A Year Without Autumn (13 page)

I walk toward it and catch my breath. My heart’s thumping hard in my chest as I step carefully inside and slide the doors closed behind me, slicing away the light. I can’t see the buttons properly. I fumble along the walls, the numbers slowly growing clearer as my eyes get used to the dim light. My body is alive with prickles zinging up and down, lighting up every nerve ending in my back, my neck, my arms.

I know it’s impossible. I know it can’t be true. But I also know it
is
true. It happened; there’s no other explanation.

The elevator didn’t only take me up a floor — it took me up a year as well.

What if Autumn had lived on the third floor and I’d gone up two floors to see her? Would it have taken me forward two years instead of one?

Perhaps another year on from that awful time, things will get back to normal. Perhaps we’ll all be happy again.

I need to know.

The buttons are clearly visible now that my eyes have gotten used to the gloom. As I stare at them, I know there’s only one way to answer the questions shooting around my mind.

With a shaking arm, I reach out, and press the button marked
3.

The elevator stops. I drag the doors open, run to the hallway, and check the condo numbers: 310, 311, 312 . . .

I run down the stairs. At the second floor, I pause and look down toward Autumn’s old condo. Before I’ve even thought about it, I’m marching along the hallway. I’m not going to wimp out this time. I need to ask some straight questions — and I need some honest answers.

I stop outside unit 210. My chest feels as though there’s someone inside it, banging their fists on my ribs. I knock three times on the door, and a second later it flies open.

“It’s you! I
knew
you’d come back!” Mrs. Smith smiles broadly and grabs me. She pulls me toward her, squashing me in a tight, bony hug.

I pull away. “What’s that about?” I ask, stepping back to look at her. Is she older? It’s hard to tell. She’s wearing different clothes but —

That’s when I realize. My clothes. I look down at my exposed ankles, my jeans stopping a good two inches short of my shoes, my wrists bare where my T-shirt sleeves stops.

“Come on in, Jenni.” Mrs. Smith holds the door open for me.

“Can I use your bathroom?” I ask. I need to be sure. She motions me into the condo.

In the bathroom, I stare at myself. It’s
so
weird. It’s as if I’m looking at myself, but looking at someone else at the same time. It’s hard to even put my finger on what’s different. My face looks about the same. A bit thinner, perhaps. My hair’s still quite short, but it’s got tinges of color in it. Highlights? Mom’s let me dye my hair? Well, that’s one good thing, anyway. It suits me.

This is me at fourteen. This is what I’ll look like. I can’t stop staring.

“You all right in there, Jenni?”

I haven’t got time to sit around examining my looks! I need to sort this out. “Coming,” I call.

She’s waiting for me at the kitchen table, a couple of glasses of orange juice in front of her. She points to one of them. “I got you some juice,” she says with a nervous laugh. “Not just water like last time.”

I sit down. “Thanks,” I say, taking a sip.

She watches me drink. “About last time,” she says. “I’m sorry I was so awful to you.”

“You weren’t awful,” I say quickly.

She shakes her head. “No, I was. Jenni. Please let me apologize.” She smiles, and her eyes are so full of sadness and regret that I instantly want to give her whatever she needs.

“OK,” I say. “Thank you.”

“I thought you were playing a joke on me, you see. But then the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I was wrong — and then it was too late to do anything about it. I prayed you would come back,” she says. “I couldn’t come to you. Couldn’t say what I wanted to say in front of your family and friends. I wanted to tell you everything.”

“Tell me what?”

“After you came here . . .”

“Last year?” I ask. I realize I’m holding my breath while I wait for her to answer.

“Yes,” she says. “Last year.”

My heart thuds to a stop. I thought she knew the truth. I must have misunderstood her. “But —”

“Or in your case”— Mrs. Smith leans forward and peers into my face —“yesterday.”

“Really? You know?” I swallow hard.

“Yes — I know it all,” she says in a whisper. “I probably knew the first time you came around. I wasn’t going to admit it, though. Not to you at any rate, not even to myself. I mean, it’s not possible, is it?”

“No,” I say numbly.
She understands! She believes me!

