The Color of Forever (10 page)

One interesting item I discovered was that she had been swept off the rocks at the Portland Head Light. This came as a surprise to me, for I had assumed she’d died on the property itself, in the place where the captain had erected the sundial.

Later in life, the children’s letters to each other revealed how they lamented their father’s perpetual grief over the loss of his young wife, and how they wished he would marry again.

The daughter, Amelie, wrote this to her brother about her efforts to find him a new bride:

“Father is so stubborn and rude sometimes. He slams his book closed and walks out on me whenever I mention a pretty lady’s name. He knows what I am up to. Then he sails off again for months on end. I worry about him, Nathan. He is obsessed with his regret, and I often catch him standing at the edge of the lawn, staring out at the waves on a stormy morning, no doubt thinking about how he couldn’t save her…”

I read the letter aloud to Bailey, who sat back in her chair and laid both her white gloved hands over her heart. “Oh, to be loved like that.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied, carefully tucking the letter back into the envelope. “But it’s so sad, how he couldn’t ever be happy again. And the children, never having a chance to know their mother or see their father happy.”

The curator glanced up from her work. “It is rather tragic,” she agreed.

We discussed the rarity of such everlasting love, then Bailey and I continued poring over the rest of the collection. At last I came to a reference about the captain’s desire to build a time machine.

In a letter dated September 1915, his son Nathan wrote this:

“He’s not well, Amelie. Last night I found that H.G. Wells book on his bedside table again. I thought he was all through with that, but he nearly electrocuted himself last week, fooling around with another one of his mad gadgets. I also snuck a look at his journal when he was out. There were notes and equations about time doorways and the alignment of the stars and the universe. I think you should come home…”

“I wonder what happened to the journal,” Bailey said when I folded the letter and returned it to its envelope.

The curator glanced up again. “It was never found. We believe the children must have destroyed it, because at the end of his life, they were quite concerned about their father’s mental state, and his reputation.”

As I read through the remaining letters, I thought their assessment was a reasonable conclusion, based on Amelie’s and Nathan’s correspondence.

Sadly Captain Fraser died a few months later, from a severe fever, at the age of seventy. His descendants lived in the home until the 1950s when they couldn’t afford to maintain it any longer and sold it to a family from Portland. It changed hands a number of times before Angela and her husband purchased it in 2009.

When Bailey and I walked out of the museum, it was almost noon, and scorching hot. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I could go for a sub before we hit the beach.”

“That sounds good,” I replied, not wanting to reveal the fact that I would have preferred to skip the beach altogether, return to the inn and spend the afternoon napping in my room, because I felt deeply, inexplicably morose.

I decided to blame it on the aftereffects of the Rusty Nails.

Chapter Twenty

“Of course, it’s all very fascinating,” I said to Bailey as we shook out our towels, laid them on the sand, and sat down. “But I didn’t come all this way for a history lesson. I’m still just as frustrated.”

“You mean you’re still thinking about the son you had with Chris.”

I sighed heavily and gazed out at the blue water for a moment before I squirted sunscreen on my palm and rubbed it on my shoulder. “It’s not that I’m in love with Chris or anything. It’s just…” I paused. “It’s more that my memories of Logan are painful because he was sick most of the time and I was so afraid of losing him, and there was so little I could do to make him better. Now here I am, but he’s not with me. It’s like…my worst fear realized.”

“But he’s not real in your life,” she reminded me, growing a little impatient. “Who knows what happened to Sylvie? Maybe the whole thing was just a dream for her, too, and you picked up on it somehow—maybe through some sort of psychic ability. I saw a documentary about that once, where scientists were studying how people’s brainwaves could actually intermingle, where they would suddenly think of the same thing at the same time, like a steak dinner or something, or have the same dream. Maybe that’s what happened to you.”

I sat forward, hugged my knees to my chest, and stared at the horizon where the water met the sky. “You’re right. It probably
was
just a dream. It’s crazy to think otherwise, right? And she did mention that it happened because she was experimenting with lucid dreaming.” I turned to Bailey, who was stretched out on her back with her mirrored sunglasses on. “What is that, anyway? Lucid dreaming…”

Bailey raised a knee. “I think it’s where you’re half-awake, and consciously, you know that you’re dreaming, so you can control what happens in the dream.”

This idea went off like an exploding lightbulb in my brain, raising all kinds of possibilities. I turned slightly on my towel and raised my sunglasses. “Have you ever done it?”

“It’s not something that you
do
. It just happens. And yeah, I’ve had them. Haven’t you?”

I faced the water again. “I’m not sure.” For a long while I watched families on the beach, wading into the water with their small children, and listened to the distant sound of a portable speaker playing rock music. I breathed in the scent of coconut sunscreen on the air, then noticed a colorful seashell in the sand. I picked it up and studied it closely. Completely fascinated, I stuffed it into my bag.

Then I turned onto my stomach and rested my cheek on my arm. “Sylvie said she was experimenting with lucid dreaming, which suggests she had been
trying
to make it happen. I wonder if that’s how she did it. I wish I could remember everything she said, but it’s all running together in my mind.”

“You could always call her and ask.”

I considered that for a moment, knowing that Sylvie wouldn’t be thrilled to hear from me again. “You remember what she was like yesterday. She won’t want to discuss it with me.”

Bailey leaned up on her elbows and flicked her blond hair off her shoulder. “Not that I’m
encouraging
you or anything—but you’re a news reporter. It’s your job to ask people questions they don’t want to answer.”

I smiled at her and dug my phone out of my purse.

o0o

“Thank you for taking my call,” I said a few minutes later as I walked down the beach, along the water’s edge, holding my cell phone to my ear. “I hope I didn’t take you away from a patient.”

