“So what’s that rolled up under your arm?” Holly demanded.
“This? Oh, just a little plan for a job I’m doing. It’s nothing much.”
“Hand it over.” Holly had assumed the tone of a parent chastising her child and the irony didn’t escape her.
Billy looked beseechingly at Tom, but Tom was looking equally uncomfortable.
“It’s the plan for the garden, isn’t it?” Holly asked when neither man made a move.
“Might be. Then again it might not,” muttered Billy, again looking to Tom for help.
“I’ve just remembered, I need to phone the studio,” Tom said, letting the sheet slip to the ground and tossing the poor baby doll onto the workbench some ten feet away.
Wearing nothing but boxer shorts, he headed for the door. Billy tried to follow suit, but Holly grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Holly said. “You’ve lost me my model and you’re just going to have to take his place.”
“Me?” stammered Billy.
“Sorry, Bill,” Tom said, taking the plan from him and disappearing out the door.
“Didn’t you know I was always after your body?” Holly told Billy with a mischievous wink.
Two weeks together was all they had, and for that brief time Holly tried hard not to think about the future. Life was all about living in the present. Tom’s next trip was to be his last assignment; he was going to South America to film a piece on the lives of young children who made their living scavenging on landfill sites. The subject matter promised to be as harrowing as he’d encountered in Haiti, and Holly worried how this new assignment would affect Tom. She wondered if he would be in any fit state to deal with the news she would have to break to him when he returned. Part of her was looking for more excuses to put off her confession, but she knew that one day soon she was going to have to tell him about the moondial.
It had taken the full fortnight to get Tom looking like his old self, but the hollow anxiety etched around his beautiful green eyes had gradually filled out after copious amounts of rest, relaxation, and home cooking, even Holly’s burnt offerings.
“I’m glad your hair’s growing back.” Holly was watching Tom run his fingers through his damp, freshly washed hair. It was the early hours of the morning and the taxi was already on its way to pick him up. Holly lay back on the bed watching him pack up the last few things that had actually made it out of his suitcase.
“You do realize that the studio is going to make me get it cut again as soon as I get back from South America,” warned Tom. “While we were in Haiti, they tried to bribe the crew into cutting it while I was asleep.”
“So why didn’t they?”
“I put in a higher bid. You’ll spot a rather large payment at the duty-free shop on our credit card bill.”
“Well, I hope the crew will be looking after you on this trip, too.”
“They will. We’ll look after each other. Don’t you worry.”
Tom sat down on the bed to put his socks on, and Holly crawled up behind him and wrapped her arms around him.
“But I do worry,” Holly said, kissing the top of Tom’s head.
Tom pulled Holly around so that she was sitting on his knee. “I’m going to miss you.”
“You’ll be back soon enough. It’s not forever.” As Holly wrapped her arms around his neck and felt her heart beating against his chest, she could also feel it ache. She reminded herself that the decision she was about to make was as much for him as it was for both of them and she tried desperately not to think of the one thing, the one person that made that decision so heartbreaking.
“We could just stay here,” Tom suggested, pulling Holly onto the bed and kissing her slowly and sensuously.
“Don’t,” moaned Holly. “I’ll never let you go if you say that.”
“I love you, Hol.”
“I love you, too,” Holly croaked, holding back the tears.
“The taxi will be here soon but, oh, how I wish we had more time,” Tom said, peeling himself from her and reluctantly getting up off the bed.
“We will have more time. One day soon we’ll have the rest of our lives to spend together,” promised Holly, squeezing her eyes shut against the vision of Libby’s beautiful green eyes staring back at her.
She lay where Tom had left her, watching him in silence as he quickly dressed and finished off his packing. A solemn knock on the door announced the arrival of the taxi. Tom leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
“By the way …” Tom said, kissing Holly gently on the lips.
“What?” she asked, looking up into his green eyes.
“Your breath stinks.” Tom smiled his beautiful, mischievous smile.
“Well, you’ve got a bogie hanging from your nose,” countered Holly.
