A Year Without Autumn (14 page)

“And what did he say to that?”

“He started getting angry then. Asked if I thought he was going to hang around while I made a fool of him again and told me I didn’t need to feel sorry for him. Said he had a new girlfriend now, so I didn’t need to worry about him bothering me anymore.”

“So he never knew what really happened?”

Mrs. Smith shakes her head. “I remember the conversation where I tried to explain it to him as if it were yesterday. We were standing in the foyer downstairs, in front of the elevator.”

“The elevator!” I gasp.
Does she know that was how it happened?

“As we stood there, I suddenly realized — that was it,” she continues before I get the chance to say anything. “The moment things had changed. It was the elevator! I grabbed his hand and dragged him inside with me. Told him what I suspected. Told him all of it. I was so happy! All we had to do was go back a year — together. Everything was going to be OK. More than OK — it was going to be wonderful! I was going to get my life back. And he would get to live that year all over again — but as my boyfriend this time!”

“So what happened?” I ask, entranced.

Mrs. Smith pauses for a long time. “He looked into my eyes so hard and so deep that I mistook his look. I thought it was excitement, passion — a realization that we could have everything we wanted, everything we had talked about.”

“And what was it?”

“I don’t know. Fury, hurt,” she says flatly. “Do you know what he did, Jenni?”

I shake my head, anxious for her to go on.

“He got out the penknife he always carried around with him in his pocket and went over to the control box in the corner of the elevator. Working at the edge of it with his knife, he levered it open. And then, before I even knew what was happening, he switched to the sharpest blade, reached into the box, and pulled out the wires inside it. Then he said, ‘This is what I think of your nonsense,’ and cut every wire in the box. ‘No one makes a fool of me and then comes back to gloat about it,’ he said.”

“But that’s horrible of him!” I butt in.

Mrs. Smith shakes her head. “It sounds it. But it wasn’t like him at all. He was always so gentle and kind. He was hurt, Jenni. He needed to hit back at me and didn’t know any other way to do it. Don’t think badly of him.”

“OK. I understand,” I say quietly. “So then what happened?”

“I said, ‘I’m
not
gloating, Bobby — I
promise
I’m not.’ But he never believed me. All he knew was that I’d rejected him and that was that. He’d had a whole year to think about it. A year that I had no recollection of — a year of my life that took place without me!”

“With everyone around you acting as though you’ve spent the last year with them — but you don’t know anything about it. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“Worse than awful,” Mrs. Smith agrees.

“But I still don’t understand how it works,” I say. “I mean, if the missing year existed for everyone around us, but not for you or me, then was that year real? Did it happen or not? And what about the past that you’ve left behind? Do you disappear from that completely or keep on existing in two places at the same time?”

“Jenni, I’ve spent over thirty years asking myself questions like these. I know that you can’t disappear from the past completely, or else by the time I turned up on my fifteenth birthday, they’d have had search parties out looking for me for the last twelve months!”

“But if I didn’t disappear, why didn’t I turn up at Autumn’s house to go horseback riding?”

Mrs. Smith shakes her head. “There could be a hundred different answers to that question. Perhaps you
do
disappear, just for a short while, as you travel from one time to another. Or perhaps we both just slipped into a timeline that was always there and was always going to be there, and no one disappeared from anywhere. Perhaps the past kind of starts again once you land in the future.”

“The past with all the parts we’ll never know about because we simply weren’t there to experience them,” I add.

“Exactly. The truth could even be that Jenni from a year ago was called away by someone before she got to Autumn’s condo,” Mrs. Smith goes on. “Maybe she got distracted for ten minutes, and by the time she got to Autumn’s, it was too late and they’d gone without her. The fact of the matter is . . .” She pauses for a moment.

“That I’m never going to know,” I finish for her.

“I don’t think you ever will,” she agrees. “Just as I’ll never know exactly what happened in my missing year, either. But I’ll tell you something else I’ve discovered. It doesn’t matter! There are
always
going to be some questions you can answer and some that you can’t, which will drive you crazy if you keep trying. Not all questions
have
an answer, Jenni — and even with the ones that do, not all of their answers make sense to our simple human minds.”

