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“You are a vessel, not a mother. Just a whore in a nun’s habit. You played your part. Now turn over the child.”
Mom closed her eyes, and I thought she might tell me to come out. Instead, she said with her voice shaky from fear or anger, “He’s not here.”
As a child, I frowned for a second. Moms didn’t lie, so it took a fraction of a second for me to realize she lied to him to protect me.
“When will he return?” the bad man asked.
“I don’t know.”
For all his name-calling, he believed her too because he said, “But he will return with that sinner he believes is his father.”
My father, the man who’d raised me until this point, wasn’t home. He and my mother had married to help each other. Mom had been pregnant and unmarried. He’d been unmarried with a boyfriend. They’d each needed each other to survive life here in Charleston in the late 1600s when the town had been created.
One night long before this moment, I’d caught Daddy’s boyfriend in his bed. The next morning my parents explained everything to me. And with no friends for me to tell, their secret was safe with me.
“Yes,” I heard Mom say in answer to Michael’s question.
This was the point I should have realized I was different. And I probably did. In the wake of the coming trauma, I’d chosen to forget the truth of what followed. The lie I’d lived was because the truth was unbearable. I suspected my recent acceptance of what I was had unlocked the memory I was now ready to remember.
There was not even a second between the S of “yes” leaving my mother’s mouth, and Michael wielding his sword. Instinct sent me bursting out of my hiding place and over to Mom. Only I wasn’t fast enough. The bad man’s sword plunged through her chest like a knife through butter. And though I’d grabbed her hand as I slid over to her like a baseball player to home plate, it wasn’t her physical form I’d caught on to. But I had been just a child, and I didn’t realize what I’d done as I flung us forward in time.
The 1600s weren’t kind to people like my mom and dad. A nun who found herself pregnant. A man who loved other men. I landed Mom and me in the 2000s. The house still stood and looked mostly the same in structure. The hallway now had the painted walls and the handmade table was gone and replaced with something pleasant to look at but wasn’t made with the same materials and workmanship of the past.
Back in the body of my present, I sat rocking in the middle of the hallway with tears spilling from my eyes. I didn’t know then I’d been a child who had no one in the world, not alive anyway.
At that point, I hadn’t realized that I could interact with ghosts in a way that gave them physical form. Mom’s spirit didn’t want to leave me either. She’d known what she was but loved me enough to play along as if everything was fine.
She’d created rules like not leaving the house because a child of nine on their own would be noticed. Because I wasn’t fully human, I didn’t need to eat and drink in the same way humans needed it for survival. It explained why I hadn’t needed to eat much in my recent past.
Not needing to sleep, Mom used her ability to travel through walls and not be seen to learn about our new point in time. She found out the rules of the twenty-first century by listening to our neighbors and finding legal papers in the house that left it to a trust that belonged to me. There would be more time to figure out how those papers came to be. It was likely that at some point in my current future, I traveled through time and left what was needed, knowing what would happen. I couldn’t say for sure because I hadn’t experienced that yet.
When I lay back against the wall, back in my current body, no longer a child, and sobbed, Mom floated over to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, which I seemed to be saying a lot lately. “I trapped you here. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” she whispered. “You saved us both.”
I wasn’t sure I believed that but I’d needed her then as much as I needed her now. Yet, it was time for me to be selfless for her. “I think I know how to send you where you need to be.”
There was someone else I needed to find. Rebecca. I needed to fix that problem, too.
The quickening in my belly happened again, and I covered my hand over the spot.
“Elin,” Mom gasped. “Are you pregnant?”
