9. Jo
CHAPTER 9
Jo
The late February evening is cool and pleasant, and Jo has the sliding door to the backyard and the kitchen window open to let in a breeze. She's sitting at the kitchen table with her typewriter out, her thin robe tied around her waist and her feet encased in pink house slippers. Bill and the kids have been asleep for a couple of hours already, and she's sipping a cup of decaf coffee with a splash of cream.
The sun was just starting to rise. No one had slept for days in the Malcolm house, particularly Iris, whose eyes were red-rimmed and raw from her tears.
"Mommy?"
Iris turned around quickly, spotting her little girl standing in the bedroom's doorway. "Oh, baby," she said, holding her arms open wide for her four-year-old to climb into. "Why are you awake?"
"I want Daddy."
These simple words ripped at Iris's heart. They shredded her insides and left her feeling whipped and beaten.
“I know, baby,” she said, rocking her daughter back and forth in her arms. “I wish he could be here, too.”
Jo pauses, staring at the words she’s just typed onto the paper. The hum of her electric typewriter is the only sound she can hear, aside from the rumble of the pool filter through the open door and the sound of night creatures rustling and slithering in the dark Florida night. With a loud sigh, she stands and crosses the kitchen, her slippers pitter-pattering across the floors as she walks to the fridge.
The feel of warm weather and the sounds of the different bugs and animals in this wild place had taken some time to get used to, but now, nearly three years into their time in a state with orange groves, red tides, and hurricanes, Jo is accustomed to what once felt exotic.
With the door of the refrigerator open, she chooses a glass bottle of orange juice and then pours some into a tumbler, taking it back to the kitchen table. She’s still stuck on what to write, and what she has so far feels remarkably like she’s about to write the story of Maxine Trager. A young widow, small daughter in her arms, longing for her husband to come home again—which he never will.
She knows that this is wrong; writing yet again about the space program, or anything that’s even slightly related to real life, is going to get her into even more trouble with Bill. But the things that pull at her heart and her fingertips are all things she knows. Things she’s observed and experienced.
Jo stands next to the typewriter, and without overthinking it, she yanks the page from the machine and crumples it into a ball, tossing it across the room like she’s pitching a baseball. She needs something new—something fresh. Jo cannot use her writing solely to work out her fears, her anger, her frustrations, or her worries about Bill dying or leaving her for another woman. Her one job here is to write something that will appeal to her readers and will ignite a fire inside of her that makes her want to lose hours of valuable sleep each night in order to get the words on paper while her family slumbers down the hall.
Rehashing the things that have happened in her daily life won’t cut it, and she’s got to get something fresh on the page. She has to.
Jo sits, places her glass of juice on the table, and puts a fresh page into the machine. She sets her fingertips on the keys and takes a deep breath. New story , she tells herself. New characters, nothing familiar, nothing real .
With her eyes closed, a brand-new scenario forms in her mind, and without thinking, Jo begins to write.
Adeline woke up on a pile of hay. The sunlight poked through cracks in the wood around her, and she blinked at the hazy dust motes that floated on a beam of light above her.
“Where am I?” she said aloud, partially hoping that her husband’s voice would come through loud and clear, letting her know she was in her own bed, and that she simply had one foot still firmly placed in dreamland.
Instead, a blurry figure appeared before her, and an unfamiliar voice, deep and strong, responded to her question. “In my barn,” the man said.
Adeline blinked a few more times to clear her eyes, but it didn’t work. All she could see was the outline of a tall, broad-shouldered man, and a wash of sunlight that formed a halo around his entire body.
“I think these are yours,” he said, stepping closer. Adeline sat up, hoping that the man would be friend and not foe. “Here.” He reached for her hand, putting something cold and delicate in her palm. “These must be your spectacles.”
Adeline realized quickly that she was, in fact, holding a pair of eyeglasses, and she clumsily unfolded them and slid them on, bringing the world into view.
She nearly gasped aloud when her eyes focused on the man standing before her: he was indeed tall and broad, but also dark-haired, full-lipped, and possessed of the sharpest jaw and cheekbones she’d ever seen.
“But I…” she said, letting her words trail off. She looked around: this was definitely a barn. The wooden floors were covered with hay, and bales of the stuff sat stacked to one side. Several stalls lined the structure, and from them, she could hear the repetitive sounds of cows chewing.
The man offered Adeline a hand, which she took with some hesitation. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you up, then you can tell me who you are and where you came from.”
Adeline stood, somewhat unsteadily, and brushed the bits of straw from her dress—a dress that, as she looked down at it, registered as wholly unfamiliar. She looked right at the man as she fluffed her hair, freeing more bits of straw that came raining down around her.