Mrs. Smith holds my eyes with her gaze. For a long time, neither of us says anything. Then she takes a quick breath and speaks quickly. “You lost a year, didn’t you? The rest of the world carried on, leaving you behind — and you don’t know where it went or how to get back. And it happened right here.” She leans forward, sliding my glass out of the way to take hold of my hands. “It’s true, isn’t it?” she says, her eyes as tight as her voice. “I’m not just a rambling old fool. Tell me I’m not. Tell me I haven’t lost my mind, Jenni. Tell me it really happened.”

“I . . . How did you know I was telling the truth? What made you so certain I wasn’t playing a trick on you?”

Her grip tightens on my hand. “It is true, then?”

I nod. “Yes, it’s true,” I say.

She gets up from her chair, crossing to the kitchen sink. Looking out the window, she carries on almost to herself, as though she’s forgotten I’m there. “How could I explain it? How do you explain something that makes no sense at all?”

“You — you — how . . . ?” I can’t finish the question. I don’t even know what I’m trying to ask.

“How did I know it had really happened to you as you said?” She smiles sadly. “I saw it in your eyes. The shock, the disbelief, the questions. I’ve only ever seen that expression once in my life.” She looks up at me. “And you know when that was, don’t you?”

I suddenly realize what she’s saying. At least I think I do. . . .

“It was when I saw my own reflection,” she says. “How do you explain something like that? I was just a child, like you. I had no idea what was going on, no one to explain. I couldn’t tell anyone.” She slides back into her chair, facing me. “Do you understand, Jenni? No one. No way of knowing what had happened, how, why . . . nothing. A year of my life gone. And all I knew was this: it happened here.”

“You came here as a child? But I didn’t think this place existed then.”

“It didn’t. Not like this, anyway. It was a hotel. Did you know that?”

I shake my head.

“Just this building. The rest has been built around it over the years. Dilapidated little place it was, back then. My parents brought us here every year.”

“So what happened?” I ask.

“I was thirteen years old. Nearly fourteen. Always wanting to be older, wishing my life away. If only I’d known. I remember the night before it happened. I’d been reading a book about a girl who traveled back in time, and I thought, wouldn’t it be marvelous to be able to travel through time?”

That was what I’d done too! When it happened, I’d just been wishing I could see into the future!

“We always celebrated my birthday here at the hotel,” Mrs. Smith continues. “I’d been out with my friends in the afternoon, and I came back home to our room. As soon as I walked in the door, I knew something was wrong. Celebrations were taking place — but they were the wrong ones.”

“The wrong ones?”

“The cards. The first one was from my grandparents. I thought they’d made a mistake.
Happy Birthday, darling granddaughter. Fifteen today.
I showed it to my mother, laughing. Said to her, look what they’ve gone and done. She gave me a strange look. Open the rest of your cards, she said. So I did. I tore the next one open. It was from my auntie Gladys and uncle Frank.”

“And it was the same?”

She nods. “Fifteen today. All of them. It wasn’t funny after a while. Wasn’t funny at all.”

“And then you saw yourself?”

“I’ll never forget it, as long as I live. Mother had given me a hairbrush set. It was beautiful. Gold trimmings and padded on the back with a picture of an old English sheepdog.” She pauses. “There was a hand mirror. That was when I knew for sure. One look. Dropped the mirror right out of my hands. It smashed to pieces right there on the table. Mother was angry.”

“Seven years’ bad luck,” I murmur.

“Oh, I had much more than that, Jenni. That was just the start of it. Anyway, I went to the bathroom, tried to calm myself down.”

“Just like me,” I say. “And it made it worse?”

“Absolutely. Seeing my reflection like that. It was like a funhouse hall of mirrors. Looking at yourself, but it’s not really yourself, not the person you know. It’s a freaky distortion, a shadow stretched by late-afternoon sun. Or a hallucination, a nightmare. You try to peer at it sideways, try to catch it out. But it won’t be caught.”

“So then what happened?”

“When I came back out, my parents had put the cards up on the mantelpiece. They thought it would cheer me up. Well, they had no idea what was going on, did they? All they could see was that I was unhappy. So they tried to make it better. You know what I did?”

I shake my head.

“Tore them all down. Wiped them off the ledge, then I ripped them into shreds. Every last one. Screaming all the while. Nearly smashed the whole place up. I thought I was losing my mind. So did my parents. They were so worried, for a while at any rate.”

