Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You)

by Rachel Carter

  I try not to laugh. “You’re a nurse, aren’t you? I think you can handle a few cows.”

  “Easy for you to say, when you’re not the one shoveling manure for a lifetime.” She bumps into me on purpose, locks our hands together and swings our joined arms back and forth as though we’re little kids.

  This time I don’t bother trying to hide my laughter as I pull away.

  She laughs too, though the sound quickly dies away when she glances over at me. “I’m so glad you’re back, Lydia. If only you had been here a year ago. It would have made things easier. But you just disappeared. I never even heard from you.”

  There is enough accusation in her voice for me to stop walking. I turn to face her. “I’m sorry I left so suddenly. I didn’t mean to abandon you. I know I don’t have a great explanation, but the truth is that I couldn’t help it.”

  She folds my left hand in both of hers. “I know. You had a man to follow. I understand, I do. I just wish you’d been here.”

  “I missed you,” I say. “This year . . . it hasn’t been easy for me either.”

  “And here I’ve been blabbing away, not asking about you at all.” She squeezes my hand. I reach out and touch her shoulder, my fingers brushing against the soft wool of her sweater.

  She turns to look up the road. “If we weren’t in a hurry, we’d sit right here in the dirt and I’d make you tell me everything. You’d have to spew your guts out. But you’re back now, and we’ll have plenty of time later. We’ll talk for hours and hours and hours, don’t worry.”

  I smile and follow her as she starts walking again. I’d bet anything we’re going to Susie’s house, a small cottage near the ocean, or maybe we’re visiting Jinx, just home from her day at the factory.

  We finally reach the top of the hill, and I see the wide bay spread out in front of us, deep blue and shining where the sun hits it. To the left is the naval base: small seaplanes are floating in the water, while men in blue-and-white uniforms stand in groups along the shore. Some are talking and smoking cigarettes, while others kick at the waves.

  “It’s nice to see, isn’t it?” Mary asks. “Just a few months ago they were rushing around, training the new soldiers, or blasting torpedoes out into the water. The booms would shake the whole town! But now they’re just goofing around. It makes me think the war truly is over, or close to it.”

  “It is. It’ll be over by the end of the summer,” I say.

  “What are you, a fortune-teller?” She smiles. “From your mouth to God’s ears, Lydia.”

  She steers me in the opposite direction from the navy camp, where several one-story houses sit next to larger wooden buildings advertising for bait and tackle and fresh fish. A group of older men are standing around a beat-up truck with high, rounded hubcaps. Mary waves as they watch us approach. “Hiya! Heard Mick’s coming back. Suze is real excited.”

  A grizzled man leaning against the rusted-out bumper nods. “Yup. Back on the sixteenth of June. ’Bout time, too, need him on the lines.”

  “Mr. Moriglioni, there are more important things than fish, you know!”

  “None come to mind.”

  Mary laughs, and the men join her.

  “Old man Moriglioni is a real gas.” She clutches my arm, leading me down a dirt road that is quickly narrowing. It looks more like a bike path now, with long grass shooting up out of the middle. There aren’t many houses around us, and the beach to the left is becoming rockier and steeper. Up ahead I see where the cliffs start forming, growing taller and taller until they eventually reach the lighthouse at the point.

  “He’s as crusty as stale bread, but he knows all kinds of dirty jokes that he’s always telling Mick . . . who then tells us of course. It’s hard to even keep a straight face around him. Oh, we’re here!”

  She pulls on my arm and we leave the road to follow a grassy, beaten-down path. It winds toward the beach, and stops at the door of a one-story shack made of battered blue and gray boards. The roof is slanted to the side with a bent black chimney sticking out of the top. There’s a window in the front next to a wooden door, but I cannot see into the shadowy interior.

  “Is this where Suze lives?” I ask.

  Mary doesn’t answer, just yanks me forward. I trip a little as I try to keep up with her, and the simple leather shoes that Tag gave me slide in the high sea grass that surrounds the house. “Hang on a second,” I say.

