Chapter 23
23
Caroline, Age Thirty-Two
Most of the time, Caroline didn’t think about the other place, the other life, the other, very different childhood, lived under a different name.
And what a strange name it had been.
Bliss.
She believed she’d imagined that, along with all the other things she allowed herself to recall now and then, when her mind wandered.
And it was wandering that day. Meandering.
It was a hot Saturday morning in midsummer, and she was kneading bread dough at the kitchen sideboard, while Katherine, elderly now, sat nearby in her rocking chair, in front of the big window Jack had put in when they’d added on to the house, and awash in the sunlight streaming through the glass.
Katherine’s hair had long since gone silvery-gray, but it was still lush and shiny and thick. Her back remained straight, her shoulders strong, and Caroline loved her as dearly as if she’d been born of her sturdy body, not that of some forgotten woman.
The old woman was knitting as she rocked, her fingers working nimbly, though unlike the rest of her, they were twisted and gnarled. She’d turned her thoughts inward, a common thing these days, and she hummed under her breath and smiled at whatever she’d found tucked away inside herself.
Caroline smiled fondly in her mother-in-law’s direction. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
Katherine didn’t pause in her knitting, though she gave Caroline a sweet glance. “Well, my dear,” she replied, “I was thinking about you. When you came to us that day, seemingly out of nowhere.”
It seemed more than coincidence to Caroline that she’d been thinking of that, too. “Tell me what you remember,” she said gently, rolling the mound of yeasty dough in the big wooden bowl and then pressing it down with floury fists.
“I was washing clothes,” Katherine responded, her tone musing, her gaze fixed on the long-ago. “Jack had gone fishing with his dog—you remember Hobo, I’m sure—and he came back long before I expected him, and instead of bringing back trout for supper, there you were, dressed in the strangest clothes—I still can’t imagine where you would have come by such a costume, I swear.” She paused here, shook her head, mildly marveling at the memory. Then she made a tsk-tsk sound and went on. “You were so disheveled, dear. Your hair was so matted it took me hours to comb out the tangles, and as careful as I was, it must have been an ordeal for you. But did you complain? No. And when I fetched something for you to eat, why, you gobbled that food as if you’d been starved for weeks!”
Footsteps sounded outside on the little porch—Jack’s handiwork, like the kitchen window—and he stepped inside, tall and so handsome that Caroline’s heart tripped at the sight of him, even after twelve years of marriage.
He approached Caroline, kissed her cheek, patted her rounded stomach with one work-roughened hand.
“Good day to you, Mrs. Bettencourt,” he said.
Caroline beamed at him. And the child moved in her belly, as though to welcome him back from the fields. “And to you, Mr. Bettencourt,” she replied.
This baby— their baby—was a miracle, due in only a few weeks.
And every time she felt a kick or a shift, she rejoiced, because she and Jack had lost three other babies within a month or two of conception.
This little one, likely to be their only offspring, given Caroline’s previous difficulties, seemed determined not only to hold on, but to launch itself into the world with tiny fists flying and feet kicking.
Having greeted his wife, Jack crossed the room to bend down and kiss his mother’s forehead. “Another baby blanket?” he teased, with a little nod toward the small panel of blue yarn now resting in her lap.
“One can’t have too many,” Katherine replied, smiling.
Jack squeezed her shoulder, smiled back.
He turned to the big porcelain sink this time, and pumped water to wash his hands and splash his face. “Don’t stop chatting on my account,” he said. “I’m just here to rest my feet and gulp down about a gallon of water before I go back to tilling the cornfield.”
“We were just remembering the day you found Caroline down by the creek and brought her home to me,” Katherine said brightly. Sometimes she was forgetful, but today, her mind seemed sharp. “Do you recall those odd clothes she was wearing, Jack?”
Jack filled a tall drinking glass with water from the sink pump, crossed to the table, turned a chair backwards, and sat astraddle of it. “Yes,” he replied. “I’ve never seen anything like them, before or since. And those shoes.” He paused, shook his head. Looked up at his wife. “You called yourself Bliss back then, remember?”
Caroline covered the bread dough with a clean dish towel and went to the sink to wash the flour and butter from her hands, as Jack had washed away field dirt and sweat. Then she stepped up behind him, leaned down, and kissed the sun-reddened nape of his neck.
“I suppose that must have been my name at the time,” she said, lowering her bulky self carefully into a chair beside her husband’s. “But it doesn’t suit me now,” she added. She’d chosen the name Caroline herself, out of a book. That mysterious child of long ago, the one called Bliss, was a vague curiosity to her now rather than a person.
Although she must have been abandoned sometime before Jack discovered her, dazed and sitting on the bank of Painted Pony Creek, she didn’t remember much about the time before that.
She’d had wicked parents, and one friend, a pretty young woman named Madison.
All part of a fantasy, she supposed.
The dream—the dreams— had all been so vivid, seemed so real.
But how could they be true?
She’d gone back, in a later dream, she recalled now, to steal medicine for Jack, as he’d been so sick with a fever that even Doc Wiggins had expected him to die.
Recalling that made her tense.
Jack had taken ill when he was just ten years old, almost consumed by a high fever. And he’d recovered.
“Do you remember the medicine?” she asked, and then wished she hadn’t spoken aloud. The memories crept closer when she did that, and there was always the danger that they’d catch up with her.
Katherine was rocking again.
Jack was leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed.
“What a peculiar thing that was,” Katherine said with a thoughtful nod. “You brought me a handful of little white tablets, and begged me to give some to Jack. I was desperate enough to try anything by then. And to God be the glory, he got better after that. Where on earth could you have gotten such a thing, Caroline?”
