Once Was a Time (18 page)

Chapter 36

I stared at Kitty. Silently, she stared back. “
You
figured out the secrets of time travel?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How on earth did you do that?! Kitty—
you know how time travel works
?”

“Yes,” she said again. Delicately she took a sip of water.

“So?” I poked her arm. “How does it work?”

She shook her head. “I'm not going to tell you.”

“Oh, come on.” I nudged her with my shoulder, but perhaps harder than I should have, and I saw her wince. I'd briefly forgotten how old Kitty was. I'd remembered only that she was Kitty.

“No,” she said again.

“Oh, come on, you know I won't tell anybody. When have I ever not kept a secret for you?” I asked.

“That's not it. I trust you completely. But I won't tell you how time travel works. Not because
you
shouldn't know, but because I don't believe that
people
should know. There's a reason why time travel isn't part of our everyday experience. It's dangerous.”

She told me that it's one thing when a portal appears randomly. That's a natural act, like a volcanic eruption or an earthquake. But when humans create portals of their own, it would be like creating an earthquake just to further your own goals. It's disturbing the natural order of things.

She went on, “I can understand why Intelligence suspected that your father understood time travel and was just refusing to tell them how it worked. If he had known, I imagine he
would
have kept that secret from them.”

“So you understand how time travel works, but you've never actually done it yourself,” I said.

“Correct.”

Which meant that I was still the only person I knew—maybe the only person in the whole world—to have leapt through the years. “You
used
to want to,” I reminded her. “You used to want to go on an adventure.”

“And I have done,” Kitty said. “I've traveled all over the world. I've met fascinating people everywhere I've gone. I've fallen in love—more than once—and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and experienced nearly nine decades of innovation. I've led a life filled with adventure. I didn't need to time travel to do that.”

Kitty told me that as the years passed, Dad brought her in on his research more and more. When she was at school in Ireland and he was working, it was a casual
apprenticeship,
similar to the sort of chores she did for him while they were held captive in Wales. But after the war ended, he became increasingly insistent that Kitty learn everything he knew.

“‘I am so close,' he kept saying—for
years
he said how close he was,” Kitty said. “And eventually, when he was around sixty years old, he admitted to me that he was concerned he might die before he had worked it all out, and he needed to be certain that I knew everything he knew, so that I could take over his work if the need arose.”

“And did you need to?” I asked, my chest tight.

“Yes. Your father passed away in 1962. From natural causes, Lottie—a heart attack. I'm sorry.”

I shook my head and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “You don't need to be sorry. I already knew he'd died. And actually, I'm
happy
. I'm so happy to hear that he died from a heart attack and not from the war, that he lived more than twenty years longer than I thought he had. And that he could kind of be
your
dad for all that time.”

“He was,” Kitty confirmed. “I was very lucky to have him. I don't know what I would have done otherwise.”

“You would have figured it out,” I told her. “If you'd been a ten-year-old girl all alone in the world, I promise, you would have figured it out. And I think he was lucky to have you, too. He didn't have any of his kids or his wife or anyone anymore. Really he just had you.”

“And I believe that's why he chose me to be his apprentice, the repository for all his research. Or maybe he saw an innate problem-solving talent in me and wanted to cultivate that. I don't know. But he told me that he
needed
me to continue his work. That it was
extremely important. Because . . .”

She coughed again, for longer this time. I held out her glass of water, but she waved it away.

“Do you remember your father's saying about coincidences?” Kitty asked once her throat was clear.

“Of course. ‘When something seems like an unbelievable coincidence, then consider that it might not
be
a coincidence.'”

Kitty beamed at me. “
Exactly.
Well, that's what your father thought was the explanation for the portal that you went through.”

“He thought it was an unbelievable coincidence?” I said.

“He thought that it was not, in fact, a coincidence.”

“Like, it was too convenient for a portal to open up at the exact time that I needed to escape?”

Now that I'd said it, I realized that my dad had a point there. Most people went their whole lives without ever seeing a portal. How incredibly low
were
the odds that I would not only see one—but that I would see it three seconds before a bullet hit me?

“But if it was so convenient,” I said slowly, “then why couldn't you come through the portal with me? Why would
it be such a great coincidence for me, and such a useless one for you? That doesn't seem fair. It's never, ever seemed fair.”

“It didn't seem fair to me at first, either,” Kitty said. “I was glad you got out, but I was jealous that you got to time travel when you hadn't even wanted it, really, and I had. I didn't understand why you hadn't taken me with you—or sometimes, why I hadn't gone
instead
of you. There were times—especially when I was a teenager, living undercover in a strange country, hiding my identity—when I felt angry with you for abandoning me.”

“I'm so sorry,” I told her. “I have been sorry this whole time. I wish I'd brought you with me.”