“Sir,” she said, shaking her head. “My name is Adeline, and while I appreciate your kindness, I have to tell you I’m a little confused about who I am and where I came from myself.”
He frowned at her in confusion, then his look turned to one of amusement. “Well, you seem to know who you are, Adeline, but you really can’t tell me where you came from?”
Adeline glanced around her again; the world she lived in was not one of barns and animals that needed milking. She did not wear calico dresses, and never had she seen a man as handsome as the one standing before her.
“I come from…” she said, still taking in the structure in which she’d woken, the way the light fell across the man’s stubbled cheeks, and the old-fashioned cut of his trousers. “I come from a place where I don’t need glasses, because I have perfect vision.”
The man’s look of amusement faded. “I don’t understand,” he said, giving a single shake of his head.
Adeline, at a loss for words, felt her eyes sting with confused tears. “Neither do I.”
Jo stops typing here, feeling the tingle of excitement that comes with writing something that feels good—something that feels right. This is it, and she knows it. A story that has nothing to do with her own life. Well, okay, not nothing; she also feels as though she went to sleep in one life (her old, familiar life in Minnesota) and woke up somewhere foreign (the sunny, citrus-filled state she lives in now), but there’s nothing damning here. There’s nothing telling or personal or inflammatory. This will simply be a story of a woman who fell through time and into the arms of a man from another world.
Jo drains the rest of her orange juice with relish and then rinses out her glass. With a smile of satisfaction, she turns off the typewriter and puts away her writing paraphernalia. Before she knows it, she’ll have the first fifty pages of something new to send to Martin Snell of Snell & Banks Literary, just as he’d requested. She dearly wants to keep writing, but it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning now, and Bill will be up at six, hoping for fresh coffee and a hot breakfast before he starts his work day.
With visions of Adeline and the attractive farmer in her mind, Jo drifts to sleep, already excited for the next time she pulls out her Remington and falls into a world that’s entirely her own creation.
* * *
“Time travel? Well, I wouldn’t say it’s impossible ,” Dr. Chavez says, looking up from the notes he’s jotting down about a patient in the room that Jo is about to enter. “As a man of science, I can’t rule it out entirely, no. Why do you ask?”
Jo is holding the handle of her cart as she stands there, tapping her toe against the linoleum floor behind her absentmindedly. She suddenly feels silly for having asked Dr. Chavez for his opinion on a topic that makes her sound like a flighty dingbat.
Looking at the books in her cart, Jo rearranges a few of them, stacking and moving things around to busy her hands. “Oh, you know, just an idea I had for a story.”
Dr. Chavez tucks his clipboard under one arm and clicks his ballpoint pen to retract the tip. He slides the pen into the breast pocket of his lab coat and looks at Jo with curiosity. “I’d like to hear about it. Do you have a second for a cup of coffee?”
Jo looks at her cart and feels conflicted. She’s a volunteer, not a paid employee, but she’s always taken her position seriously, and she knows that seeing her walk in the door with books, magazines, and snacks, is sometimes the only positive thing to happen for a patient on any given day.
“Leave it right there,” Dr. Chavez says, lifting his chin at the cart. “No one will bother with it, and if someone steals—“ He pauses and picks up one of the well-worn paperbacks, examining the cover, “—if someone decides they really need to filch a copy of Her Lover’s Hot Tempest , then I think they probably need it more than you do.”
Jo stifles a giggle and nods. “Okay,” she says, pushing the cart up against the wall. “I’ve got five minutes.”
Dr. Chavez leads the way to the break room and pours them each a paper cup of coffee, nodding at the cream and sugar. “I’ll let you doctor your own drink, even though technically doctoring is my job.”
Again, Jo feels like giggling, which is ridiculous. For some reason, being around Dr. Chavez makes her act like a teenager with a crush, and she notices it each time she starts to blush. Her voice even inches up an octave in his presence, which she finds mortifying.
Once they’re seated at a small table by the window that overlooks the new garden two floors below, Jo clears her throat. “Okay, so the story I started writing the other night has really captured my imagination.”
“And my interest,” Dr. Chavez says, holding his cup with both hands on the top of the table that suddenly feels quite small between them. He’s not an overly large man, but his presence is formidable and reassuring, and the clean scent of soap and laundry detergent follows him everywhere he goes. “Carry on.”