Caroline bit her lower lip. Was it possible to cross over between dreams and everyday reality? Surely not, but there had been that medicine. She’d stolen it from a box in a strange metal carriage standing outside a strange metal house .
And a man had chased her into the cemetery, snatching at her arm, shouting profanities. He’d intended to hurt her, she’d been sure of it.
Then, suddenly, the nightmare had ended with a terrible, aching burst of energy, and Hobo the dog was there again, licking her face.
He’d led her home through the dark woods, and—
And she’d opened the little bottle, in the yard behind Bettencourt Hall, poured the pills into the palm of her hand. Lost a few in the grass when they overflowed.
If she’d been dreaming, where had the bottle come from? It, too, had been odd, made of something hard, something she could see through, though it definitely wasn’t glass.
She’d hidden the thing under a bush near the back door, she remembered now, and a few days later, she’d retrieved it, secretly buried it down by the creek.
Caroline began to feel dizzy, and she clutched at the table’s edge with both hands, afraid she might swoon.
Jack reacted instantly, wrapping a strong arm around her shoulders, holding her steady so she wouldn’t topple from her chair. His gentle face was etched with worry as he studied her face with those changeable hazel eyes of his, eyes that reminded Caroline of someone else.
Briefly, an image flickered in Caroline’s mind. A girl, with Jack’s light brown hair and chameleon eyes.
Before she could even attempt to put a name to the face, it faded away.
“Shall I fetch the doctor?” Jack asked in a raspy whisper.
No doubt he was thinking of those other babies, poor little things, lost before they’d had a chance to come into the world.
“It isn’t that,” Caroline said, breathless. When she tried to focus her eyes, the room pitched and dipped and swirled, like the deck of a boat sailing a stormy sea. “It isn’t the baby.”
She clutched at Jack’s arm. Held on.
“You need to lie down,” he fretted. “You’ve overdone it again.”
“The bread—I have to finish—”
“The bread must rise for an hour before it can go into the oven,” Katherine put in. “Let Jack help you, Caroline. Please.”
It wasn’t a matter of “letting” Jack do anything, Caroline thought, even more disoriented now. She didn’t have a choice, because the room hadn’t stopped moving, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand on her own two feet.
Jack carried her easily up the rear stairway and along the hall to their bedroom.
There, he laid her gently on the bed.
She clutched at him, squeezed her eyes shut to stop the incessant spinning sensation.
“I’m getting the doctor,” Jack told her in a voice that brooked no argument. “Something is really wrong.”
“No,” Caroline protested. “Please. Please don’t leave me, Jack.”
He bent over her, kissed her forehead, and she breathed in the earthly scent of him. “Mother will keep you company, if that’s what you want, but I’m heading for town. You need help.”
This wasn’t about the baby being born too soon, but she didn’t know how to convince Jack of that.
No, this was about memories she’d called dreams, recollections she didn’t want to entertain.
For whatever reason, things were flooding back, filling her with images she couldn’t explain, not even to Jack, who was the husband of her very soul, as well as her heart and her body.
She’d loved him since she was eight years old.
Don’t make me remember , she pleaded silently, listening as Jack strode out of the room. His boot heels made a steady thumping sound on the back stairs, like the firing of a Gatling gun. Please don’t make me remember.
But it was all coming back, and there was nothing she could do to stem the flow of vivid pictures, visceral impressions. They twisted and turned before her mind’s eye, like colorful glass shards moving inside a kaleidoscope.
It was a good thing Jack had carried her to the bed, she thought miserably, because she was coming unraveled, physically and mentally.
Fearing she might not be able to put herself back together, Caroline clutched her distended belly in both hands and tried to lie still, to breathe slowly, to calm herself down.
She heard Katherine climbing the stairs, walking along the hallway, entering the room she and Jack’s long-dead father had once shared.
Katherine’s hand rested, cool and comforting, on Caroline’s forehead.
“Don’t fuss, now. It isn’t good for the child.”
Caroline didn’t protest that the baby was all right; Katherine’s concern was justified, if wholly misguided. She longed to confide in this woman who had been a mother to her long before she was a mother-in-law.
But how would those confidences be received? As the ravings of a mad woman?
My name was Bliss Morgan, and I was eight years old.
I lived outside Painted Pony Creek, but it was the last part of the twentieth century, not the first, like now.
My father was called Duke, and my mother was Mona.
Duke was a mean drunk and Mona left us, because she needed freedom and fun.
I never really blamed her, because I wanted those things, too. I just didn’t know how—or where—to find them.
Duke and I lived in an old camping trailer because we were poor and there was nowhere else to go.
Those odd clothes and shoes you remember me wearing? Those were—will be—worn by kids everywhere. Shorts. A T-shirt. Sneakers.
And that medicine? It was aspirin.
Caroline pressed her hands to the sides of her head, trying to push the memories—could visions of the distant future be called “memories”?—back down into the deepest, darkest part of her brain.
“I shouldn’t even be born yet!” she wailed, because in that moment, just as the images wouldn’t stay down, neither would the words hammering the back of her throat in an effort to escape into the world and be recognized at long last.
“Hush, child. You’re not making sense,” Katherine murmured, sitting on the bed beside Caroline now and patting her hand.
“I’m not losing my mind!” Caroline cried. “I’m not!”
“Shhhh,” purred Katherine. “Of course you’re not losing your mind, dear. Something bad happened to you before you came to us, and now it’s made its way to the surface. Try to breathe very slowly and deeply.”
Caroline began to sob. Emotionally, she was a human volcano, erupting, and there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing at all.
She remembered everything.