“I don't,” she said. “Not anymore. I needed to stay there, in that facility, with your father. I needed to live by his side for the next twenty-two years. I needed to learn everything he had to teach me about time travel. Because eventually he came up with a theory: that the reason why a portal appeared in the exact time and place where you needed it was because either he or I, at some point in the future, would create it for you.”

I felt like time stopped around us.

“What are you saying?” I whispered. “That the portal wasn't random at all?”

“Exactly.”

“You're telling me that somebody created it, at some point in the future, and sent it back there to rescue me.”

“Yes.”

“And that somebody . . . that was you?”

“Yes,” said Kitty again. “That was me.”

Chapter 37

I was sobbing in Kitty's arms. “Thank you,” I wept into her shoulder. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Lottie, my darling, you don't need to cry. You don't even need to thank me. Rescuing you was the guiding reason for almost everything I've done over the years. I should be thanking
you
for somehow tracking me down and showing me that my life's work paid off. That I really did save
you.”

Still my tears kept coming. “I just felt so
guilty
,” I told her. “Ever since I got to America, I've carried around this guilt, because
I left you to die
. And then when I saw that postcard, and I realized that you didn't die, that it wasn't my fault—I felt a million pounds lighter. And
now
, to learn that you couldn't even have come with me in the first place, because if you had then neither of us would have gotten out . . .”

I shook my head. It was too enormous. I couldn't wrap my mind around it.

“What if something had gone wrong, though?” I asked. “Like, what if my dad died before he was able to teach you everything he knew? What if you'd just never been able to figure out how to create the portal that I needed?”

“I worried about that,” Kitty said. “By the time I finally created your portal, it was 2002. For years I'd feared that some terrible accident would befall me before I had the opportunity to complete my work.

“But your father never worried. He believed that time is . . . well, this is hard to explain to pretty much anyone who's not a theoretical physicist. But he believed—and I do, too—that time is not a straight line where first this happens and then the next thing happens and then the next. He believed that since the portal
did
show up for you in 1940, that meant that at some point in the future, somebody had
already
created it.”

I was distracted enough by trying to understand this that my tears had stopped. “I don't get it,” I said. “I mean, I sort of do, but when I try to focus in on exactly how it would work, it seems to crumble into little pieces.”

“I've had more than seventy years longer than you to puzzle this one out,” Kitty pointed out gently. “It doesn't need to make sense right away. I'm going to give you some of my research. Not all of it, but a few of the key pieces. I'm sure most of it will seem nonsensical at this point, but you can hold on to it. And maybe once you've graduated from college, or graduate school, or whatever it is you go on to do, you'll find some value in my notes.”

She stood and walked slowly across the room to a credenza with silver candlesticks and china plates displayed behind its glass front. She bent over, deliberately, painfully.

“Can I help you?” I asked, already on my feet.

“No, no, that's fine. Goodness, I should be able to get around my own house by myself !” Finally she opened the cabinet doors below the glass front, and instead of seeing more dining room supplies, I saw that the bottom of the credenza was a filing cabinet stuffed with papers. Kitty started pulling out files. “You can have this one,” she said, “and this one. . . . Oh, you'll definitely want this. . . . Now, where did I put the notes from the Paris meeting? . . .”

“Are you sure you want me to have all of this?” I asked, watching the piles of papers grow at her feet.

“I'm certainly not going to do anything else with it. My research on time travel stopped in 2002. Once I'd created your portal, my work was complete.”

“Is it okay if I show all this to someone else?” I asked. “My friend Jake is really interested in all this stuff. He's the only person who knows where I really came from.”

“Certainly.” Kitty stopped pulling files and looked at me. “Jake. . . . Now, is he a friend who's a boy, or a boyfriend?”

“
Kitty
,”
I said in a withering tone. “Seriously?”

She laughed. “Do you remember when we had that crush on one of Justine's boyfriends? What was his name? The tall one, with the long eyelashes.”

I started laughing, too. “Henry! Henry Lee.”

“Oh, of course! How could I forget Henry Lee? And I dared you to write him a love letter.”

“And I dared
you
to kiss him,” I said.

“And then Justine threw her shoes at us!”

“She had terrible aim,” I said.

“I wonder whatever happened to Henry Lee,” Kitty mused.

“Who knows. That was the last time I ever saw him. I don't think he came around to call on Justine after all that.”

“It's magical,” Kitty said, “to have someone who remembers the same things I do.”

“I know,” I said. “It's even more magical than time travel.”

I piled Kitty's files onto her coffee table, and then she took me out the back door of her house, so I could see the garden she kept there: flowers of all colors, and small lemon and orange trees. Butterflies darted among the plants, and the air smelled sweet and fresh.

