Come Down In Time (A Time Travel Romance) (3 page)

“
See that willow tree?” he
asked, pointing at the tree. The tree was leaning, its branches
trailing the water. “There’s an overhang underneath it,” Tommy
continued. “You can’t really see it because of the branches, but
it’s there.”

He walked down the embankment,
closer to the lake, then turned toward the leafy tree branches. He
grabbed them and held them aside. “Let’s sit in there,” he
said.

Jamie ducked under the tree
branches and crawled into a little cave. Tommy crawled in and sat
beside her. Through the leaves, they could see the lake water
shimmering in the afternoon light. A wild duck and her ducklings
floated by and Jamie grabbed Tommy’s arm in excitement. That’s
when Tommy kissed her for the first time. It wasn’t her first kiss
from a boy or his with a girl, but it was the best kiss. If she
thought really hard, she could still feel his lips brushing against
hers.

Linda looked back at Jamie from
the front seat. “Could you stop at the next gas station?” she
asked Josh. “I need to go.” A few minutes later Josh pulled over
to a country diner with a gas station and Jamie and Linda got out of
the car. Inside the bathroom, Linda said, “Girl, you don’t look
like you’re gonna make it today.”

“
I’m sorry, Linda,” Jamie
said. “I started thinking about Tommy. I don’t want to spoil
everything.”

“
I’m not worried about me,
I’m worried about you,” Linda said. “I’m going to ask Josh to
take you back to the dorm.”

“
No!” Jamie said. She had to
get a grip. This was embarrassing. “No, I don’t want you to do
that. I’m going to be all right. I promise.”

“
Are you sure, Jamie?” Linda
said. “You really don’t look all right.”

“
Just give me a few minutes,”
Jamie said. “Tell them I’ll be out in a few minutes, okay?”

Linda left the restroom. Jamie
splashed cold water on her face and looked in the mirror. Her brown
eyes looked back at her. “Get control of yourself,” she told her
mirror image. “You can do this.”

When she went back out to the
car, Jamie had done a complete about face. She talked to Matthew and
he talked to her. Everyone talked to each other and it wasn’t long
before they were all singing to Third Eye Blind on the radio. “I
wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend,” they sang.
Jamie had stepped away from the ledge. She put the memory of Tommy in
a deep place in her mind, a secret box, a Pandora’s box. Her mind
might look at that box, consider opening it, over the years, but she
would not open it again.

Chapter
Two

As she drove through the hilly
landscape, Jamie was looking at that box again. She was on the edge
of opening it, but she didn’t know what would happen if she did.
She forced herself to avert her mind by looking at the thick
treescape that lined both sides of the highway. It was fall, and the
hardwoods were at their most glorious moment that day, a collage of
brilliant and muted reds, yellows, oranges, and browns blending into
each other. Jamie concentrated on that while she drove.

Eventually, Jamie began to climb
a road that went higher and higher, steeper and steeper. If she went
much further, she would be in the misty mountaintops, but her journey
ended before she went that far. The landscape flattened and she drove
into Grahamville. Cottage-like houses and Victorians lined the
street, with trees blazing with color in the front yards. She could
see the mountains in the distance. This doesn’t seem so bad, she
thought. This looks nice.

She kept driving where her GPS
took her. After a few blocks of pretty houses, the landscape changed
into a series of businesses—restaurants, antique stores, and one
strip mall. At the end of that, stood the clinic. Jamie parked her
car and went inside.

As soon as she walked in the
door, she sensed an urgency. She walked over to the receptionist.
“I’m Dr. Walters,” she said.

“
Oh, Dr. Walters,” the
receptionist said. She was a middle-aged woman with graying short
brown hair. “We’ve got an emergency right now. I’ll let Dr.
Abbott know you’re here.” She got up and walked to the back of
the clinic.

Not a minute later, a nurse came
out wearing the typical scrubs nurses wore. “Dr. Walters,” she
said. “I’m Stacie McCorkendale. We’ve got an emergency here
right now. Follow me.”

