Yesterday's Sun

by Amanda Brooke

  “Well, why don’t you go freelance? I’m sure you’d find enough work; we’d manage. My work at the gallery is selling well. Tom, we could do it if you really hate the thought of being a news anchor so much.”

  “It’s a good job and I can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And if it means I can be at home more when we do have a family then I really do want to do it. I just want you to want it, too. Yes, it’s going to be unsettled for a year, but after that we’ll know what’s going to happen and we can plan.”

  Holly laughed but it was tinged with suppressed hysteria. “Do we? Do we really know what’s going to happen? What if we can’t have everything we want, Tom? What if everything comes at a price?” Holly was conscious that she was teetering on the edge of a precipice and, with a little more nudging from Tom, she was ready to tell him about her vision.

  Tom lifted his hands in despair. “I love you, Holly. I love you with every beat of my heart, with every breath that I take and with every bone in my body. I couldn’t love you any more and I will never, never love you any less. But you drive me mad sometimes. You drive me mad because I can’t seem to convince you that you’re not going to repeat your mother’s mistakes. What could be so frightening about creating a baby? Look at the sculpture you’re working on. If that’s what you can make from a load of chicken wire and paste, imagine what you can make from love. What do we have to lose?”

  Holly knew exactly what she could lose, but she really did need to hold on to reality. The Tom standing in front of her was real and the baby they could make together would be real, too. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” Holly said to him. She looked intently at the sculpted image of the baby and the orange embers of maternal feelings that she had all but extinguished burst into flames. “I think I’m ready to put that five-year plan down in writing. Five years for me, you, and whoever comes along.”

  Tom stepped toward Holly and leaned down to kiss her forehead, then her nose. Hovering over her lips, he waited for her to come to him.

  “Don’t tell me, more practice?” she asked in a whisper. She needed Tom to hold her more than ever and she leaned up to kiss him. They tumbled onto the dust sheet that was lying abandoned on the floor and their gentle caresses transformed into an urgent, passionate rhythm that chased away Holly’s fears for the future and replaced them with hope and anticipation.

  Jocelyn was ready to forego her usual Sunday brunch with Holly while Tom was home but Holly insisted. It might have been only days before Tom would be jetting off for Canada, but Holly was looking forward to introducing Jocelyn to him. It felt just like she was introducing a new boyfriend to her parents, not that she had ever experienced that before, or even contemplated it for that matter.

  “What time will she be here?” Tom asked nervously as he came out to the patio, which was bathed in sweet summer sunshine.

  Holly was laying out napkins and cutlery on the garden table. “Oh, she usually gets here about eleven. It depends how long it takes her to loosen up her joints and get walking.”

  “You should have said so. I’ll go get the car and pick her up,” Tom said, turning on his heels to head back into the house.

  Grabbing Tom by the arm, Holly pulled him back. “Oh no you don’t. Jocelyn would be livid if you started treating her like an invalid. She’s a firm believer in mind over matter and she won’t even think about slowing down yet. Believe me, I’ve tried already.”

  “Good grief, I’m going to have another iron lady to deal with. If I’d known, I would have invited Billy over to even out the numbers.”

  “You’ve been meeting up with Billy quite enough as it is,” Holly accused him.

  “Well, you’ll be seeing a little bit more of him while I’m away,” Tom replied. He looked ready to slope back into the house, but Holly still had hold of his sleeve.

  “Tell,” commanded Holly. She ignored the flow of adrenalin surging through her veins. She knew what was coming, but she had a new talisman to ward off any doubts about the vision of the future. She and Tom had committed their five-year plan to paper just as she had promised. She had written it down with Tom sitting beside her at the kitchen table, in full view of the full moon and fully aware that the moondial was vying for her attention. The plan recorded that the rest of the current year would be set aside for Tom’s travels, in the following year they would plan for baby number one, by year three Tom was supposed to start writing the book he’d been putting off forever, and then by year five, maybe, just maybe, baby number two. Five years, all planned out, and Holly was there in the future with Tom. It was written down in black and white and nowhere did it mention dying in childbirth. It simply wasn’t in the plan.

  “Well, see this patio table,” Tom explained as he guided Holly farther away from the house so they could visualize his plans. “Say, from over there, just before the kitchen door, right across the back of the house in front of the living room and then out, say this much.” Tom was now pointing excitedly to an imaginary line that reached past the current patio area and across the garden. “Imagine, if you will, a beautiful structure of glass and steel, perfectly placed to catch the warmth of the sun with the right amount of shade at the end of the day to take the occasional evening aperitif in our brand-new …”

  “Conservatory,” Holly said blankly, finishing his sentence. She didn’t need to visualize the conservatory; she had already seen it firsthand.

  “So what do you think?”

  Holly wanted to tell Tom to rip up his plans, but she looked at his puppy-dog expression and couldn’t say no. That didn’t mean, however, that the vision she had seen would come to pass, and Holly was about to make sure it didn’t. “I think that’s a lovely idea, but there is one suggestion I’d like to make before you finish off your designs.”

  “Suggest away. You are the artiste of the family, after all,” conceded Tom.