  And then the front door opens, and I feel the world go still. Mary drops my arm and beams at me. Silhouetted in the doorway, the dark interior of the house at his back and the sunlight shining full on his face, is Wes.

  Chapter 19

  “It’s you.” I lift shaking hands to my face, press them against my mouth.

  “Lydia.” The hammer he’s holding falls to the ground, bouncing off the wooden door frame. And then he is there, in front of me, and I am in his arms, pressed to his chest, his hands in my hair, his mouth to my forehead.

  I rise onto my toes to get closer to him, burying my face in the crook of his neck. He smells like pine needles, like salt water. “You’re here. How are you here?”

  “I followed you,” he whispers against my skin, and I start to cry, not just for him but for Tim, for my parents, for all the people I will never see again. I was resigned to leaving everyone behind in order to defeat the Project, but just seeing Wes’s face makes me realize the magnitude of what I was giving up.

  “I never thought I’d see you again.” The tears are choking my throat. Wes runs his hand down my hair.

  “It’s okay. I’m here.”

  I twist my hands in the rough material of his shirt. He lifts his head to look at Mary, but I don’t let go of him or turn around. I can’t.

  “I’ll leave you alone now,” Mary says. I hear the smile in her voice. “But don’t get all wrapped up in your love nest, you two. You have to come to our house for dinner later. Daddy got some fireworks from the general store, and Lucas will be there, too. If you don’t come I’ll hunt you down, I swear it.”

  “We’ll be there,” Wes tells her.

  “Six o’clock sharp.” Her footsteps barely make a sound on the grass.

  As soon as she’s gone, Wes lifts me up. I move my arms to curl around his neck, my body against his, my feet swinging a foot from the ground.

  He carries me into the house, setting me down on the floor in the middle of the one open room. I slide my hands from his neck to his chest. He leans back, fitting my face in the palms of his hands as he tilts my head up. For a minute we just look at each other. It is darker in here, the windows small and narrow, but I see that his skin is tan, his cheeks lined with dark stubble. His black hair has been recently cut, though it still falls down over his forehead. He is no longer so thin, and I can feel the muscles curving along his shoulders and back. “You look different,” I whisper.

  His black eyes move over my face, taking in the sharp bones that press against my pale skin. “It was only days ago, wasn’t it? That you were in the woods?”

  I nod, feeling his thumbs rub my cheeks. They are rougher than I remember, newly calloused and dry.

  “God, Lydia.”

  He leans forward, and I know he means to kiss me. I start to close my eyes, remembering what it feels like to have his lips on mine, but then I stop. The last time we were together, he told me why he betrayed me to the Project. I’ve been so focused on my destiny and the decision to come back here that I haven’t had time to process what that confession meant.

  Wes feels me tense and pulls back. “What is it? Are you okay?”

  “Yes. I’m—” Suddenly it feels like I have eight limbs, and they are all tangled around his. I carefully move out of his arms.

  “Right.” He looks thoughtful as he watches me take a step back, toward a wooden table that sits against the wall. “I was hoping . . .”

  When I don’t speak, he spins around, walking toward the kitchen that’s on the other side of the house. “When was the last time you ate?”

&
nbsp; I stare at his back. I know he wants everything to be easy between us, but I’m not sure what I want. “The Bentleys gave me some cookies,” I say quietly.

  He looks at me over his shoulder, his lips curved into a smile. “Let me feed you.”

  I sink down into one of the wooden chairs at the table as he moves around the tiny kitchen. It’s just a long counter that’s built into the wall with a small gas camping stove. There’s no running water, I realize. No electricity, no plumbing.

  I glance around the rest of the space. The walls, ceiling, and floor are all made of the same untreated, gray wood. There’s a bed in the corner with a woolen blanket thrown over it, and the only other pieces of furniture are the small table and two chairs. “Is this your house?”

