Timeless

CHAPTER 19

H er book would end there, she thought as she finished the last chapter with Deb in Harriet’s arms once again. Abby still had a lot to write. She had skipped ahead because she’d needed to get the ending down before she lost it, but she’d have to go back and write more about Harriet’s time in the war, Deb’s time back at home before and after finding out about John David, and even the time before the wedding of Deb to John David. She wasn’t yet sure if she’d tell that part more as a flashback or actually begin the story there, but she felt good that she at least knew more about how it ended.

The feeling of Deb and Harriet being so real to her still hadn’t gone away. If anything, with the ending of their story written, she felt it even more now. There was just something about this story that was hitting her in a way her previous one never did.

Before she could close her laptop to take a much-needed break, though, she noticed a notification, so she clicked over to where she and Quinn had been messaging. Abby had been sending her links of male realtors to see if she recognized the man who had dropped off the box. At some point, Quinn had asked her to just let this go, but while she worried she was taking things too far, Quinn hadn’t specifically told her to stop messaging the links, so she’d kept going.

Quinn_Jordan: That’s him.

Abby clicked on the link she’d sent earlier that morning, wondering who it was. She’d sent over a dozen, wanting to be thorough, so she could no longer remember which one she’d sent last. It was a man who appeared in his forties or maybe his fifties. She’d never been good with ages, and he had salt-and-pepper hair, so that made it a little trickier for her to be sure. There was a number next to the image, so she wasted no time and dialed. When a woman answered, Abby asked to speak with him .

“I’m sorry; he’s at a showing right now. Can I have him call you back?”

“Oh, okay. Can I ask you a question, then?”

“Sure,” the woman replied.

“The listings shown on the website; are those the only ones he has?”

“I would assume so, yes. We’ve got to keep those up-to-date so people can make offers and request showings. I can ask him when he returns and have him call you back. What’s your name, dear?”

“Never mind. Thank you.” Abby hung up and scrolled through all the listings on the site.

The company had several realtors, so she needed to dig a little deeper. There were three farmhouses listed. When she clicked on one of them, she noticed that another realtor was handling it, so she went back to the main page to click on the second one. This one was managed by her guy, so she took a look at the photos available. Not knowing anything about the house from Quinn’s interaction with the man, Abby had no idea what she was looking for. Then, she remembered the photo. She didn’t know if the picture was taken in front of Deb’s house or in front of John David’s. In her version of the story, John David’s family had agreed to let their home be used for the after-wedding festivities since it was larger than Deb’s family home, but she couldn’t know for sure because her version of the story was just that, a story.

It was getting harder and harder for her to think of it that way, though. Every time she wrote a sentence of their story, it became more and more real to her. She picked up the photo and compared the porch from the listing to the porch in the wedding photo. It could’ve gone through a lot of changes in the previous decades, but if she had to guess, she would say that this wasn’t the house. Clicking away, she moved on to the third listing she’d found, and the moment she focused on the small thumbnail image next to the address and other information that someone looking to buy a house would care about, she felt it; that same warm feeling that had rushed over her when she’d noticed the antique shop for the first time. There was that same pull to know more, check something out, be wherever the feeling was telling her to be, and she couldn’t ignore it even if she wanted to now.

She clicked into the listing and knew it instantly when the much larger image of the front of the house appeared. This was it. She didn’t even need to compare it to the photo. Abby knew. The house of old, the one in her version, was yellow and white. It had been painted all white since and had blue shutters, but it was the same house. Where the old posts that were holding up the front porch had been white, they, too, were blue now. Of course, they were only white in her story. She had no way of knowing what color they were in reality because the photos she had were black-and-white.

Abby scrolled through the twenty or so pictures and had to stop several times. When she got to the kitchen, she smelled blackberries. When she saw one of the bedrooms, she smelled dirty socks and had no idea why, but it made her laugh. Finally, she made it to the master bedroom, and she smelled it.

“Honeysuckle,” she let out. “Holy fuck!”

She sat back in her chair and covered her mouth. Abby knew this house, and she had no idea how, but in her story, this was the house where she’d placed her characters, and this was Harriet and Deb’s bedroom. It, too, had been changed over the years, but this was the room. She knew where the small closet was, that the bedroom she’d just smelled dirty socks in had been Paul’s room, and that he would be one of those teenagers who probably didn’t give his mama his dirty laundry right away when he should have.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “How the hell?”

She also knew that the kitchen smelled like blackberries to her because of the blackberry pies Harriet’s mom would sometimes make for them. Harriet would help her with them, and since she knew the recipe and that Deb loved the pie, she’d made it for their family whenever they were in season.

“Popcorn,” she whispered then, remembering making popcorn on the stove again, holding the handle, and carrying it to the room where there was a radio and a little boy sitting in front of it on the floor.

Harriet would sometimes make popcorn for them, but it was usually Deb. Abby recalled it as if it were a memory of her own, Deb telling Paul to move away from the radio because he was too close.

“Oh, let him be. It’s not hurting anything,” Harriet said in her mind.

“I’m just still writing the story,” Abby said to herself. “That’s all this is. I need to write the rest of the damn book and get these women and their damn house out of my mind.”

She pictured Deb handing Harriet the popcorn. They sat on the small, straight-backed couch together. Harriet had her arm around Deb’s shoulders. Deb leaned into her side. They ate some popcorn before Paul stood up and took the bowl from them to eat some himself. They let him, turned, and kissed one another sweetly over and over again before Harriet deepened the kiss.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” Deb said.

“I am, too. I’d like to visit JD’s grave. I know he’s not really there, but I’d like to visit him and Jacob, if I can, now that I’ve been back a bit,” Harriet replied.

