by Georgia Byng
Thirty-five
If you have ever felt what it is like to come back home after a long trip away, imagine that now and multiply it by a hundred. For that is how Molly, Rocky, Petula, and Forest felt as they sped away from the 1870s, forward toward their own time.
Molly was as confident of her scarred red crystal as a pilot might be of a high-tech, state-of-the-art jet, so the journey was perfect. Sometimes she slowed their traveling speed down so that they could enjoy the sight of the Ganges River rising and falling. The sky above flashed like a supersonic chameleon changing the color of its skin, and the moon streaked repeatedly across blackness like a comet. Time purred as minutes and hours and years flicked by.
“Where are we now?” Rocky asked.
“I think we’re in the 1950s,” said Molly calmly. She accelerated their travel. “Now it feels… a little bit more… hmm… not quite… now we’re nearly there.” The world around them became more visible, but it was still hazy. Molly chose a time when the sky above them was a golden evening, because she knew everyone would want to sleep fairly soon. She waited until there were only a few people on the ghat where Amrit stood, and then she let the world appear.
It was a hot evening in mid-January.
A woman washing her saucepans in the water of the river shrieked, dropped the copper pot she was holding, gathered up her sari, scrambled to her feet, and ran up the ghats, screaming.
“Are we back?” asked Forest.
“Sure as tofued turnips is tofued turnips,” laughed Molly.
“Wow and wow again.”
Ojas nudged Amrit behind her ears, and the sweet-natured elephant stepped forward. Molly saw that the alleys ahead would be far too tight for her, and so they walked along the dirty ghats, past water buffalo and tourists and Indians who were in the sacred city of Varanasi on pilgrimages. The river was glazed amber in the evening light.
Later that evening they found transportation to the city’s airport and Molly arranged, through hypnosis, for a doctor to come and put some stitches in the wound in the ten-year-old Molly’s neck. She also organized for a giant plane that could carry Amrit to be taken out of its hangar and brought to Varanasi. At one o’clock in the morning they took off for Europe.
Ten hours later they landed. It was six in the morning, Briersville time.
Molly, Rocky, Forest, Ojas, and the hypnotized young Mollys bundled into a giant rented truck, with Amrit in the back and both Petulas on Molly’s lap, and soon Forest was driving them down the frost-covered highway, heading for Briersville. Everyone wore airplane blankets as cloaks over the new clothes that they’d bought at the airport. Ojas sat shivering in his new sneakers. His eyes were glued to the window.
“Pukka!” he exclaimed at every fast car that whizzed past.
Molly turned the heater up and thought how brand-new everything looked, compared to India. She thought of the trucks in Delhi, painted with pictures of flowers and elephants. Ojas gazed at twenty-first-century transportation shooting past. Sports cars, estate cars, pod cars, trucks, vans, and motorbikes. The world had never seemed so fast, and he clung to the edge of his seat as if he were in a rocket.
Finally the turn off to Briersville appeared. Then they were on the icy lane that led up to Happiness House—once the Hardwick House Orphanage.
Molly knew that the building was empty, as all its occupants were in Los Angeles. But she wasn’t planning on visiting the place right now. She had to take a little trip down memory lane.
“Good luck,” Rocky said as the truck groaned its way up the final part of the slope and turned onto the gravel drive.
“Thanks.” Molly climbed down. “I’ll take the baby first.”
The baby wriggled and looked about, alert and interested in the world as she was passed from Ojas to Molly.
Once in Molly’s arms, the baby seized Molly’s hand and pulled it toward her mouth. She began sucking on Molly’s finger.
Molly suddenly felt very sad. Sad for the small baby that was herself. She looked at the newly painted building in front of her, knowing how horrible life there would be for the little girl. She felt bad knowing that she had to put this baby in it when it had been a cold, uncomfortable, undecorated place.
A part of her wanted to keep the baby and bring it up in happier surroundings, but a glance up at Rocky in the truck told her that this was impossible—for if she did, she would change the past. She must put herself back. She knew the child’s future would be full of trials and difficulties, but she also knew that the baby Rocky was in the past, and that Mrs. Trinklebury, the one kind person at the orphanage, was there to love her.
