Come Down In Time (A Time Travel Romance) (11 page)

Tommy put his jeans on and zipped
them up. He buckled his belt.

“
I can’t wait until we’re
married and don’t have to answer to anyone else,” he said.

“
Me either,” she said. “It
won’t be long.”

He kissed her on the path, and he
started down one way, and she the other. She turned around once,
before he was lost to her sight, and said, “I love you, Tommy.”
He waved at her. “I love you, too, sugar.”

Jamie and Tommy had been given a
second chance.

Chapter
Eight

“
Don’t move,” Jamie’s
mother said around the pins in her mouth. Jamie stood on a stool and
her mother sat on the floor, pinning up the hem of her wedding dress.
She wore the white lace-up ankle boots she had chosen so the hem
would be right. Her mother put pins into the hem. “Now turn just a
little,” she said. Jamie turned as her mother instructed. Around
and around she went until her mother had placed the last pin in the
hem.

Jamie stepped down from the
stool. “Can I take it off now?” she asked.

“
Yes. Bring it right back down
so I can get started. Your wedding’s in a week. There’s so much
to do!”

“
It’ll all work out, Mom,”
Jamie said as she headed for the stairs. She stopped and looked at
her mother standing in the den. “I love you, Mom,” she said.

“
I love you too, honey,” her
mother said. “A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.”

Tears sprang to Jamie’s eyes
when her mother said that. She used to tell her that all the time
when she was little. She went upstairs and took the wedding gown off.
It was exactly what Jamie wanted. She couldn’t have found it in a
store. She and her mother had gone to Nashville trying to find the
right dress, but Jamie wasn’t satisfied with any of them.

“
Mom,” she said tearfully on
the drive home from Nashville. “None of those dresses are right for
me.”

“
Tell me what you want,” her
mother said. “I’ll make it for you.”

So Jamie explained as best she
could the kind of dress that she wanted. “I like old-fashioned,”
she said. “With maybe eyelet material. I want three-quarter
sleeves. I want the skirt to be plain off-white gauzy material, and
the top to be off-white eyelet material. I want the neck to be
scooped, maybe scalloped a little. I want a simple dress that fits
who I am.”

“
Do you think you can find a
pattern like that?” her mother said. “I feel like I need a
pattern. Can you go on the Internet and find something like what you
want?

When they got back home, Jamie
sat at her computer and started searching. She looked through a lot
of patterns and finally found a style that suited her. It was simple
but elegant. It would follow the lines of her body. She printed the
page and took it to her mother.

“
This is what I want,” she
said.

“
This is Simplicity,” her
mother said. “I can go into town and get this pattern tomorrow. You
should go with me so we can choose the fabric.”

Jamie hugged her mother. “Thanks,
Mom. You’re the best mother ever.”

And now, Jamie hung her wedding
gown on a padded hanger and put her jeans back on. She took the dress
down to her mother, who took it out of her hands and walked into the
den. “I’m going to get this hem done tonight,” she said as she
sat on the couch.

“
I’ll make supper,” Jamie
said. “You don’t need to be fooling with that.”

Her mother looked at her
gratefully. “Thanks, honey,” she said.

Tommy picked her up after supper
and drove to the cottage near his grandparents’ farmhouse. They had
been working for the past three weeks to get it habitable for them.
The slat wood walls had been painted a fresh creamy color and the
wooden floors had been scrubbed and waxed.

Tommy took her hand and led her
to the one bedroom. Her eyes lit up when she saw the iron bed with a
new pale green comforter on top, a hand-made quilt folded at the
bottom.

“
Granny helped me pick out the
sheets and stuff,” he said. “She said it needed to be right for
you to move in.”

Jamie walked over to the bed and
fell back on it. The mattress was soft and welcoming. The antique
bedside tables had been cleaned and waxed. She turned on the old
Victorian style lamp by the bed. “Come here,” she said.

“
Let me lock the door first,”
Tommy said. He left the room but came back in less than a minute. He
lay back on the bed with her.

“
This is going to be our bed,”
Jamie said. “I love it.”

Tommy put his leg over her and
kissed her. They undressed each other slowly as they kissed and felt
each other, caressed each other. Nothing can be as good as this,
Jamie thought as Tommy came into her. Nothing. Nate and 2013 were
very far from her mind. She had decided that Tommy’s accident and
medical school and Nate were the dream. She was living in reality
now. This was the real life, the tangible life. She could touch it.
She could feel it.

On June 23
^rd
, Jamie
held on to her father’s arm and walked down the straw path in
Tommy’s garden. When they reached the far side of the garden and
the pasture beyond it, people were sitting in chairs on both sides of
the path. Tommy stood at an arbor of roses he had been growing for
several years. She took Tommy’s arm and her father sat down on the
front row of seats.

Pastor Rickens from the Baker
Baptist Church performed the ceremony, which was traditional. But
Tommy had told the pastor beforehand, when they were having
pre-marital counseling, that he did not want the word “obey” in
the ceremony. Pastor Rickens had laughed then. “We don’t do that
anymore, son.”

After the reception and the
bird-seed throwing, Jamie and Tommy drove to the beach in Georgia and
spent a week in the sand and water. They consummated their marriage
as soon as they got in their cottage, and then many times after that
during the week. They ate seafood every night and spent the days on
chaise lounges under an umbrella. Wait staff came out periodically to
replenish their drinks. They held onto each other in the water,
kissing, tasting the salty ocean. They couldn’t get enough of each
other.

When the week was over, they
drove back to Baker tanned and happy. They played the radio loudly
and sang along with every word they knew. Even the words they didn’t
know. They sang and laughed. They stopped at a fast-food
drive-through and ate onion rings and barbeque sandwiches as they
drove down the road to home.

