What Was I Thinking? (32 page)

And here I was, making this all about me. I was
a person of my own time, too—selfish and egocentric. My thoughts whirled and
made no sense.

When I was finally free of the park, out on the
public road, I abandoned the last pretense of decorum, picked up my skirts, and
ran. I ran and ran the mile or two back to Roland House, yanked open the front
door, pounded up the three flights of stairs, and shoved Bert’s door open.

“Bert! I’m going home!”

Chapter
Fifteen

What Am I Going to Do?

The room was empty. Talk about an anti-climax.
The bedroom and bathroom doors were standing open, and he definitely wasn’t in
his suite at all. Crap. I searched through the house, hoping he hadn’t gone
into the steamship offices for the afternoon. In a forlorn hope, I went to the
basement. It was quiet, but I pushed open the door to the secret “It” room,
just in case. Not only was it empty, but it looked abandoned—as if no one had
been there at all since the day we arrived.

The safe built into the floor was still in
sight—Bert hadn’t put the decoy plank back over it, after removing his identity
papers that first day. On a sudden impulse, I knelt beside it, and tried the
lock. It opened easily.

With shaking hands, I unfastened my gold
locket—my betrothal gift—I blinked away some tears at the memory of the lost
romance—and set it gently in the safe, letting the delicate chain settle in a
pool around it. It didn’t look right there. It looked almost as if it had been
discarded thoughtlessly. Whatever else, I didn’t want Bert to think I hadn’t
treasured it. I scrabbled in my capacious old-fashioned pocket and pulled out
the little notebook I carried everywhere for making notes about the business,
and its accompanying pen.

Finding a blank page, and wishing I had some
pretty stationery instead, I hastily wrote,
Dear
Bert, give this to your true love when you find her.
Ever
your friend, J.A.H., 1904.
I folded the paper around the necklace,
put it carefully back in the safe, and closed it.

Then I gave up on finding Bert myself, and
asked all the servants where he was, but no one knew. There was a general
consensus, though, that he had gone out, “Some goodly time ago, miss.”

God, I missed cell phones! Now I had to figure
out where he might be before trying to call him.

Well, I wasn’t putting it off. I went to the
kitchen and asked Mrs. Horner to show me how to use the phone. Under her
guidance, I explained to the operator that I wished to connect with the main
office of the Roland Steamship Company and that I didn’t know the number. Mrs.
Horner thought Augusta probably had the office number written down somewhere,
but it wasn’t generally known in the household. I hadn’t thought of that.

After a time, and with a great variety of
noises on the line, the operator told me she could ring through now. A distant
brringing sounded in my ear, low and long, and after an eternity, there was a
clack, a cough, and a shout of, “Hollo!
Hollo!!”

I thought it was Bert, but couldn’t be sure. I
was a little surprised that he would answer the main line himself, but then
realized that the secretarial staff probably didn’t work Saturdays.

“Hello,” I said, in my normal voice.

“Hollo!
Hollo! Is anyone on the line?”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. I instantly took back every bad thought I’d ever had for
Verizon’s network quality.

I cleared my throat and yelled back, feeling
like an idiot. “Yes! This is Addie! Is Bert there?”

After a long pause, with a lot
of background whirring and clicking, and then a bellowed reply.
“Bert Roland
here!
Who is speaking?”

I thumped my head against the kitchen wall.
This was no way to have an important conversation.

“Hollo?
Hollo?”

I took a deep breath, and shouted louder and
slower, enunciating carefully. “Bert, this is—”

“Yes! Bert here! Who’s that?”

Oh, for God’s sake!

“Addie here!
Coming to
meet you at office!”

“Addie? What?”

I gave up. I’d hurry to get there, and hope he
hadn’t left in the meantime. “Stay there. Meet you at office. Goodbye.”

I hung up, and asked Mrs. Horner the way to the
office. She didn’t know, of course, and Augusta wasn’t home yet, so I couldn’t
ask her. Even if she had followed me immediately, she wouldn’t have run—I
spared a half smile, imagining Augusta running—so she wouldn’t be here for
quite a while.

I knew the steamship company was headquartered
downtown, near the river—near where the Arch would someday be, but that wasn’t
very close. I would have to take a trolley into town—the one Augusta and I took
for our shopping excursions—and find it from there. Oh, for five minutes with
Google Maps!

After a brief, guilty hesitation, I went back
to Bert’s study and searched his desk for letterhead. It wasn’t hard to find. I
wrote the address down in my handy-dandy notebook, and rushed back down the
stairs.

To my great surprise, Betsy was waiting for me
at the bottom of the stairs. “Mrs. Horner says, she begs your pardon for the
impertinence, miss, but she took leave to tell Joshua to hitch up the buggy and
to see you safe into town. He
be
waiting for you out
front.”

I sagged with relief. I hadn’t even thought of
Joshua and the buggy. “That’s lovely, Betsy. Do tell Mrs. Horner that I greatly
appreciate her thoughtfulness.”

Joshua had clearly been given full
instructions. As he helped me up, he confirmed, “You be wishing to call on Mr.
Roland at his business, is that right, miss?”

“Yes. Yes, thank you. Do you know the way?”

“I do, miss. You just sit yourself comfortable
now, and I’ll see you safe there directly.”

“Directly” took a couple hours of jolting
through the muddy lanes that passed for streets, but we got there. Joshua
helped me down in front of the imposing waterfront building, and told me he’d
be waiting when I was finished. I thanked him again and went in to find my
betrothed.

