Timeless

CHAPTER 47

“A re we wrong for doing that?” Abby asked as Quinn drove them to the address on her GPS.

“For what?”

“Scanning the book. It belonged to his parents, and he was clearly aware of it and wants it back.”

“Probably because he knows what’s in it. They might have told them about their past together, or maybe he just got ahold of it after their deaths and thinks it makes them sound crazy and doesn’t want anyone else to see it. It could also just be a keepsake that he didn’t mean to part with, and he just thinks it’s something they made up. I don’t think we’re wrong for wanting to know more about ourselves, though, Abs. They’re our past lives, too.”

“I know. I just don’t–” Abby paused abruptly, and Quinn realized why when she pulled up to the house.

“Wow! It’s the same, but totally different,” she noted.

The road to the house – or houses , really, since this property had been broken up years ago – was paved now, but the driveway, which was only about half as long as Quinn remembered, was still gravel, and she could hear it under the car tires. It took her back, and she was suddenly Harriet, walking home to her wife and son after the war, hearing it crunch beneath her feet. The house was painted differently now and had been kept up for the most part, but it was still the same old farmhouse that Deb and Harriet had made their own after John David had died.

“Are you feeling them more strongly now?” Abby asked.

“Yes,” she admitted and stopped the car, putting it in park. “They lived here, Abby.”

“The cellar.” Abby pointed. “It’s still there.”

Quinn followed her finger and noticed the old cellar, where they’d tried to take shelter from the storm, saved their son, but they ended up losing their lives. Beyond the cellar was a field, and beyond the field, which was much smaller now than Quinn remembered, there were the woods and the river within it that she only knew of because of her memories.

“They put new doors on it,” Abby noted of the cellar. “And the barn looks new; not the same one from when they were here.”

“Might have been destroyed in the storm,” Quinn suggested, turning off the car.

“I’m not sure how the house itself is still standing.”

“Hey, did you ever see Twister ?”

“What? Yeah. Why?”

“It’s what Helen Hunt’s character says, isn’t it? It missed this house, that house, and took the one her family had. But in this case, it took others and maybe the barn, but missed this house.” Quinn nodded toward it.

“First Jerry Maguire and now Twister ?” Abby chuckled. “Do you have a thing for 90s movies I need to know about, Quinn?”

“My parents and I watched both of those movies, including not one but two sex scenes in Jerry Maguire , and let me tell you about the most awkward moments of my life.”

Abby laughed a little and said, “I’m just glad it’s still here.”

“Me too. But you realize what’s going to happen when we go inside, don’t you?”

“The memories could rush at us all at once, yeah.”

“And confuse the hell out of Simon if he’s in there with us.”

“Maybe he won’t be. Look.” Abby nodded, and Quinn followed her eyes.

Simon was walking out of the house with a man and a woman. They both shook his hand and spoke for a moment longer before they got into their car, and Simon looked over at them, noticing that they were there.

“Now or never,” Quinn said, taking a deep breath.

They got out of the car, with Abby holding on to the book, and they walked together as the other couple drove away until they got to Simon.

“Hi,” Quinn greeted.

“Hi. Thank you for meeting me here,” Simon replied. “We went a little longer than I thought we would. I think they might be interested. These old ones are hard sells. People want homes, not farms, these days. And this house needs some updating. The previous owners didn’t do much with it at all. This is sort of one of those family houses, you know? The kind generations hold on to, so at a certain point, someone will either sell it or live in it again. The family that’s around now didn’t want to live in it, so they’re selling.”

“No one has put in an offer yet?” Abby asked.

“No.” Simon shook his head. “It’s only been on the market for a few weeks, but it’s a tough one. It’s got a few acres, but not enough for a full farm, like some of the others around here, and the land hasn’t been taken care of well, so someone would have to come in and really get it ready for any crops to grow. There’s a field of flowers where corn could grow, maybe.” He laughed. “And weeds, too, obviously. The barn isn’t even that new. Built in 1957. It’s not bad, though. Does what barns need it to do. But it’s still small for a farm this size if people wanted horses or anything else in there. Some people don’t even want the gravel driveway. They think it’ll damage their cars. That couple said if they put in an offer, they would want the driveway paved at the seller’s expense before they moved in as part of the offer, but I don’t see that happening. So, we’ll see. Anyway, thank you for bringing that back to me.” He held out his hand expectantly.