“Why only for a while?”

Mrs. Smith reaches down to brush invisible crumbs from her dress. “I gave in, eventually. Played along.”

“What do you mean ‘played along’? What did you do?”

She lets out a heavy sigh. “After a couple of weeks, I told them I’d made the whole thing up, that it was all about trying to get attention. What else could I do? I couldn’t keep putting them through that anguish, so I made up a lie that they were happy to believe —
desperate
to believe. And then I kept on lying. Said I remembered everything. Told them everything was normal, apologized, got on with my life.”

“With your new life, a year ahead of the one you knew?”

“Exactly. It got easier, you know. It does. The gaps are easy to fill in. You just have to learn how to do it. Ask the right questions, in the right way, and people will tell you everything you need to know.” She turns away, but not before I’ve noticed that the edges of her eyes are damp. “Or nearly everything.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean, you can lie to others; you can even lie to yourself. You can very nearly convince yourself things aren’t really how you see them, didn’t really happen, haven’t sent you to the very edge of your sanity. But I’ll tell you something, Jenni.”

“What?” I hold my breath.

“You can’t lie to your spirit.” She clenches her teeth, raising her head in a defiant nod. “When you try to do that, you die inside, Jenni.”

“Is that what you did?”

She tightens her jaw. “I didn’t just lose a year. I lost everything.” She half smiles as she looks out the window. “I was in love with him. I was going to tell him that night.”

“In love with who?”

“I said to myself, once I’m fourteen, I’ll tell him. Every year, I saw him. I knew he was the one. Right from the start. But I thought, you can’t be in love at ten years old, or eleven or twelve or even thirteen. That’s what they all said, anyway. My parents laughed at me. My friends thought I was crazy. Boys! They weren’t interested in
boys
! Well, neither was I, really. Not boys. Just the one boy. I told myself, as soon as I’m fourteen, I’m going to tell him.”

“Why fourteen?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve asked myself that a thousand times. I don’t know. It just sounded older. Old enough. And I thought, if he feels the same way, we’ll get married someday, and then we’ll be together forever. Every day, every week, not just one week out of fifty-two.”

“So what happened?”

“I’d seen him the night before. He tried to kiss me. Well, he’d kissed me before, on my cheek. Lots of times. But it was different this time, I knew it was. He leaned right forward toward me, closed his eyes . . .”

“And?”

“And I ducked. Jerked away from him. You should have seen his face. Looked as though I’d slapped him. I said, ‘No, don’t kiss me yet. Not till tomorrow.’ ‘What happens tomorrow?’ he asked. I said, ‘It’s my birthday. I’ll be grown up tomorrow. You can kiss me then.’”

“What did he say?”

“He said I was making excuses. Said I didn’t really want him to kiss me, and if that was how I felt, then he wouldn’t bother. I told him, ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong!’ but he stormed off.” She tears her gaze away from the window and turns to me. “I wanted it to be special, you see. I had it all planned. I had to be fourteen. I’d convinced myself of that, for some stupid, stupid reason. I was going to tell him I was in love with him. It was going to be perfect.”

“And?”

“He never tried again.”

“To kiss you?”

“Next time I saw him, I’d lost a year. He hardly spoke to me. Kept walking past me, holding hands with another girl. He stopped to kiss
her
once, right in front of me. I saw his eyes, though. Open, they were, right there as he kissed her.
See,
he was saying.
I can get kisses if I want them.
”

“But didn’t you tell him?”

Mrs. Smith laughs drily. “Tell him? Tell him what? That I was sorry but I’d accidentally lost a year of my life and could we pick where we left off? Think he’d have taken me seriously? Anyway, I did try actually. Just once.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I hadn’t meant to push him away that time. Said I wasn’t rejecting him. Told him I couldn’t really remember what had happened afterward, and I tried to get him to tell me — to help me fill in the blanks.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me I’d said the same thing before, and he wasn’t going to suddenly give me a different reply now. I could only assume he meant that in the year I had no recollection of, I’d tried to explain what had happened that night. But it was obvious he wasn’t having any of it. He told me to let him get on with his life. I said I didn’t want him to get on with anything.”