Come Down In Time (A Time Travel Romance) (20 page)

After the week in bed was over,
Tommy got up and resumed his life on the farm. He was used to Jamie
not being around since she had gone to college, and now he would get
used to the fact that she was never coming home again. He didn’t
think he would ever be able to love anyone ever again, but he had to
get on with his life. He had a farm to look after.

Over the years, his best friend
Ben and his wife, Sandra, tried to set Tommy up. He always refused,
until one day, five years after his divorce, he decided to accept. He
met Ben and Sandra and his date for the night, Charlotte, at the
Japanese steak house that had recently opened in Baker. Tommy felt
awkward trying to make conversation with Charlotte. The chefs came to
their table and chopped and cooked their food right in front of them,
so that was a welcome distraction. But by the end of the evening,
Charlotte had given up on him. He didn’t blame her. Charlotte
seemed like a nice person, but she could never measure up to Jamie.
Jamie with her tan skin and straight glossy hair and her loving brown
eyes.

Jamie was in medical school by
the time he went on that date. He knew that because he had run into
Jamie’s mother at the grocery store. He had told Mrs. Walters that
he was happy for Jamie and to please give her his best, but he didn’t
mean it. Not in the depths of his soul. He had wanted to ask Mrs.
Walters if Jamie was seeing someone, or maybe even remarried, but he
didn’t really want to know the answer to that. Mrs. Walters had
touched Tommy on the arm before she walked away from him that day.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out between you two,” she said.
Tommy was very sorry about that, too.

Ben called Tommy the day after
the fiasco date.
“I love you, man,” Ben said. “But you’re
going to have to do better than that if you intend to start dating.”

“
I’m sorry,” Tommy said. “I
know I screwed it up. But I can’t love anyone but Jamie.”

“
You don’t have to
love
them,” Ben said. “You just have to like them enough to keep you
from being a recluse. You’ve been alone too long, man. Jamie’s
been gone a long time and she’s not coming back.”

Tommy had gone through a period
of anger and resentment after that. Anger at Jamie for leaving him
when she had to know that Tommy was her only love. How could she do
that to him? They had dreams together. They were going to have
children together. She had left Tommy and Grandpa and Granny all at
the same time. How could she have done that to him? To them? Granny
had cried about it. That hurt him, to see his Granny crying in the
kitchen about Jamie. Hurt him deeply. It was Jamie’s fault.

Tommy started going to the
overhang at the end of the day during that time. He drank bourbon
straight from the bottle and stared out at the lake through the
willow branches. The drunker he got, the harder he cried. He called
out loud to Jamie. “Come back to me!”

After a few months of being eaten
up with anger and rage, Tommy finally accepted that he had pushed
Jamie away. He didn’t intend for her to be gone forever, but he had
made it impossible for her to not go to college. He had been so
insistent about it, all so he could feel better about himself. That
he had not denied her a college education. He had failed to realize
that Jamie was happy with her life. She would have remained happy, he
had no doubt about that now.

So, Tommy had to live with it. He
had orchestrated the end of his marriage. He alone had done that, and
now he had to lie in his own bed. A bed that did not include the
forever love of his life, Jamie.

But Ben had been wrong when he
said Jamie was never coming back.

Chapter
Fifteen

Jamie and Tommy lay on the
blanket. His hand covered hers. “I’ve never stopped loving you,
sugar,” he said.

“
I’ve never stopped loving
you, either,” she said.

“
I know we haven’t seen each
other for a long time,” Tommy said. “But it seems like time
hasn’t passed. Here, I feel as close to you as ever.”

“
In a way, time hasn’t
passed,” she said.

Tommy got up on his elbow and
looked down at Jamie. She leaned up and kissed him. They fell back
together on the blanket.

“
This is going to seem crazy,”
Tommy said.

“
Nothing seems crazy to me
anymore,” she said.

“
But I want to ask you to marry
me again,” he said.

“
I’ve never not been married
to you,” she said. “My answer is a thousand times yes.”

Jamie looked up at the ceiling of
the overhang, which she now realized was a cave and made of rock. She
wondered where the writing was.

“
Tommy, I’ve got to tell you
something. You’re going to think I’m insane and might take back
your marriage proposal when I’m finished.”

“
No way,” he said nuzzling
her neck. “No way.”

“
Do you remember graduation?”
she asked.

“
No,” he said. “Because I
wasn’t at graduation, remember?”

Jamie only remembered Tommy not
being there in her first timeline, when Tommy had been killed. She
didn’t know this timeline, had not lived it in the conscious mind
she was bringing to all of her strange timelines. She could not even
imagine how she could have ever left Tommy, divorced him. But in some
timeline, this one, she had done that.

“
Refresh my memory,” she
said.

“
I was on the way to pick you
up when I had that accident,” he said.

“
Right,” she said. So, Tommy
had had the accident, but he had not been killed.

“
I always thought you might
have had that accident because you were trying to call me to tell me
you were running late.”

“
No,” he said. “Why’d you
think that? You know why I had the accident.”

“
I can’t remember now,” she
said.

“
Because that wasp got in the
truck. I was driving with the windows open listening to Metallica on
the radio. I wasn’t paying attention. A wasp got in the truck and
stung me on the neck. I ran into the barrier.”

So, that was it! A wasp. Jamie
had tortured herself about why Tommy had that accident. Now, after a
life of guilt and misery and several timelines later, she had the
answer. A wasp. In her original timeline, the one she had lived for
so long, the wasp sting had caused Tommy to run right through the
barrier and off the cliff. In this timeline, he had managed to put on
his brakes before breaking all the way through the barrier.