  He nods and rummages around the counter until he finds a butter knife. There’s a parcel in brown paper tucked up under his arm.

  “How do you have a house? How long have you been here?”

  “Six months.” He walks back over to the table and drops the items he’s carrying.

  “Six months,” I repeat, my voice flat. “You’ve been waiting here for six months.”

  “Yes.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  Wes opens the brown paper and pulls out a loaf of dark bread. “Harriet made the bread and the jam. She keeps sending food over, worried my wife isn’t here to take care of me.”

  I think of that moment in Mary’s bedroom, when I told her I was eloping with Wes. “Your wife.”

  He sits down in the chair next to me, avoiding my eyes. “I told them we got married and you followed me overseas for a few months, and then went to Boston to study journalism.”

  “And now you have a house.”

  “It’s not much, but it works.”

  I lean forward, resting my elbows on the table. The wood scratches at my skin. “What happened in the woods, Wes? How did you get here?”

  He cuts off a chunk of bread and spreads pink jam on it, then holds it out to me. He doesn’t answer until I bite into it. “I watched you get into that truck and the FBI swarmed. They thought I would be an easy capture, and they only had a couple of men on me. They didn’t even use handcuffs, just those plastic ties. I still had the knife that . . .” He trails off.

  “That Twenty-two used on me,” I say slowly.

  He nods without looking at me, and I know we’re both thinking of being by the stream and him taking her side.

  “I kept picturing your face, Lydia.”

  His words pull me back and our eyes meet. “I could still see you lit up by the gunfire, so scared and pale. I don’t know where the strength came from, but one minute I was standing there in handcuffs, waiting for an ambulance, and the next all the soldiers were on the ground bleeding.”

  It was me, not Twenty-two, who made him feel like that. Even though he lied about her, I know he is telling me the truth now.

  “I stole a car, and used the grid to get to New York,” he says. “I made it to the park just in time to see you leave with Tag. I followed you, saw the car disappear, and realized they had some kind of hideout. It took me a few hours to break into it, but I did.”

  “You were the one who shouted my name.” The bread is dry in my mouth, and I force myself to swallow. Wes watches me carefully.

  “It was a shock, seeing Tag and LJ again. They told me where they sent you, though they wouldn’t say why. I demanded access to the TM. LJ didn’t want to let me use it, but Tag made him, in the end. They said they’d send me to the exact time they sent you. But the TM must have screwed up. I was early and you weren’t here yet.”

  I drop the bread back onto the table. “What do you mean you were early? I was late.”

  Wes narrows his eyes. “What date did they send you to?”

  “May fourth, nineteen forty-three. I’m two years late.”

  His jaw becomes more pronounced as he clenches his teeth together. “They told me they sent you to May fourth, nineteen forty-six.”

  “Why would they lie?”

  He shrugs. It’s not a gesture I’ve seen Wes make very often.

  “Maybe he didn’t want you to interfere with our plan,” I say.

  “What plan?”

  I hesitate, pushing crumbs off the table with one finger. Wes reaches over and touches my hand. “I know there’s a lot of mistrust between us,” he says. “And I know that’s my fault. But you can trust me. Believe that.”

  “I want to.”

  “Just try.” He lets go of me and sits back in his chair. “I was able to fight back like that against the FBI because I love you. I followed you here because I love you. You’re the only reason I’m still alive.”

  “Wes . . .”

  “Trust me, Lydia.”

  I take a deep breath, and then I tell him what happened in New York. Meeting the future me, Colonel Walker, and the choice I made.

  “She told me I was supposed to become Director Bentley. I would run the Project one day, change it. That was my destiny all along.” The words are hard to say, and I stop, looking down at the table. I can’t bear to tell him the rest—like what his fate would have been in the other time line.

  “Lydia.” He shakes his head. “I just . . . how is this possible?”

  “I don’t know. General Walker kept talking about my destiny, but I never dreamed it was something like that. I had no warning when she walked into the room.”