  “I don’t know where you were planning on putting the door, but I’d really like French doors coming from the front of the conservatory. Just in case you were thinking of putting them on the side next to the kitchen …” Holly held her breath. Not only was that where she had seen the doors in her vision, but it was also the logical place to put them. But Holly was willing to sacrifice practicalities to prove that the future she had seen had been and always would be restricted to her imagination. If her mind could play games, so could she.

  “But that way you’d have to walk back around to the patio, which would be in front of the kitchen,” argued Tom.

  “You’ve just said I’m the creative one. Trust me; it’ll work better. It creates a continuous flow from the living room, through the conservatory, and then out to the garden beyond.”

  The explanation sounded so good Holly almost believed it herself, and Tom didn’t have a chance to question her because at that precise moment the doorbell rang. Jocelyn had arrived.

  “I can’t imagine another family living here,” Tom mused. He had used his journalistic skills to extract almost as much information from Jocelyn as Holly had, and Tom had known her for less than an hour.

  “I can barely imagine you living here, Tom,” Holly added pointedly, unable to resist the urge to tease him.

  With the sun in his eyes, he squinted at Holly with what was possibly meant to be a hurt look. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “Well, your traveling seems to be taking you so far around the world you’re practically coming back on yourself. How far do you need to go to prove to your wife that you love her, anyway?” countered Holly.

  “Oh, all the way,” smiled Tom, before realizing Jocelyn was sitting quietly watching them. He coughed with embarrassment.

  “Don’t mind me,” Jocelyn encouraged. “It’s been a while since I saw such love in this house.”

  “So what happened to your cruel excuse for a husband, anyway?” Tom asked her. Holly’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t believe how forward he was being, but before she could scold him, to her surprise, Jocelyn replied.

  “He
killed himself,” she answered candidly.

  The silence that passed between them left a chill in the air despite the sunshine. “I’m sorry, Jocelyn,” Tom said, to fill the space that had opened up an unwanted connection to the past.

  Jocelyn looked at Holly and seemed to read her mind. “No, it wasn’t in this house,” she assured them. “When I left with Paul, Harry had nothing left to live for. If you want the honest answer, it was always going to be him or me. For Paul’s sake, I’m glad I left, but I carry the guilt with me, too.”

  “Guilt? What on earth do you have to feel guilty about? You’ve told me enough to know what a horrible man he was. He made his choices; you made yours. Don’t ever feel guilty,” Holly told her firmly.

  “You have a good wife there,” Jocelyn told Tom. “Don’t you ever let her go.”

  “I don’t intend to,” Tom replied.

  Holly couldn’t help but think how easily things could change. Life was so precarious and nothing could be taken for granted. She glanced nervously toward the moondial, which was now half-hidden beneath the new summer’s growth of grass and weeds. Jocelyn followed her gaze.

  “It came from Hardmonton Hall—the moondial, that is,” she told Holly. “There was a massive fire that razed the Hall to the ground in the seventies and the moondial was among the few things that survived it.”

  “I read up on that. The family actually died in the fire,” added Tom.

  “Lord and Lady Hardmonton perished, but their young son was away at the time. He never returned and what little was left of the estate was sold off.”

  “And that’s how you came by the moondial,” concluded Tom.

  “I can see why you make a living from your inquiring mind,” laughed Jocelyn. “Yes, Harry spotted the dial and just had to buy it, not because he liked it but because he knew I wouldn’t. We’d been married a good while by then. I think Paul would have been about ten and life wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all.” She turned to Tom before she continued, ready to make a point. “Hard as it is to believe, the garden was beautiful back then. It was the one part of my life I still felt I had some control over, a form of escape, but Harry tried his best to spoil that, too. He set up the moondial in the middle of my beautiful garden just because he thought it would sully it.”

  They all stood up without prompting and walked over to the dial. Tom did his best to stamp down the overgrowth to make it easier for Jocelyn to get to the dial. “I will make it good,” he promised her apologetically. “Once I’m done with all of this traveling, it’ll be restored to its former glory, and that’s a promise.”

  “Well, make sure you do,” Jocelyn answered.

  Holly stood in front of the dial but was reluctant to touch it. She had purposely avoided getting close to the dial since her fall, and seeing the stone up close, watching the quartz glinting menacingly in the sunlight, she could almost feel the electric shock she had received from the dial course up her arm.

  It was Jocelyn who tentatively reached out and touched the surface of the dial first. “You found the mechanism,” she whispered. Holly thought she detected a slight tremor in her voice.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. We tried putting the glass ball thing in the claws but it didn’t fit properly,” explained Tom.

  Jocelyn visibly relaxed. “It doesn’t work, never has,” she told Tom. “Still, it makes a good bird table.”

  “I’ve never seen a bird land on it yet,” Holly said, almost to herself, as she realized how strange it was that she hadn’t actually seen a bird anywhere near it.

  “So what else do we know of the moondial?” Tom asked her, his eyebrow raised in suspicion.

  Guilt flushed Holly’s cheeks. “What do you mean?” she stammered.

