For a brief, glorious moment, I was sure my logic and reason had won out, but Aline just smiled.
“I know you mean me, Evan,” she said. “If I found a list somewhere with the intent of playing a stupid joke by claiming such a thing, what would be the point of waiting until now to reveal it?”
Her response was cryptic and loaded, but before I could go further, Aline pulled a small cardboard box from her safe and handed it down to me. Inside, she said, were the pieces of a family’s life collected and placed into the capsule on a bright summer day in 1891. When she opened the box, a musty odor drifted out and Aline waited for a moment in silence. I watched her and she seemed to drift away to a place where no one could follow.
In those final seconds, the storm of emotion sweeping through her could only have been intense and I could see her tears.
“We can leave it for another time,” I offered, but she straightened herself and brushed the wetness from her face.
“No,” she said softly, “we have to finish it; this is for you. Open the box, Evan.”
Inside I found a delicate lady’s hairbrush made of pewter and inlaid with an intricate design in mother-of-pearl. Behind it was a small metal container, and its faded red label announced “Peek Freans Famous Biscuits.” I reached again and pulled out an antique photograph of four people—parents and two young children—sitting close together for a formal portrait. I couldn’t see in detail, but their faces were stern and serious. Aline motioned for me to flip it over, and there was a brief handwritten annotation made with a quill or old-fashioned fountain pen:
Mr. H. Pryce and family, Aberystwyth, 14th June 1891
Aline reached for another envelope, but this one was smaller and likely made for sending formal invitations to guests at a wedding. I looked inside and found a single tooth—a small molar—clearly taken from a younger jaw. I looked at Aline, but there was one more object to go in the box, and a tiny cedar case with a beautiful cameo made of ivory opened easily to reveal matching opal cuff links. She selected one and brought it to her lips as her eyes closed. There was no explanation, but little was needed: an otherwise ordinary item from any Victorian-era haberdashery meant something to her, and I waited through the moment in silence. We returned to her kitchen, and she placed each of the five objects carefully onto her table. It was obvious they were taken from the capsule, but still she wasn’t finished.
At last she handed me the manila envelope. I looked inside and found a single unopened letter addressed from Aline to herself and posted from Colwyn Bay. When I looked up with a frown of confusion she said, “There are three additional copies, and my solicitor has one of them at her office in Rhyl; the other two are kept in safety deposit boxes outside the country.”
“This is what you couldn’t tell me before?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“This is the final step,” she replied, handing me a paring knife for a letter opener.
One sheet of expensive bond unfolded to reveal a standard red seal of a notary public registered in Denbighshire, and at the top was a column of words I recognized immediately.
List of items prior to excavation. Pryce family time capsule buried off Morfa Bychan road near Abersytwyth on 14 June 1891. Recorded here, 5 March 2010—Aline M. Lloyd.
• biscuits (1 tin)
• gentleman’s opal cuff links (2)
• girl’s tooth (1)
• family photograph (Huw, Paulette, Rhian & Thomas Pryce) hairbrush (1)
“You made your own list?” I asked with a shrug.
“Yes,” she answered, but her voice was low and almost a whisper.
“Why mail it to yourself; is it that important?”
“Look again at the date, Evan.”
The notary’s signature date was also “5 March 2010” but it meant nothing. She handed me Professor Williams’ assessment letter next, pointing with her little finger at its date: “21 September 2011.” Once more I looked at the list of items and again at the date before the obvious screamed through in my thoughts at last. The letter was much more than an itemized list of the capsule’s contents; it was her proof—her insurance policy—and I sat immediately in the grip of a cold reality I could no longer ignore. My doubts still lived, but they teetered on the edge of a reality I never thought possible. My resolve was weakening under the weight of the capsule’s contents and the truth Aline knew what waited inside before Dr. Williams’ team set up shop in a sheep pasture.
The capsule had been examined by professionals across several disciplines for the express purpose of confirming or denying a simple premise that no hands had touched the heavy glass container in over a century. Her list, handwritten and witnessed by her lawyer, was made eighteen months before the capsule was pulled up and into the light. No one could possibly have known what waited inside unless they had an original list…or they had witnessed its burial in that remote Welsh field.
“It will take time, Evan, but you will see it; I promise.”
“All this,” I mumbled. “I don’t understand…”
“Yes, you do,” she replied softly. “You simply haven’t adjusted to it yet. I could help you see and understand right now, but it would be wrong; you would never be sure my influence wasn’t at work to deceive you.”
“What does this mean?”
“It’s not a trick; you can see with your own eyes and this is exactly as it seems. You can search the Earth for the rest of your life, and you will never find the list you suspected because we didn’t make one—my mother wouldn’t have it.”
She reached for the old photo and handed it to me, circling with her finger one of the children—a girl standing at her mother’s side—where the photographer had posed them in a time when cameras were gigantic and made of wood and brass. I could barely speak as a tempest of confusion swirled in my thoughts until I choked out the words.
