What Was I Thinking? (16 page)

Finally, I hung up, having had several
promising pre-interviews for jobs and canceled the Visa. It was time to rest my
phone ear, figure out who I could ask for a lift back to my car with my spare
key, and to get something to eat. I’d been on the phone through lunch hour, and
then some, and I was starved.

My phone buzzed again almost instantly.

It was Bert again—barely coherent. “Addie! I’ve
been trying to reach you for hours! We’re almost out of time!”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Are you home? Do you have your Gibson Girl
costume? Can I call on you?
Right now?”

“Okay.” I hung up and, shaking my head, went to
find something to eat in the fridge.

Some time later, the phone rang again.
Bert again—breathless this time.
“I’m downstairs. Please
come let me in.”

“O—”
click
. “
kay
,” I said to the dead phone. I grabbed my
apartment key and hurtled down the stairs, too curious to wait for the
elevator. I opened the street door, and he pushed right in, grabbing me in a
most un-Bert-like way. “Addie, I love you! I know I was out of line to kiss you
so passionately yesterday, and I’m ashamed, but I truly love you. Come with
me!”

“What? Come where?”

“The time wave is almost here. I felt the
vibrations late last night, and I worked all day to get
It
ready for travel. There’s room for two, but we have to go within the next four
hours, or there’s no telling when the next chance will be. Addie, please come
home with me! I love you! Say you love me too. Say you’ll come.”

I was beginning to come out of my fog. “I love
you? I do love you, yes.” Something that might be happiness was creeping in.
“Where’s home?”

“1901.” Well,
that
certainly explained quite a bit. “You’ll need your costume. Do
you have it?”

“Yes, you carried it up for me the other—
1901
?
Really?”
I sat down on the dirty front step. Gobsmacked didn’t begin to cover it.

“Really.
Yes. I left home in the Roland
Steamer on August twentieth, 1901, and I’ve been here three years. I made a lot
of arrangements for living here, but there are matters at home that require my
attention, and I would like to visit my family as well.

“Please, Addie, I have to go back, but I don’t
want to go without you. I know it’s irregular, but I promise you we will get
married immediately on arrival. We just don’t have time to arrange it now.”

I brushed that aside. I didn’t care about
getting married. I was much too stuck on the time travel thing. “You need a
minimum of three days for a date to go
bicycling
and you want me to time travel with you on a couple hours’ notice?”

That slowed him down. He took a breath,
swallowed, and looked down at me, where I sat virtually at his feet. He sat
down beside me and took both my hands. “I know it’s a lot to ask, Addie. I was
planning to tell you where I came from and give you time to get used to it
before we even talked of going back, and I certainly expected we would marry
first, but there are…it’s an infant science, after all…and I just ran out of
time. Please say you’ll go.”

I blinked at him, and squeezed both his hands
in mine. I did believe him. At least, I thought I did. “But we do have few
hours, you said?”

“Yes, not many, but at least
three.
At most, five.”

“Okay.” I breathed, stared up at the sky, and
looked back at him with decision. “Okay. Give me two of those hours to think
and to make arrangements, and I’ll be ready to go or to say goodbye then. Is
that fair? It gives you an hour’s leeway to make your flight—or whatever it
is—at a minimum.”

He nodded slowly. “It’s more than fair. I hope
you’ll decide to come, but I know it’s a big decision. I’ll go and finish the
arrangements, and be back in two hours.” He stood, and helped me up like the
old-fashioned gentleman he was, turned toward his car, and then turned back to
face me suddenly.

“I almost forgot. I’d like you to wear
this—either as token of our engagement, or to remember me by.” He handed me a
small gold locket with a cameo of a rose on the cover. I opened it. There was a
photograph of him in it, and a blank side for mine.

I nodded, wordless, and took it. He kissed my
hand and ran for his car.

I went back inside, dazed, and pounded on
Susan’s door.

When she answered, I spoke without taking time
to say hello. “Listen, can you come over?
Right now?
I
need to make a major, life-changing decision, and I’d like your professional
opinion on whether I’ve completely lost my mind. I’d also like your chick-chat
romantic advice.”

I held my breath, but she laughed and agreed.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come in here? I’ve got wine.”

“Bring it. But I have to pack while we talk.” I
whirled and went into my place without waiting. She caught up before I got
through the door, with the wine bottle in one hand and two glasses dangling
from another.

“Okay. I get that you’re in a rush, but you’ll
just trip over your own feet if you don’t slow down. Let’s sit down, sip a
little wine, and see what you need opinions on, and whether you have, in fact,
lost your only mind.” She looked at me consideringly. “At the moment, I’m
leaning toward yes.”

She was right. I could tell I was about to
hyperventilate, which wouldn’t get me packed and organized in time, much less
let me make a rational decision. I noticed dimly that I was already leaning
toward a decision—and it was a drastic one.

I sat on the couch and put the locket on the table
in front of me. “You’re right. It’s Bert, which you probably guessed.”

“Mmhm.”
She handed me a glass of wine,
picked up hers, and leaned back in the chair she’d slept in so recently.

“He asked me to marry him—this is supposed to
be an engagement gift or a remembrance, depending on my answer—but that’s not
the main thing.”

“It’s not?” She stopped herself and waved her
hand in something like apology. “The shutting up part of being a psychologist
turns out to be the hardest part to get back into. Tell me all. I’ll try to
listen without interrupting.”

