A Whisper in Time (9 page)

Dad’s voice was pained. “How long have you two been standing there?”

“Long enough,” I said.

Mom peeked over his shoulder.

Susanna looked at them neutrally. “If you wish me to find another place to live, I shall.”

“Not necessary,” Dad said.

My mom shook her head, cheeks flushed.

They had not done a good enough job reassuring Susanna. “You’re not leaving.”

“Perhaps it would be best.”

“It wouldn’t be best for you. It wouldn’t be best for me.”

My mom leaned her butt against the washing machine and stared at the wall straight ahead of her, not saying anything.

“Susanna,” Dad said into the awkward silence, “you have a home with us for as long as you need. That hasn’t changed.” He laid a hand gently on her shoulder. “Sherri and I have some issues we ought to discuss with Mark. May we excuse ourselves?”

“Of course.” She ran lightly up the stairs.

“I’m sorry she overhead that,” my mom said.

I was too. “Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to her.”

Dad pushed past me. “Let’s finish this in the family room.”

For the next fifteen minutes, they dragged through the same conversation again, only it took longer this time. Talking around the truth required a lot of words.

I waited until Mom paused for a breath and said, “Let me ask you this. Are you sorry I rescued her?”

They shook their heads.

“Do you regret that I brought her here?”

“No,” they said together.

“So what’s the real problem?”

Mom shook her head. “The amount of time it’ll take to straighten things out.”

“It’s worse for Susanna.”

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance, complete with eyebrows lifting and lips twitching. Dad looked back at me. “You’re right.”

Mom nodded.

“Anything else?”

“You,” she said, hitching forward on the couch, propping herself up on my dad’s legs. “This should be the most carefree year of your life. You’re missing out.”

“I miss out anyway because I train hard.”

“Good try, but we all know that you’d hang out more with friends if she weren’t here.”

“Maybe not, Mom. Girlfriends are always a time drain. You only ever see me because my girlfriend lives
here
.”

My dad patted her hand. “He’s right about that.”

She frowned at him and then me. “Can you promise that you’ll try to be normal?”

I jumped to my feet and resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s strange to be holding this conversation right now. I went to a game with my friends Friday night, and I hung out with them today after school. I don’t need to promise you anything. Susanna is not holding me back.”

My mom gave Dad the
punting-it-back-to-you
look. He shrugged and didn’t say anything.

I took that as a positive sign. “Are we good then?”

Dad smiled at Mom as he nodded. “Yeah, we’re good.”

“Fine,” she said.

So it was settled. Now if we could just get past the fact that Susanna had overheard.

* * *

Susanna made supper for the two of us in her kitchenette, but she sat across from me, silent and withdrawn. After a couple of attempts to get her to talk, I gave up.

She collected the dishes as soon as I finished and set them in the sink.

I rose and followed her, rubbing my hands over her shoulders. “You cooked, babe. Let me wash.”

“No.” Her voice was husky and soft. “Work comforts me.”

I took a step away. When she got like this—all shut down and closed off—I had no clue what to do.

She turned and looked at me. “Do you have homework tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Perhaps you should start it now.”

“You want me to leave?” It was hard to say whether I was more hurt or relieved.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “I think it would be best.”

“Okay.” The faucet turned on as I shut the door behind me.

I spent most of the evening either completing homework or studying for the pop quiz that Jesse was sure we would have in physics.

Even though it was almost bedtime, I had a personal project that needed some attention. Creating a past for Susanna. I had to make up documents real enough that a judge would consider them for a court order and yet government agencies wouldn’t scrutinize them too carefully.

Which documents would those be? I went online and checked the list.

Hospital records or midwife records were the most trusted. Not going to fake those. They could likely be verified over the internet, even by an overworked government official.

A signed and notarized affidavit from one of her relatives? Yeah, not going to happen.

Family Bible? It would be easy to buy an old Bible with empty “Births” pages. Maybe even too easy. It was the kind of evidence with the highest skepticism factor, but I wouldn’t write it off yet.

A baptismal certificate seemed like it shouldn’t be too hard—but even the Social Security Administration listed it as a possibility, which meant it must be harder to fake than I expected.

High school transcript? Maybe, especially if I could make up the school too. Private schools went out of business all the time.

My eyes skipped over one of the documents and then returned. I stared hard. Took a deep breath.

An original marriage certificate.

Damn.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

S
HARP
R
ELIEF

I could hardly settle my thoughts during the night, but exhaustion must have finally claimed me, for the whine of the garage door startled me awake. As the powerful growl of Bruce’s vehicle faded away, I glanced at the clock. Six-thirty.

Clogs slapped across the kitchen floor and into the laundry room. The door slammed. The garage door whined up again, followed by the light hum of Mrs. Lewis’s hybrid car. She didn’t put the garage door down. It was nearly seven. She would be late.

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis had kept to their daily rituals. I knew what that meant. The unpleasant scene had not affected them the way it had me.

Mark was the easiest Lewis to recognize unseen because his morning routine involved the most noise. His bike whistled into the garage and then clanged against the garage wall, signifying the end of his training ride. Footsteps stamped in from the garage and through the laundry room. Ten minutes later, with his shower doubtless completed, he tramped into the kitchen. It had become our custom to eat breakfast together before he left for his school. Today I wouldn’t join him.

Cabinets banged. A chair screeched across stone. He walked into the laundry room, hesitated, hurried up the stairs, hesitated again, and tapped lightly on my door.

I held my breath, not wanting to speak with him. What if a night’s sleep had changed his feelings about my presence in his parents’ house?

He had defended me yesterday, but would he defend me forever?