“Since when do you garden?” I asked.

“Since I settled in Manarola. I spent so many years of my life on the run, or exploring the world, wandering from place to place. Once I had a home of my own, I wanted to make it feel permanent.”

As I smelled her flowers, she told me that she'd moved here in 1987 because it seemed beautiful, remote, and, most importantly, safe—someplace no one would ever expect her to be. She was never confident that the British government had stopped looking for her. She never stopped worrying that if they
were
to find her, they would try to silence her.

“When I moved here,” she said, “naturally I told everyone my name was Catherine Blair, and by now my Italian accent sounds almost like a native's.”

“Impressive. I can't speak any other language. But I can mostly do an American accent.”

“Yes, I noticed that,” Kitty said drily. “Not my favorite of the world's accents, alas, but you carry it well.”

“Did you ever have kids, or get married?” I asked her. “Was Ron Alama a code name for your husband?”

Kitty laughed with surprise. “Ron Alama? How did you even hear of him?”

“I read one of his papers,” I told her. “And I figured out that it was your way of telling me to go to Manarola.”

“Lottie, I think you're cleverer than I am. I
did
invent the name Ron Alama as an anagram of Manarola, but that was just for my own amusement, not because I ever once suspected you would be alive to find that name and piece together what it signified. Ron Alama was my own code name, for my own scientific research. As I continued to research time travel, I made a few useful discoveries with more everyday applications.”

“That was
you
who came up with a way to treat cancer?”

Kitty smiled and picked a low-hanging orange from one of her trees. “It was.” She told me that the other scientists who she worked with directly obviously knew that she was a woman, but they respected her decision to publish her findings under a male pseudonym. One of her colleagues even gamely volunteered to be the “face” of Ron Alama, posing for that headshot I'd seen all over the Internet. What none of them knew was that, to Kitty, this radiation treatment was just a step along the way toward her ultimate goal of creating a time travel portal.

“That radiation treatment improved the quality of life for quite a number of people in hospitals all over the world. You may not know it to look at my little cottage here, but I made an awful lot of money from that discovery as well. Suffice it to say that I will be well cared-for no matter how much longer I live, and had I had any children—which I did not—they also would find all their needs financially provided for.”

“So you're rich?” I asked.

“Well . . .” Kitty demurred.

“You are! You are a rich inventor. I love it. My best friend is a rich inventor who knows how time travel works. Of course.”

I tore off the peel on the orange Kitty had picked, offered her half, and took the other half for myself. It smelled more like an orange than I'd ever known an orange could smell.

“Here's what I don't understand,” I said. “You didn't know that I traveled to Sutton in 2013. You didn't create the name Ron Alama so that I could find you here. You didn't even put up the ‘Wills Tower' sign for me?”

“I did not,” Kitty said. “I just liked it as a name for my house because I'm up so high in the mountains here, looking out over everything—it's what I imagined living in Wills Tower might feel like.”

“So why did you put that note in
A Little Princess
at the Sutton library? That's what I don't get.”

“I have a theory,” Kitty answered. “So, as I told you, I've never been to Sutton. I've never even been to Wisconsin. I don't really know why anybody would—sorry, Lottie.”

“I'm not offended,” I told her.

“The closest I've ever been was Chicago. And even then, it's probably been, gosh, twenty years since I was there? But I wonder if the Chicago Public Library's copy of
A Little Princess
might have somehow wound up in Sutton.”

“It definitely could have,” I told her. “Miss Timms—the librarian—told me that some of the books in our collection were handed down from the Chicago library.
A Little
Princess
could have been one of them. But . . . why would you have put this note in there in the first place? If that wasn't supposed to be a clue telling me how to find you, then why bother?”

“Because I always put notes in copies of
A Little Princess
.”

“What? Really?”

“Yes. Every time I see the book, into it goes a postcard or a piece of stationery or some such. You remember: My parents always told me that you must leave a note.”

“Are your notes always about me?”

“Yes. They're all more or less like the note you showed me a few minutes ago. Different stationery or postcards, sometimes slightly different wording, but that's the gist of every one of them.

“As I said, Lottie, I have traveled all over the world. I've been to more than a hundred countries on every continent except Antarctica. And I've put notes about you in every copy of
A Little Princess
, in every language, in every
place where I found it.”

“Why?”

“It was silly,” Kitty said. “It wasn't scientific at all. Every rational part of my brain told me that you would have gone too far into the past or future for you to ever find one of these notes. But I kept leaving them anyway, just in case, because . . .” She smiled at me. “Because it was silly, but I had hope.” She took my hand in hers, the orange juice on our fingers sticking them together. “I love you,” she said
simply.

“I will always love you,” I said to Kitty.