Jo looks into her coffee, which she’s lightened with cream. “I was writing something else, which I scrapped entirely.” She waves a hand and flicks it at the window to mime throwing away her work. “I put in a fresh piece of paper and just let the scene unfold, and it turned out to be a woman who’d fallen through the cracks of time and ended up on a farm somewhere in the past. When she wakes up, a handsome farmer is standing over her, holding out a pair of eyeglasses for her. She puts them on and she can suddenly see that he’s quite handsome.”
Dr. Chavez’s smile quirks up on one side of his mouth. “Naturally.”
“Yes, of course,” Jo says, realizing the predictability of this scenario. But she knows what women want to read, and she is certain that this storyline will be a hit. “Anyway, he helps her up, and she tells him she isn’t sure where she is, where she’s from, or why she needs eyeglasses to see, as she doesn’t normally wear them.”
“I see,” Dr. Chavez says, then pauses with expectation. “Did you get what I did there? Eyeglasses… ‘I see’?”
Jo laughs appreciatively. For such an attractive, accomplished man, Dr. Chavez is one of the goofiest, most down-to-earth people she knows. “You’re good. Maybe you should write comedy.”
He holds up both hands and lets his head hang in mock defeat. “Alas, I have chosen my career path already, Josephine. I’ll leave the writing to you, and just cheer you on from the sidelines.”
“Thank you for that,” she says, feeling shy. “I really appreciate how much interest you show in my writing, and how encouraging you are.”
“Hey,” he says, looking into the cup of coffee in front of him. “I can appreciate a person with a genuine passion, and I have to support that. Life is more exciting and rewarding when you have something that you do, and you do it well.”
They sit there for a moment as Jo basks in the glow of his kind words. “But do you think it’s at all possible? Or am I writing pure fantasy here?”
Dr. Chavez sits back in his seat and folds his arms across his chest. “Well, I think there are plenty of things that are possible and there are so many things we can’t yet answer. Just because I have never woken up in the barn of a hunky farmer in a different time myself doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.”
Jo reaches across the table to swat at him playfully, then realizes what a familiar gesture it is. To hide the flush on her cheeks, she ducks her head and tucks her hair behind one ear.
“That’s fair,” she says. “Do you think there’s any scientific precedent for it though? The ability to travel through time?”
“Hmmm. Okay. I guess we could rely on Einstein here for some groundwork. While he never expressly said that he believed in time travel, he did indicate that time itself is relative. Time can be affected by both speed and gravity, and, I suppose,” he says, spreading his palms wide as he looks at Jo earnestly, “we could allow for time dilation and, quite possibly, travel into the future.”
“Just the future?” Jo lifts her eyebrows as she watches his face for any indication that he might think she’s a total quack.
Dr. Chavez shrugs and places his palms on the table. “I guess the past would be fair game as well. I mean, why not? We simply don’t have the answers or even the capacity to answer them at this point.”
This is good enough for Jo. “Okay, thank you for that. I just never imagined myself to be a writer of science fiction, and I thought that if I could wrap my head around the possibility that I wasn’t entirely inventing something, it might resonate more with me. And, consequentially, with my readers.”
“Sure,” Dr. Chavez says, giving her a relaxed smile as he lifts his coffee cup. “And you could make it even more realistic if you gave the farmer a good, solid name. Like Nicholas.” His smile goes beyond a quirk of the lips and spreads widely, showing his rows of straight, white teeth.
It takes Jo a moment to remember that Dr. Chavez’s first name is Nicholas, as she always thinks of him as, well, just Dr. Chavez.
“You know what?” she says. “I will take that under consideration as a thank you to you for putting up with all of my writing talk—no promises, though.”
“No! Jo, I was just teasing,” he assures her, reaching over and putting a hand on her wrist on top of the table. “Truly.”
Jo is at a loss for words as his hand lingers against her skin, and it only seems proper to cut things off right there, at this perfect moment when their smiles are still on their lips. Regretfully, she makes to stand, and he releases her by lifting his hand from hers.
“Thank you for the coffee and the chat,” Jo says, smoothing the front of her dress just as Adeline had done in the barn when the farmer helped her to stand. She even blinks a few times as she looks at Dr. Chavez, realizing as she does that he is tall, broad-shouldered, and has dark hair, a sharp jawline and cheekbones, and a dusting of stubble on his cheeks that makes him look even more handsome.
Jo swallows hard as she picks up her cup of coffee and holds it in front of her. Without realizing it, she’s made her fictional farmer look a heck of a lot like Dr. Nicholas Chavez, and there’s no way to dislodge the image in her mind at this point. It’s there to stay. And though she’d had no intention of doing so, she’s inadvertently created two main characters in this new story who closely resemble two people she knows in her own life: herself, and Dr. Chavez.