Wynn in Doubt (7 page)

I know what he means. Before Grams got too old, she had the most amazing garden in her backyard. Rose and lilac bushes, a big white pergola covered in morning glory vines. We’d all get together for brunch on Sunday afternoons, and while everyone else perched on couches and chairs in the family room, I’d go and sit in the iron chair she kept in the center of the garden. It was the only place I could truly escape from my family or my job, even from my thoughts. I loved sitting in that garden. And in a matter of days it will belong to someone else.

Oliver walks beside me, quiet. I can’t imagine his life. His job requires him to be something different for everyone. Rock star, celebrity, sex symbol . . . And now that he’s home, we want the boy we knew—the one who had us spellbound by his talent and passion to live a big life. He’s probably met a million strangers, each wanting their piece of him. I look over, wanting to ask how that feels, but don’t. I don’t want to be another person needing something from him.

We arrive at the school and jog past the curved stone entrance.

“C’mon.” He takes my hand, and we run faster along the front of the building.

There’s no one around, but we hunch over, doing our best to be sneaky and quiet. We cross the parking lot. The slightly cracked version I stood on when Oliver kissed me is now cobbled and pretty. He releases my hand and asks me to wait, then skims the side of the brick wall and disappears around the corner.

Crickets and cicadas chirp noisily in the lawn. My heart races a thousand miles a minute. Are we really doing this? Breaking into the school? If we get caught, I’ll never teach in this district again. I scan the parking lot for signs of security. All is quiet, save for the bugs.

I jump at the sound of a lock turning. It scares me half to death, and I nearly drop my purse as Oliver sticks his head out of the door to my left.

“Alright, let’s go,” he whispers.

I squeeze through the half-open door. The corridor is dark. It smells like rubber erasers and clean white paper. Or maybe nostalgia is messing with my senses. “How’d you get in?”

He holds a finger to his lips, then takes my hand again. “While you were busy acing the SATs, I was mastering the art of skipping class. I have my secrets.” He leads us to the entrance of the girls’ locker room. I hold back.

“You’re not allowed to go in there,” I mouth.

He leans close, his mouth inches from my ear. “What makes you think this is my first time?” It’s dark in the hallway, but the look in his eye is unmistakable. You can take the boy out of the high school, but you can’t take the high school out of the boy. His smile reflects my own.

We creep into the unlit room. He flips on the light. Rows of gym lockers and benches stand across from us.

“I’ll be right back.” Oliver holds up his hand to signal for me to wait and again disappears.

I walk between the rows, dragging my fingers against the slotted cubicles. Locker 1091. This spot, this very place, is where I experienced some of my worst teenage moments. Undressing in a room full of girls was nothing new. I shared a bedroom with each of my sisters at one time or another. But having to disrobe in front of girls who’d developed beyond my meager A cups was a daily lesson in agony.

“Here.”

The loudness of his voice startles me. He hands me a pair of deep-purple gym shorts and a gray T-shirt with a white Trojan emblazoned across the front.

He shrugs. “Best I could find on short notice.”

“Are you sure there’s no one else around?” I’m suddenly very aware of our aloneness.

“It’s seems totally empty.” His gaze skims my wet dress. “I’ll change in the shower room.” His voice is rough.

I wait until he’s out of sight, listening as his footsteps move from cement to tile before removing my shoes and peeling off the dress. The bra and undies beneath are equally wet, so I strip those off as well and roll everything into a neat ball. The T-shirt is a little baggy and the shorts are a little snug, but I’m dry.

I sit down on one of the wooden benches. If someone had told me yesterday I’d be breaking and entering my potential place of employment with Oliver Reeves as my wet accomplice, I’d have thought they were crazy. But here I am. And I have no idea how.

“You decent?” He pokes his head through the doorway. Dressed in a nearly identical outfit. Gone is the boy I fantasized about in health class. A man, broad and solid, stands in his place. I look down at my own too-big shirt and see the same old Wynn. Unchanged, untethered, and uncoordinated. I wonder what he sees as he looks at me. Does he see a woman, or the girl who silently worshipped him?