Once inside, I found it hard to get my
bearings. The first floor was one big, dim room, with ranks of wooden desks and
chairs, sectioned off by fences that looked very much like the wooden sides of
a Fifties-era playpen. Lamps of some sort hung on chains from the high ceiling,
but none were lit. The late afternoon sunlight coming in the rows of tall
windows illuminated the room enough that I could see I was alone.

I thought I saw stairs at the far end, so I
headed down the central aisle, trying not to be intimidated by the silence.
After all the delays, it was very hard to keep the level of urgency and drama
I’d had when I had slammed into Bert’s home office hours before.

I found the executive office
beside
the second-story landing. I could see Bert through the glass that made up the
top half of his office wall. He was bent over some papers on the scarred oak
desk. He had a green eyeshade on his head and garters on his sleeves to protect
the fabric from falling into the ink, and looked very much like a character in
a picture book in the pool of light from his one desk lamp.

He must have heard me approach because he rose
instantly, taking off the eyeshade, and met me at his door.

“Why, Addie! What a pleasant surprise! Do sit
down.”

Talk about surprise! I sat in the
straight-backed wooden chair facing his desk and asked, “A pleasant surprise?
After this morning?”

He smiled a bit sheepishly. “I know, I wasn’t
very nice, causing a quarrel when I owed you information and emotional
support.”

I goggled at him and he laughed.

“See, I
did
pay attention when I was a visitor in your world. I just lost track for a while
when I came home.”

I smiled back at him and looked down at my
hands. This had been easier when I was freshly shocked and angry, but my
decision hadn’t changed. I looked him in the eye and said, “That’s what I came
about, Bert. I need to go home.”

“Go home? Whatever do you mean? And why?”

“I mean—” I broke off and looked through the
glass at the rows of desks in the shadowed room beyond, a virtual twin of the
one below, wondering if I could speak freely.

Bert interpreted correctly and said, “You don’t
have to watch your words today. I’m here alone. That’s why I didn’t light any
of the lamps in the bullpen. Do tell me what concerns you so, Addie,” he said
with a gentle look.

He was making it harder—reminding me of the guy
I’d liked so much in the twenty-first century. But I had to go through with it.

“I mean I need to go back to my own time, Bert.
I don’t belong here. There are things I just can’t live with and know I can’t
change. It’s time for me to admit I made a mistake, and go home, where I
belong.”

“But you can’t. You know that.”

“What?” He seemed so matter-of-fact that I knew
he wasn’t making a romantic argument that I couldn’t leave
him
, but I didn’t know what he did mean, if that wasn’t it.

“Why can’t I leave?”

He hesitated, squinting a little, as if he were
trying to find a way to word the obvious without being condescending. “Because
the time wave isn’t here, Addie, and we don’t know when—or even
if
—it will return.”

My jaw dropped, and I stared at him. It was
true, we had rushed our departure because he had known then that a time wave
was coming and wouldn’t be available for long, but it hadn’t occurred to me
that there might not be another.

But there had to be! Surely he didn’t just
happen to think of time travel the one and only time…

“If?”
I said faintly. I managed to
close my mouth, but it didn’t seem inclined to stay that way.

He nodded, looking at me with something like
pity. “Yes,
if.
I’m so sorry, my
dear, I was sure you
knew,
when you made your choice.”

“No…how could I…you never said…” With enormous
effort, as if I were forcing myself to stand in the face of a hurricane wind, I
marshaled my thoughts and tried again. “You traveled twice in under four years
and you never said anything about not knowing whether—”
Hysterical, hysterical, don’t let the pitch rise
, I told myself. I
tried again with my voice much quieter and in alto, not falsetto.

“I guess I assumed that the time wave was a
recurring phenomenon and reasonably predictable, especially because you never
said otherwise,” I finished.

“I see.” He rubbed his chin, thinking. He
stayed like that, staring down at the desk and rubbing his chin slowly, so long
that I began to think he’d forgotten me.

Finally, he spoke, still looking down. “I am so
very, very sorry, Jane Addams. I never intended to deceive you. I simply did
not realize I hadn’t communicated the inchoate state of my research.”

He faced me, taking a deep breath, and went on.
“The fact is, I discovered time waves and I
can
tell when one is approaching, but the harbingers I’ve been able to identify
appear less than a day in advance. You’re right that I have experienced several
time waves. The two you know about and a few before that inspired and informed
my research, but I do not have the data to postulate the rate of recurrence.

“I agree that it’s unlikely that I just
happened to think of it in the only era a few time waves would occur, but I
cannot prove it impossible. I just cannot say whether there will be another
time wave.”

He went silent, and we sat looking at each
other.

“I am so very, very sorry, Jane Addams.”

I nodded, silent too. What was there to say?

* * * *

Some time later, I noticed the light in the
room had all but gone. I stood, saying dully, “I left poor Joshua waiting for
me with the buggy,” and turned to go.

Bert rose as well. “I’ll go with you. It grows
late and Mother will be expecting both of us at supper.”

Something must have shown on my face, because
he looked sharply at me and asked, “It’s surely not because of Mother that you’ve
decided to go home? I thought you were great friends.”

I shook my head and, to my great shame, burst
into tears.

He pulled me close, patting my back and
murmuring comforting sounds until I quieted. At last, as I sniffled to a stop
and he said, “Inconsiderate of Joshua though it is, I think we’d best talk a
bit more before we go in company. Whatever has made you so distraught and why
does the thought of supping with Mother make you so unhappy?”

And so I told him, blurting out the whole
story, not skimping on my self-disgust at having lived so oblivious to the
wrongs around me, and ending with my shock at Augusta’s easy acceptance of the
anthropology exhibit.