So, winking at Rocky, and trying to appear braver than she felt, Molly stepped toward the front door.
Thirty-Six
Molly grasped her green crystal and bid the eye on it open. Immediately its swirling pool, all glassy and green, spiraled and shone. Molly willed it to lift her and the baby Molly in her arms backward in time. The world around shimmered and became a blur. They shot backward. The years peeled away like layers of wallpaper depicting pictures of her past. Molly could feel various holes in her life where her other selves were missing and needed to be put back. Then she slowed down and began to feel for the gap in her baby life. She could sense a time when her baby self wasn’t there—she calculated that so far, this period had lasted only about a week and a half.
Molly could put the baby back either an hour after Waqt took her or, more accurately, a week and a half later. She decided to put her back at the correct time—a time that allowed for the period the baby had spent in India.
Molly knew she would have to be very careful. For Waqt had also traveled back in time to fetch the baby. She didn’t want him to be aware of Molly now, or that might change the whole course of the week and a half. She focused her mind on the gap that she felt in her past and zoned in.
She let herself slow down until she was hovering in the world, and then she stopped. As she did, she was aware of a curious sensation—of joining the place that the baby’s life continued from.
It was about two o’clock in the afternoon on a September day. Hardwick House stood decrepit and crumbling. Molly tried the front door. It opened.
Inside, the familiar institutional smells of the orphanage, of disinfectant and of boiled cabbage, filled Molly’s nose and made her feel extremely uncomfortable. It was all in her past, but visiting it made her homesick for her future comfort and sad that this hollow, chilly environment was where her baby self would have to grow up.
She gently squeezed the child. Then suddenly she heard a familiar voice.
“What are you doing, lazing about in here, you stupid woman? You’re paid to work, not drink tea.”
“M-m-miss Adderstone, I was just t-t-taking a br-brief br-break.… I j-j-just spent thr-thr-three hours scrubbin’ the kitchen fl-fl-floor.”
“Get upstairs and do something else useful, then. And if you’re going to keep sniveling about that baby you lost, bring your own tissues to work!”
At this, Mrs. Trinklebury made the most awful sobbing sound, and Molly heard her move toward the door. Molly quietly nipped upstairs and along the corridor to the nursery room. It was just the same as she remembered it from when she was little.
The curtains were shut, and pink light filtered in over a cot where an angelic, dark-skinned baby boy slept. Molly touched the baby Rocky’s head. She laid her baby self down beside him. The baby Molly looked slightly out of place, dressed as she was in a finely embroidered white silk dress. Molly tickled her chin, making her giggle.
Then she sat on a chair in the shadows at the back of the room.
She heard a miserable Mrs. Trinklebury come shuffling along the corridor, into the room and up to the cot, where she immediately saw the baby Molly.
“Oh, my lordy lordy!” she exclaimed with a small cry. Then she added, “Oh, my lordy, are you real?” And then she broke down into floods of the most heartfelt, thankful tears that Molly had ever seen. The kind, old, st
uttering lady wept and laughed and hugged the baby in her arms, and the baby gave tiny shrieks of joy to be back with her again.
Deep down in Molly’s memory she felt this joy. She stepped out of the shadows quietly toward Mrs. Trinklebury and tapped her on the shoulder. As the chubby woman turned about, Molly stared into her pink, puffy eyes. At once she was hypnotized. Molly put a hand on Mrs. Trinklebury’s head and said, “You will no longer think that this child went missing. You will forget the event. If ever anyone asks you about it, you won’t know what they are talking about. As far as you are concerned, it never happened. Is that clear?” Mrs. Trinklebury nodded.