Oliver sits beside me on the bench, his expression playful. “How do you feel about time travel?”

“Time travel?”

“It’s a little something I’ve been working on while touring. Follow me.” He nods toward the door and stands up, not offering me his hand this time as we leave our wet things behind in the girls’ locker room.

I haven’t been in this part of the school since graduating. The hallways look lonely without the usual bright bits of poster paper littering the walls. My bare feet pad noiselessly next to Oliver’s. We turn into the English corridor, one of my favorite places in the school.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a time machine hidden in Mrs. Warnerbaker’s class.”

“Ah-ha. That’s a common misconception. See, you don’t need a physical vessel to bend space and time. You only need this.” He taps a finger against his temple. “I met a yogi once who told me that everything in life is limitless if you just believe in it enough.”

“Are you sure your yogi master wasn’t just reading you
The Secret
?”

He turns the handle of the door to our eleventh-grade English classroom and pushes inside. “I don’t know what secret you’re talking about, but I promise you, I’m about to blow your mind.”

Oliver finds the light. The desks and chairs have been neatly stacked against the walls, all but Mrs. Warnerbaker’s desk, which is clean and void of the little knickknacks she always kept there. A miniature Henry VIII, a plastic bust of Mark Twain, the paperweight in the shape of a red rose, all stored away until sometime in September when she’ll no doubt open the year with her famous performance of
The Raven
.

I watch out of the corner of my eye as he examines the walls and touches the desktops.

“It’s kind of creepy with no one here,” I say.

He smiles at me. “I like it. No one here to quiz me or ask me to read anything out loud.”

“You’re joking, right? You always wrote the best stories.”

“No way. You were the star in every class we had together.”

I flush at the compliment. “I didn’t know you remembered me from school.”

Oliver moves to the center of the room, closer to me. His eyes lock on my face. “Why wouldn’t I remember you?”

I pull my wet hair to one side, twisting it into a rope. “You were popular, you had a million friends. Everyone worshipped you.” The last sentence I utter quietly, almost to myself.

He steps forward and moves a wayward strand of hair from my cheek. “Not everyone. There was this one girl who wouldn’t give me the time of day. I’d make eye contact with her, and she’d look away. It drove me crazy.”

My breathing is rapid and scratchy against my throat. He couldn’t mean me. I was a nobody. A clumsy, nerdy, self-conscious dork with eyes too big for my face and boobs too small for my body. I was invisible compared to his light.

Oliver’s eyes focus on my parted lips. My arms and legs feel tingly, panicked, undecided on whether they should wrap themselves around him, or spirit me away. I try swallowing, but my mouth is dry.

“So where’s this time machine, anyway?” I turn and walk to the wall behind me.

He sighs softly. “I told you, it’s in your mind. You just need to access it.”

“Okay, and how do we do that?”

“First, I need you on your back.”

My head turns so fast a twinge of pain runs down my neck. He smiles and sweeps his hand across the brown Berber carpet below our feet. “After you.”

I lower myself to the ground. I’m so nervous, I worry I’ll levitate off the floor. He kneels beside me and stretches out. We lie side by side on the scratchy carpet, and I wait for him to speak.

“Relax your arms, hands, legs, and feet, and close your eyes.”

It’s impossible to relax when everything from the hairs on my arms to the atoms in my cells are violently trying to collide with his, but I do my best.

“Now take a deep breath.”

I do as instructed, listening as he exhales slowly.

“Are you relaxed?”

No.
“Yes.”

“Good. Now I want you to imagine where you’ll be exactly one year from this moment.”

I open my eyes and turn to face him, confused. “I thought we were going back in time?”

I see his smile in profile; he shakes his head. “I never said we were going back.”

“But . . .”

Oliver turns his face to mine. “Let me ask you a question. Is there anything worth going back for? Anything you’d really want to repeat?”

I think of Jenny and the expression on her face when she talked of going back. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for myself. There’s nothing in my past but disappointment. I shake my head.

“So close your eyes, and focus on your future.”

I do as he asks. One year from today—365 days from this moment, 8,760 hours from right now. And . . . nothing. The blankness of a clear mind and closed eyes are all that greet me. Panic jabs my sides.

