TIME BEING Chapter 10. THE FORGOTTEN
Chapter 10. THE FORGOTTEN
A dying woman travels through time to significant points in her life, but things are not as she remembers them. Accompanied by a handsome young stranger and her childhood cat, the fate of both past and future now lies in her aged hands.
It was a dream that had recurred throughout Sylvan’s life for as far back as she could remember. In the dream, she was small, scarcely a toddler—she knew this because everything else was so huge. When she went to open her bedroom door, her tiny hand barely reached the knob.
In the long hallway, people were rushing about in hushed alarm. They crept in and out of closed doors; they spoke in whispers and moans. In the turmoil, no one noticed little Sylvan slip into the room next to her own, the hub of the muted frenzy.
It was a dream, yet there she was. No more plaza, no more colored lights or dark river. What remained was a single lamp on a bedside table. What remained were people gathered around the old man from the courtyard, but now he lay in a feather bed like a corpse. What remained was the elderly doctor bending over him, taking his pulse. What remained was the panic in Sylvan’s heart that something tragic was happening. Someone was dying, someone she knew and loved.
“Thank the Lord he gets to go on his own patch,” a gray old woman whispered to another matron, this one white from her wispy hair to her pale, bare toes. “He nearly didn’t make it home in time.”
“They want to take him to the hospital,” said a man with black hair sleeked back with gel.
“Shhh!” both women reprimanded. “You don’t want him to hear, do you?”
The man hung his head, duly chastised.
A soft crackling emanated from the pillows. The dying one was speaking, words as dry as ancient bones. “No… hospital…”
“Of course not, darling.” The gray woman moved to take his hand. “You’ll stay right here until you get better.”
“No… better…” he sighed, but a ghost of a smile touched his snakeskin lips.
Sylvan pushed closer, edging between the legs of her family until she got to the bedside. Peering over the edge, she saw her grandfather, or what was left of him. Sunken into himself as if already half-gone, she barely recognized the grandpa she loved so well.
Without words yet to form her grief and fear, she cried out, “Ga! Ga!”
“What’s she doing here?” the gray matron hissed. “She shouldn’t see this.”
“I’ll take her,” said her mother who had been lingering on the sidelines watching in horror as her father slipped from life. She was required to be there, and she hoped her presence brought her daddy some comfort, but she, herself, hated it, loathed it, would rather have been at the gates of hell than stuck in that familial room of death.
Mother went to pick up Sylvan, but the baby started to wail. “Ga! Ga! Ga!”
“Come on, darling,” Mother crooned. “I’ll read you a story, your favorite-The Adventures of Tom Kitten, with all the pretty pictures you like so well?”
Sylvan wasn’t having it. She squirmed and writhed in her mother’s arms, breathless with tears. Something was terribly wrong, something not even Tom Kitten could fix.
Before Mother could get away, Grandpa closed his eyes and made a funny sound. The doctor checked again, then turned to the watchers, his face grave.
The pale matriarch leapt onto the bed, keening for her husband of sixty years as if he were her new bridegroom. The gray woman rushed to her side with wails of her own. Cries went up from the others; people hugged one another, not for love but for comfort.
Sylvan allowed herself to be carried into her bedroom where she too sobbed for a very long time.
* * *
“This dream has been haunting me all my life,” Sylvan told Aron as the two gazed at the grieving family from just outside the ring of lamplight.
“Not a dream,” said Aron.
“Is it real? Was it real? Did this really happen?”
“What do you think?”
Sylvan turned away from the death. “All this time, it must have been a memory—I didn’t understand that until now.” She studied her hands, a distraction from the keening that continued behind her. “I think,” she said slowly, “that if I’d remembered my grandfather, my life might have gone a different direction.”
“How so?”
Sylvan looked around for Brie and found her curled up at the base of her dead grandfather’s bed. Gathering the cat into her arms, she sighed.
“I don’t know—I just feel it. He was kind and loving. He taught me to trust and to laugh. But until now, I couldn’t recall any of that. The trauma of his passing must have made me forget. My earliest memories are dark and filled with fear.” She held Brie closer. “I know I was just a baby, but if I’d been able to carry his gentle presence into my formative years, it might have saved me a lot of pain. And the dream that overshadowed everything—I wouldn’t have had to bear that dreadful nightmare for the last eighty years.”
Sylvan went out into the hallway and settled on the top tread of the stairs with Brie on her lap. “I need to write about this. I need to get it down before I forget again.”
“I doubt you’ll forget for a second time…”
Aron’s voice seemed distant, but Sylvan didn’t pay it any mind. Pulling the red diary from her silk bag, she began to read over what she’d written before.
You’ll never guess where I am! That’s because I can’t believe it either…
She turned the page.
A new place, a new time. A new place in time…
Below that entry was the pen sketch of the Avenue.
Even as she watched, the sketch was changing, the street morphing into a small river, wild with bubbling current. Its rocky shores were lined with old-growth firs, and weeping willows dipped their branches into the calmer of the waters. A profusion of wildflowers grew alongside. Sylvan could almost smell their perfume…
Chapter 11. PAIN AND FEAR, coming next Saturday.
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