Jamie followed the nurse into the
back and into a patient room. A child lay on the bed and Jamie
couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. “He was bitten by a
rattlesnake,” the nurse said. A clean-shaven man with dark hair was
suctioning an area on the boy’s leg.

“
The ambulance is on the way,”
he said.

“
How long ago did it happen?”
Jamie asked. She put her purse down against the wall and walked over
to the child. A boy, she could see now.

“
Too long ago,” the man said.
“It was up in the hills and they got him here as soon as possible,
but it’s been more than a few minutes. The crucial time. It takes a
while for the ambulance to get here.”

Jamie walked over to the boy. His
mother was holding his hand. She looked up at Jamie with frantic
eyes. “Is my boy going to be all right?” she asked her.

What could Jamie say to that? She
had only just arrived and didn’t know how to answer her. She placed
her hand on the mother’s shoulder. She looked down at the little
boy in the bed. He looked back and she saw something in his eyes.
Strength.

“
Yes,” she told the mother.
“He’s going to be all right.”

The mother looked at her
gratefully. “Thank you,” she said. A few seconds later the
emergency responders arrived and put the boy on a stretcher and
carried him out of the room, down the back hall, and out the door to
the waiting ambulance. The mother looked back at Jamie as she got in
the ambulance. “It’s okay,” Jamie said to her, giving a little
wave.

“
Well,” the man said behind
her. “I guess you got a baptism by fire today.”

Jamie turned. The man held out
his hand. “Dr. Abbott,” he said. “You must be Dr. Walters.”

“
Yes,” she said. “I wasn’t
expecting all of this. I just drove into town.”

“
I heard you tell the boy’s
mother that he’s going to be okay,” he said. “But we don’t
really know that.”

“
I know it,” she said. “I
could see it in his eyes.”

Dr. Abbott gave her a long look.
“Are you ready to start working?” he said.

“
I’m ready,” she said,
though her official first day wasn’t until the next day.

Jamie retrieved her stethoscope
from her car. She was exhausted from driving several hours, but she
got a second wind as she finished out the afternoon in the clinic.
Nothing so dramatic as a life-threatening snake bite for the rest of
the day. Mothers brought in babies with respiratory problems and
there was one broken foot. Mr. Almers had stepped into a hole in his
yard and flipped over, breaking his foot in two places. They were
able to treat him, give him a removable cast, and provide crutches.
As Mr. Almers and his wife walked slowly and painfully out of the
clinic, the day ended.

“
I guess I need to show you
where you’ll be living,” Dr. Abbott said. “You must be pretty
tired by now.”

“
I’m okay,” Jamie said. But
she was tired. She just wanted to get where she was supposed to go
and collapse. “Thank you, Dr. Abbott.”

“
Call me Nate,” he said.
Jamie followed him out the clinic door. “Follow me,” he said
getting into a Jeep. He backed up and Jamie got behind him. He took a
left, back toward the little town. A minute later, he turned into a
driveway in front of a white cottage. A Japanese maple in the front
yard was at its peak with deep purple leaves. A pot of yellow
chrysanthemums greeted them at the front door.

“
I see Stacie has been here,”
Nate said. “Here’s your key,” he said, handing the key to her.
Jamie unlocked the door and Nate followed her inside.

The floors throughout the house
were wide-plank hardwood and looked to be in pretty good shape. The
walls were all painted an off-white color that wasn’t unpleasant.
The kitchen was bigger than Jamie was expecting since it was a small
house. Butcher block countertops lined three of the walls. The
cabinets were old, but seemed to be freshly painted. The floor was
checkered in black and white squares of vinyl tile.

“
We painted the whole house
before you got here,” Nate said.

Jamie took her gaze from the
kitchen cabinets and turned to him. “This is nice,” she said. “I
like it.” It was the first house Jamie had lived in since she left
her childhood home. She had been living in apartments and duplexes
and townhouses for years. She opened the back door in the kitchen and
walked onto a porch. It was getting dark, but she could see a garage
and a yard.

