Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  The construction was solid. She couldn’t imagine being able to break it apart in any short period of time, if at all. And as soon as she began trying, he would return, see the effort, and take whatever action necessary.

  She lifted the mattress. The springs were made of steel. Two were broken. They didn’t look as if they would make a reasonable pick, but there was nothing else. Only one was within easy reach. She fiddled with it enough to conclude it wouldn’t come loose very easily. She laid the mattress down and sat on it again, deciding she would work at it tonight, after he leaves again, if he leaves again.

  “Then what?” she said out loud. “If I lucked out and picked myself free, where do I go? I don’t even know where I am.”

  She pushed up the mattress, balanced it against her back and began attempting to bend the broken spring back and forth.

  Chapter 68

  Saturday ~ November 13, 1943

  Anne sat patiently while Bronson cleaned and treated her wrist where the handcuffs had worn and eventually torn into her skin. The sun was long below the trees. The only light was one lamp just inside the door and another on the table by which he was working.

  “What time?” she asked.

  He applied iodine and Anne gritted her teeth. “What time what?” he said.

  The stinging eased and he started applying the bandage. “What time do we go? You said we were leaving tonight. Where are we going?”

  When he had brought in the radio equipment and began setting it up, she expected a voice communications and hoped with her little knowledge of German to pick up something. Through bits of conversation she had already surmised that he was waiting on a U-boat. But what he was doing with the radio wasn’t voice. It was Morse code or whatever the equivalent was in German. He tapped on the key, waited for a reply, and then tapped some more. It continued for nearly an hour, between tapping, waiting, and referencing a small book. When he was done, he said, “We go tonight.”

  He remained focused on his task with her wrist until the bandage was secure, and then looked at her ankle. The swelling was down a bit but she hadn’t put weight on it in 24 hours. He rewrapped it and then stood and stepped away.

  “Stand up,” he ordered. “Let’s see how well you walk.”

  “It’s going to hurt like hell.”

  “You need to move around on it. I don’t want to carry you.”

  She stood on one foot, using the table for balance. “When do we go?” she asked again and began applying weight to the foot. The pain flared, she eased back then tried again. Each time it got easier until, eventually, she was standing on both feet, most of her weight still on the good foot.

  “Good. Good,” Bronson said. “We go in four hours. Try walking now.”

  Thinking that it was going to be okay, Anne took one step away from the table and then buckled under the pain. Bronson caught her. She leaned hard against him until the pain became bearable again and then said, “I’ll be okay. I just wasn’t expecting that much...” Her words caught in her throat when it occurred to her whose arms she was in. How was it even possible? This man who she had known of all her life, but who she never met, this man who should have been part of her life but because of something that happened when her mother was a teenager, was nothing more than a picture.

  “This is your grandfather,” her mother would say as they paged through photo albums.

  “How come he has never come to visit?”

  Her mother shrugged her shoulders. “We didn’t get along, and he didn’t like your father.”

  “Why?” Anne would ask.

  All her mother could say was, “I don’t know.” But she would continue with the story. “I was a very good child until I turned fourteen. Then I guess puberty hit, or something. For four years I went through ‘a stage’ as my mother insisted on calling it; but it kept my father, the sheriff, awake many nights. I challenged everything and wanted to try anything, felt the need to experience the world before I turned twenty. Many times I heard my mother, your grandmother, say, ‘she’ll grow out of it, Sam.’ I guess she was right because I did, but not before he kicked me out. A couple girlfriends and I talked our way into a club we were too young for. We met a bunch of guys, college guys who were doing summer study at the university. They were the smartest men I had ever known and among them was, for sure, the smartest of them all. We hit it right off. It was 1961, and he had his own car and we became inseparable, except I never brought him home. My father and I weren’t talking so I didn’t want to do anything that crossed his path. I told my mother about him. That was the first time she and I had talked in a long time. I dated a lot of guys but this was the first one who made my heart do back flips and I had to talk to my mother about those feelings. For about a week, we had become friends again. Then after much resistance on my part, she talked me into inviting him home for dinner. After that I got really excited. I made the invitation for Saturday night. Saturday afternoon instead of vacating the house as I usually did, I stayed home and helped my mother. We cleaned the house and I baked pies while she prepared the dinner. My father even came in and talked to me, a real father-daughter thing and I remember us all laughing about something. It was good that we laughed and got along on that day, the last day I saw my father. That night it all turned bad.”