Tommy spent his days working on
the cash crops with his grandfather. Jamie spent her days tending the
acre of organic vegetables that was Tommy’s garden, and now her
garden. In the afternoons, she usually walked up to the farmhouse to
visit with Granny. She was the sweetest woman, and she showed Jamie
how to can vegetables. It was a skill and one that Jamie needed to
know. She worked with Granny, taking the skin off the tomatoes by
boiling them for a minute, then plunging the fat red fruit into big
bowls of ice water. They were so busy canning tomatoes or making
pickles that often Tommy and his grandfather came inside for the day
as the cans were beginning to pop, letting her and Granny know they
were sealed.

Jamie was able to spend a lot of
time with her parents and Bobby, though he was preoccupied most of
the time with video games. She walked down the path to their house or
drove Tommy’s truck. Everything in Jamie’s life was about
family—Tommy’s family or her own. And at the end of the day, she
and Tommy ate the meal that Granny and Jamie had prepared and then
walked back to their home. They were alone in their little cottage,
and it was enough for them.

Then one day, when Jamie was in
Tommy’s grandparents’ farmhouse working with Granny, Tommy and
his grandfather came into the kitchen.

“
It’s hot out there,”
Grandpa said. And then he dropped to the floor.

Jamie rushed over to him and felt
his pulse. None. She started to pump his heart. Pump pump pump. “Call
911,” she shouted. “He’s having a heart attack.”

Jamie never let up on the
pumping. Before the ambulance arrived, Grandpa had a pulse. She sat
beside him on the floor. Tommy stared at her. Granny looked
completely freaked out. “He’s got his pulse back,” she said. “I
think he’ll be all right. He needs to get to the emergency room
right away.”

The ambulance arrived then and
brought the stretcher inside. Grandpa was starting to come around.
“Where’re we going?” he asked.

“
It’s okay, Grandpa,” Jamie
said. “They’re taking you to the hospital. You’ll be okay. Your
pulse is strong now.”

The EMTs moved Grandpa through
the front door and put him in the ambulance. They drove away with
their lights flashing.

“
We’ve got to get to the
hospital,” Jamie said. She walked over to Granny, who had been
standing there without talking for several minutes. “Come on,
Granny,” she said. “We need to leave now.”

Tommy walked over to his
grandmother. He took her arm and led her out to his grandfather’s
car. He put her in the front seat and Jamie got in the back.

“
We need to let your parents
know,” Jamie said as they drove down the dirt road and past his
parents’ house. “I’ll call them.”

At the emergency room, the same
hospital where Tommy had been taken in that far away world, Tommy and
his grandmother went back to the room where his grandfather was.
Jamie waited in the waiting room with Tommy’s parents.

“
I think he’s going to be
okay,” she assured them. “His pulse was strong when the ambulance
got there.”

Tommy’s mother looked at her
gratefully. “Thank you,” she said.

Eventually, Tommy came out
through the doors and sat down with them. “He’s doing pretty
good,” he said. “Mom, you should go back now and see him. Granny
won’t leave and they only let two people at a time.”

Tommy’s mother got up and
walked through the swinging doors into the emergency department.
Jamie knew how it would be back there. A nurses’ station, people on
hospital beds in the hallway waiting for x-rays, people in rooms
waiting for the doctor.

“
I think I’ll go outside for
a smoke,” Tommy’s father said getting up from his orange plastic
covered chair.

After Tommy’s father had left
the waiting room, Tommy turned to her.

“
The doctor said you saved his
life,” Tommy said. “I told him what you did when Grandpa passed
out. The doctor wants to know if you’re a doctor. I told him no.”

“
I’m just glad I could help
him,” Jamie said. She wanted to say that she was, in fact, a
doctor. She had been forgetting about that, pushing that to the
furthest reaches of her mind for several months. But at the end of
the day, Jamie was a doctor. She had attended medical school,
followed by an internship, then a residency. She had worked in
emergency rooms. She was a doctor.

Tommy took her hands in his.
“Thank you, sugar. I’m going to be grateful to you for the rest
of my life for saving Grandpa. I don’t know how you knew what to
do, but I’m glad you did.”

“
Me too,” she said.

“
I’ve never seen you so in
charge,” Tommy said. “It’s like you knew exactly what you were
doing.”

She wanted to tell Tommy that she
did know exactly what she was doing. That she was a doctor. But she
didn’t know how to tell him that she had lived another life that
went on for over a decade after high school. She didn’t know how to
tell him that he had died on their graduation day. For the first time
since the beginning of her strange journey, Jamie wondered if she
needed to explain things to Tommy. For the first time since then, she
realized that she really had been living another life. That she
really was a doctor.

Tommy’s father came back
through the emergency room doors and the three of them sat in the
waiting room for a long time. Finally, Mrs. Grisham came through the
swinging doors.

“
They’re moving him to the
cardiac ICU now. Granny wants to stay with him tonight,” she said.
“I can’t talk her out of it.”

“
I’ll stay with her,” Tommy
said, looking at Jamie. She nodded her head.

“
He wants to see you,” Mrs.
Grisham said to Jamie.

“
I’ll go up with Tommy,”
she said.

Tommy’s parents left then and
she and Tommy asked the nurse what room his grandfather was being
moved to. “Room 307,” she said. She and Tommy walked over to the
elevator and took it to the third floor. Grandpa was being wheeled
into the room when they walked up.

The attendants moved Grandpa from
the rolling bed onto his permanent bed. Grandpa was wearing a
hospital gown by that time and he wasn’t happy about it.

“
I don’t know why I have to
wear this,” he said. “I’ve got pajamas of my own.”

“
It’s the hospital rules,”
Jamie said. “It’ll be okay.”

A nurse came in and Tommy, Jamie,
and Granny moved out of her way. She attached oxygen to his nostrils
and checked his vital signs.