“
Are you Native American?”
Nate asked abruptly.

“
I’m one quarter Cherokee, on
my mother’s side,” she said.

“
That’s going to be an asset
to us,” he said. “We’ve got a Native population around here and
they are distrustful of the clinic. They use it when they have to.
Well, it’s not just the Natives who are distrustful. If you aren’t
from around here, most people are wary at first.”

“
Do they trust you?” Jamie
asked.

“
Just barely,” Nate said with
a laugh. “Just barely.”

Nate helped Jamie move her
suitcases and her few boxes into the house.

“
I’ll see you tomorrow,” he
said as he closed the door.

There were two bedrooms in the
house, and Jamie chose the one with a bathroom to be her bedroom. It
wasn’t large, but it was big enough. She unpacked her suitcases,
hanging her clothes in the small closet. She put her jeans and
t-shirts and underwear in an antique dresser. She unpacked her items
for the tiny bathroom and placed them in the shower and on the
vanity.

And then she was starving. She
drove down the tree-lined street to one of the restaurants she had
seen on her way into the town. A sign on the diner’s door said it
was open from eleven to eight, and she walked in at ten minutes till
eight. The place was packed. Jamie felt the other customers’ eyes
following her as the waitress led her to a booth. She opened the menu
and studied it. She could get meat and three vegetables for seven
dollars and fifty cents. There was so much to choose from, but Jamie
finally decided on chicken fried steak, turnip greens, black-eyed
peas, and macaroni and cheese. Not the healthiest of meals, but one
that Jamie was looking forward to anyway. The waitress brought her a
basket of biscuits and cornbread squares while she waited on the main
meal.

She felt heavy as she left the
diner and drove back to her new house, but she felt full and
satisfied. How long had it been since she’d had a real meal? Jamie
couldn’t remember, but it had been a long while.

When she got back to the house,
she found her sheets in a box and started to make up the bed. The
sheets were queen-sized and the bed was a double, so they were too
big. But they worked. After a shower in the small green-tiled
bathroom, Jamie got into bed and fell asleep.

She wasn’t sure what to wear to
the clinic, but she took Nate’s attire as her cue. She put on jeans
and a t-shirt, then put on her white doctor’s coat and white
sneakers. She walked into the clinic at eight with her stethoscope
around her neck. She saw mothers with children waiting outside the
door. She didn’t have a key herself yet, so she waited with them
until Stacie opened the door. She talked to the mothers about their
sick children while they waited. She looked the children over and
even used her stethoscope to check them out.

“
I’m sorry,” Stacie said
when she unlocked the door. “I should have given you a key
yesterday.”

“
It’s okay,” Jamie said.
“I’ve been getting to know our patients.”

The day was full with patients,
from a severe case of poison ivy to a pregnant woman with abnormal
bleeding. She and Nate and the nurse practitioner, Stacie, took care
of everyone. At five, the clinic doors were locked. It was the first
time in years that Jamie had worked in the daylight hours.

As she was getting ready to leave
for the day, Nate walked into the back room where she kept her purse.
“I realize that I should have taken you somewhere to eat
yesterday,” he said. “I just wasn’t thinking. But can I take
you somewhere now?”

“
Okay,” Jamie said. “I
don’t have a thing to eat in the house.”

It was close to six when they
left the clinic. “Let’s go in my car,” Nate said. “I’ll
bring you back here after.”

Nate drove out of town and up the
mountain. “There’s a place up here that’s good,” he said.
“The tourists love it.” About ten minutes later, they pulled into
a parking lot. A sign, that was lit from underneath, said The
Farmhouse Restaurant. They were seated at a table with a red-checked
gingham tablecloth and the waitress brought them water in Mason jars.

“
We can get beer or wine here,”
Nate said. “Nothing stronger. Want something?”

“
I’ll have white wine,”
Jamie said. Nate ordered a draft beer and glass of chardonnay for
Jamie.