Reaching Through Time (14 page)

“One of your new friends from school called to check on you.” His mother tried to change the subject.

What friend? Drake had no friends except Gina.

“Her name was Beth. Isn’t that the girl who showed you around at registration?”

Drake waved his mother’s words away. “Mom, please go up and check on Gina. It’s the only way. I’ll draw you a map of how to get there. Please!”

Her shoulders sagged. “Is she that important to you?”

“Yes.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’ll ask my friend Lois to ride up with me tomorrow after work.”

“There were so many trees across the road on Sandstone Mountain, we couldn’t even get close to number thirteen.”

Drake’s stomach knotted with his mother’s report. Lois had come into his room with her and nodded repeatedly to second the bad news. “Did you try?”

“A cat couldn’t have gotten through that mess of trees. They were lying every which way, pines and oaks. It was a real mess.”

Drake turned his head, shoved his partially eaten dinner away from him on the rolling table a nurse had placed
across his bed. He had no appetite. All he wanted was to get out of this hole.

Connie stopped the tray from sliding onto the floor. “Now listen up, son. I know you’ve been sick and I know you’re worried about this Gina, but I won’t excuse bad manners. Lois gave up her afternoon to go on this little jaunt with me, so yes, we tried and couldn’t get there.”

Lois cleared her throat, stepped between Drake’s hospital bed and Connie. “You know, my mother was born and raised in this city. She’s eighty-three now, and she’s a real historian about these parts of North Carolina. Used to be a docent in the museum downtown, and can rattle off information about the area all the way from before the Civil War.”

Drake sighed, bored.

Lois forged ahead. “Anyway, I asked her about Sandstone and the families who used to live up there. A few of those houses have been passed down from generation to generation. You know, before developers came in and started buying up properties and building new vacation homes.”

“And?” Drake said, to keep Lois on message.

“Well, she recalls that back after the war ended, in ’forty-four, a professor from some fancy university in Boston moved into the old McCaw residence. Pity they had to sell out back then, but they lost both sons in the war.” She shrugged her plump shoulders. “So this old man
was a recluse. Didn’t have anything to do with anybody. Wouldn’t let anyone on his property except the grocery delivery boy. In those days, there was a store at the foot of the mountain and they’d bring orders up to you. Not like today.”

Drake was growing impatient listening to Lois ramble. “What happened to him? Did he have a daughter?”

“No kin. Just him. Mama said the house burned down in the mid-fifties, and the old man died in the fire.”

Drake gritted his teeth. He was over hearing Lois’s meaningless story.

Connie asked, “What happened to the house?”

“Don’t know,” Lois said.

Exasperated, Drake sank into the pillow. He didn’t know one thing more about Gina than he had the day he’d gotten sick.

Drake was cleared to return to school, and Connie sent him off with a list of Mother’s dos and don’ts. As soon as he was in his car, he ditched school and headed up Sandstone. The higher up he drove, the more he saw the colors of autumn. He remembered once hearing “Spring marches up the mountain, autumn flows down it.” He understood the meaning now. Bright red and orange leaves exploded on tree limbs. In the valley, where he lived, the trees were barely tinged with color. Overhead the sky was brilliant blue, and the air was so clear and clean it stung his lungs.

The road veering off to the Dennisons’ was littered with leaves and branches. No wonder his mother hadn’t been able to get there. He ended up parking far from his original summer space and making a slow laborious climb over felled rotting trees. They looked as if they’d been there for years instead of only a few weeks.

By the time he reached the bend in the path to the Dennisons’ property, his bad leg ached and his lungs burned, but his longing for Gina drove him beyond his pain. He caught his breath, straightened, rounded the bend. He stopped cold. In front of him lay the property and the grand old house in ruins.

D
rake went numb with shock. The house lay broken, wooden walls ripped and charred down to the stone walls black with soot. The roof was completely caved in, the turret looking as if some giant’s hand had clawed it apart. The white picket fence where Gina met him every day was gray with age, the paint chipped and peeling, sections of it lying on the ground. The wisteria vine was so overgrown he would have needed a machete to get through it.

Drake limped toward the broken hulk of what had once been Gina’s beautiful home, stepped over a section of the downed fence, plowed his way through overgrown weeds that only weeks before had been a lush green lawn. Maybe he was going crazy. Maybe his summer job had never happened. Maybe everything had been an illusion—the work and Gina, Gina, Gina.

He stopped in front of the cracked and broken porch,
now impossible to navigate. Lizards rustled over burned boards and small animals scurried out of his way. Dazed, Drake heard Lois’s words: “… burned to the ground in the mid-fifties.”

And then he remembered the last thing Dennison had said to him before taking Gina back into the house. “There’s a large rock on the back corner of the property. Look for it later.” It had made no sense. And yet …

Drake took his time walking beside the ruined house along what had been the path he’d taken into the gardens. There were no gardens now, just weeds and brush, dead growths that he couldn’t recognize as ever having been flowers. He found tangles of thorny rosebushes, all dead. He passed the weathered bench where he and Gina had sat for summer lunches and stolen kisses. A fist-sized lump clogged his throat.

The back line of the property was semicircular, with the largest area marked by tree stumps and a sheer drop into autumn-colored woods. He hiked the long perimeter, his leg in spasms. In a far back corner, Drake found a wedge of jutting stone. It stood a good four feet high and held faded charcoal markings in the shape of an arrowhead, pointing down. Goose bumps skittered up his back. He’d handled a lot of arrowheads during his summer job. Someone had left him a message.

He searched the ground for a sturdy stick, found one and began to poke the area surrounding the rock. Nothing. “Deeper,” he told himself. With two hands, he shoved
the stick hard into layers of dead leaves and dirt. The stick hit something solid. More rock? Drake shifted awkwardly to his knees and dug through the rotting wet foliage with his bare hands. He touched the surface of something hard and smooth. With the stick he pried a rusty metal box from the earth.

He scraped dirt off the top, saw that it was the old square breadbox that had once sat on the Dennisons’ kitchen counter. With shaking hands Drake hammered the stuck lid off with a nearby stone. Inside was Gina’s sewing kit, musty-smelling, brittle with moisture. There was also a long envelope, better preserved because it had been wrapped in a thick layer of plastic wrap. He stroked the sewing basket, unable for the moment to open it. Instead he unwrapped the envelope and with cold dirt-covered fingers unsealed it. The words were written in Dennison’s distinctive flowing handwriting. Drake sat in the old leaves, leaned up against the big rock and read.

Drake stopped, reread the last sentence. Time portal? Was the professor joking? Making an excuse for taking Gina away? And yet Drake had to admit that the clock had been weird—beyond weird.

Drake paused. Gina had been real. All that had happened to them had been real. And the “days” he’d spent holding her, loving her, had also happened, with mere hours stretched somehow by the clock’s bending of time.

Drake shuddered, thinking how close he’d come to destroying Gina. He shivered against the autumn chill, glanced at his cell phone, now working perfectly. Although it was practically noon, the sunlight offered no warmth.

Drake’s vision blurred and he stopped reading. She was gone … very close to a hundred years gone. But he had held her, kissed her, loved her. And she’d taken his heart with her.

Again Drake stopped reading, all but blinded with tears. He vowed to go to the address Dennison provided and visit Gina’s grave one day. He took a shaky breath and returned to reading the letter.