“No, there isn’t more than one of any of us. If you cross into a different timeline, you don’t keep existing in the other. You’re either here or there. But somehow, things have been disrupted. You’re the same June I met five years ago, but if you don’t remember me, then you’re the younger her. You went through the door . . . early. The things that happened here haven’t happened to you yet.”
“How early am I?” I whispered. “How much earlier did I cross than before?”
“What year was it when you crossed?”
“2023.”
“Well, it’s early for you, but late for us. That’s the problem. The first time you came here, it was 2024 for you.”
“2024,” I repeated, trying to wrap my mind around it.
That meant I would have been thirty-five, which meant that I’d had another birthday. I’d come through the door at least nine months after Gran’s funeral, maybe longer. And I hadn’t come to 1951. If it was five years ago, it had been 1946 for them.
Esther was studying me again, those pale eyes refocusing. “Why did you choose 1951?”
“What?”
“When you crossed. Why did you choose 1951?”
“I didn’t choose anything. I walked through the door, and it brought me here.”
A look of disbelief flashed over her features. “The locket, June.”
Immediately, my hand went to my throat, fingers searching for the chain of the locket watch. But it wasn’t there. I set down the coffee cup and opened the collar of my shirt, searching for it.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“I must have dropped it in the field, or along the road.” I said, anxiously. “I—”
“You didn’t lose it.” She reached into the collar of her own dress, pulling a chain free. Then she was lifting it over her head. She set the locket watch down on the table between us.
I stared at it. “How did you . . . ?”
“We’ll get to that.” She opened the locket, turning it so that the watch face was right side up for me. All four of the hands were pointing to the number zero. “So, you were wearing the locket, but you didn’t choose the year.”
I shook my head, so confused now that I didn’t have a response.
“Do you remember what the hands were set to?”
“I don’t know. I think five? One?” I swallowed. “Yes, there were two hands on one.”
“One, nine, five, one. 1951.” She said.
My eyes snapped up to look at her. “This is how you cross?”
“You fix the four hands into the four digits of a year, starting with the shortest. It was 2023 when you left?”
I nodded.
“All right.” She pulled a pin from her hair. Beginning with the shortest hand on the watch face, she moved them to the numbers two, zero, two, and three. When she was finished, she snapped it closed. “As long as the locket says 2023 when you open that door, that’s where it will take you.”
I turned it over in my fingers, dazed by the flicker of sunlight on the gold. I’d always known the watch didn’t work, and I’d found the four hands and missing numbers strange. But there was nothing about it I hadn’t dismissed with the reasoning that it was old. Very old. It still looked ancient, but the metal wasn’t quite as fogged and smoothed as the locket I’d worn around my neck.
I eyed the calendar tacked to the wall by the back door. It was a farmer’s almanac, open to the month of June. Today was the seventeenth, only four days since Gran’s funeral. I didn’t know how that was possible. How had four days been enough time to completely unravel everything I thought I knew?
“I’ve never understood why your grandmother never told you any of this,” Esther murmured.
Gran.
That’s right. If it was 1951, then Gran was here. She’d been raised by Esther in this very house.
My hands slipped from the mug. “Where is she?”
Esther shifted in her seat, and for a moment, I wondered if she was considering lying to me. “She’s here.” Her hand came down on mine, stopping me before I could stand. “Listen to me.” She leaned in closer. “The best thing you can do, for all of us, is go back.”
I searched her face. What did that mean, for all of us?
“As soon as you see that door again, cross. And stay there.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that. “When will that be?”
She sighed. “There’s no exact timing, unfortunately.”
“No exact timing?” My voice rose. “Are you saying that I’m stuck here?”
Stuck. The word made me feel nauseous. Claustrophobic.
“It will appear again. You just need to be ready to walk through it.”
“There are people who will be looking for me.” The image of the empty Bronco on the road flashed in my mind. “How am I going to explain where I’ve been?”
“The same way the rest of us have explained it every time this has happened. You create a story, and you stick to it. You don’t draw attention, and you don’t offer explanations. The more mad they think you are, the better.”
That’s exactly what Gran and Birdie had done with my mother—let the town think she was crazy and that was the reason she’d gone missing. The reason she’d never come back. It was much more believable than the truth.
I pressed my fingertips to my temples. I’d always known that they weren’t telling me everything they knew about my mother. I thought it was because she was trying to protect me. That she didn’t want me to live in fear of what was coming. But really, she was protecting Susanna. And herself.
“Okay, what else do I need to know?”
“Well, there are rules.” She stood, going to the stove, and poured the rest of the coffee into another cup. “The door won’t open to you if you don’t have the locket, and you can cross only three times. After that, it won’t appear to you anymore.”
“But you just said I’ve been here before. If I crossed as a baby and then came here five years ago . . .”
She shook her head. “No. The last time you were here, you were older. The younger you has only crossed once—when you were seven months old. You, in this body, have now gone through the door only twice. Then, and now. You have one more crossing left, a choice to make.”
I waited.
“Which side of time you want to live on. Which life you want to live.” She answered my unspoken question. “After that, there’s no going back.”
Is that what I’d done? Crossed to 1946 and eventually decided to cross back?
“And that’s not all. The second rule is that you may go only where you do not exist.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed at the locket. “There’s only one of you, June, just like there’s only one of those lockets. That will never change. The locket around your neck disappeared when you crossed because it already lives here. It ceased to exist. Your mind can exist in two places at once, but your body cannot. So, if you walked through the door right now and went back to a time you already exist in the future—say, 2022—you, also . . . disappear.”
I swallowed, the gravity of the idea like a weight pressing down on top of me.
“The other thing you need to think about is what kind of information you’ve brought with you. No talking about what happens in the future to any of us. No warning us of danger or opportunity or anything else. There are too many risks. Too many things that could be affected.”