Another Time

Katie sent her the most determined stare she’d managed in years, her left hand’s two remaining fingers curled around her pumpkin spice latte. The voices of the café’s other patrons dulled to a murmur. Liliana examined the branch-like gray stripes on the marble tile below.

           “You’ve gotta take me,” Katie said, voice also more forceful than Liliana had ever heard it.

Liliana remained silent; the request had come out of nowhere. When her late grandmother had told her about the portal, she’d framed it as something that she’d “probably never use,” and Liliana had thought her right; she’d seen too many movies, fictional but logical, that proved time travel more than likely to wreak havoc.

           Apparently, however, Katie didn’t see it that way.

           She shook her head, claws curling around her stomach. “Why do you wanna go there, anyway?”

           “Men were better then. They’d never do what these men did to me.”

           Images she’d wished to forget flooded her. Rust-colored gashes on Katie’s arms. Purple ivy climbing her biceps. Swollen, blackened flesh swallowing her right eye. Tears she’d fought as she declared herself “fine.” Her listless gaze as she sat in her hospital bed, hand stitched and bulging with bandages where Hayden had done his hacking. Each hammered a nail into Liliana’s heart, rendering it, by now, more steel than tissue.

           However, that didn’t make what Katie had suggested a good idea.

           “You don’t know that, Kate. People are people. I’ll be there were just as many jerks then as now.”

           “No. It was different. They were different. Chivalry wasn’t dead yet.” She leaned forward, the glint in her eyes piercing Liliana’s flesh. “Please, Lili. This is my only chance.”

           The thought of taking such a risk twisted her gut.

           The thought of denying Katie impaled it.

            She couldn’t decide on the spot. She needed to think. To get a second opinion.

           She already had a source in mind.

*         *         *

           Her mother ground a rag over a spot on her sterling silver tea kettle that only she could see. Liliana shifted, feeling as if someone had lit a fire beneath the Queen Anne chair on which she sat. Her gaze arced from the window to her left to the travertine floor tile to the section of granite countertop holding a brochure for a doctor who performed colonoscopies. She remembered how Katie had pressed the pamphlet into her mother’s hand, reminding her that doctors didn’t recommend the procedure for over-fifties for no reason, proclaiming short-lived discomfort worth suffering in exchange for, possibly, more time. Her mother had told her she’d think about it, which, of course, meant that she wouldn’t, and never had.

           Her mother said, “You can’t really be considering this.”

           “She’s been through so much…”

           “I know, but this is not the solution, Liliana. She’s fresh off a breakup—not in the right mind to be making these decisions.”

           “She seems sure…”

           “Of course she does. The better to manipulate you.” She finished polishing the kettle and set it back on the stainless steel stove. “I’m warning you, Lili, do not ignore me.” She shot her a look that could’ve halved a coconut. Liliana squirmed, wishing that she could dissolve and seep into the cracks between the tiles.

           Her mother would’ve bolstered her argument all day, if allowed. But Liliana didn’t see the point in that, so she left, answering her mother’s nagging with a promise to think about it.

           She spent the next two hours doing so, dancing back and forth as she drove home and paced across her living room. She kept seeing Katie’s face as she’d made her request, the agony she’d tried to keep out of her eyes but couldn’t, the cuts and bruises and shrunken shoulders. Her stomach wrenched.

           She reached a verdict, though not at all sure that it would prove the right one.

*         *         *

           They stood in the field, grass as fine as hair tickling their ankles, the few possessions they’d packed on their backs. She’d spent the twenty-minute car ride grilling Katie, demanding that she think and rethink. Katie said she did but didn’t; Liliana had seen her surety, and she saw it now, in the set of her shoulders, the protrusion of her jaw, and her rock-steady glare. Liliana didn’t have to ask whether she was ready.

The stepped forward, onto the ridge her grandmother had specified.

           A flash; wind unlike any she’d experienced before shoved her backwards into white nothingness. Then, the field, looking exactly the same as before the blow, materialized. She wondered, briefly, whether the portal hadn’t worked, but then she noticed an old car, boxy and baby-pink, gliding up the street.

           “Oh, wow,” Katie said. “It really worked…But how’re we gonna get to town?”

           “We could walk.”

           “It’s eight miles, and we’ve got our stuff, too…Why don’t we grab a ride?”

           “That’s not safe, Katie.”

           “Not in our time, maybe. But crime’s a lot lower here. I think we’ll be okay.”

