Chapter 16 #3
“Hey, that’s when I went there, a year after Dad returned there, but twenty-one years for me. That’s why I wanted to change the orbs’ settings. I thought it would be better to go back when Dad had aged another twenty-one years.”
“You can’t,” Uncle Mark said.
Bree clicked her tongue noisily against her teeth. “Why not?”
Uncle Mark grimaced. “As I said, your father wouldn’t have been fit to look after you then, and he still wasn’t even a year later.”
“The only thing we could think of is to have you fully grown before you met,” Aunt Di said. “We’re hoping you’ll be able to get through to him where we couldn’t.”
Horland came to Bree’s mind, and she ignored the quickening of her heart at the thought of him.
Her aunt and uncle were playing with her life and while she saw their meddling was a good thing for her cousins, something about their demeanor told her something was wrong, something bad.
“Are you telling me you’re trying to play matchmaker with me and Horland? ”
“No,” Aunt Di said. “We don’t know where your relationship with him goes, it hasn’t happened yet, at least not for us.”
Bree plopped back onto the stool. “You know, you’re not making sense.”
Aunt Di stepped forward and sat on the stool next to Bree. “Sit down and we’ll tell you what we know.”
Bree slowly sat down and said, “All right then.”
“Like your uncle said, we did go back many times, but each time Garlain was in no mental state to look after a child. The last time was about fourteen months after your mother died.”
“He’d sunk low, Bree,” Uncle Mark said. “Lower than we thought was possible.”
Bree noted Aunt Di’s eyes tear up.
“How low?” Bree asked, scared to hear the answer but determined to know the truth.
Uncle Mark gave Aunt Di an encouraging look and said, “There’s no other way to say this, Bree. After your father had been back in his own time just over a year, he killed himself.”
“What?” Bree couldn’t comprehend how the laughing, loving man she knew could do such a thing. What about her? Didn’t he even think about her? Care for her feelings? She was about to ask why, but she knew why. He couldn’t live without Mom and he didn’t care about me.
Aunt Di grasped Bree’s hands in hers. “He did love you, Bree, he just couldn’t find his way out of his despair; he couldn’t find his way back to you.”
Bree understood how depression could change people, take them down to a place where they could see no way out, no way to end the pain within.
“How?” she whispered.
Mark stood alongside Aunt Di. “One day,” he said, “Garlain left the ruins and walked into the river. It was during a storm and the rain fell hard. The river raged and took him down to its depths.”
“Morla tried to save him,” Aunt Di said. “But she nearly drowned herself and when she finally got to shore, he was gone.”
Mark cleared his throat. “The only way we hoped to fix everything was to wait until you were grown and send you back before he sank that low. We needed you to go back before he did anything, to make him see that life goes on.”
Bree stood up and paced the width of the basement and back to the bench again.
They were right—the child her would never have been able to comprehend her father’s depression, let alone get through to him.
She sucked in her bottom lip. There was no longer a choice.
If she didn’t go back to when her father was young, she would lose him forever. She stopped at her stool.
“Do you think I can get through to him now? Will he even believe I’m his daughter?”
“We know you can,” Mark said.
“Because you’ve seen it?”
“Yes,” Aunt Di said. “Time is a beautiful thing and we have seen so much.”
“Including all your children’s weddings.” It wasn’t a question. Bree knew they had been there—the photographs proved it already. “Why didn’t you say something, let everyone know you were there?”
“We couldn’t,” Mark said. “It was like we were in a different dimension, watching the celebrations but unable to join in.”
The anticipation of seeing Horland again ran through her body like a jolt of electricity. “Do I get married?”
Mark regarded Bree with fatherly concern.
“We don’t know. There are still some things we don’t understand about time travel.
You going back is one of them. When you meet Garlain, we will be there.
We will be able to converse and touch. I don’t know how really, but I’m thinking, for us, this is our present timeline.
We are here and we will be there, but we haven’t gone forward. ”
“So, all this is happening for the first time for you?”
They both nodded.
“So, you can talk to Garrett now then.”
“They have.”
Bree started at the sound of Garrett’s voice. She hadn’t heard him come down the stairs.
“You’ve talked?”
Garrett nodded. “Yep, they’ve told us everything. They were lost in time but they’re back now.”
Bree couldn’t help but to smile at that. “That should be interesting for your neighbors.”
Garrett shrugged. “We’ll come up with something.”
“I’m sure you will but right now, I have somewhere I have to be.”
“You go,” Uncle Mark said. “We’ll be along shortly.”
Garrett wagged his brows. “I bet Horland will be glad to see you.”
“I’m not sure he will be,” Bree said, making a doubtful face.
Bree knew it then, though: she would die of heartbreak if she didn’t at least see if Horland felt the same way about her as she did him.
She didn’t know when it happened, but she had gone and fallen in love with the guy.
She silently giggled. She guessed it was from the first moment she set eyes on him.
She held up the white orb. “Yep, I’m going back. Hope to see you all soon.”
Clasping the white orb, it occurred to Bree that she might end up in the same huge hole that she left. “That could be a problem.”
“What could be?” Garret asked.
“Hang on.” Bree picked up the black orb and turned it upside down.
Peering at the coordinates, she could make out she was going back to the same year as she left, but something was different.
The number of her contact had changed. She was sure it had been seventy-two, but now it was seventy-three. She looked up at her aunt and uncle.
“Ah yes,” Aunt Di said. “We, um, thought it would be better for your father to be your contact now that you know everything. Your father is the most important one. You’ll go back to where he is.”
Bree nodded. He had to come first. Once she’d helped her father, then she would meet up with Horland again.
She quickly changed the white orb’s setting and lifted her hand to twist the top, but Garrett grasped her arm.
“Wait,” he said.
“What now?”
He took a ring out of his pocket and held it up to Bree. “It’s a man’s ring but I want you to have it.”
Bree took it. It was a thick gold band with a gnarled tree etched into the head. She widened her eyes at Garrett. “Is that the bristlecone tree?”
“Yeah, I had it made from a sketch I did, and I was going to wear it but then I thought how you love that tree more than any of us so I want you to take it to remember us by.”
Bree threw her arms around his neck and gave him a hug. “Thank you.”
She stood back and looked at the ring. “It’s beautiful.”
Once she’d put it into an inner pocket, she twisted the top of the orb, and let herself fall into the dark void.