“This little girl…”
“Her name was Rhian Pryce,” Aline replied.
I looked again, but there was no point in fighting against a truth looking out at me across a century from cool, shining eyes.
“She was…she’s you?”
“I went there almost ten years ago,” she began. “The moments were easy to find and live again, but it took a lot of driving back and forth until I matched my memory to what’s there now and sorted out the spot. It wasn’t a pasture then, and the trees were different, but I wanted to see how much the place had changed since I was Rhian. I expected a block of flats, or maybe some houses…”
“Was there a landmark, or something from before you remembered?”
“The shape of the hills beyond, but mostly it was the distance to a sharp bend in the road and I could see beyond it to the river in my memories. They dug the hole quite close to the road because my father and Uncle got tired of carrying it. I worked it backward, walking that field until the distance looked right.”
I pictured her pacing in this direction or that, dodging sheep shit and looking off toward the Ystwyth River with a hand above her brow. She told me it took more than one trip until the images from her moments as Rhian had become stark and vivid in Aline’s memory and the distances finally matched. A few years later, she made her list, and a year or so after that, a call to Monica Williams in Cardiff.
“You knew it was there, but why dig it up at all?” I asked. “Why go to all the bother and expense?”
“I wanted to see it again,” she answered. “I never felt that way before, but I just wanted to touch it and know it’s real. But after Glasgow, I worried another incident might one day force me to prove who and what I am.”
“What would force you?”
“To prevent being sent back there ever again.”
I felt numb, and I knew she could feel it through my thoughts as the last of my doubts flickered and died.
“After you rest,” she replied gently, “I will take you to other moments, just as we did when I let you see some from my first life, but these are new and happened since
we met.”
“Why show me?”
“Because you are in them. You will hear your own words as you spoke them to me and you will know they are real. After, I will show you the moments when we made and sealed up the capsule. You will watch through Rhian’s eyes—my eyes— as workmen buried it in that field and there will be no more doubts.”
Since that first day, when she tore through my mind with such terrible effect so I would see for myself and let go the stubborn belief no one could do those things, I had held fast. I refused in defiant confidence there is no such thing as a soul moving through time in the lives of others, but all the forces of logic that make us rational and sure in our convictions were disappearing. I thought it should be a moment of despair and lonely abandonment, but it wasn’t either of those things. What couldn’t be had become something that could be nothing else, and I smiled as the pestering needles of disbelief were withdrawn.
“You’re tired,” Aline whispered. “Let’s go to bed now. In the morning, I’ll explain it more.”
She was right, and the fatigue pulled at me in an endless wave, so I gave her a sad smile and followed as she gathered up the capsule’s contents and turned off the lights. It was the night my life’s changes became permanent, but also the moment I found a new path where I would walk only with her.
A YEAR AFTER it began, a strange journey no one else can know pulled me stumbling at last to the final, unavoidable conclusion. I wish I could say I fought a good and honorable fight so as not to be fooled, but in truth, I simply ran out of excuses. It wasn’t enough she could start fires with her mind or poke around inside my deepest, most guarded thoughts; instead, I surrendered to the sobering truth Aline walked the earth 1,500 years before I was born, and she did so as another person—a separate life.
There are no instruction manuals or self-help videos to shield against the collision between those things we regard as unquestionable truths and others we know are absurd impossibilities. When the moment arrived, and all rational answers were gone, I stood and walked to her kitchen window watching as a polite Welsh rain made tiny ripples across the surface of a stone birdbath in the middle of her backyard. I wasn’t dumbstruck or lost for words, and there was no more tension or rising fear. Instead, I just felt spent and naked at the doorway of a life I had never thought possible. One more time, the ultimate expression of secrets held me as if by the scruff of my neck. Of course, the battle was already fought and lost. With only the two of us, alone and in silence, I had no more arguments.
In the quiet, as she waited for me to speak, I questioned my own sanity for the first time. I reconsidered the lingering possibility of an elaborate hoax, but I knew better. If indeed I felt compelled to examine stability, it was mostly to reassure myself it hadn’t gone that horribly wrong. Insane people, they say, never wonder if they’re crazy, but Aline heard my thoughts and I could hear hers before she spoke.
“You’re not crazy,” she whispered.
I smiled with closed eyes, and she stood close to steady me as I crossed over from what was to a place where she waited quietly for me to follow—where she always waited. No longer burdened by a need to challenge and expose a charade that didn’t exist, I was lifted by a strange and liberating breeze because I knew the stunning revelation in her garage wasn’t a sinister mechanism operating to harm me.
The days ahead would be cluttered with questions spurred by mere curiosity, and I wondered if she would grow tired of explaining it. How could I hope to catch up and truly understand when her experience crossed a millennium and more while mine plodded along in only decades? She knew what I faced, and it surprises me still she went patiently beside me with an understanding I could never match. There was so much to learn, and suddenly I wanted to hear it all, even as the life I once led fell away. Aline’s giant bottle was opened to the light after more than a hundred years and finally, on an otherwise dull, rainy day, I was ready to take my first step into her world.
