If Only in My Dreams by Markham Wendy

Author:Markham, Wendy [Markham, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Published: 2013-10-21T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Now what? Clara wonders, rising from the park bench, tossing the wrapper from her second hot dog into a trash can, and brushing the crumbs off her jeans.

Now she should probably go home before it starts to rain, that’s what.

Above the tree line and skyscrapers at the southern edge of Central Park, she can see that the blue sky has given way to an ominous bank of clouds.

She entered the park from the West Side on a whim, needing to walk and process everything Mr. Kershaw told her. She meandered quite a considerable distance before she came across the hot dog vendor and realized she was still famished. She decided to take a break to eat and watch the skaters on Wollman Rink.

Now she heads slowly down the path leading to the southeast, leaving behind the white rink crowded with skaters.

It was a welcome diversion, and as much fun to see the professionals executing perfect twirls and jumps as it was to watch the beginners: stiff-legged preteen girls in cute outfits, wobbly husbands clinging sheepishly to their wives’ hands.

Then there was the little girl who teetered over to the edge of the ice, entranced by the skilled skaters gliding by. Clara could see the longing in her eyes even from where she sat, yards away, on the bench.

“Wait, Brittany! Wait for me!” her mother shouted as she hurried to lace her own skates, but the little girl diligently ignored her.

Brittany had obviously never been on skates before, but she stepped out gamely and pushed right off, gliding across the ice, arms outstretched in elated imitation of the magnificent solo skaters…

Until she fell.

And put her hand to her injured mouth, took one look at the crimson smear that covered her fingers, and started screaming.

Clara watched her mother comfort her, dry her tears, blot her bloody lip.

She found herself filled with renewed longing for that kind of maternal nurturing… and reminded herself, again, that her mother probably can’t provide it. Not in the way Clara needs, anyway—without looking at Clara with that same desolate expression she always gets whenever anybody even just mentions the word cancer.

Clara couldn’t help but wish her mother were more like Brittany’s, who coaxed the shell-shocked child right back onto the ice again with a firm but patient smile. She encouraged her daughter to start slowly this time, to stick to the edge of the rink until she found her footing, to keep her balance.

For Clara, spying on Brittany and her mother was more than a melancholy reminder of her relationship with her own mother. It was also a welcome diversion from…

Well, from pure panic.

Which has subsided at last, a good hour after having left Mr. Kershaw’s apartment.

If everything he said is true, then she’s convinced that what happened to her on Friday morning was no dream.

She really was back in 1941.

She knows that now, not just intellectually, but spiritually. She slipped through some kind of warp or wormhole or whatever a physicist or science fiction writer would choose to call it, and she was instantaneously thrown sixty-five years into the past.

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