  Anne remembered waiting patiently for her mother to continue. She had heard the story once before and then once again before her mother died and, like she, never understood why it turned bad.

  “Things were good when your father arrived. He wore a dark blue sweater and gray slacks and his shoes were polished. A handsome and mature college man. And he had flowers. Not for me. For my mother. He looked really nice and I was on cloud nine because I knew everything was going to go perfect, and my father and I were speaking again. It was like I had turned a corner in my life. I was nervous as well because the summer study your father was in was nearly over and he was to return to North Dakota. He had asked me to go with him. That news I had not yet shared with my mother.

  “Then your father stepped in the door and I turned to make the introductions, and speak my last happy words in my father’s presence. ‘Mom and Dad, this is Robert Hair. Robert, this is my mom and dad, Francine and Samuelson Frick.’ I felt good because I got it all out without stuttering. While your father shook my mother’s hand and presented her with the flowers, I saw something change in my father’s face. In a matter of a few seconds he became a totally different person, not even Sheriff, someone altogether different. Your father offered his hand but your grandfather only backed up a step.

  “‘Hair!’ my father said, as if he had just bitten into a sour grape.

  “‘Yes, Sir,’ Robert said.

  “‘Robert Hair... ah... scientist?’

  “‘No, Sir. Not yet. But I hope to be someday.’

  “My father turned away and then back. My mother and I stepped back, not knowing what was going on. It was as though something, like a monster, was growing inside him and he would explode any minute but he was trying really hard to keep it under control.

  “‘What are you studying?’ my father demanded.

  “‘Electrical engineering, sir.’

  “‘Nuclear!’ That word nearly bulleted from my father’s mouth.

  “‘Pardon, Sir.’

  “‘Nuclear science! Do you study that?’

  “‘A little, Sir. There’s no program at the U yet but there are plans to build one. I’m hoping to pursue it on graduate study.’

  “Frankenstein! I recall my father appearing like Frankenstein. He moved in jerks, stiff necked. I looked at my mother and her jaw was hanging down.

  “‘MIT?’ my father said, very quietly.

  “‘Sir?’

  “‘Are you planning to attend MIT?’ His voice rose from the beginning to the end of the question. We, all three of us, jumped at the T.

  “‘I... I... I don’t know, Sir. I’ve thought about it but it’s tough to get into.’

  “‘Someday... s
omeday you will.’

  “And that was it,” her mother told Anne. “He looked back and forth between your father and me and said to both of us, ‘Go! Get out of here! I don’t want to ever see you again!’

  “We hadn’t been getting along for a long time, then for a few hours it was all perfect. Then it was like I’d gotten kicked in the gut. I remember your father taking my hand, opening the door, and my planting my feet for a few seconds, looking toward my mother for an explanation. The grief and confusion were all over her face. She hugged me and said through her tears, ‘Go. Call later and maybe I’ll know something. Maybe he’ll change his mind.’ We were both crying when I walked out that door. Your father was confused and angry. I called my mother later that night and she sounded sad and resigned. ‘Come by tomorrow afternoon and get your things,’ she said. ‘It’s for the best.’

  “For the best, Anne! It’s been fourteen years and I still don’t know what was best about it. Why did my father hate Robert so much when he didn’t even know him?”