“And with those loving words of endearment, I’ll leave you in peace. Go back to sleep.”
Holly wrapped her arms around Tom and held on to him tightly. There was another knock at the door, firmer this time, but Tom didn’t pull away. It was Holly who had to let him go.
The all-too-familiar sense of loneliness settled around her even before she heard the front door slam and the taxi pull away.
Holly had made little to no progress on Mrs. Bronson’s sculpture while Tom had been at home but she couldn’t just blame her husband. She knew she had been deliberately prevaricating. The figure of the baby she was about to create would be based on Libby’s image, not Mrs. Bronson’s son, whose photographs were now lost at the back of a drawer somewhere. She was torn between wanting to create an image of Libby and the fear of seeing her daughter’s beautiful, trusting face looking back at her. But Libby wasn’t the only reason she was procrastinating. Holly had been uneasy about the concept of the sculpture long before her embryonic maternal instincts had been crushed by the moondial and its rules. She couldn’t start work in earnest until her belief in the design was firmly established. She needed a second opinion.
“I just don’t know what it is that’s missing,” Holly said, staring at the sculpture. She had been constructing the figure of the mother and child from chicken wire and steel poles drilled into the marble base, and it was a true reflection of the scaled-down version Mrs. Bronson had signed off on.
“The base is absolutely beautiful.” Jocelyn was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Holly at the far end of the studio, as far back from the sculpture as they could get. The biting October wind outside was making the withered branches of nearby trees scratch forlornly at the windows.
“Which means you don’t like the top half,” Holly answered flatly.
“Now I can hardly make a fair assessment on a twisted pile of chicken wire,” scolded Jocelyn. She turned her attention to the scaled-down version and went over to trace her fingers along the figures of the mother and then the baby. “It is beautiful and I know you’re going to do it justice in the full-size version. Is this Libby?”
Holly nodded, unable to trust herself to speak without her voice cracking with emotion.
“She’s beautiful.”
“And I’m a terrible mother,” Holly added, voicing her guilt.
“You have no choice; we both know that.”
“I know. I just don’t know how I can live without her. I know I’ve been given a chance to save my life and it’s wonderful that I ever got to meet her at all, but it breaks my heart.”
“So this sculpture, then,” Jocelyn said, deliberately changing the subject. “It’s meant to represent the generations, each child becoming the mother of the next?”
“Yes,” Holly said with a sigh. “What I’m trying to do with the base is show the link from one generation to the next—and believe me, I was tempted to slip a broken link in there somewhere.”
“To reflect your relationship with your own mother, by any chance?” Jocelyn asked, knowing enough of Holly’s past to understand why she had struggled with this aspect of the sculpture.
“The only foundation my mother laid
for me was a foundation of doubt.”
“Libby has shown you how to be a mother and for that reason she’ll always be a blessing in your life, even if she can’t share it with you.”
“I know. That’s why it’s more important than ever to get this right. I’m the first to admit that I didn’t put my heart into it at first, but now it’s about the only thing in this whole mess that I still have complete control over. I just can’t shake this feeling that something doesn’t work. It’s the pose that’s wrong, I think.”
“Well, explain it to me. How does it make you feel?”
Holly concentrated on the scaled-down sculpture. She walked around it, following the spiral at the base, the vague images of the figures, and then the upper section where the mother continued the spiral upward. “The linked figures don’t just represent the connections between mother and child; they also show how each generation forms the base for the next. The spiral adds the dynamics to the piece. There’s always a corner to turn, venturing into the unknown.” Holly paused and laughed. “Quite ironic, as it turns out, don’t you think?”
“Not everyone has the chance to see what lies ahead,” Jocelyn added, always the defender of the moondial.
“Anyway, the mother and baby represent the present generation.”
Jocelyn tapped her chin, deep in thought. “So why is the mother holding the baby and looking down? Is that because it’s in the present?”
Holly stopped still. She walked quickly around the sculpture again. Then she rushed over to Jocelyn and gave her a big hug. “You clever thing! That’s it. That’s why it wasn’t working.” Holly released Jocelyn just as quickly and rushed over to her workbench to grab her sketch pad.