“And from now on, you won’t take Adderstone’s rudeness to heart. In fact, you will think she is just a sad old trout. When I have gone, you will come out of this trance and you will forget you ever saw me.” Molly leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Remember, Mrs. Trinklebury, that Rocky and Molly, and all the other children, too, absolutely love you.” Molly took Mrs. Trinklebury into a time hover. “And I lock this instruction in with the words ‘Fairy Cakes.rsquo;”
Then, having deposited them both back in the correct time, Molly left the room. Behind her she heard Mrs. Trinklebury chuckling.
“Oooh, you sweet thing,” she was saying. “You make me go all soft. Look, I’m crying! I don’t know why, but I am!”
Molly walked down the front stairs to the hall. She heard Adderstone in the kitchen below, talking loudly. She opened the swing doors and ventured down the kitchen stairs. A nauseating smell of eel stew became stronger the closer she got.
“How can a child just disappear?—that’s what I want to know,” came Adderstone’s slurred voice.
“Maybe she’s not as stupid as she looks,” said someone else, talking with her mouth full. Molly recognized the voice as Edna’s. Edna, the mammoth, bad-tempered orphanage cook. “I still think she sold that brat. Wonder how much she got for it. She’ll probably sell the chocolate boy next.”
“She’ll be doing us a favor,” said Adderstone, her fork scraping the plate as she skewered the gray eel with her fork and sliced it in half. “We’re lucky to be rid of them. Two sniveling, smelly brats, one white and sickly as a bog worm, the other black as the bog itself!” Molly looked through the wired-glass window in the kitchen door and spied the two mean spinsters sitting at either end of the kitchen table. Adderstone sat by a bottle of sherry. A nasty sneer played on her tight lips as she sipped at a glass. Edna smoked a cigarette and tapped ashes onto a pink blancmange mousse—a pudding that was bound for the children of the orphanage that evening.
Molly barged in. Both women looked up, surprised.
“Excuse me,” said Molly, “but I’m lost. Is this the home of the haggy witch and her horrid, troll-faced assistant?”
Adderstone spluttered on her sherry while Edna uttered, “What the bloody ’ell!”
Immediately Molly sent out fierce hypnotic beams toward them both.
There they sat, still and quiet as stuffed turkeys, amid smoke and eel odor. They were at Molly’s mercy.
Of course, the impulse that roared inside Molly was one that implored her to punish these terrible women—to change them so that they would never be unkind to her or to Rocky, or to anyone else in the orphanage. She wanted to set them straight. She wanted to remold them. But the calm, logical side of her brain held her back. For Molly knew that, if she did change these women, then her past would surely change, too. If she hypnotized Adderstone and Edna to suddenly become angels, Molly’s life would most definitely change and so would her character.
So far, Molly’s personality had led her to where she was, which was a good place. So she really shouldn’t tamper with anything. If she changed things, she might never have found the hypnotism book. She might never have run away. She would lose her memories of what it had felt like to be on her own in New York City and then with Rocky in Los Angeles. Her adventures would be wiped out. And what about Petula? If Adderstone had been different, maybe she would have kept cats. She might never have bought a pug puppy. Molly couldn’t imagine loving any other animal as much as she loved Petula. All that love between her and Petula might disappear if she changed her past. Maybe the love between her and Mrs. Trinklebury wouldn’t be there, either. And what about Rocky? If Adderstone was a lovely person, maybe a nice friend of hers would have adopted him as a baby. Maybe the new life she created would be only a fraction as full of love as her life was now. She couldn’t guarantee that her life would have more love in it.
Molly thought of Forest and Ojas sitting in the truck. She liked them more than she could say. She was really excited about her future. And that was the important part, wasn’t it? The future. Molly felt great about that.
As she looked at the horrible women in front of her, she knew that she couldn’t meddle with her past. Although she had drawn a very short straw, she had survived it. She was proud to be herself. In fact, she treasured her life.