  She wiped at her tears. “Every few years I get to missing my mother something terrible and I call her. Each time she is cold, reiterating those words, ‘It’s for the best!’ The first time I called was when I was pregnant with you, the fall of ‘62. I thought she would be excited about becoming a grandmother and maybe it would bring us all back together.

  “She showed up in the hospital the day after you were born, held you and cuddled you, kissed me, said she loved me and left. Flew in, spent an hour, flew out. I don’t know how she knew you were born. Nobody called her. After that, only my calls to her every few years.

  “It’s for the best.”

  Now Anne understood. All the sessions in his home talking into the recording machine, divulging what she thought was her imagination getting carried away. She talked a lot about her father and her early years in North Dakota and her later years in Boston. Unknowingly, Anne had set her mother up.

  “How come you’re not married,” Anne asked Bronson after one of their sessions.

  “Too busy with my work,” he answered. “I had a girl once, Francine. But that was a long time ago.”

  Anne could see the picture now. He goes and finds Francine and shifts from medicine and spy to law enforcement, and changes his name. Probably not hard to do in the forties. He settles in Illinois, becomes a sheriff no less, an upstanding American citizen. He marries Francine. Together they’ve one child – Rebecca. Eighteen years later Rebecca brings home a man for her parents to meet. Anne can see in her mind’s eye Sheriff Samuelson Frick’s face when he hears the name, Robert Hair. Rebecca’s fate was sealed the day Anne arrived in the barracks with a rabbit tucked up to her bosom.

  Anne pushed herself away from Bronson onto her good foot and hopped to the table. “I’ll be fine now. Just let me exercise it. Maybe you could make me a crutch or cane or something.” Bronson said nothing, turned away and began packing up his radio equipment. Anne sat and flexed her ankle to the limits of the wrap. She gradually placed weight on it until she could stand and shift most of her weight to it without feeling as though she were going to black out. By the time Bronson carried the equipment to wherever he stored it, she was limping around the shack. When he came back in, he had a stick.

  “Try this,” he said.

  Anne took it and hobbled around a bit. “It’ll work. Could you cut it off a little? It’s too long.” She figured out where she wanted it cut and presented it back to him with her fingers around the spot. “Right there.”

  After several seconds of not taking the stick from her, she looked directly into his eyes and said, “Please, Sheriff?” She then wanted to bite her tongue for saying it, but how would he even know or have any idea?

  He took the stick and returned a few minutes later with it the length she requested. She moved around the room some more and then sat. “It’ll work. Thank you. So, where are we going in a few hours?”

  He said nothing.

  “It doesn’t have to be a secret, seeing as I’m going with you. Or are you changing your mind? Have I convinced you that it’s not going to work? You’re coming to trust that what I’ve told you is the truth. You cannot change anything. You cannot alter history. Yes, Germany will lose this war. But the country will not go away. They will rise from the ashes and become a very powerful, proud people who will work very hard to put the black smudge of Hitler and his Third Reich behind them. America, Britain and all the allies will assist the Germans in rebuilding their own government with something called the Marshal Plan. We’ll help the German people regain their self-respect. It won’t be easy and it won’t be without a lot of anger but it will be done, and Germany will be a better country for it. You can’t change it. If you knew what will take place in the next forty years, you would not want to change it.”

  Bronson turned and walked out.

  Anne sat and perplexed over how much more she should tell him. At what point will he just gag her into silence? Or would he not come back until it was time to go? He can’t have gone very far because he didn’t handcuff her back to the bed. She could just walk out and disappear into the woods. Her fate with the alligators and snakes couldn’t be much worse than getting in a boat and paddling out to a waiting German submarine. She limped over to the door and opened it. She had been out a few times when he assisted her getting to the outhouse, but it was daylight then. Now it was dark. Very, very dark. She couldn’t see him anywhere. But then she couldn’t see anything.

  Gradually a few things began to take shape. The outhouse. Trees and bushes. She could hear the surf. She knew the surf was seldom very strong along the Atlantic, so the fact that she could hear it meant it was rather close.