Scribbling away, she explained to Jocelyn what she was doing. “I paid too much attention to Mrs. Bronson’s need to be center of attention, so much so that I didn’t follow the concept all the way through.”
“I’m still not following you,” Jocelyn said.
“The base is a perfect representation of the concept, the spiral, the links, one generation providing the foundation for the next. The top half, though, the mother and child, that was only my naïve interpretation of the relationship between the two. The mother is turned in a way that continues the spiral. But the way she’s holding the baby, it’s all wrong. Protective yes, but she’s holding it like it’s a possession. She needs to be holding the baby up, supporting it on its journey into the future, carrying on the theme of one generation being the foundation for the next.”
“Can you change the design now? Hasn’t Mrs. Bronson already signed off on it?” warned Jocelyn.
“To hell with Mrs. Bronson. It’s my work and I struggled with this piece from the very beginning. I haven’t been able to fully connect with it because I knew something wasn’t quite right. I put a part of me in every piece I create, but with this sculpture I’m putting in a big piece of my heart and all of my soul. Now that I know what’s wrong, I have to change it.”
Jocelyn looked at Holly and smiled. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen that twinkle in your eye.”
Holly smiled back at Jocelyn. She was right. For the last few months, Holly had seen each day as a battle with her emotions and working on the sculpture was a challenge. A piece of the jigsaw had now fallen into place and Holly was eager to demolish the chicken wire structure and start again from a new perspective.
Jocelyn told Holly that she would leave her to it, but she hovered by the door of the studio, reluctant to say good-bye.
“Is there something else?” asked Holly, aware that her friend still had something on her mind.
“It’s a full moon tonight,” Jocelyn replied with an anxious smile.
“I know, and don’t worry; it’s still under wraps.”
“You won’t use it again?”
“Not yet, at least. Perhaps one day, I don’t know. I’m scared what the future now holds for me,” confessed Holly.
“It holds you and Tom,” Jocelyn assured her. “You’re doing the right thing.”
Jocelyn eventually left, believing, as did Holly, that Holly’s resolve was strong enough to resist the pull of the moondial and that she didn’t need Jocelyn’s help.
Left to her own devices, Holly threw herself back into her work. But if she had hoped that the new surge of creativity would help distract her, she couldn’t have been more wrong. She had sketches of Libby’s face scattered all over the studio and they all looked out to her, calling for her attention. She knew there was still a chance that the future hadn’t been rewritten yet. She hadn’t actually acted on her decision not to conceive Libby. Her next appointment for the contraceptive injection wasn’t until the following month. That would surely trigger the changes that would erase Libby from the future, but right now, as the full moon crept ever closer, Holly sensed that she was still traveling the same path.
She looked around her, her eyes moving from one image of her daughter to another. Then she looked at the new sketches she had drawn of the mother holding up her child. Her body tingled with excitement as she remembered what Jocelyn had said about her reflection being stronger in the moonlight. Tonight might just be the one and only chance she would have to hold Libby.
Holly was almost buzzing with anticipation, and for the first time since the moondial had entered her life she was actually looking forward to seeing the moon’s perfectly formed and hopefully benevolent face.
The cloudless sky had warmed the day with weak autumn sunshine, but the moon that replaced it held no warmth of its own and a halo around its edges promised an early frost. The trees in the orchard rattled in the desolate wind, shedding leaves in grief for the lost summer, and the white dust sheet fluttered like a ghost as Holly uncovered the moondial.
The dial practically glowed in the moonlight and its brass claws reached out beseechingly, ready to grasp the glass orb that Holly held in her trembling hand. As she dropped the orb into place and waited for the shower of moonbeams to consume her, Holly focused on the orchard. It had been three months since she had last used the dial, when it had taken her to a cold January night. If the dial continued to open a window eighteen months into the future, then the autumn landscape would be transformed into spring and the orchard would be the first sign of hope that the future she had seen still remained intact and that her seven-month-old daughter would be there waiting for her. If the orchard showed her something else, Holly knew she was opening a window to a world she wasn’t prepared to see yet.
