The Yearbook (15 page)

“Caroline lit the fireplace in your room, and put extra blankets on your bed,” Eunice said. “It should be nice and toasty by now. If you feel cold you must come and tell me.” She gave Lola one of the oil lamps that was burning on the mantel, and together they climbed the big staircase, its banisters twined with fresh holly. Eunice kissed Lola on the forehead and went off down the hallway toward her bedroom in the east wing, her velvet hem brushing along the runner carpet. As fond as she was of Eunice, Lola was glad to be alone. The evening had been a trial. It had left her hollow and depressed, and the effort of concealing her feelings from everyone had exhausted her.

She entered her bedroom, the lamp lighting her way. Peter, still in his formal suit but dusted in snow, was asleep on her bed. He was half-reclined, his head leaning on the dark walnut headboard, his long legs stretched out in front of him on the quilt.

At the soft closing of the door he opened his eyes and looked at her. Neither spoke for a minute as the storm whistled in the eaves.

“You can call the judge,” Peter said at last, his eyes never leaving her. “I'm sure he'd know what charges to bring against me. Although under the circumstances, he might just shoot me.”

“How did you get in here?” she whispered.

“I climbed,” Peter answered. He swung his feet onto the floor and began to brush the slush from his hair.

Lola moved to the window and looked out. She had estimated that long drop to the ground once before, the night she'd leaped out to her escape tree. Now her conclusion was the same; a fall from the window would be fatal. She closed the drapes and faced Peter. He was staring at her again. She felt lightheaded and steadied herself on the bedpost.

“Don't worry, I'm not dangerous,” he said. “At least not yet.”

“What do you want?” she said.

“I came to apologize.”

“For which thing?”

“My behavior toward you.”

“Including this latest?”

“All of it.”

“You had to break into my house? You couldn't apologize at school? Or at the dance? I was there, you know. You were too busy with your girlfriend to notice.”

Peter laughed, strangely, like he'd been tickled. It sounded to Lola like a crazy laugh.

“You mean Paulette?” he said.

Lola had been right, then. It was Paulette, Paulette Waters, the girl who intended to make herself Mrs. Hemmings by graduation. Despite herself, she was seething.

Footsteps approached along the hallway. Lola tensed and clapped her hand over her mouth; Peter sat quietly but composed, seeming not to care if he was discovered. The footsteps passed the door and continued toward the back stairs. It might have been Caroline or Henrietta, checking the fireplaces.

“I'll go in a minute,” Peter said.

“How? Down those bricks? You'll break your neck.”

“I don't care.”

Lola took a step toward him. As he fell under the arc of her lamp, she noticed how thin he'd grown. There was a grim expression in his eyes that was new and disturbing. His palms were scraped and bleeding from his struggle up the bricks, and he was shivering. He was a shadow of the young man from the fall dance.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I have been for a while.”

Lola felt a pang in her chest. It made her sit down on the bed next to Peter and take his hand. “What is it?” she asked.

He pulled his hand away and stood up. “I've been monstrous to you and I apologize. That's all I came for, to tell you that. I promise I'll stay away and won't bother you again.”

Lola set her lamp on the bedside table. “Did I do something? Do you hate me? I'd like to know—”

“Can you accept my apology?” he interrupted. She heard grief in his voice, but resignation, too.

“Tell me what you have—what sickness,” Lola stammered. She was lost again, fumbling in the dark to understand him, just as she had been at Hillside, and at Eagle Rock.

“It's irrelevant,” he said.

“Please.”

“It would embarrass us both.”

“If you go without explaining, I'll never have peace. Why did you change?”

He walked over to the fireplace. He leaned on the mantelpiece and watched the flames.

“Do you remember the night of the dance?” he asked.

She nodded. It was the same question he had asked in the woods.

“We were at the mermaid,” he continued. “And you said you were going to get your bag. Remember?”

“Of course.”

