Maggie couldn’t breath. Her heart was a pounding, and she wanted to wail like a wrongly imprisoned man who knew he was a dead man walking.
“Roger was so angry!” Irene rushed on. “He ranted and raged about you for weeks, saying you’d insulted and embarrassed him. Like a fool, I thought I needed to prove my loyalty all the more. I gave him my virginity that night, thinking it was the only thing I could do to show him I wasn’t going anywhere. I told Nana I was staying at the Russell’s again, and Cathy and Shirley covered for me....but I was with Roger.”
Maggie grimaced and felt sorrow leaking from her eyes and sliding down her nose. Gus had told her there would be unintended consequences, things she could never predict, lives she would unknowingly alter....or shatter.
“By the time August rolled around, I had come to my senses. Roger had been unbearable, and I was quite afraid of him. When Billy Kinross died and Johnny disappeared, I was horrified, knowing that it was all Roger’s fault. Billy had been so sweet to me, and he was gone -- at Roger’s hand! I believed that, but it was too late. I was pregnant.”
“No, no, no!” Maggie wanted to scream. This wasn’t the way it happened! Irene had married several years after high school. She’d seen the wedding announcement in the old newspapers at the library.
“The baby was stillborn. Did I ever tell you that?” Irene’s voice was almost trance-like as she remembered the child she almost had. “He was perfect. A beautiful, full-term little boy with lots of dark hair. But he was dead,” she whispered. “I had hoped and prayed for a way to be free of Roger. Suddenly, I had it....and it had come at the price of my child’s life. So I stayed. It was penance, my own slow dance in purgatory.”
“Can you forgive me?” Maggie’s agonized whisper filled the room, and Irene shook herself, abandoning the trance-like state she had hovered in. She stared at Maggie, her blue eyes wide and filled with anguish.
“There is nothing to forgive, Maggie,” she said softly, reaching out and touching Maggie’s stricken face.
“You’re afraid of me,” Maggie mourned, her voice barely audible.
“I understand what happened....at least I think I do,” Irene replied quietly. “You slipped back....just like Gus said you would. You tried to help me. I know that...”
“But...”
“Maggie! You tried to help me. Now,” she said tiredly, rising to her feet, her back bent and her head bowed in exhaustion. “We need to get you out of this house.”
***
Maggie had slept restlessly ever since coming home from the hospital after the fire. Dreams of Johnny and burning hallways made sleep a minefield, and though she had longed desperately for the relief unconsciousness would supply, she found that she no longer felt safe in her bedroom.
Maybe it was because she had been awakened twice in the last few weeks to see Roger Carlton, the aged and overweight Uncle Roger, sitting on the benchseat pouring over his old pictures. Both times, she had reached for her glasses on her night stand, pushed them on her nose, and forced herself to concentrate on the details of the room she knew existed in present day, which did not include a ghostly fat man. Both times Roger had flickered out almost immediately without even raising his head.
That night, the drain from the conversation with Irene had Maggie stumbling to her room and falling into a deathlike slumber. Irene had wanted to leave and check into a hotel. She was afraid that Maggie would slip away if she slept in the house again. Maggie thought of the tongues that would wag in the small town if she and her aunt suddenly checked into the Honeyville Suites right on Honeyville’s Main Street. Plus, Irene didn’t have the funds to waste on a hotel room when there were four perfectly good bedrooms right here.
Maggie was convinced it was the talk of 1958, combined with the furnishings in Irene’s old room and the dress Maggie had donned, that had precipitated the shift. She had practically stepped back in time before she even fell asleep that night, and she told Irene as much.
“We have to get you out of this house,” Irene said again, wringing her hands desperately, but she had gone to bed after a little coaxing and reassuring. Irene looked as if she were ready to collapse. Both of them needed rest before making any rash decisions.
Maggie had been pulled from sleep suddenly. She became completely and fully awake as if ice water had been poured over her, bringing her instantly and alarmingly from the depths of unconsciousness. She sat up and reached for her glasses on her bedside table, but the space was empty. She felt up and down, trying to connect with the surface of the table in the darkness of the room, knowing that she should be feeling the little knob on the drawer and the pointed edges of the table top. She felt a shift, a sense of falling, and then her legs folded and the surface beneath her changed. She was sitting upright in a chair. The chair was hard and the rungs dug into her shoulder blades. Goose flesh rose on her arms as she felt the cool against her bare feet which curled disbelievingly against the flat surface of her bedroom floor. It was still so dark. She looked toward where she knew the window should be and watched as they sky beyond lightened instantly by several shades, as if she were watching a time lapse on the news where the weather of the entire day is captured in seconds.
Roger sat at the window, his head bent over his scrapbook. The light beyond him was dusky, as if dawn had ascended while he read. He was younger, his hair thick and dark, his body still lean and his clothes reminiscent of a different decade. Maggie longed for her glasses. She didn’t dare move or even breath, knowing that she was no longer observing him in her room. She was with him.