“Simon, can I ask you something?” Quinn asked.

“Sure.”

“Did you read this book?”

“Yes, it was my mother’s. She wrote it. It’s an interesting story. Did you two…”

“Not all of it,” Abby said. “But some. It’s about past lives, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Interesting concept. One of my mothers was a writer. Well, she was a journalist, but I always believed she wanted to write fiction, and I guess she did.” He nodded toward the book.

“Did she tell you about the book?”

“No, she died before she could. Cancer. My other mother gave it to me. She died not long after. I was always convinced it was of a broken heart.”

Quinn had heard or, really, felt that before with Bess and Elizabeth and wondered if it was a trend: if an accident or disease didn’t take one of them but they were left without the other, maybe they died of a broken heart or, rather, what happened to them physically when they stopped taking care of themselves as a result of it.

“She and my other mother lived when they couldn’t be themselves, but they loved each other very much. She wasn’t the same after she died.”

“I can imagine,” Quinn replied.

Abby looked over at her, gave Quinn a small smile, and then turned back to Simon.

“So, your other mother gave you this book before she passed? Did she happen to tell you anything about why your mom wrote it?”

“Why do you want to know?” Simon asked, dropping the hand he’d been holding out for the book.

“I guess I’m just curious. I read some parts of it. And I’m a writer myself. Abigail Brennon.”

“Oh. I thought I recognized you. You’re the most famous person from this town now. Your book hit the big time. Didn’t I hear they’re making it into a movie?”

“Maybe,” Abby replied. “Anyway, I guess I was just interested to learn more about her inspiration. Did she believe in past lives?”

Simon squinted at her and said, “You’re not mocking them, right? I want to be clear here that they don’t deserve to be mocked for something they believed, no matter how silly it might sound to some people.”

“No, I’m not mocking. I promise. ”

“We’re genuinely curious,” Quinn added, trying to help.

Simon folded his arms over his chest and said, “They’re gone, so I suppose it doesn’t mean much now. I wasn’t telling the whole truth before to protect them, but they believed they were the women in that book.” He nodded toward it. “All of them. My mom, Diana, told me that they believed they first met in the 1500s, if you can believe that, and that they’d been different incarnations of women throughout history, always finding each other; sometimes, reincarnated as babies and having that spirit in them the whole time, and other times, it happened later, like for them.” Simon nodded toward the house that time. “It’s one of the reasons I moved here.”

“What do you mean?” Quinn asked.

“They believed that when they were teenagers, they became a couple who had just died. That couple lived here.” He motioned to the house behind him. “We came here a few times when I was younger. I always thought they wanted to move here but didn’t, for some reason. We came back before my mom, Cheryl, passed away and drove to this house. They didn’t tell me why then, but later, my other mother did, and I came back myself after she passed. I met the owner at the time and his family.”

“Paul?” Abby spoke.

“You met Paul?” Quinn added.

“You knew him?” Simon asked, looking confused now, probably because Paul had died when they were kids.

“No, we just met his daughter, Deborah, yesterday. She stopped by the shop to look around and introduced herself,” Quinn covered.

“Yes, she’s one of the owners with her sister. And yes, I met Paul. I knew him.”

“Did you tell him?” Abby asked. “About what your moms thought?”

“Not on the first visit, no. I came back, though. He and I had coffee in his kitchen, and I told him about what they believed then. He said something about seeing two women once, who, in a strange way, reminded him of his mothers.” Simon shrugged. “I don’t know if he was pulling my leg or just trying to be nice to me because my moms believed they were his mothers, reborn, but we kept in touch, and when he passed away, I went to his funeral. My wife and I were already thinking about moving, and she came with me. She liked the town, so we moved here, and when the sisters were ready to sell this place, I asked to help them do that.”

“Paul believed you?” Abby asked.

“I don’t know. Like I said, I’d just lost my mother, and he knew what that was like. Maybe he was just being nice to me and letting me have this thing about them maybe living on in someone else one day.”

Quinn took Abby’s hand. A second later, she felt Abby squeeze it, and decided to risk it.

“Your birth mother was Lily. Her wife was Sandy. When you were about six or so, we took you to New York to spend time with them. Lily took you to the Central Park Zoo and gave you way too much sugar.” Quinn stopped there, gauging his reaction.