“I was watching you walk away when it occurred to me that my manners had been atrocious. Not only had I mistaken you for a boy”—his eyes flitted over her chiffon-draped figure—“but I had neglected to offer to help you carry your books. So I went after you. I imagined you were going to the gymnasium, but you passed right through it into the school. That confounded me some, because you hadn't started attending Ashfield yet, or so I understood. Isn't that what you told me?”

Lola swallowed. He had followed her. How far?

He took a deep breath and resumed. “You ran along the hallway. I called your name, but there were still a lot of kids around, making a racket, and you didn't hear me. Then I saw you go in the library. Just as I got my head in the door, you were entering the reserve room. I followed you. Then I saw you. But—”

Lola tasted blood in her mouth and realized she had bit her lip. She could not imagine what he would say next.

“But I could see through you. You were like a ghost. I called your name, but you didn't hear me. The room was terrible. It was destroyed. Papers and books were scattered on the floor, and I smelled ashes. I called to you again and you dissolved like ashes yourself. Then the room was normal and I was standing in it, alone. I saw this as if it were real. I told no one, of course. I scoured texts, racked my brains, but I could not find any plausible theory to explain what I'd seen in the reserve room. Then you came back. You weren't a ghost; that much was obvious. You were solid as anybody, and besides, like I told you, I don't believe in ghosts or any of that bunkum.”

“Peter. If you'll sit down a minute—” Lola began.

“Then the idea came into my head,” he went on. “I can barely make myself repeat it now, out of shame—that you might be some kind of an alien being capable of dematerializing, and the more I thought about it, the more I believed it. I kept on watching you, from a distance, looking for a clue, a sign, to support this cracked theory of mine. I believed if I observed you for long enough, something would have to show. I watched you at school and a couple of times from down there, like a prowler.” He gestured toward the rose garden.

“But then you appeared without any warning that night at Hillside Manor. And I couldn't help myself. I had to get close to you, see how you felt and smelled, and, I don't know, even what kind of a shadow you cast. But when I took your hand it was like any other girl's. That was more terrifying to me than if you'd had scales or horns; it meant that what I'd seen had nothing to do with you, that it had all come from my own mind. It meant that something was wrong with my mind, and if I couldn't trust my mind anymore, what would become of me? At Eagle Rock I tried again. I wanted to force you to tell me some secret that would prove to me that I was sane, but when you ran away, when you got lost and fainted, I saw myself for what I was, a madman who'd got stuck on a girl and then harmed her. I'd read of such men, of course, but I never—” He stared down at the rug. “I thought it would be enough to stay away from you, but when I saw you at the dance tonight, I could see you were unhappy and I knew it was my fault.”

He stood in the firelight, quiet and spent.

“Stuck on me?” she whispered. She touched his cheek, and was surprised to feel tears.

“Well, what did you think?” he said.

He pulled her against him. His hands gripped her shoulder, her waist, her ribs, through the midnight blue silk.

“I love you,” he said. She felt his warm lips on hers. “You are everything I ever wanted in the universe. You are my universe.”

The room was spinning, and flashing with sparks, hail, meteors. Lola saw the image of the two of them, on a tidal wave of light, flying, racing through space.

“And you're mine,” she said. It had been true since the first moment she'd seen him, or even before, when she'd only heard the sound of his voice in the gym, the night he'd thought she was a boy.

But he was already turning away. “I'm not someone you should love, or allow to love you,” he said. “Believe me that I'm not. Trust me.” His hand was on the doorknob. “I'll be absolutely silent. No one will ever know I was here. My parents are in Pittsburgh until Wednesday, so there'll be no questions from that end.”

Cold formality had crept back into his voice. He had returned to Earth, and to everyday worries.

“There are things you don't know,” Lola said. She took hold of his arm but he pulled away.

“Let me leave, Lola. For your sake. While I still can.”

