caught up in today in the spring of 1943 and she couldn’t much blame them. If this war continued, some of them would be soldiers themselves.

             
And she was tired and couldn’t go home. The little apartment she rented had suffered a massive water
leak
so that until she could get a plumber in, hopefully tomorrow, she had be
e
n forced to throw herself on her parents’ mercy and spend this night in the cottage where she’d grown up. They were having their usual Friday night get-tog
e
ther for supper and dominoes and though she’d enjoyed the excellent meal put together by Mom and Auntie, the dominoes were hitting the table a little too loudly and the laughter came right through the walls to where she was trying to make an early night of it in her old bedroom.
Lately her sleep had been interrupted by troubling dreams and she’d spent too much of the night hours lying awake in the darkness with
powerful
feelings of longing and lost that lingered into her daylight hours.

After tossing about for over an hour, a sudden
happy
shriek from the other room brought her to her feet. A short walk was called for, exercise to help her sleep, even though Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of her going out alone after dark.

She slipped into a cotton dress and comfortable shoes and then, moving quietly, glanced at the kitchen table where her parents, Auntie and
Owen
, and their friends the Ezells were seated around the table.