No, I could not speak to him when I was facing yet another day with nothing to do. I stayed silent so that he would leave.

The bike rattled again. The garage door shrieked back into place. I ran to the window and watched as, helmet on, he rolled down the drive and disappeared around the bend in the lane.

With an odd sense of defiance, I reached for yesterday’s clothes. For my entire life, I’d had two sets of clothing—one for Sunday and one for the rest of the week. There had been one bath per month. I’d worn the same shift for weeks on end.

Mark’s world had changed all that. Bathing every day, sometimes twice. Fresh clothes every day, sometimes twice.

The blouse I slipped on was stale but not truly bad. I stepped into a rumpled skirt and ignored socks and shoes. I didn’t look my best, but there would be no one here to scold me with words or scowls.

I ought to find something useful to do. Perhaps it would be best to study English grammar for my GED, but a stack of library books beckoned. I picked up a volume on history and turned to the early years of the nineteenth century, to learn of the times my sister had lived through without me.

After an hour of immersion in the political turmoil of the young United States, I set the book down. Two months ago, had someone offered me a day to do nothing but read, I might have fainted from sheer joy. The reality was far different. The printed word was not as happy a companion as I might have believed. I enjoyed people more.

I left the apartment and wandered down the back stairs into the kitchen and then to the family room. This space made me yearn for Mark, so I hurried through it to the front foyer, careful to step around Toby, who had kindly accompanied me. I paused in the living room, a place the family hardly ever visited. There were lovely paintings on the wall and a fireplace—rarely used. Shelves held books, small sculptures, and gilt-framed photographs of smiling children.

I stopped to browse the books that no one ever read. There were six volumes by Jane Austen. I had only read
Persuasion
. A delightful story. Perhaps I should read the others. Miss Austen had much to say, more than she could say in a single book.

Like Phoebe?

I pondered this thought. Might Phoebe have written more?

Indeed, yes, if I knew my sister. The first journal had ended abruptly, and Phoebe had much to say. There would surely have been others if she could afford the cost.

Might other journals have also been preserved?

Would the internet know?

I raced back to my apartment. It was good that Mark had shown me how to search the web on the laptop. I brought it up, but there my hands hesitated. What did I ask for? I had only tried in the past to find food recipes. He always seemed to know exactly what to ask for, but he was in school. I would go mad awaiting his return at past three.

Perhaps the easiest thing to try would be my sister’s name.

Phoebe Marsh
proved to be more popular than I would’ve anticipated—and in many countries. I added
journal
and
North Carolina
.

The list of links altered dramatically, but all seemed to reference Phoebes in the twenty-first century.

I tried
servant
,
Raleigh
, and
18th century
next.

A promising website appeared. I selected
North Carolina State Archives -Artifacts from the Colonial and Early Federal Periods
.

There was a brief paragraph of introduction.

I smiled. The greatest treasure trove they could ever know sat right here—reading their words—yet they would never find me.

I scanned the list of materials and found what I sought on the third link.

Phoebe’s indenture lasted from 1796 until 1802. Could she have any documents among these?

The reference claimed that these diaries and journals were stored in a special warehouse but they were available for public viewing. Most had yet to be transcribed.

It didn’t matter to me that the materials were not transcribed. If any of those journals had been written by my sister, I could read them as well as any printed book.

I wanted to investigate further, but I didn’t have the skills and Mark wouldn’t be home for hours.

I prepared and ate my dinner, washed the dishes, and put them away.

There was nothing left to do in this place.

Life had been simpler for me in the first few weeks after I moved to the twenty-first century. I had been ill. It had taken time for my ankles to heal and my infection to cure. I had slept, eaten, and slept more. I’d been told what to do and when to do it.

Mark had barely begun to teach me about my new world when he had to return to school. When would there be time to teach me again? How many more such days would I have?

Perhaps a stroll about the lawn would lift my spirits. I hurried down the back stairs and out the rear door of the laundry room, hopped across the over-warm lumber of the deck, and sighed with pleasure at the cool prickle of grass under my feet.

Rose bushes adorned the foundation of the house, their bright pinks bringing a smile to my face. I left the shadow of the house to walk along the edge of the property, to the waist-high fence dividing their yard from the greenway. A large corner of the lawn had made way for Mrs. Lewis’s garden. It was evident that she’d taken great care with its design.

There was a pool at its center with a small fountain. Nearby, in the shade of a dogwood, squatted a white iron bench. It looked like a piece of Phoebe’s embroidery, with curling vines and graceful leaves. I sat on the bench and reflected on this world I had joined.

Behind me, the greenway wound through tall pines and spreading oaks. It ought to be a place of beauty yet, to my mind, it could not be—not with its acrid surface and heavy traffic. With so many people seeking refuge, the greenway would fail to bring true peace.

A pair of women ran past in their shorts. It no longer jolted me to see exposed skin, but neither did I envy them. I might be willing to wear a shirt that revealed my collarbone, but I had no wish to bare my limbs.

Not that I should. There were too many scars tracking across my legs. Dozens of them crossed like a wide weave, thin and straight. The recent ones had plumped up pink and puckered. The older ones had faded to a lightening of my skin tone, perhaps more like shadows than scars inflicted by beatings from a switch. I considered them now with an odd detachment, even though I had received each and every one of the beatings without flinching or crying out.

I slipped down onto the grass, lifted the long skirt to my knees and exposed my legs and feet to the warmth of the sun.

The screams of a baby roused me from a light sleep. I checked the position of the sun. Mark would be home soon. I had best go inside, bathe, and change into fresh clothes.