           Liliana wanted to argue but didn’t have the energy, so she followed Katie to the curb, where Katie stuck her thumb up as if she’d grown up doing so. The car groaned to a stop before them. The passenger window opened, and the driver, a young woman sporting cat-eye sunglasses and a beehive a tornado wouldn’t have budged, told them to hop in. Liliana told herself that a woman like this wouldn’t mean them any harm as they did so and all the way to town.

           Once they arrived there, however, shock wiped that off the table. The place looked so different, the houses spaced far apart, the buildings’ edifices so bright and crisp that they seemed cut from construction paper. More archaic vehicles zoomed around them. They passed a beauty shop through whose windows she saw women reading magazines beneath dryers like space helmets and a café where men in wool suits and women in full-skirted dresses and kitten heels sipped coffee from fine china with one hand and smoked with the other.

           As requested, the woman let them off in front of the Wells Inn. They thanked her, and she drove away, car belching smoke that combined with that of passersby’s cigarettes to form a stench that smothered and seeped straight to one’s bones. They headed into the hotel, where they found more people like those outside, more odor. They booked a room with the man at the counter, who marked their names in a leather-bound ledger and handed them keys on a clumsy plastic fob.

           Their room, too, reeked of smoke. It offered two double-beds covered in patchwork quilts and pillows where the maid had left chocolates in gold foil. The dark wood table between them held a powder-blue rotary phone. A small closet interrupted one corner; a polished oak dresser, the other. Glass doors on the adjacent wall opened up to a balcony, complete with two plaid-patterned lawn chairs. She dropped onto the farther bed, sighing.

           “You look tired,” Katie observed. “Why don’t you take a nap while I go explore?”

           “I don’t think you should go alone.”

           Katie sighed. “Honestly, Lil, what do you think’s gonna happen in broad daylight, in public, in the fifties?”

           She had a point.

           As Katie left, she lay back, closed her eyes, and searched the dark for sleep.

*         *         *

           The phone’s ring jarred her awake. Blinking back sleep, she fumbled, finally grabbing it and answering with a groggy, “Hello.”

           “Lili.”

           Drowsiness dropped from her like unfastened armor. Her heart buckled. “Katie. What’s going on? Are you okay?”

           “I’m at the police station.”

           Knives stabbed her gut. “The police station? What happened? Are you—“

“I just wanted to let you know. You don’t have to come…Actually, it might be better if you didn’t.”

           Before Liliana could reply, she hung up.

           Heart fluttering like the wings of a moth too heavy to fly, she sprang into action.

           Yellow pages—taxi service.

           Call taxi.

           Leave hotel.

           Ride, not even trying to reciprocate the driver’s perfunctory attempts at conversation. Fail to generate possibilities to rifle through.

           Arrive at police station, wishing to have landed anywhere else.

           The squat brick box glared at her, daring her to enter and see what she had caused, or at least enabled. Taking as deep a breath as her starchy lungs allowed, she propelled herself forward, to the glass double-doors, into a lobby where she approached the towering black granite desk. “Can I help you?” the cop seated there—a young man with a crop of mahogany hair shooting up along the borders of his hat—asked.

           “I’m here to see Katherine Vincent.”

           The officer’s brows rose. “You family?”

           “Her sister.”

           “Oh, good. Maybe you’ll have more luck getting her to explain herself.”

           “What’d she do?” she asked, though certain that she didn’t want to know. Heart pounding, she gripped the counter so tightly that her knuckles blanched.

           “Ma’am, your sister killed a woman.”

           She felt as if flattened by a redwood. Her jaw dropped, mouth instantly as dry as a cracker. No. Not possible. Katie would never do that. Never.

           On autopilot, she followed the officer down a blurry hall to a holding cell. Katie had been slumped on the cot but jumped to her feet and made a beeline for the glass when she saw her. “I told you not to come.”

           “Is it true, Katie? Did you really…did you…”

           Katie’s face confirmed both that she knew what she meant, and that she had, indeed, done it.

           Liliana withered against the wall, the room tilting. It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. Forcing words from her tight throat, she demanded, “Why?”

           Katie sighed, gaze dropping to the scuffed, slush-gray tile. “It was Aria—Aria Parkinson.”

           Initially, the name rang no bells. Then, however, it hit her.

           Aria Parkinson.

           Hayden Parkinson.

           She shook her head, not wanting to believe it, not wanting to think herself so naïve, so stupid. She wanted to think it an elaborate, sick joke—anything, but the truth. But, when her eyes dropped, the final nail pierced the coffin.

           Katie’s left hand brandished all five fingers.