  Tom turned to Jocelyn. “My wife here has been doing her own research. I’ve been waiting patiently for her to reveal the murky history of the moondial, but so far she’s keeping her information to herself. She hasn’t even apologized for spilling coffee all over my computer.”

  Tom turned back to Holly. Her mouth opened to speak but she couldn’t quite find the words that would help her wriggle out of a conversation that was making her decidedly uncomfortable.

  “You switched the screen off, but you didn’t close down the computer,” he explained.

  “I was just trying to find out where the moondial came from,” she confessed. “Sorry about the coffee.”

  “What did you find out?” Jocelyn asked tentatively.

  “There was a Lord Hardmonton in the nineteenth century who was an explorer,” Holly explained. “He discovered something called a Moon Stone in Mexico and it went missing on the return voyage to England. I think maybe he kept the stone for himself and made the moondial from it.”

  Jocelyn’s eyes didn’t flicker. If she knew any more about the moondial, Holly thought, she was hiding it well.

  “Not only that,” added Tom, eager to share his own discoveries, “there was a legend that the stone could summon up visions. I found some suggestion that the Aztecs actually believed these were visions of the future, although, if you ask me, it had more to do with the hallucinogenic drugs they would have been taking back then. Still, it’s made me look at the dial in a new light.”

  Tom ran his fingers across the etched words on the outer edge of the dial. “I read it wrong,” he told the two women, who both seemed to have turned to stone, their complexions as gray as the moondial. “Reflection is the key to traveling in time.”

  They all fell silent and the only thing Holly could hear was the hammering of her heart in her chest.

  “All stuff and nonsense,” sniffed Jocelyn, breaking the spell.

  “I think you might be right there,” agreed Tom. “After all, if it had worked, then why didn’t Lord Hardmonton know that the electrical rewiring he’d just had installed at the Hall would raze it to the ground?”

  An electric current of her very own making coursed up Holly’s spine and sent stars glittering across her vision. She was sure she was going to faint, so despite her best intentions she put her hand on the dial to steady herself. The stone felt cold and Holly felt an almost imperceptible tingling between her palms and the dial. As her vision settled, Holly looked across to Jocelyn, but Jocelyn was looking just as intently at the dial and didn’t meet her gaze.

  “I wonder if this thing could tell me if my wife will burn our supper tonight?” Tom asked mischievously.

  “Bread and water is all you deserve until you get this garden in order, young man,” scolded Jocelyn. “These nettles are stinging the backs of my legs.”

  It was only when their laughter filled the garden that Holly felt the moondial loosen its grip on her.

  “Time for another cup of tea, I think,” Holly told Tom, who led the two women carefully back to the safety of the patio.

  Tom seemed more relaxed as the time approached for him to set off on his travels again. Meeting Jocelyn had obviously eased his guilt and allayed any fears he might have had about leaving Holly alone and isolated in her new surroundings.

  “There’s going to be a major time difference this time around,” he warned Holly, as he started to cram clothes into his suitcase for the early start the next day. They were in the bedroom and the open window was easing in the summer night’s breeze and the sweet smell of the overgrown honeysuckle that had clawed its way out of the neglected garden and along the back of the house.

  “I think we’re only going to manage to speak once a day.”

  “Without exception,” Holly warned him. She was leaning over the open suitcase, plucking out the crumpled clothes and then neatly folding them and placing them back inside.

  “Speaking of phone calls …” Tom started.

  “Speaking of phone calls, are you finally going to tell me what your long conversation with the studio was about this morning?”

  “I told you, it’s nothing bad. It’s still the same plan. I’ll spend a month in Canada, then come home briefly before setting off again
. It’s looking like the next assignment will definitely be in Haiti and I could be away for longer this time, maybe a couple of months.”

  “So, I knew that anyway. What’s new?” Holly asked suspiciously. Tom had already broken the bad news about his next assignment days earlier. Although Holly wasn’t happy about the traveling, or where he was going, for that matter, their future was there, written down in their five-year plan. So all was well in the world and Holly had reluctantly accepted the news.

  “They were saying how happy they were with my front-of-camera work,” continued Tom a little sheepishly.

  “But?” Holly demanded.

  “They want to work on my image.”

  It was no secret that Tom preferred writing at a desk to presenting behind one, and part of that reluctance was the pressure for him to conform to certain standards when it came to image. It was inevitable that the studio would want him to smarten up his appearance at some point.

  “Well, I could see that one coming,” laughed Holly.

  Tom gasped in mock horror. “Thanks for the vote of confidence! So go on, say it. Tell me I’ve got the perfect face for radio.”

  “You have a perfect face,” Holly told him. “Your hair, on the other hand …”

  “I know,” Tom said, self-consciously pulling at a wayward curl that was sticking up on top of his head.

  Holly suddenly burst into laughter. “They want you to cut your hair, don’t they?”

  “It’s not funny,” Tom said seriously, but then started laughing, too. “The studio wants me to have my new image sorted before they start filming my pieces over in Canada.”

  Pushing the suitcase out of the way, Holly crawled over the bed toward Tom. She wrapped her arms around him and lovingly began to caress his dark locks. “Then I think I’m going to have to kiss every last one good-bye,” she whispered.