“If...if I did...uh, return to the past, could I tell him I’m from the future?”
“You can, but it’ll be like that man with the songs. You can tell him about computers and cell phones and 9/11, everything. But at the end of three weeks it will all disappear. You’ll return here to this house and you’ll be this age. You will have gone through the years together but neither of you will have known the future.”
“I was trained for the stage, so how will I remember that I need to study to become a psychologist?”
Arrieta smiled. “That’s exactly what I asked my aunts. They said that if you’d really and truly liked being an actress you would have continued to be one.”
At that, Olivia gave a bit of a smile. She’d never admitted to anyone but Kit that she’d loved the first week she’d been on Broadway, but doing it over and over, night after night, had bored her.
“My aunt Primrose said that if you’d had Mr. Montgomery and been happy you would have gone back to school. And she believes you would have studied psychology.”
“I did take a few courses in college and I loved them, but the stage seemed to be calling me.” She looked at Arrieta for a few moments. “The man with the songs wasn’t the only time it didn’t produce good, was it?”
“No. Sometimes there are disasters.” Arrieta leaned forward. “Sometimes people are so joyous to be young again that they’re reckless and get themselves maimed, or even killed. They say they want to experience a different side of life so they run off with dreadful people. When they get back to the present, they nearly always choose to stay with the life they had before. Especially if they died in the second visit.”
“I would think so!” Olivia paused. “But even with all the bad, when they returned, it would release that feeling of regret. It’s something that haunts me every day. I recently had a new one put onto me. I thought I was a good mother to my stepson, but I found out that he thinks I only cared about money. It’s made me worry that I wouldn’t be a good mother to anyone.”
“Your stepson is a greedy little bastard,” Arrieta said vehemently. “Sorry, but this is a small town. When Josh was doing the renovations, your stepson came here. He and his wife are planning to add an entertainment wing onto their big house. They said that Mr. Montgomery was going to pay for it.”
It took Olivia some moments to fully understand what she was hearing. After all the protests that Kevin and Hildy had made about her marriage to Kit, they were actually planning to benefit with his family’s wealth. That was more than Olivia could take. “All right, I’ll try it—but only if you tell me how you do it.”
Arrieta shrugged. “Actually, it’s up to the people. I just have to think hard, and if they really and truly want to go, then it happens. I have no idea how. It’s just something some of the women in my family can do. We—” She clamped her mouth shut, not saying any more, then she got up and put the teapot on a tray. “Are you ready to go back in time?”
“I think I am,” Olivia said, and they left the kitchen.
When they were in the empty little library, Arrieta put the tea tray on the desk and handed each woman a cup. While they drank, she explained about memory.
Elise said, “I don’t want to remember what my parents and Kent did to me!” Arrieta and Olivia exchanged looks. It’s what they’d predicted she would say.
When they finished their tea, Arrieta took the empty cups and put them on the tray.
After a moment’s thought, she moved her chair from behind the desk and sat down in front of the three women. “Shall we get started? All you have to do is tell me when you want to go back to, then close your eyes and think really hard about that time. I’ll do the rest.”
Instantly, Elise nestled her hands in her lap, then closed her eyes. Her whole body seemed to relax.
Arrieta looked away from Elise. “She’s already there. She wanted to get out of this world so very much. But if you two don’t want to go...”
“Sorry,” Olivia said. Elise was smiling. She looked like she was sleeping—and like she was very, very happy. Whatever she was dreaming of, she was enjoying it. Olivia looked back at Arrieta. Whether what she was proposing was true or not, Olivia would like to again feel as happy as Elise looked. “I want to go back to exactly three weeks before they came to get Kit. I want every second I can get to change a lot of things with many people. I want—” She didn’t say any more because she felt herself drifting off, floating. Kit, Kit, Kit, she thought. With a smile, she imagined Uncle Freddy and Mr. Gates, the children, her parents, and... She felt too good to do any more thinking. She just gave herself over to the feeling of being weightless, of not having a sad thought or feeling. She drifted. It felt like all the unhappiness of her life was being taken out of her mind, being removed from where it seemed to have settled down into her bones. She was smiling as she hadn’t done since... Since the day Kit left.
Arrieta looked at Kathy. “What do you want to do?”
“Be as happy as those two look. Do I click my heels?”
“To stop talking would make a start,” Arrieta snapped. “Sorry. I’m new at this. I’m not used to dealing with sarcasm and doubt and all the other bad things that go with this job that I never wanted in the first place.”
Kathy was looking at her with wide eyes. “When Ray went to Chicago,” she said softly, then closed her eyes. She was so skeptical about everything that it took minutes before she began to feel a release from what her life had become.
“Kathy!” she heard her father order. “Get us some coffee.”
“Get it yourself,” she heard herself say, and that made her smile. No one had ever talked to her father like that. Kathy began to smile so broadly that it was about to take over her entire body. The sheer size of the smile seemed to turn her inside out. She had no body, just an enormous, life-changing smile.
Arrieta looked at the three women, glad that they were where they should be, then got up and went into the kitchen to call her aunt Primrose. Everything was going well. So far, anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As Elise pounded on the door of Carmen’s hotel room, her only thought was Alejandro. The skirt of her big wedding dress was thrown over her arm and her fist ached from hitting on the door. She was doing her best not to think of the horror of the last four hours. “Open up!” she rasped as she looked up and down the corridor. No one was there, but then they were probably all in the church waiting for Elise to march down the aisle.
Just hours ago, she’d been sitting in the little library of that woman, Arrieta, doing as she’d been told, and thinking hard about the time she wanted to return to. When the silence continued, Elise opened her eyes, expecting to see Olivia and Kathy sitting beside her.
Instead, she’d found herself in the big hotel suite her mother had booked for her to use for the wedding. Elise was sitting on a hassock with her ghastly wedding dress spread out around her. It was like a silk cloud left over from a nuclear explosion.
To her left was a full-length mirror, and to her right were four of the six bridesmaids that her mother had chosen. They were the unattractive daughters of the two mothers’ college friends. “They’re all rich and they’ll help you in the future,” her mother said when Elise protested them.
As she glanced in the mirror, she saw the girls huddled together, whispering.
For a few moments, Elise was caught in a halfway point between then and now, and she could still feel the elation she’d had on her wedding day. She was going to marry Kent! The man of her dreams. And a side effect was that in doing so she’d please everyone. She had a vision of both families smiling and sharing meals together. It was going to be heaven!