She could see it all now, too. The trip; Simon running into the room after the zoo that day; Lily’s face when she said goodbye to him.

“Your favorite toy was a red fire truck that we got you for Christmas when you were four. You played with that thing until the wheels came off,” Abby added.

Quinn laughed and added, “I had to keep fixing them because you wouldn’t let us buy you a new one. It had to be that one.”

“Your first girlfriend was a girl named Donna Jo. You introduced us to her one night when you brought her to dinner. You were blushing the entire time,” Abby said.

“You were adorable,” Quinn added, seeing all of that as well now.

“How do you… How do you know all of that?”

“Because the book they wrote together isn’t fiction. It’s real, Simon. Paul did see them that day. The reason they liked coming back to this town was that he was their son from another life. They wanted to try to know him as much as they could because of that. We have this draw to the people from our past lives,” Abby replied. “Quinn and I only figured out who we were when you dropped off that box that you found here. I went into her shop, thinking I was just taking a break from my writing, and when I saw her, I knew something I’d never known before.” She leaned into Quinn’s side. “We are your mothers reincarnated.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is. And we can talk about any of this, if you want, or we can leave you alone. Whatever you need,” Quinn said. “I guess I just thought you should know that your mothers weren’t crazy. They loved each other very, very much, and they probably would have either way. I know I’d still love Abby if we weren’t connected like this. But there’s something else to this that we tried to fight and couldn’t. There’s about six centuries of love between us. Right now, I can see Diana sitting on the floor with you, repairing the wheels on that truck. You’re watching her, and she’s teaching you how she does it and telling you how she used to fix real cars with her dad, your grandfather, before he died.”

“We don’t see everything all at once,” Abby shared. “Just bits and pieces, usually. But when we’re confronted with the past, like we are right now, things come back to us. Events. Feelings. Whole conversations.”

“You’re…” He took a step back. “You’re them?”

“Not exactly. I’m still Quinn, and she’s still Abby. We’re both whole people on our own. But we’re also the remnants of what they left behind. Their legacy.”

“You,” Abby said softly. “And Paul. His children and grandchildren. Yours, too.” She nodded to the house. “This house, where Deb and Harriet got to live the best life they could for the time they lived in; together, happy, in love, loving their son. We’re the remnants of all the women who couldn’t tell people about that love in the same way that we can. We’re the first couple who could actually be a couple, hold hands like this, get married and have it be legal, adopt a child, or have one ourselves, if we want. None of them got to do that how we can now , and we feel them all differently. So, we’re not them, like Quinn said, but we’re also part of their legacy.”

“Do you want us to go?” Quinn asked, giving him an out. “We can. You don’t have to hear from us again, if that’s what you want. I know this is a shock. Trust us, we get that.” She chuckled a little. “The book belongs to you, but it’s our story, and you’re part of that. We’d love to, I don’t know, tell you more about what we’ve discovered, if you want to know.”

“Today or anytime,” Abby added.

“You have their memories?” he asked with tears welling in his eyes.

“Some of them and their feelings.” Abby held out the book for him to take. “They loved you very, very much. From the moment you were born, they loved you. Lily loved you, too. She just couldn’t be your mom how they could. You were so loved, Simon.”

He wiped a tear that had rolled down his cheek.

“Do you maybe… want to get coffee? I think I could use some time with this, so not today, but maybe one day, I could call the shop or stop by, and we could all go get some coffee?”

“Of course. Anytime,” Abby said.

“Yeah. Whenever you want,” Quinn replied.

“Not that new place, though… The other new place is fine, but that one has the bitterest coffee I’ve ever tasted. They’ve got to be going out of business soon.”

Quinn and Abby both laughed before Abby took a step toward him and held out the book again.

“Whenever you want, we’ll be there for the not-bitter coffee.”

He took the book from her, gave her a nod, and said, “Thank you.”

“Can I ask you something?” Abby said when she moved back into Quinn’s side, and Quinn wrapped an arm protectively around her shoulders .

“Sure.”

“What are they asking for this house?”

Quinn turned her head to her girlfriend in confusion.

“I might be interested in buying it,” Abby added.

Quinn smiled softly at her. Then, she smelled it. Abby must have, too, because they both turned their heads at the same time in the direction of the field.

Honeysuckle.