It had always been hard for me to believe in things I couldn’t see with my own eyes; I had always been skeptical about everything I read in a book. Nonfiction could be as fanciful as fiction to me when I considered that those books were written by people who were simply telling me something they’d read or heard somewhere else. I suppose it’s why I’ve found it hard to believe in God, and share Eddie’s faith. If I can’t see it, I’ve got a problem with its existence. I mean, I believe in germs, even though I can’t see them with my naked eye, because they are at least there to be seen under a microscope.
If only, if only, God could be seen under the microscope.
There were more abstract things I believed in, even though I couldn’t see them or understand them, like electricity and how it makes bulbs light up, or aerodynamics and how those forces get an airplane off the ground, but the physical results of those things were evidence enough for me.
All this in an effort to explain that I had always, always, trusted my senses. I pressed my toes into the carpet and touched the needles on the Christmas tree. I jiggled one of the ornaments and heard the tiny bell ring inside it. I licked my lips and tasted salt, and a tiny bit of blood; when I closed my eyes and breathed in hard, I could smell my childhood home. A sensation that can’t be described but is as distinct as the pattern on the wallpaper.
Never before had I mistrusted my senses in the face of such overwhelming evidence. If I could see it, smell it, hear it, feel it, and taste it, then it had to be real. But now my sense of reality was reversed; the confirmation of my physical surroundings was giving me proof of something that I knew simply couldn’t be true. I had never had such unequivocal, solid proof of something being real, yet at the same time not believed in it. I wasn’t sure I had enough faith to believe in what every single sense was screaming at me: that the only possible truth, impossible as it might be to accept, was that I had traveled back in time. That was the most reasonable explanation I could come up with. And for a woman who thinks God is farfetched, that was really something.
* * *
I CONSIDERED THE strangeness of my immediate situation: it was nighttime and I was in someone else’s house, they were probably asleep, and if they found me it was going to be difficult. And when I say “they,” I am of course talking about my mother. My mother. My heart stopped for a moment, skipped a beat, then it pounded hard. Would I see my mother again? Was she upstairs?
The issue of getting home again, by which I mean back to Eddie and the girls, hadn’t hit me until I reasoned with myself that I must be in the past. I don’t feel comfortable when my children are out of arm’s reach or shouting distance. I’m only truly at ease when I’m in the same building as them. The only exception is when I know they’re with Eddie, because he’s the only other person in the world who loves them like I do. And there, I suppose, is the most faith I have in the world: when I can’t see my children but know they’re with Eddie, for me, that’s faith. A version of fear rose up and filled every cell of my body, a fear like no other that I might never see my children again. The times I had lost sight of them as they turned the corner at the end of a supermarket aisle; the time Evie wandered off in a shopping center and security locked all the doors, and I wailed, “What if she’s already outside of those doors?”; all the imaginings I’d had, daily, of every possible thing that could go wrong, that might mean they were lost from me forever—those imaginings were nothing compared to this.
This time everything was different because it was me who was lost. They couldn’t find me, and I couldn’t reach out to them. If I became a prisoner in time, then my daughters—like my mother—would be relegated to memory only, and I would be relegated to theirs. I was suffocating with fear, which forced me to engage a level of faith I had never required before. The girls were with Eddie, but I was not in a different building or a different country, I was in a different year. The fact that I was thirty years removed from my daughters made everything go gray, and the air buzzed in my ears, and my arm swam about looking for something to hold on to.
I crouched down and pressed my hands to the floor. It struck me like a hammer that if I couldn’t get home to my children, then I was like a mother who had died suddenly, leaving her most beloved to the care of others. And so I prayed that Eddie would be safe and well and strong, because my girls needed him. I tried to remember the last moments I’d spent with them: in the study; it was good. It would be a good memory for them, of me. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured Esther and Evie in my mind’s eye. “I’m going to get back to you,” I whispered.
I stood slowly, my hands on my hips. I swayed, but I was okay. “I got here,” I said out loud in a shaky voice, “I can get home again.” I was being my own air hostess, the only woman on board who could reassure me that I would, at some point, make it back to the place I started. And I didn’t quite trust her unsteady voice, but what choice did I have?
I felt the need to safeguard the box: it was my ride home, my ticket to see my children again—or so I hoped—so no wonder I had the presence of mind to protect it.
* * *
ALTHOUGH IT WAS dark, I knew my way around the house; I took a right and went to the kitchen, unlocked the back door. The rush of freezing air bolstered my conviction that I was neither dead, in a coma, nor dreaming in any way whatsoever. I was in my bra and jeans and bare feet, having lost Eddie’s sweater on the fall here, and I hobbled down a little path to the garden shed knowing the washing line was running parallel to my right. The bolt on the shed door had always been a bit stiff and I knew just how to wiggle it loose. I threw the Space Hopper box inside and bolted the door again before returning to the house. I didn’t lock the kitchen door in case I needed to get out quickly. I braced myself by the sink for a moment, then did the thing my heart was longing to do: I went up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom.
In her doorway, I hesitated. The room was dark, but predawn light bathed the room, making it gray rather than black. I was half in fear that she might be awake, and half in fear that it wouldn’t be my mother in the bed; so that was 100 percent fear of one kind or another. I could tell from her breathing that she was asleep. I’d been holding my own breath and it came out as a shudder; my mouth was dry, palms damp. Could I be about to see my mother for the first time in thirty years, a mother I had known in all that time only as being dead? Hope rushed through my veins, while the rest of me was paralyzed. I hoped, I prayed, for the impossible.
Summoning movement, I padded round to her side of the bed, crouching down.
My mother’s sleeping face. I took a sharp gasp. Her lips were slightly parted and her breath touched me, soft and warm, the very essence of alive. This is my mother’s breath, remember this, I thought. Her light-brown hair swept across her forehead. She had longish bangs and looked as if she’d dreamed about standing at the front of a ship at sea, letting the breeze do what it wanted with her. I looked at the miracle of her eyelashes, and her fingers that were curled under her cheek. I leaned closer, to smell her skin, and my eyes filled with tears: her face cream, a hint of roses. I had smelled the exact same scent on a lady in the supermarket once, and had followed her for a bit.