And so, all that she said to the two hags was, “When I leave the room, you will forget that I was here. You will also forget that the baby Molly upstairs went missing. If anyone mentions it, you will say it never happened. And when Molly Moon goes missing in the future, when she’s three and six and ten, you will forget about that, too, and deny that it ever happened. When I go, you will come out of your trances and… and…” Molly couldn’t resist changing things just a little bit. “And you will go upstairs and apologize to Mrs. Trinklebury for all the times that you’ve ever been rude to her, and you will tell her that although you are probably going to be rude to her again, she must always remember that she is a far better, nicer, funnier person than you both are and that you are dried-up, rotten, bad-tempered pigs. Also”—the temptation was too great—“from now on, whenever you have guests to the orphanage, you will both find that you need to fart and burp a lot.” Then, touching Adderstone and Edna on the shoulder, Molly whisked them both up into a time hover. “And I lock these instructions in with the words ‘Eel Stew.’”
Molly returned the two women to their rightful time, and then she left the room. At the front door she put her hand in her pocket for her red crystal and zoomed forward.
Back in the twenty-first century, Rocky, Forest, Ojas, and the hypnotized young Mollys sat together all squashed up in the front seat of the truck. The Petulas were asleep on Rocky’s lap.
“What about those hypnotized maharajas? What’s she gonna do about them?” Forest asked, drawing a picture on the misted windshield of a man cross-legged and in a turban.
“Oh, she’ll go and sort that all out later,” said Rocky. “She’ll have to go back to India and back in time to do it. Whether she does it this week or next year doesn’t really matter because whichever, it’s all in the past. She needs to work out the password.”
“She’ll get a bit scaly,” said Ojas, fiddling with the precious ankle bracelet stowed away in his pocket.
“I don’t know,” said Rocky, opening the glove compartment. “I think she spent a bit too long in that beginning-of-time light. I really think she looked younger when she came back. So maybe the scales won’t grow so quickly on her if she time travels again. Fancy a toffee?” Everyone took one and began to chew.
“Guys, did any of you, like, scale up?” asked Forest. “Yes. Behind my knees a bit,” said Rocky. “The younger Mollys’ elbows are flaking.”
“My ankles are very dry,” said Ojas.
“I think it’s the primary time traveler who gets hit worst,” said Rocky. Ojas and Forest nodded. They all chewed some more.
“And you, Forest?” asked Ojas.
“And me what?” Forest took off his glasses to polish them.
“Did you get any dryness?”
“Er, well…” Forest fell silent.
“Did you get any flaky skin?” Ojas persisted.
Forest paused. Then quickly he said, “Er, well, the truth is, my… um… my butt has kinda scaled up.”
Neither Ojas nor Rocky knew quite what to say. Ojas
chewed. Forest chewed. Rocky chewed. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Forest.”
“Thanks, Rocky.”
Thirty-seven
“‘Mission baby’ accomplished!” Molly declared as she arrived back at the truck and opened the cab door. “This is so weird. You know,
Rocky, you were a sweet little baby.”
Rocky smiled and helped the hypnotized three-year-old Molly down.
Taking her younger self’s hand, Molly approached Happiness House.
“I’ll tell you all about it when I get back,” she called, waving at her friends. Then she disappeared.
Once again Molly was flying backward through the years, directing the green crystal in her hand, willing it to slot them into the place where the young Molly’s life was waiting to resume. They traveled back through the years to when Molly could feel her three-year-old self at the orphanage. Molly sensed that she was passing trillions and zillions of moments that made up her life. Each moment was like a still picture from the many, many pictures that make up an animated film, except this wasn’t a cartoon; this was her own life reeling backward. Her life was made up of squillions and xillions of separate Molly moments, all joined together in a continuum of time.
And then Molly sensed that a time was approaching where she wasn’t. The time that this three-year-old Molly beside her belonged to. Molly slowed down and stopped.
It was a cold, gray morning and fog was floating over the grass. Molly picked up the small child and quietly opened the front door to Hardwick House. She made her way up the stairs and along the corridor. The occupants of all the dormitories were fast asleep. Molly could hear snoring. The smell of sleeping children filled the air. Outside the nursery door she heard a small child singing.
“Little cuckoo, little cuckoo, don’t push me out of my nest!”
Molly opened the door. The three-year-old Rocky sat up in his cot.