“Right then.
It’s not the main thing. I told
you a lot about him, but I skipped some important details.” I told her the
whole story, including the Roland Steamer—I had noticed that Bert had started
calling it that, and it was a more useful name than
It—
and the kind of travel it did. I also told her about all the
little things about Bert that hadn’t made sense until today—the old-fashioned
manners, the shock that I would kiss him back, the occasionally odd phrasing,
the discomfort with driving at night, the inconsistent knowledge of modern life
and culture—like using email but being stunned to hear that all modern offices
and most homes had computers. Like not recognizing the term “bathroom” and
referring to a divorced woman as a widow.

When I finished, she sat considering for a
moment, looking at me with her lips pursed. Then she chugged her wine and
poured some more. I laughed, shakily. “So what do you think?”

“I’m not sure. You’re right that it explains a
lot. Even in the short time I talked to him I noticed that something was off.
And the poem he sent you was from the right era.”

That made me remember something Mrs. Peacock
had said the day I met her. I told Susan how she’d told it helped to think of
Bert as being from the Progressive Era. I had thought it only an eccentricity
at the time, but maybe it was literally true.

“That does make sense,” Susan mused.

She sat up straighter. “Okay, let’s apply some
logic here. First of all, I notice it all fits just fine, and makes perfect
sense, unless I start reminding myself that time travel isn’t real.”

I nodded. “Yep, that’s exactly where I am.”

“And you say the science actually makes sense?”

“To the extent that I follow it.
I’m not a physicist, and,
clearly, it’s not a common line of thought, or…”

“Or there would be routine tourist flights to
the Renaissance.
Right.
Okay. So let’s postulate for a
moment that this steamer thing actually works. That leaves the following
questions: do you love him? Do you want to go? Can you come back if it turns
out to be a mistake? And if you go, what arrangements do you need to make?”

“Okay. Good thinking.” I took a very deep
breath and poured some more wine for myself. “First, yes, I love him. It’s been
fast, but I do love him. I’m sure.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“Given that I love him, and that my life has
gone from not happy, to miserable, to untenable in the past thirty days, yes, I
want to go.”

She nodded again and didn’t say anything this
time. She was getting her shrink mojo back.

“I should be able to come back. After all, Bert
came here, and he’s making a return trip. As for arrangements…” I looked
around, thinking.

“I would need to send a message to my parents,
so they don’t lose their minds with worry, but telling the absolute truth would
worry them more, so I’ll have to think of something. I lost my job today, so I
don’t have to deal with that, but I also don’t have any money to take care of
my things … oh! My car is still at the mall out in the burbs. I’ve got to go
get it.

“Okay, so I own a car, and it’s worth
something. Other than that, I have clothing, furniture, and other household
goods. I have an overdue Visa that I just canceled. I have an apartment that I
don’t need except to store my stuff, and utilities to pay for.”

“That’s a lot to deal with. How many days to
you leave?” I looked at my phone. Guess I’d be leaving that behind, too.

“I have ninety minutes until I give my answer,
and at most another ninety minutes before I leave.”

“Okay, then, time is of the essence. Grab your
laptop and whatever else you need for the next hour, and let’s go pick up your
car. I’ll drive you out there, and you can draft emails to your parents and
anyone else you want to tell as we go.”

“Good plan.” I was up and shoving the laptop
into its bag before she finished speaking. I pulled an old shoulder bag out of
my bottom drawer, and filled it as quickly as I could with replacement
essentials—some cash, just tucked into a pocket, because my only wallet was
gone, my hairbrush, travel toothbrush, tampons, lip gloss, pens, tiny pad of
paper…that would have to do, because I didn’t have time to think.

I had the phone and my remaining apartment key
in my pocket already. I looked at the locket for a moment, but decided it would
be safest where it was.

We drove and talked, and I drafted the email,
reading it aloud to Susan for feedback. In the end, we settled on a simple
statement that I’d gotten
a
once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity for an exotic trip, during which I expected to have no access to
phone or email, but I had to leave right away, with no time to see them or
call. That part wasn’t strictly true, but I really couldn’t spare the time for
another lengthy conversation. I told them that my friend Susan Garringer would
be taking care of my belongings, and would let them know if I couldn’t return
within six months. Then I said that I loved them, and not to worry.

“Surest way to make sure a mother
does
worry,” Susan observed, but we left
it in. I wrote a version of it, without the love, to Cassie, Kelley, Beth, and
Pete, and saved all the emails as drafts to be sent after I had left.

With a lot of discussion, we decided that I
would sell my car to Susan for the sum of $1, and she would then sell it to get
cash for movers and storage. She would close out my apartment and put all my
stuff, except my laptop, which she would keep handy against my return, into
storage with six months prepaid. At the end of six months, if I wasn’t back,
she would contact my parents and let them make a decision about my stuff,
telling them as much of the truth as she could.

She would use more of the money to pay any
cancelation fees on my apartment and utilities, and put the rest, if there was
any, into my checking account, for which I would leave her the deposit slips.

We got that all settled just before as we got
to the mall parking lot. I got my car unlocked, and we headed back to our
building. I saw the time on the dashboard clock, and called Bert while I drove.
He answered on the first ring.

“Bert?”

“Yes, Addie? You’re calling early. It’s not to
say…you’re not telling me not to come get you?”

“No, not at all.
I’m definitely going with you.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s
good
.” We took a moment to be happy, and then I spoke again. “I’m
calling because I won’t be ready to leave at exactly two hours from when we
talked, and I didn’t want you to worry. I’m making arrangements, though, and
I’ll be ready well within the three hours. Is there anything I need to bring,
other than myself in my costume?”