  “It wouldn’t be smart to run.” His voice came from somewhere in the darkness. “Lots of wild critters between here and civilization.”

  Into the woods or out to the U-boat? Maybe neither was an option. She needed to convince him there was another option and she had little more than a few hours to do it.

  “How is it you look, talk, and act so American?” Anne asked the darkness, but got only silence in return.

  She sat down on the step. “What I mean is that it appears you’ve spent much of your life here. Where were you raised, educated?”

  Silence.

  As her eyes adjusted, she began making out more shapes. Doctor Bronson was sitting on a tree stump. “Tell me where we’re going. Are we going to get on a submarine? Are you taking me to Germany? What are you telling them about me? Have you told them who I am and if so, how do you know they believe you? Maybe they just think you’ve gone wacky, over the edge, maybe sniffed too much operating room ether. And if you haven’t told them who I am, what have you told them to convince them to pick me up. And what are you going to tell them when you get me there? ‘Mister Hitler, may I present Annabelle Waring. She’s a time traveler from 1987. She is going to help you win the war.’ I think he would get rather excited. Of course, now that I no longer have Elizabeth Anne, she being forty-four years separated from me, I’ve nothing to lose. I could just say I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Or I could just go crazy right in front of Hitler and his generals and start babbling in tongues or something. Maybe they would just do me a favor, shoot me in the head and drop me in a hole. Of course after they dispose of the crazy woman for whom they went through a lot of trouble to get, what do you think they would do with the nice American doctor, alias German spy? Send you back to see if you can find another who isn’t so crazy or give you a helmet and send you to the front lines. If the latter were the case, I believe I would consider yourself lucky, wouldn’t you?

  “You see Mister Bronson, I already know how this war is going to end and there’s nothing you or I can do to change it. And I don’t think you’re actually going to go through with this. I have a feeling right down here that you are not going to get on that U-boat.”

  Bronson stood and walked up to her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Stand up and go inside
.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Then I’ll pick you up and carry you in.”

  She looked at him for a long time. The lantern light spilling out the door sent a harsh softness across his face, if that was possible. The dark areas gave him the harsh German spy look, but the areas of light were soft yellow, bringing out the features that originally inspired the vision of the photographs of her grandfather. He was very handsome. And she also knew from the pictures, that Francine was very beautiful. They would make a beautiful couple. She relented and offered her hand. He helped her to her feet.

  “Thank you,” she said. Instead of her makeshift cane, she continued to lean on him as she navigated the steps. He was very gentle. Maybe it was working, she thought. Once inside, she leaned on her cane to turn around and tell him thanks again and heard the door close and the log drop into place. He didn’t use the log often but seeing she wasn’t handcuffed...

  “Damn!”

  She limped over to the bed and lay down. Would she get a chance to talk to him again before it was time? If so, should she tell him who he’ll become and how she knows, or would he find some other way of shutting her up? She felt a churning in her stomach and then an aching in her breasts from the need to feed Elizabeth Anne, and an ache in her heart from the need to touch her and hold her. Tears welled up and began flowing down the sides of her face. She made no attempt to stop them or wipe them away. She wondered if Elizabeth made it and was Steven holding her close right now. She hoped so. Then she thought to pray. She hadn’t done that in a long time.

  Oh, Lord,

  I may be praying in vain as I’m sure the events about to unfold are already written and cannot be changed. Whatever they are, I pray You have written a long and healthy life for my baby, Elizabeth Anne Waring, and that she lives that life during the time for which she was meant, with her father. You have written a long and successful life for Nathaniel Bronson, giving him the wherewithal to become a respected American citizen. For that I thank You. Whatever You have planned for me, I pray You are kind, gracious, and gentle. And whatever challenges You continue to throw before me that You allow me not to disappoint You. And oh, Lord, if this is not a plan You have written, then please guide me through whatever is coming next.