“Please don’t take her from me, not yet. You can’t be that cruel,” she whispered, as she was forced to close her eyes against the shards of moonlight that spun across the surface of the dial and the world beyond.
As the dancing light faded, Holly blinked her eyes, desperate for that first glimpse of her new surroundings. The rambling chaos of her garden had been replaced by clean, manicured landscaping, but Holly held her breath as she looked beyond the garden toward the orchard.
The apple blossom was only just starting to peek through the darkness but it was enough to give her hope.
Holly opened the back door with ease, her determination to see her daughter giving her the strength of presence she had struggled with in her earlier visits. The house was in complete darkness as Holly crept stealthily through the kitchen and into the hall, eager to reach Libby. It was only when she realized the house was completely still that she forced herself to stop and catch her breath and her thoughts. The occupants were either in bed or not there at all and a knot of fear caught Holly by surprise. She couldn’t face going upstairs until she was sure Libby hadn’t already been written out of her future. She took a breath, building up the courage to go into the living room, where she would find enough evidence to confirm whether or not her meddling had already taken her daughter from her.
In the eerie darkness of the room, Holly picked out some familiar silhouettes: the sofas, the TV stand, the fireplace, and even the outline of the china cat on the shelf. She knew it was smiling at her smugly even
though she couldn’t see its face. Holly wondered how the cat could still be there when she had already smashed it, but she wasn’t about to be distracted from her desperate search for confirmation that Libby was safe. Stepping deeper into the darkness, Holly accidently kicked something that rattled and rolled across the floor. She picked it up and smiled at the baby rattle in her hand. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Before she left to search out Libby, Holly’s curiosity got the better of her and she crept over to the shelf to peer at the china cat sitting proudly in front of her. In the dim light it looked in pristine condition but as she let her finger follow the curve of its body, she felt a telltale ridge at its neck. The shattered pieces of the cat that she had left to gather dust behind the sofa had at some point been retrieved and glued back together.
Holly took the stairs two at a time. She might now know that Libby still existed but she wasn’t yet sure whether or not she was at home. Tom could be away somewhere with Libby, staying over with his parents perhaps. The gatehouse had only two bedrooms and Holly ignored the first door to the master bedroom with only a faint tug at her heart to see Tom. Holly knew if he was there she couldn’t give him comfort, and she didn’t think she could bear to see any more of his pain. Besides, she didn’t need to, she told herself. She was going to make sure that Tom would never suffer her loss.
The door to the second room was slightly ajar and there was the faint glow of a night-light coming from the room. Holly knew in her heart that Libby was in there and she had to take a moment to compose herself before entering the room. Her body shook with raw emotion and anticipation, her heart hammering in her chest. She had used the dial with a single purpose in mind but as she paused at the doorway, her courage failed her and she fought the urge to turn and run. Holly had to face her daughter and she wasn’t about to make it easy on herself. She had to tell Libby that she was sorry for what she was being forced to do, to choose who should live and who would never be born.
The room she entered was no longer a spare room full of junk. It was a beautiful nursery and Holly felt as if she were walking into a wonderland. It was decorated precisely as she would have liked it, in soft pastel tones but with a modern twist. The walls were painted in a delicate pale yellow but the accessories picked up deeper, contrasting colors and there was a beautiful fairytale tapestry hanging from one wall. An ornate white crib was positioned against the far wall and a colorful mobile dangled above Libby, who was snoring softly beneath it. Holly leaned over and just breathed in her baby smell. Her racing heart slowed and warmth radiated through her chest and then spread across her entire body, relieving some of the tension in her muscles. She took in every detail of her baby’s features, features she had tried so hard to burn into her memory since her last visit. The baby’s face was heart-shaped with those perfectly chubby cheeks Holly remembered. Her rosebud lips were ruby red against her iridescent skin and her hair was a halo of soft, blond curls.
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