Thick-fingered and clumsy, fighting every impulse, I exchange my bowl for the empty one beside me. The woman sitting there begins to eat greedily, sending droplets of it flying.
Evil, says my mother’s voice in my head. Whatever’s in that bowl might kill her.
It’s not evil, I argue. If I don’t figure this out, it might kill us all.
Such convenient logic, my mother replies.
And I have no response to that, because this time she’s right.
By the time the meal ends, the pounding in my head is worse and my skin is clammy. We are pushed down a long hall, into another gray, windowless room lined with cots, which the women move toward as if this is home. I know mine too, somehow.
My head hurts so much that my stomach rolls in response. I lie down, waiting for it to pass. When my eyes open, the room is dark, but I can make out the face of the woman on the cot next to mine.
Marie.
I whisper her name. My throat does not seem to work right. The word is garbled, and she doesn’t respond. “Marie,” I repeat. Nothing.
I close my eyes, sick again, longing to be anywhere else, longing for Henri. And then I am with him, watching as he slides into the bathtub, lean-muscled, still tan from summer. He holds his hands out for me. “Give me the pitcher,” he says. “I’ll wash your hair.”
I climb in and sit between his legs, my back to his. “That’s very Out of Africa of you.”
He raises a brow. “What’s African? Washing your hair?”
I laugh. “No. It’s this movie with…never mind. You don’t know who they are. Anyway, the guy washes the woman’s hair. It’s very erotic.”
His hands slide around me to cup my breasts. “I’m glad you think so.”
The water sloshes as my knees fall open. “Do you want more?” he asks, his hand sliding down my torso.
“Yes,” I groan, but suddenly I begin to shake. I’m hot. Sick. This is not the way this is supposed to go. Not the way it happened the first time.
“Sarah?” he asks, his voice urgent. “What’s wrong?”
I flail in the water, sending it spinning over the lip of the tub. My insides are twisting. “Don’t know,” I murmur. “Make it stop.”
This is all wrong. I remember the afternoon vividly. I remember how Henri used his hands on me in the tub until I came, with my head pressed to his chest, and how he carried me to the mattress afterward, too impatient to even let us dry off.
But instead I am curled into a ball against him, hot and shivering at once, and I’m hearing that noise again, that awful noise. “Henri, make it stop,” I beg, clutching my hands to my head. “I don’t know where I am.”
My eyes open and I’m back in the dark room with the shrieking noise, sweating, breathing too fast. My shift clings to me, twists around my legs. No, I think. I don’t want to be here. Please don’t let me be here. Let me be back with Henri.
And then I am. He’s perched beside me on our bed with his hand on my brow. “It came out of nowhere,” he’s saying. “She was fine and now she’s like this. It’s been hours.”
I don’t understand, I want to weep. What’s happening to me? Why am I in two places at once and sick in both of them?
“It’s just a fever,” soothes Marie, leaning over us. “You’re as panicked as a new father.”
“It’s more than that,” Henri argues, running his hand through my hair. “She keeps telling me you’re with her, saying there’s something in the stew.”
“Stew,” I whisper. “Don’t eat. Trap.”
She smiles at me over his head as if I’m a sleepy toddler. “We haven’t had stew in weeks,” she says. “You’re dreaming.”
My eyes open in the dark room once more. Marie is on the pillow across from mine, unmoving, her lips bled of color.
“No,” I reply, though no one is listening. “I think I’m the only one who’s awake.”
All night I’m feverish, going from Henri to the room with the cots, uncertain which of them is real. I’m awakened the next day by a guard who slams his gun against a metal pipe to rouse us. I’m shaking so hard it’s a struggle to climb from the bed, and I do so too slowly for the guard’s liking. I’ve just pushed myself to standing when he plants his boot in my stomach, sending me flying backward. I go to my hands and knees, certain I will throw up.
“I should put a bullet in her head,” he says to the other guard. “She’ll be dead by morning anyway.”
I push to my feet and nearly fall in my haste to join the other women. I follow them down a long, poorly lit hallway, all metal and concrete block—back to the cafeteria, where we line up like lambs to the slaughter.
They push gruel at us instead of stew this morning, but my mouth waters with desire for it just the same. I pretend to eat, and when the woman next to me empties her bowl, I replace it with my full one.
“Watch them carefully today,” says a guard who passes only a moment later. “They’re decreasing the sedative. The ones we’re looking for will be the first to wake.”
The ones they’re looking for. I know this means I need to be careful, even though it’s not me they’re after, but I can’t. Fighting my desire for the gruel and that noise overhead, that noise that never goes away, has exhausted me. My eyes close, despite my best intentions, and remain so until I feel Henri’s palm on my forehead. My eyes flicker open to find that I’m in our bed, the curtains drawn but sunlight sliding through the cracks around them.
I want to ask him why this is happening. I want to ask him if I’m being punished for my sister’s death. Or perhaps just the hundreds of times I used time travel to get myself ahead—to finish a paper I’d forgotten, to learn something I didn’t know would be on the test, or when I needed tuition money,
All because of time travel, I want to tell him. My mother was right. Don’t let us make this journey.
But the words never come. A sentence in my head becomes only a gasp, a single syllable, as it exits my mouth.
Doctor Nadeau leans over me, his brow furrowed. “She’s been poisoned,” he concludes. “I’ll give her castor oil to bring it back up.”
Henri stiffens. “Poisoned? How?”
“Mushrooms, juniper berries, even too many apple cores maybe,” says Doctor Nadeau. “She’s American, yes? Perhaps it’s not common knowledge there.”
I’ve never seen Henri look as desperate as he does right now. He knows something else is going on—he just has no idea what it is.
Help me, I think, and his hands go to the sides of my face.
“Tell me what you need,” he begs, as if he’s heard my words. “Tell me what to do.”
The shrieking catches my attention and pulls me away before I can answer, if I was even capable of answering. My eyes open to find I’m back in the cafeteria and being pushed toward the door. What just happened? Was I hallucinating, or was I—sort of—in two places at once?
There’s a faint taste of castor oil in my mouth, but it’s not until my stomach starts churning in response to it that I have my answer. I was, somehow, in two places simultaneously. I have no idea how it’s possible, and I don’t know why that shrieking noise doesn’t entirely keep me in place. At this exact moment, I wish it would, though. We enter the hall and the first wave of nausea hits. I walk faster, but the women shuffle so slowly I can’t go anywhere. When we turn a corner I vomit, letting it fall in a trail to my right as I walk.