She’s right. Understanding the ins and outs of exactly why and how this has happened isn’t important. What matters is the fact that it
has.
It happened to Mrs. Smith; it’s happened to me.

And however complicated and impossible all of this is, there’s one simple truth at the heart of it. Both of us ended up in a future we wished we could change.

My head is swimming. I want to ask her so many things. I want her story to have a happier ending.

“Did you ever see him again?” I ask.

“Never. It was too late. He didn’t want me. All I knew was that as far as he was concerned, I’d rejected him and then tried to make a fool out of him with some ridiculous story. I don’t blame him for not believing me. But I wished and wished he would.”

“What happened next?”

“I was so upset, my parents cut the vacation short. It put them off the place for good.”

“So you never came back?”

“Never. At least, not till last year, when you saw me.”

“Last year? You mean yesterday?” I say without thinking.

“Takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it?” she says quietly.

“So why did you come back at all?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Was it to look for him?” I ask.

“You’ll think I’m an old fool. As crazy as my poor parents thought I was back then.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Do you know something, Jenni? You are the first person I’ve told any of this to in my entire life. Do you realize that?”

I try to imagine keeping something like that a secret for my whole life. It would be like always wearing a mask over your face, which everyone believed was the real you. You would be the only person who knew it wasn’t — and who knew that you could
never
take it off.

“I’m sorry,” I say eventually. I don’t know what else to say.

“We had this thing,” she says, staring out of the window again. “Used to joke about it. ‘We’ll come here when we’re fifty,’ he’d say. ‘We’ll buy this place and run it together.’ ‘We’ll be married then,’ I’d reply, and he’d laugh at me. I never forgot, though. All my life. I mean — yes, of course I moved on. He wasn’t my only love. But he was the first — and the deepest — and my heart never gave up the corner it had reserved for him all those years ago. So I did.”

“You did what?”

“I came back when I was fifty! There, now. Stupid old fool, like I said. As if he’d be here. As if he’d remember.” She shakes her head and laughs. “Can you imagine that? Bought a share in a condo and everything. Couldn’t get rid of the darned thing till now.”

“Get rid of it?”

“What use is a place like this to someone like me? No, I’ve sold it. At a loss, of course, but it’s nothing compared to the losses I’ve had. I’ll be gone after this week. Won’t come here again. Nothing here for me now, is there? Not that there ever was. I know that now.” She looks away and seems to be looking far into the distance. “Do you know what I did last night?” she asks with a wry smile.

“What did you do?”

“Wrote him a letter. Silly mumbo jumbo my daughter tells me to do when people upset me. She says write it in a letter, then address it to them, but don’t send it. She figures it gets rid of the feelings at least.”

She points to a writing pad at the other end of the table. “So I wrote a letter. My daughter says then I have to destroy it, so I will later. I’ll go down to the weir and throw the silly thing in. Get him out of my head once and for all, and that’ll be that. Over and out.”

“You never forgot him,” I say quietly.

She shakes her head. “Bobby was the one, Jenni. Was for me, at any rate, even if the feeling wasn’t mutual. The one that shone through the others. Sounds like something out of a cheesy movie, doesn’t it?”

“So, you never fell in love again?”

“Oh, yes. I got married. Divorced too. Because it
wasn’t
a movie. It was real life, and the girl doesn’t always get her boy in the real world. I moved on, lived my life. But there’s always been a sense of — I don’t know, unfinished business, I suppose you’d call it. Knowing that everything could have turned out so differently — and wishing more than anything that I could have that year again and turn it into the life I really wanted.”

“The one where you married Bobby?”

She smiles. “I used to write it all over my homework books: Irene Barraclough. I thought it sounded quite nice.”

“Barraclough?”

“Bobby Barraclough. That was his name.”

My insides turn cold. “But there’s a Mr. Barraclough who works here. He did, anyway, two days ago — or rather, two years ago.”

“Mr. Barraclough.” Her face has turned white. “Bobby Barraclough?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known his first name. I think he’s left now. He said it was going to be his last year. Said he was staying for his fiftieth birthday and then that was it. He’d be off.” As I say the words, the cold feeling seeps and snaps its way through my body.
His fiftieth birthday
— was that why he was leaving? Did it have anything to do with Mrs. Smith?

