“Let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing…”
“Whoa…” Gretchen’s feet slightly tilted as Thelma pushed herself deeper into the other woman’s hold. “That’s quite the grip you’ve got.”
“Sorry.” Thelma’s voice was muffled as she spoke into Gretchen’s shoulder. “It just feels good to hold somebody.”
“Yeah… I know what you mean.”
When Thelma feared she might wear out her welcome, she pulled away, allowing her fingertips to linger on Gretchen’s T-shirt. Their eyes briefly met, but Thelma’s bag smacking against her was all it took for her to resume life as it had been before they hugged.
“Thanks for hearing me out,” Thelma said. “I’ve been a right mess ever since I got here. I guess you could say it wasn’t my choice. I’m very grateful for Robbie taking me in, but…”
Gretchen held up her hand. “I get it. And no problem. We all need someone, sometimes.”
“I better head back,” Thelma said with a small smile. “Before he notices I’m missing.”
She took a dramatic step back toward the library, her skirt swishing around her legs. Gretchen’s voice suddenly smacked her in the back of the head.
“What are you doing this weekend?”
Thelma stopped, but did not push her head completely over her shoulder to look back. She held her bag to her chest like a schoolgirl on her way home. “No plans. Why?”
“Let me get you out of that house, huh?”
Thelma suppressed the grin attempting to kill her. “All right. It’s a date.”
“Now, I didn’t say…” Gretchen was more flustered than any of the boys who attempted to talk to Thelma on her way home from school.It’s adorable.Especially the red on her face that almost matched the color of her shirt. “Nah. You’re right. It’s a date.”
This time, Thelma let her see the full brunt of her smile.
“I look forward to it.”
She hurried back to the library. When she found Sandy’s book right where she left it, she looked at the picture of her old lover on the back cover, wondering what it would have been like to grow old alongside her.
“So, what do you think?” Thelma held the book up before her, thumb lightly rubbing Sandy’s laminated face. “Is she cute? Do you approve?”
She was giggling before she could anticipate an answer from a photograph. Because Thelma was a teenager again, making her way home from her after-school poetry club, where she was exposed to Sappho for the first time.Hidden in the back of a Classics poetry book.Most of the other girls had no idea what they were reading, but Thelma had a good idea. It was one of the first things to truly spark that part of her heart.
Someone had stopped her on the way home. It was a classmate, Esther, who lived two streets away from the Ericksons.
“I really love your blouse today, Thelma,”the popular girl who was dating the class president said.“It accentuates your figure nicely.”
Ten years of aging and seventy years on Earth later, Thelma was still giggling. Compliments from other girls did her in harder than a single kind word from a boy.
Chapter eleven
Predestination
“I’m of two minds about it,” she said in therapy. “I think it could be good for me. The Lord knows I could use somethingfunfrom someone who doesn’t know everything about me. But one of the first things we talk about in group is that we must be careful about dating.”
The therapist, Crystal, nodded along to what Thelma said. “You’ve only been here a couple of months. That’s alotto process while still coming to terms with what’s happened. While you haven’t had a language learning curve and your children are still alive, Los Angeles of 2018 is extremely different from 1958.”
“Trust me, I think about that every day.”
It wasn’t that Thelma was opposed to therapy. After she got used to it being about more thanpeople are crazy,it was easier to open up about the aspects of time travel she struggled with the most, and how upset she often was when she tried to sleep at night and could only see her children’s young faces in her mind. Crystal’s breathing techniques and the concept of “mindfulness” had helped ground Thelma in the “present” as she nowexperienced it.One of the most powerful things she’s ever told me is that for my children, all of that has already happened. There’s nothing I can do to change their past.Sometimes, Thelma cried into her pillow at night because she thought about Debbie, how they never really got to know each other, and how that little girl grew up into a woman who clearly idolized her mother and never got to meet her again.Not with her brain intact…Thelma had yet to visit her daughter again. She wanted to go, but wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.
Then there was Robbie… his own can of worms.
Thelma brought up that week’s revelations with Crystal, including Gretchen asking her out on a date the next day. That included the details about “the book” as well as what Thelma had been doing the day she disappeared—and the guilt that continued to wreck her every time she wondered if this was a punishment from God.
