Page 18 of Christmas Past
Instead, we were about to disappear from their lives forever.
Again.
“Seth,” I said quietly, gaze still focused on the street outside the window. “When we leave, they’re going to know something’s wrong almost at once. We told them we’d be at dinner tonight.”
“I know.” His voice was heavy with guilt. “I left a note. It’s not much, but at least they’ll know we made the choice to leave.”
A note. Such a small thing to sum up everything we couldn’t say. I wondered what words he’d found to explain the unexplainable, to justify abandoning his family again just when they’d gotten him back.
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth, as much as I could. That we had to go somewhere they couldn’t follow. That we weren’t in danger and weren’t running from anything.” He paused. “That I love them.”
My throat tightened. It wasn’t enough — how could it be? — but it was more than he’d been able to give them the first time he’d disappeared.
Before I could reply, he went on, “At least they’ll know we’re alive somewhere. That has to be enough.”
It would have to be, because we were out of alternatives. I closed my eyes and tried to center myself. Even now, I still didn’t know how my gift precisely worked, although I understood that I had a better chance of it doing what I needed it to if my mind wasn’t bouncing all over the place. But instead of the inner calm I needed, all I felt was exhaustion and the growing certainty that I was pushing myself way too hard.
Well, I couldn’t worry about that now.
“Ready?” I asked, and opened my eyes to find Seth studying my face intently, as if he could somehow see in my expression our chances for success.
“Are you sure — ”
“Ready?” I repeated, cutting him off. If I let him voice all his concerns, I’d lose what little nerve I had left.
And we needed to get the hell out of there.
He took my hands again, his grip firm and reassuring. “Ready.”
I reached for my gift, visualizing our target — December twentieth, the day we’d left our own time. The bungalow as it would be in the future, warm and familiar, with modern plumbing and electric lights and all the conveniences we’d grown accustomed to. I pictured the updated kitchen with its stainless steel appliances, the bathroom with its efficient shower, the comfortable furniture Seth and I had chosen together. Home. Our real home, not this beautiful anachronism we’d been visiting.
But the moment I tried to direct my magic toward that particular moment in time, I could feel it begin to spin out of control. Instead of the deliberate jump I’d attempted, magic exploded outward, uncontrollable as a river in flood. The power coiled inside me burst free, wild and chaotic, carrying us away from 1926 with terrifying force.
The world dissolved around us, and immediately I knew something was horribly wrong. Instead of the specific jump I’d intended, my gift seized control and flung us forward through time like a stone from a slingshot. I felt Seth’s hands tighten on mine as we careened through that other-when, completely out of control.
Time spun around us in a kaleidoscope of images — faces I didn’t recognize, buildings rising and falling, seasons changing in the space of heartbeats. I tried to regain control, to direct our passage toward our intended destination, but I might as well have been trying to steer a hurricane. My gift had become something alien and uncontrollable, a force that no longer obeyed my will.
We crashed back into reality with enough force to send us both sprawling. The impact drove the air from my lungs, and for a moment, all I could do was lie on the hardwood floor and try to remember how to breathe. The light in the bungalow was different again — dimmer, grayer — and when I struggled to my feet, I could see through the windows that many of the buildings visible from this vantage point looked shabby and rundown.
“Where are we?” Seth asked, helping me to my feet. His voice was carefully controlled, but I could hear the undercurrent of concern in it nonetheless.
No, the real question was when we were.
I stumbled toward the kitchen, my legs unsteady. Everything felt wrong — the way the light fell through the windows, the musty smell in the air, the sense that the bungalow itself had been changed in some fundamental way. There was a newspaper on the table — a different one from what we’d seen in 1925, thinner, with not so many pages.
“Jerome News,” I read aloud, squinting at the date. My vision was blurry, and it took several seconds for the numbers to come into focus. “October 15, 1935.”
“The Depression,” Seth said quietly. Although of course he hadn’t lived through it, not with the way he’d escaped the 1920s to the twenty-first century, I knew he’d studied the history of that century, wanting to learn about all the things he’d missed. He moved to the window and looked out at the town below, his entire body tense. “Damn.”
I joined him at the window and found myself wishing my vision had stayed blurry. Many of the storefronts were now boarded up, their windows covered with sheets of weathered plywood. The few people we could see on the streets moved with the defeated shuffle of those who’d lost hope, their shoulders hunched against more than just the autumn chill. Even from a distance, the town looked hollowed out, like a shell of its former self. Jerome in the 1940s wasn’t what it had been when I stumbled into 1926, but at least it had seemed as if it was trying to bounce back.
There definitely wasn’t any bounce in the town I saw now.
“Some of the mines must have closed,” I said, remembering what I’d read online about my adopted hometown. The last mine didn’t shut down until the early 1950s, but others had ended their operations long before that. “I know the Depression hit the mining towns especially hard.”
Seth was quiet for a long moment, his expression troubled. “My parents would have lived through this.”