Mrs. Smith is staring at me, the color drained from her cheeks. “Oh, my goodness,” she says. “Oh, my goodness.”

“What? What is it?”

“His fiftieth.
His
fiftieth. I’ve been such a fool, even more of a fool than I’d thought. I had my whole life to prepare, and I got it wrong.”

“Got what wrong?”

“He was a year older than me! I came a year too late!” She gets up and paces the floor. “It was his last year, you say?”

“I think so.”

“And what was he going to do after that?”

“I — I can’t remember. I think he said he was going traveling.”

“With his family? Was he married?”

I try to remember what I know about him. I’ve only ever seen him on his own. But then you don’t take your wife to work with you, do you? “I don’t think so. I don’t know,” I say eventually. “I’m sorry.”

She stops pacing. “No.
I’m
sorry.” She tries to smile. “Look at me. Just can’t let go, can I? It’s over. The silly dream of a silly girl. A silly old woman. There’s no going back. It’s done now. He’s gone. He’s moved on, and it’s time I did the same.”

“But maybe he
hasn’t
moved on!” I burst out. “Maybe that’s why he was leaving. Maybe that’s why he stayed till then — for you!”

She looks at me, a glint of hope in her eyes. Then she shakes her head. “No — I’m not going to get my hopes up over nothing. He’s gone now, anyway, even if it
was
as you said — which I very much doubt.”

“Come back with me and find out!” I burst out. “The elevator — it’s working again!”

“The elevator? So I was right — that’s how it happened to you, too?”

I nod. And then I remember something else. “It was the day after he was there.”

“Who was there?”

“Mr. Barraclough — he was trying to fix the elevator! Maybe that was why! Maybe he was fixing it for you!” I try to remember what he said to me at the time, but I can’t. All I can remember is that he didn’t make any sense. But maybe he did! Maybe this was exactly what he was talking about.

Mrs. Smith runs a hand through her hair. Then she shakes her head. “No. I can’t do it,” she says.

“Why not?”

“Jenni, your theory is full of
if
s. Far too many to hope that all of them would go my way. There’s no going back. I’ve lived all these years with that as a permanent refrain in the background of my life. You cannot go back. You have to go forward.”

“But what if you —?”

She stops me with her hand. “No, I can’t do it. Maybe last year, I would have. Even a couple of days ago, perhaps I might have said yes. I might have dared face another humiliating rejection. But not now. Now I realize why I came here again.”

“Why’s that?”

“To let go. To move on. I’ve made my peace with all of this, and I’m not going to risk shattering that now. I can’t, Jenni. Not at my age.”

“But maybe he —”

“No, I can’t do it. I won’t. My whole life has been about moving forward. I can’t go back. And, anyway, I don’t believe he’ll have given me a moment’s thought in the last thirty-some years. Now that I’m here, I can see that even more clearly. He’s gone. It’s too late. He was just getting his last tasks done before he left this place behind for good — and that is exactly what I’m going to do.”

“So what happens now?”

“What happens now is that I pack up, I go home, and I get on with my life. It’s about time.”

“Will you be OK?”

She picks up the juice glasses and takes them to the sink. Running the faucet, she talks to the window. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’ve been all right up to now, haven’t I? I’ll survive.”

As she’s talking, my eyes fall on the writing pad. What did she say to him? What’s it like to be fifty and in love? I didn’t know it was possible!

“Can I see it?” I ask nervously.
Did I really ask that? Jenni Green doesn’t ask things like that!
But then I realize — perhaps Jenni Green isn’t the same person she used to be. And I don’t just mean a haircut and tighter clothes. I mean something more than that — something inside.

Mrs. Smith turns around. “See what?”

“The letter,” I say, nervously. And then I have a thought. Or half a thought. I don’t even know exactly what the thought is, never mind whether or not I could pull it off. I just know that I have to try to do
something.
I can’t shake the feeling that Mr. Barraclough still loves her the way she loves him. I can’t persuade her to take the risk and try to find out. But perhaps there’s a way
I
can find out. And if I knew what the letter said, maybe somehow that could help. “Can I read it?” I add. “To help me understand what you’ve been through?”