“Just wait,” she said. “Wait.” She was halfway across the room, reaching up onto a shelf, into a silver cup, for a hidden key. She unlocked the heavy cedar chest that sat against the footboard of her bed and began to toss out clothes and linens. Her hands were shaking. But there was no going back now. Whatever the consequences were, she would accept them, even if it meant being a misfit, a freak.

Peter stood, his hand still on the doorknob, watching the pile of garments grow. “What are you doing? Lola?”

“There's nothing wrong with you.” She kept rummaging, unpacking. There seemed to be no end to the linens.

Peter crossed the room, dropped to his knees beside her, and took hold of her shoulders.

“Don't you see that I could be the ruin of you? I'm ill and I'll get worse.”

Lola pulled away from him and reached back into the chest, tearing at the linens until she felt the canvas straps of her old knapsack. She yanked it from the chest and unzipped it.

The yearbook fell out onto the rug and opened to the page Lola had turned to the most, the senior class portraits from H to M.

“Look at it,” she said.

Peter picked up the book. Lola watched his eyes move over the page. She heard his breath catch as he came to the photograph of himself in the oval frame.

He began to turn the pages, and stopped at the two-page spread on the 1924 Ashfield Senior Prom. “This is next spring.” He held the book closer to the firelight and examined it. He was feeling the pages, becoming aware of the old paper, the frayed edges of the pages that were crumbling into his hands. He leaned into the book and smelled it. “How old is this annual?” he asked.

“Almost ninety years.” Lola said.

He took her hand. His face was bright. “And how old are you, Lola?”

“I was sixteen. Now that I'm here it's harder to say.”

They kissed in the firelight, and before long they were down deep in the feather bed, their party clothes falling away, lovers meeting in defiance of all the clocks and calendars. For both of them, it was where time began.

That night as they lay in each other's arms, she told him everything, about the ruined books and Mrs. Dubois, and about her life at the Wrigley house, split between the centuries. She showed him the pocket calendar she kept in her wallet. He was delighted with her plastic book-light, made in China.

His most urgent questions, on the mechanics of her movement through time, she could not begin to answer. She could say only that she had entered some kind of an unconscious state, something like sleep, and had found herself generations from her starting point, in the same spot, but in a different year. The first time, the night they had met, she had flickered between the two eras like a short circuit; but the second time, this time, the change had been permanent.

“I felt a cord fray inside me, and then break,” she said. “I felt a pain somewhere around my heart. I knew then that I had been placed, or replaced in the time where I had always belonged.”

Peter's analytical brain ticked all night with the implications of Lola's arrival. Could her actions now create ripples that would keep her from coming to 1923? But she was already in 1923. His mind jumped from one possibility to another.

“And this house, the Wrigley House. You have to make sure not to inherit it, Lola, or it'll never become a county home like you said, for you to come to live in, and, and then you might not come to Ashfield at all, or rather, have already come to Ashfield, but in the future, the future-past—I can see this needs a lot more study.”

It was almost dawn when they locked the yearbook in the cedar chest. Lola, exhausted but wide-awake, drew back the drapes and looked out. The snow had stopped and a big moon hung in a sky bright with stars. She felt the first real peace she could ever remember. The secret was out, and impossible as it was, she had been believed. The feeling of separateness, strangeness, that had hung on her like a heavy coat all her life was gone. Peter joined her at the window and put his arms around her. Lola leaned against him. For a while they watched the sky.

“Is there life on the moon?” Peter asked sleepily.

“Nope,” Lola answered.

“None? None at all?”

“None. Sorry.”

“Are you sure?”

“It's just a rock. With no air.”

“What do you mean, no air?”

“No atmosphere. You can't breathe up there. And you float.”

“You don't mean to say you've been there?”

Lola laughed. “No. But a few people have. Astronauts. And they have to wear these special suits with air tanks on the back. I think it's cold up there, too, but I'm not sure how cold.”

“Astronauts?” he whispered with awe. “But how do they get to the moon? Are there aeroplanes that can—”

Lola put her finger to her lips. Now Peter heard it, too, singing, coming from the east wing. It was the judge.