“I’m just waiting for the next one to arrive,” Sylvie said. “He’s a bit late.”

There was an awkward pause, and I cleared my throat. “I see. Well, I just wanted to ask you a few more questions if you don’t mind. Yesterday, you said you experimented with lucid dreaming, and that’s how you ended up in those alternate realities. How,
exactly
, did the sundial play into it?”

“I can’t really answer that,” Sylvie replied, “except to say that it always happened when I went to sleep
trying
to dream about the thing I wanted to remember or revisit. Then I would float out of my body and… I know it sounds far-fetched, but in my dream, I would fly to the sundial and take hold of it, and the next thing I knew, I was living another life, and not always remembering the old one. But like I said, I couldn’t control it. I never intended to go to the sundial. It just happened after I drifted off.”

“What were you trying to remember, or revisit?” I asked.

“That’s another story altogether.” She paused. “Things from my past—my
actual
past. Choices from my youth that I regretted and wished I had handled differently.”

A volleyball came flying at me and landed in the water. I fetched it and threw it back to a group of teenagers on the beach, then returned my attention to Sylvie on the phone.

“So you were trying to return to your actual past,” I said to her. “I wonder what would happen if I tried to dream about a past I never actually lived.”

Sylvie was quiet for a moment. “Please, Katelyn, just let it go. You could end up screwing up your whole life. And you should know that I haven’t set foot at the Fraser House Inn since I found Chris, because I’m afraid I’ll get swept away again, and that scares the daylights out of me—because I like where I am right now. Just thinking about it and talking to you about it has me worried that it’s going to happen again. I really have to go. Please don’t call me again. I don’t want to talk about it, and you should go home.”

Click.

She’d ended the call. I lowered my phone to my side and gazed out at the water again, realizing that any sane person would accept that she was right, and understand that it was madness to fixate on a life that wasn’t real.

But maybe I wasn’t sane, because all I could think about was one of the last things she said to me:
I like where I am right now
.

She was happy because of her experience with the sundial.

I wanted happiness, too.

Which required me to reunite with my son, as crazy as that sounded.

So I did what any intelligent woman would do in my situation. I sat down on a large piece of driftwood and googled “how to lucid dream.”

Evangeline

Chapter Twenty-One

1878

It’s rather peculiar, don’t you think? How one particular memory can take hold in your mind and never grow dim, even years later when you’ve lived a full life and thousands of other memories have piled on top of it. What is it that makes certain experiences more relevant, more vivid than others? To the point that they are burned, as if by a branding iron, onto our brains forever?

This knowledge and understanding had not yet occurred to me as I walked along the sandy beach a few miles south of my parents’ new home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, where I had been dragged—quite by force—a week earlier. At twenty-one years of age, I was still somewhat immature at the time, because the most relevant, enlightening moments of my life were yet to occur. And I was still terribly angry with my parents for not involving me in the decision to pack up and leave our brick townhouse in Boston where I had been born and raised, in order to migrate to a tiny fishing town on the absolute edge of nowhere.

I couldn’t understand it. I was no longer a child. Why hadn’t they given me some notice, or at least time to prepare myself for what would surely be my sad and wretched fate on this desolate, rocky coast? Now I was completely dependent upon them for company and conversation, because I knew no one else here. Nor was there any sign of good society in this hapless backwater.

We had been here a full week and I had yet to meet a single neighbor of a certain standing. “One would probably have to travel to Portland for that,” Father had mentioned at dinner the night before, “or even back to Boston.”

Mother had kicked him under the table.

That was the moment I knew—my life, as I’d known it, was utterly over.

o0o

My name is Evangeline Hughes, and I was the youngest of six children who all went on to independent, illustrious lives and successful marriages. It’s obvious to me now that I was an unexpected accident, born ten years after the previous youngest offspring—who was currently a banker in San Francisco, married with three children.

I, on the other hand, was still at home with parents who should have been free to enjoy their elder years without the encumbrance of a daughter who needed to be married off—and sooner rather than later. At twenty-one, I was no longer a fresh-faced young debutante. I was, in fact, due to our unexpected removal to this place, in serious danger of being put “on the shelf.”

For that reason,
why
they decided to leave Boston at that crucial stage in my social progress remains a mystery to me. I half suspect that Papa realized I was the last child who would live under his roof, and he was refusing to let me go, because we made each other laugh.

Or perhaps he simply couldn’t pay the rent on our townhouse in Boston. That was more likely the case, for he’d been ill much of the past year, and might very well have been dismissed from his position at the bank.

I doubt I will ever know the particulars. He refers to this adventure with the fish and lighthouses as his “glorious retirement,” and I would not dare to press him for the truth. So, a
glorious retirement
it shall be.

o0o

As I made my way along the sandy beach, stepping over giant piles of brittle seaweed and skipping to avoid the flat, foamy waves that pushed aggressively up the beach, I could not pretend to be happy about my current situation, one without friends or any romantic prospects. Perhaps it was time I simply accepted my fate to become a companion to my parents in their old age.

Suddenly, a seagull swooped low over my head and I ducked. Then I looked down and spotted a colorful seashell in the wet sand at my feet. Wondering what sort of creature would dwell in such a home, I crouched to pick it up, rinsed it off in a tiny pool of seawater, and slipped it into my pocket to take home with me.

As I walked, a fierce gust of wind blew my skirts around my ankles, causing them to flap like a ship’s sail. I looked up to discover the sky had turned gray with thick, low-lying clouds rolling in from the sea. The gull was now floating in one spot on the wind just over my head, his wings spread wide, as if he had no desire to travel anywhere. He was simply basking in the indulgence of flight, taking pleasure in holding steady over my head.