Jamie was going to have to try to
explain things to Tommy in a way he could understand. She prayed he
would understand.

“
Remember those science fiction
books you used to read in high school?” she asked.

“
Yeah,” he said.

“
And some of them were about
time travel?”

He nodded. “Those were my
favorite,” he said.

“
You used to talk to me about
those books all the time. ‘Imagine if you went back in time and met
yourself when you were little? What would you tell yourself?’ you
used to say. Or ‘imagine if you could go back in time and change
something, like your grandparent dying or your pet or something.
Imagine how it would change the future.’”

“
I loved those books,” Tommy
said. “They really made me think about what time is and wonder if
time travel is even possible.”

“
It is possible,” Jamie said.
“I’ve been living it.”

“
What do you mean?” Tommy
asked. Jamie detected the slightest note of alarm in Tommy’s voice.
She was going to have to go very carefully.

“
Please just hear me out all
the way,” Jamie said. “I know you’ll have questions, but let me
say everything I have to say to you.”

“
Okay,” he said. He took her
hand and she held on tightly.

“
I grew up a few acres over
from you,”

“
I know,” he said.

“
I went to school around here.
I knew you all my life. We started dating each other and fell in
love. We decided to get married and run an organic farm and garden.”

“
Right,” Tommy said.

“
And then on graduation day,
you were late picking me up. I called you over and over on your cell
phone, but you didn’t answer. I was going to be late and my parents
were already gone to the school, so I took my mother’s car and went
to graduation.”

“
I know that,” Tommy said.

“
That’s when your story and
my story go in different directions,” Jamie said.

“
I gave my speech that day, and
afterward, I found out that you had been killed.”

“
What?” Tommy said. “I
wasn’t killed. Shook up, but not killed.”

That’s when Jamie knew that she
had never left Tommy in the timeline where she had returned to him.
She had not abandoned him after she got back to him and saved him
from his death. She knew she would never have done that. But she had
abandoned him in another timeline, this timeline, and that didn’t
make her feel good.

“
I know in your history—your
timeline—you weren’t killed. But in my timeline, you were. Just
listen to me, Tommy. Please listen. Keep your mind open like when you
read those books.”

“
Okay,” Tommy said, but he
sounded doubtful.

“
I’m not crazy,” she said.
“This is real. It’s been happening to me and I can’t stop it.”

“
I was devastated, of course,”
Jamie continued. “I had my wedding dress all ready for us to get
married. I had planned a life with you. I couldn’t get out of bed.
I couldn’t function after you were killed.”

Tommy had stopped interjecting
his comments. He still held tightly to her hand, and Jamie was
encouraged by that.

“
After about a year, I finally
realized I was going to have to do something with my life. I couldn’t
hang around with my parents and Bobby forever. So, I went to
Vanderbilt. And I never went home again.”

“
Never?” Tommy asked.

“
Never. I couldn’t go back to
the place we had been in love. I couldn’t drive on the road where
you had been killed. I tried to put it all away in a corner in my
mind, safe and secret, where I didn’t have to deal with it.”

“
I finished medical school and
did an internship in California and then a residency at UAB. I worked
in an emergency room in Atlanta. Then I took a position at a clinic
in the hills of Tennessee, where people needed my help the most.”

Tommy was silent.

“
So I started working at the
clinic and made friends with Stacie and Nate,” she continued,
hoping Tommy was still keeping an open mind.

“
Who are they?” Tommy asked.

“
Stacie is the nurse
practitioner and Nate is the doctor in charge of the clinic. He’s
been there a long time.”

“
We started hanging out
together a lot and one thing led to another with me and Nate.”

She felt Tommy stiffen slightly
beside her. But she had to tell him.

“
You had been dead for a dozen
years by that time. I had been beating myself up thinking it was my
fault you had died because you were coming to get me for graduation.
It was the first happiness I had felt in all that time.”

Jamie squeezed Tommy’s hand and
he squeezed back. She put her face to his cheek and kissed him. He
put his other arm on her arm. Jamie wasn’t losing him yet with her
bizarre story. Not yet.

“
We got engaged. He got me a
sapphire ring. And then my mother called me and told me Dad had had a
heart attack.”

“
I went home for the first time
in twelve years. When I got there and saw that my parents had made a
shrine to their house and the last time I was in it, I felt horrible.
My absence in their life had caused them so much pain and grief. I
vowed then that I would be the best daughter they could ever ask
for.”

“
You were always a good
daughter,” Tommy said.

“
Not after you were killed,”
she said. “I abandoned them.”

“
That’s hard to imagine,”
he said.

“
I know, Tommy. All of this is
hard to imagine. But I need you to hear me.”

“
Okay,” Tommy said quietly.

“
I ran into your mother at the
grocery store and she was a broken woman,” Jamie said. “She had
lost so many loved ones—you, your grandfather, and your father.
Your brother and sister had left for college and your mother was
alone. It was terrible, Tommy.”

“
I stayed with my parents for a
few days, taking care of my father. And then one day, I came to the
overhang. I just needed to see it again. And I crawled inside and
found the blanket, still in the plastic bag under the big rock. I
spread it out and fell asleep on it.”

“
I guess that’s how you knew
it was still here,” Tommy said.

“
Yes,” she said. “So, I
fell asleep, and when I woke up, my hair was long again and got
caught in the willow branches. My hair had been like it is now when I
fell asleep.”