Aline made breakfast as I sat quietly behind her counter nursing a cup of coffee until I noticed the capsule’s contents on her countertop where she’d placed them the night before. I took the family photo to her table and sat with it for a while, wondering what it must be like for her to look at the face of a child in another distant life and see herself. When she glanced at me from her stove, I held up the photo.
“Tell me about them.”
“Huw Pryce,” she said. “He was a bank manager where we lived in Aberystwyth and my father in Rhian’s life—my sixth life.”
“The cuff links,” I said involuntarily.
“They were his contribution to the capsule.”
“Your mother doesn’t look very thrilled to be there.”
Aline smiled and shook her head as the memory rushed through.
“Thomas—my brother—was squirming and fidgety because the shirt collar irritated the back of his neck. My mother took him behind a screen in the photographer’s studio to get his attention, and when they returned, we sat for the portrait.”
“That day in Professor Williams’ laboratory was the first time you saw this picture since it went inside the capsule?”
“I would never have believed a photo could be so important to me, but…”
“Who decided to do this in the first place?” I asked.
“My uncle Edward saw one being buried at a park near Rouen while he was visiting in France, and when he told us about it my mother thought it would be great fun to create one of our own.”
“This was your mom’s idea?”
“When the weather was horrid, my father read Jules Verne novels to us in the parlor; my mother loved the idea of going to the moon or living under the sea.”
I looked at the solemn faces in Aline’s photograph and then at her, but she intercepted the thought immediately.
“My parents were not stodgy and prim, Evan. I know it looks that way in the photo, but we were a loud and loving family. They decided to make a time capsule and my father started planning.”
“Was there a particular reason for making it out of glass?” I asked.
Aline laughed a little and said, “Oh yes, there was a reason. My father and Uncle Edward went ‘round and ‘round about the very thing, arguing and making diagrams on the dinner table…it was quite lively.”
“Who won?”
“My mother beat them both. They were arguing about this metal or that and how long it could last before it rusted away. They hit on brass as a possibility, but then she told them glass doesn’t rust and it keeps the water out, which ended the argument, and that’s what we did.”
“It looks custom-made,” I said, and Aline nodded.
“My father knew a man in Yorkshire who owned a glassworks. I was a bit of a tomboy then, and he took me with him so I could see how they made the pieces for a mold and watch as the melted glass was forced in and around it. It was the first time I’d been that far from home; I felt so grown-up…”
I listened with a smile because her voice came alive as she described a very special time, but there was something more. I realized after a while she spoke of her parents only in the formal “mother” or “father”—there was no shift to an informal “mom” or “dad.” The detail might seem insignificant in any other context, and I wondered if she realized it as I reached for the tin.
“I can understand a photograph for a time capsule but…cookies?”
“After the photo, we each chose something important to us, and believe me, the biscuits were very important to my little brother.”
“And the brush?”
“My mother received it as a wedding gift from my great aunt. I remember she wanted to send something else, but when my father chose the cuff links, she decided to sacrifice her favorite brush.”
The photograph was next, and I held it for a moment.
“How old were you in this shot?”
“I celebrated my eleventh birthday in March, only a few months before.”
“The tooth was yours.”<
br />
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “I had an abscess, and the dentist pulled it without telling my mother. It was very painful and he pulled it immediately. She was furious with him for not asking first, but then she kept the tooth and held it up as a warning to choose dentists carefully. I think she just didn’t like him and the excuse was convenient. She laughed and hugged me for my sense of humor when I chose it for my contribution.”
Aline’s mood lightened, and her description of a family moment could just as easily have happened twenty years before. I listened with a new ear, knowing my place was special and privileged, hearing a nineteenth century girl speaking across time through Aline. She told me about her life in Aberystwyth with a promise to show me places from her childhood so I could see and experience them, too.
After a while, and the time she always knew it would take for me to adjust, I felt better. There was no crescendo to a dramatic cymbal crash when I understood at last and the immovable, stubborn parts of my nature that once called out for an end of it had been stilled. She watched me, and I felt the delicate fingers of her thoughts moving through my own, but she was inside only to smooth the edges and steady me in the final mile of an unbelievable journey. I was suddenly delighted with myself for finally learning to recognize the sensation unprompted, and she nodded with pride.
“I understand how difficult this was to accept. If our roles were reversed, I would be just as suspicious, but you have crossed over and now you’re with me on this side.”
“I wasn’t trying to be a pain in the ass, Aline…”
“You don’t have to feel badly, Evan; I have wondered about it more times than you.”
“All along,” I said. “You knew where that thing was, and yet you waited so long to open it up to look inside?”
“When Monica’s students pulled it up,” she replied, “it was confirmation, not a discovery. I didn’t want to touch the letter to myself at all, but then you arrived and everything changed.”
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 26