Where is my future?

I force thoughts of my possible teaching job forward but can’t hold the image for more than a second. I think of my family, but they swirl away from me, out of reach. Every conjured image slips past my eyelids. Nothing but blackness remains.

Then I see the subtle curve of a cream-colored hat. I trace it with my mind, following it from side to side until all of the nothingness falls away, and it shines bright in the darkness.

“What do you see?” His voice is deep and calm.

“Lola.”

“Who’s Lola?”

An old car, its doors pulled open, on the side of the road . . . “My great-grandmother.”

“I thought we decided we weren’t going back in time?”

“I’m not—I didn’t know her.”

“Alright. Then how does she fit into your future?”

The short answer is, I don’t know. But I can’t help but feel that my discovery of her past is somehow connected to my present and, therefore, to what’s in front of me. “We all thought she was dead, that she’d died when Grams, my grandmother, was a little girl, but I found an article. It fell out of a book my Grams had. She didn’t die. Lola, I mean. She left. She left her husband and my Grams, and all I know is that within four years, she ended up running whiskey in Kentucky. I know it’s a ridiculous thing to think about. It happened so long ago.”

“But not for you.”

I look at him. Our eyes meet in the still classroom. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, this all happened a lifetime ago for your grandmother, but it’s all new to you.” He pauses, his eyes searching my face. “Why is it that when I asked you to think about your future, you couldn’t come up with anything besides something that happened to someone else, ages ago?”

I watch him carefully. He knows something I don’t. Something about me.

“Is it because her story is more interesting than anything you can imagine for yourself?”

His words wound me. They make me sad and uncomfortable because they’re true.

“Wynn . . .” He rolls onto his side, cradling his head in the crook of his arm. “If you could find out what happened to Lola, would you?”

I look away and lick my lips. I’ve thought of almost nothing else—well, nothing else besides Oliver—since that newspaper clipping fell out of Grams’s book. “Of course. I want to know. But where would I even start?”

“Kentucky seems a likely place.”

“Kentucky?”

“Yes, Kentucky. It’s the last place you know her to be, right?”

“Right . . . but wouldn’t it be easier to just do some research online?”

“What happened to the girl who wanted to go out and see the world?”

“Oliver, I can’t just up and go to Kentucky.”

“Why not?”

I smile at him, caught off guard by the simplicity of his argument. “Because I have a job and I just had an interview and . . . I’ve got a family! A family that relies on me to . . . help.” The words sound lame and whiny.

He returns my smile, though his is easy and confident. “You hate your job.” He holds up a finger to stop my protest. “I’ve worked with you for one week, and I already know you hate it. Don’t bother denying it.”

I close my mouth.

“And if they want you for that teaching position, they’ll call and give you plenty of notice. And you don’t have any kids, right?” He rushes the last word. I shake my head. “Right, so your family can do without you for a couple of days.” He doesn’t blink, and the steadiness of his gaze is like a challenge.

The energy coming off him is palpable. It makes me feel wild and happy. “I guess, but . . .”

“But nothing. Look. Maybe you’ll get there and find nothing, but maybe you’ll find something.”

“Maybe all I’ll find is moonshine.”

“Then at least we’ll have a good time while we’re searching for answers.”

“You”—the question is on my lips before my brain fully registers his words—“want to come with me?”

“Why not?”

“You literally just started a new job.”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m kind of a rock star.” His words are full of amusement. “I don’t need to work in a crappy dive bar to get by.”

“Then why’d you ask Lucky if you could work there?”

He rolls over onto his back. His words are quiet and measured. “At some point, I lost my desire to play. I thought maybe if I came home and started over, I’d remember what I loved about music in the first place.”

“And have you?”

His fingers find mine on the floor. I clench my other hand. “Not yet.”

We lie still and silent, but I know something loud and restless stirs in us both.

“Maybe I’ll find my inspiration in Kentucky.”

I bite my lip. Fear, terror, doubt, excitement, and joy. But now there’s something else. A new emotion to label and catalog. Is it hope?