“We can go this weekend, if you want. I’ll see if Delilah wants to go with us, bring the kids. We can all say hello to them there.”

“No!” Abby protested, slamming her laptop shut. “I have my ending. I wrote it. I don’t need anything after Harriet gets back from the damn war.”

It happened sometimes that when Abby thought she was done writing a story, the story – or, rather, its characters – had other ideas, and they kept pressing her to write more. But she had her ending. She’d thought she made it happy, even, and somewhat believable, too. It was perfect, and she was happy with it, but now, Harriet and Deb were talking to her again. They were writing more of the story for her.

“Mama, can I go up to bed?” Paul asked .

“Of course, you can,” Harriet replied.

Paul stood and carried the bowl to them, handing it off to Deb.

“Good night.”

“We love you,” Deb said.

“Love you, too,” he replied.

Then, he took off upstairs, leaving them alone.

“He no longer needs us to tuck him in… I’ve missed so much,” Harriet noted.

“I bet he’d love it if you tucked him in from time to time or read to him a little, if you wanted to. He missed you, Harriet. He’s growing, and he might not be the best at expressing it, but he did.”

“I know. I missed him, too.”

“Do you want to tuck him in tonight?”

“No, let him be. Tomorrow night, maybe? Can you stand up for a minute, though?”

Deb squinted playfully at her and stood. Harriet moved to lie down and held out her arms.

“Come here,” she said.

Deb moved to lie on top of her, and they stayed like that while the fire they’d started hours ago died out.

Abby didn’t want to type it, but the scene was so specific, and she might need it later, so she opened her laptop again, created a new doc, and started writing down word for word what she’d just thought of. She wasn’t sure if she’d use it or not, but it was always better to have more than less when it came to writing. Her editor might ask for more of Deb and Harriet after the war or suggest a different ending entirely, so she should be prepared.

After she finished, she decided to pull the listing back up and risk another scene coming to her brain because she had to know. She went to look up the address on the public records page she’d found before even confirming the realtor with Quinn. The house was owned by a family who had only lived there for about ten years. If the farm she kept imagining was this one, it had been sliced up and sold off at some point because, in Abby’s tale, the farm was many, many acres of fields with different crops, cattle, chickens, and pigs, and it led to the woods where Harriet and Deb often disappeared to be together. The current property was about three acres, with other houses and small farms around it, and it was for sale. Abby skipped down to where she saw a name that she recognized, which made her cover her mouth when she saw it. A man named John Paul Stevens had owned the farm for many years since 1956. Before that, it had been briefly owned by a woman named Deborah Mary Stevens, née Wilson, and before that, John David Stevens. There wasn’t a record listed before that, but if she could go back further, Abby knew what she’d find: John David’s father, and grandfather before him, had owned the property.

“He would’ve been eighteen,” she said to herself, trying to think about the year she had Paul being born in her book. “1938. He inherited it from his mom in 1956, probably on his eighteenth birthday, like John David had in his will. Oh, my God…”

Abby had no idea what to do now. This was evidence that unless Quinn was playing some pretty elaborate prank on her, including falsifying property records, Abby’s story was real. It had actually happened. That simply couldn’t be.

“A prank wouldn’t explain how you know the house so well,” she said to herself.

She tried to think back to her childhood in this town, and she couldn’t remember ever going to this place. There would be no reason for her to know what it looked like inside or the color the paint had been in the 1930s and 40s. She shouldn’t have known that it used to be a much larger farm than it was today. She knew she could just drive over there and visit the house, but it felt too soon somehow, which she also couldn’t explain.

How she’d gone from being a woman who was practical to one who was going off vibes she shouldn’t even have was beyond her, but she closed her computer once more, left her chair and her office, and went into her bedroom to change. Once she was dressed and ready to go, she got into her car and drove quickly, not exactly following the speed limit but not caring until she arrived at the diner’s parking lot. There, she got out of her car, went inside, and ordered lunch for herself and for Quinn because she had a story to tell. Maybe Quinn would think that she was crazy, but Abby knew that she had to talk to her about this and no one else, so as soon as she had their orders, hoping Quinn hadn’t eaten yet but also not really caring, she walked as quickly as she could without losing the two sweet teas she was carrying in the process and arrived at the antique shop.

“Harriet, I–” she stopped herself, her words catching in her throat because she’d just called Quinn by the wrong name, and it had felt so right to call her Harriet, that it felt almost wrong to call her Quinn in that instant. She closed her eyes and tried again. “Quinn, I need to talk to you.”

“Ouch!”

Abby heard it and made her way to the back of the shop without asking permission, promptly crashing into Quinn, who had been on her way up front and had bumped into a box on her way there. The contents of two sweet teas ended up mostly all over Quinn, but a little landed on Abby, too, and the rest ended up all over the floor.

“Jesus, Abby! What the hell?”

“Shit. Sorry,” she said. “I’ll clean it up. I…”

“I need to change,” Quinn replied, taking a step back. “I have another shirt here somewhere, but no pants, so I’ll just smell like sugar for the rest of the day, I guess.”

“What’s that?” Abby asked when she saw something sitting on Quinn’s desk that had a few things on it but was still relatively clean.

“What?”

“On your desk.”

“Oh. Mr. Potter sometimes barters for stuff in here. His wife made a pie, and he wanted one of the coins I have for it. It wasn’t worth much. I think he just likes someone to talk to, so I let him have it for the pie. Why? ”

“What kind of pie is it, Quinn?”

“What? Abby, I’m drenched in sweet tea here, and so is my floor.”

“What kind of pie is it, Quinn? It’s important.”

“Well, whatever, I guess. It’s blackberry. Mrs. Potter knows it’s my favorite. Why? You want a slice?”