  “I didn’t know about this.” He leans forward, his hands clasped between us on the table. “I swear I didn’t. I would have told you.”

  “I believe you.”

  And I do believe him. At that realization I take a slow, deep breath. Maybe I am starting to trust Wes again.

  “I knew there was something, though.” He pushes away from the table and walks across the room to the kitchen, then back again. He can cross the short distance in three strides, but the movement seems to comfort him. “General Walker told Twenty-two and me to keep you alive at all costs, and I knew it had to be about more than just the Sardosky mission. But I didn’t know it was that big.”

  “It was strange, seeing an older version of myself. She was so different in the meeting with Colonel Walker, and then when we were alone . . .” I wrap my arms around my middle, remembering her eyes, so much like my own, but wounded in a way that was permanent, that stretched into every part of her.

  “She was probably just trying to protect herself,” Wes says. “I understand that better than most.”

  I think back to when I first met Wes: his blank, empty expression, that frustrating recruit mask he rarely took off. He was always protecting himself, and I lived for those moments when he let his guard down and let me in. It was why his betrayal hit me so hard—I thought I was different, that I was the one person he would never pretend with. But was it unfair of me to have those expectations for someone conditioned not to feeling anything? Future me seemed blank too, but she showed me that we were still the same person on the inside. Did I ever really trust Wes before, if at the first sign of betrayal, I believed the worst in him?

  “How did you end up with the resistance?” Wes asks.

  I focus on him again. “The message. It was from LJ.” I tell him the rest, about meeting Tag and Nikki again, and my ultimate decision.

  “You’re going to stop the Project?” Wes sits down again, his body falling into the chair heavily. It looks handmade and creaks under his weight. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “Yes. I won’t let them destroy anyone else.”

  “But you’re already here, Lydia. We could run away.” He leans forward. “They don’t have the same resources in the nineteen forties. We can get away more easily.”

  “We can’t run, Wes. Not anymore. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering when they’ll find me. What they’ll do to my family. This is the only way to give everyone a chance at a new life, one that’s not tainted by the Project.” I stand up, suddenly feeling that same urge to move, not to be c
onfined to one chair, to one space.

  Wes stands to face me, and I see the doubt in the downward curve of his eyebrows. “But you came late, Lydia. The Project has been going on for two years now. They already have a TM. It won’t be as easy to stop them now.”

  I move across the room to the bed, then back to Wes. “The only one who knows how to create the TM is Faust, and he’s not the type to share his secrets. I’ll destroy the notes and the TM. He won’t be able to rebuild.”

  “Lydia.” He touches my arm as I pass, stopping my restless movement. “That only works if you get rid of Faust, too.”

  I don’t meet his eyes, and he squeezes me once, gently. “Are you going to kill him? Are you prepared for that?”

  “Yes.” I face him fully. “Kill one person to save thousands, right? That’s what the Project taught me.”

  “It’s not as simple as that and you know it.”

  “I killed Sardosky, didn’t I?” My voice comes out softer than I intended, and Wes sighs.

  “That wasn’t your fault. You didn’t have a choice.”

  I shake off his arm. “Maybe I won’t have to kill him,” I say. “What if I treat him the same way he treated Dean? Send him far, far back in time through the TM. He’ll end up in the prehistoric age.”

  “But the TM is unpredictable now. He could land somewhere in the future, like Dean did. And then he could start the Montauk Project over again.”

  “Without Tesla’s notes?”

  He runs his fingers through his hair, the short black strands tumbling around his head. “You have a plan, right?”

  I point over my shoulder, feeling my cheeks get warm. “Yes. But I need your help.”

  Wes stands slowly and moves until he’s behind me. He places his hand on my back, right where the folder is taped to my skin. “I was wondering what this was.”

  “I can’t get it off by myself.”

  He doesn’t say anything, but runs his hand along my back, feeling where the edges of the file start and end. His touch is too soft, too deliberate, and I swallow hard.