In the bathroom, I took the waterproof travel belt I'd pre-packed out of my bag and fastened it around my waist. I shoved my bag with my laptop and phone in it behind a stack of towels in the closet. The travel belt made my sweater look lumpy, but it wasn't anything my swingy coat couldn't hide. I'd decided it was time to upgrade from duct taping zippered plastic bags to myself. Instead of the makeup and peppermint gum I'd packed for summer days with Pete, I'd stuffed the travel belt with a folded printout of my time travel document, a multipurpose tool, pre-1953 coins, a packet of caffeine pills, and an energy bar.

I didn't know if I had a link to the Rockmore House in 1953, but Liz asked me to find her in 1953 and so I was going to try. But I worried that I'd end up in 1955 because that's when Rose moved into the Rockmore House and I didn't know if Liz or Rose would have a greater pull on me.

I washed my hands at the sink and sat on the floor without drying them. Then I leaned against the tiled wall and closed my eyes and tried to relax, but I couldn't, knowing Eric was sitting out there thinking I was headed to work. The doorknob kept grabbing my attention, because I'd decided to keep the door unlocked in case I was gone for hours. But what if someone walked in while I was sitting on the floor? I rose to my knees to lock the door and turn the faucet on, thinking the running water would help.

I tried lying flat on the floor and focused on the sound of running water, but then I worried that Eric would think I was in the bathroom running the faucet because I had a shy bladder. I stood up, turned the faucet off and gave myself a quiet pep talk in the mirror.

Maybe if I took a shower? I wondered, after I laid on the floor for a few more minutes and still nothing had happened.

No. I could not get into the shower. That would be beyond weird. And I'd wind up in 1953 naked. Or in soaking wet clothes, which wouldn't work in November.

Eventually I gave up. As soon as I stepped out of the house, cold, fat raindrops hit my face and mingled with my frustrated tears. If I couldn't use this ability I had to try to help someone, to help Liz, who shouldn't have even been stuck in the past to begin with, what was the point? I stormed down the driveway toward my car and then the ground dropped out from under me. After a moment of weightlessness, gravity took over and I found myself crumpled on the driveway, face down in the gravel.

I groaned and sat up. My Chevy Malibu wasn't parked on the street where I'd left it. It had been replaced with a navy blue antique car with round headlights and whitewall tires. I scraped my fingernails against my cheek to remove the tiny stones that were embedded in my skin. I unzipped my messenger bag, the strap of which was secured over my shoulder. My laptop was still there, along with my phone and everything else I hadn't planned to bring with me. I hoped the electronics would survive the time change and the impact from hitting the ground. It felt like I'd run full speed into a brick wall.

The Rockmore House seemed hell bent on beating the crap out of me.

I zipped the bag back up, brushed off my knees, and started walking toward the river and the Palmer Inn. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket to make sure my sunglasses were ready if I needed them. If I saw Pete, I would put on sunglasses and avoid him, while I died on the inside. I didn't want to get distracted when I was on a mission to find Liz. Between the sunglasses and different hairstyle and color, I hoped I'd be unrecognizable enough to get by.

It didn't seem like I'd have to worry about running into anyone, because the weather was the same as it was on the afternoon that I'd left behind. The clouds were low and dense and everyone must have been staying warm and dry inside their homes. I pulled the collar of my coat up to shield myself from the cold wind and stinging sporadic raindrops.

When I reached Main Street, I passed by the Rexall drugstore with the orange and blue sign where Joan worked. There were faded construction paper cutouts of leaves and pumpkins taped to the window, scattered among the advertisements for items like hair tonic, moth fume crystals, honey and horehound drops and appetite reducing wafers.

A bell jingled as I approached the next storefront. As a customer entered the shop, the raw, bloody scent of chilled meat wafted out and turned my stomach. It wasn't only the smell of the butcher shop that made me ill, it was knowing that Pete's step-dad, Frank, was probably behind the counter.

I quickly crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to the inn through the empty riverfront park. The wind from the south was so strong that the steely gray white-capped waves at the surface were lapping in the opposite direction of the current. It was strange to see the 1920s Tudor hotel in business, with sparkling leaded windows, a parking lot full of cars and a red fabric awning leading to the entrance. With its blanket of invasive vines, dirty windows, crumbling stucco siding, and splintered and weathered wood timbers, the inn I was used to seeing in 2016 looked like it was being reclaimed by the earth.

Luckily, there was a man walking toward the entrance, and as I approached, he held the door open for me. Once I was inside, the lobby enveloped me in warmth. Beyond the front desk, there was a common area with upholstered chairs, a grand piano and a wall of windows with a view of the river. Roaring fires burned in each of the two fireplaces on either side of the room.

"Hi," I said to the front desk clerk, "I was wondering if you could help me find my friend, Elizabeth. She works here."

His shoulders drooped from their perfect posture. "Elizabeth in the dining room or Elizabeth in housekeeping?" he asked with one bushy eyebrow raised.

"I'm not sure. Elizabeth with dark hair, blue eyes, about my age."

"Housekeeping," he confirmed with a nod. He turned to check the wall clock hanging over a board with rows of room keys dangling from it. "She should be done for the day in about a half an hour. The staff entrance is on the north side of the building."

I gazed at the crackling fire and accepted the fact that I'd be waiting out in the cold.

"You can wait in the lounge, if you'd like," the clerk offered with slight reluctance.

It took all of my willpower to keep myself from reaching into my bag for my phone to entertain myself while I waited. Reaching for my phone was my automatic response to boredom. Instead I got lost in the extensive battle scene carved in the stone over the fireplace. I could almost hear the swords clanging and injured horses falling to the ground. I wondered what the carving looked like in the dilapidated inn of the future. Probably obscured by layers of dust and spiderwebs, unappreciated and abandoned. It made me think of Pete's painting on the wall in Sophie's house; perfect somewhere underneath several coats of paint, never to be seen again as it once was.

The radiant warmth from the fire made me feel drowsy, so I took two caffeine pills from my travel belt and swallowed them. While I waited for the energy to kick in, I walked a lap around the lounge. On an end table there was a copy of the Detroit Free Press from November 10th, 1953. I'd landed sixty-three years prior to the day. Not bad. The bold headline said, "BYRNES SAYS TRUMAN SAW FBI SPY REPORT." I didn't know anything about that. And I thought Eisenhower was president in 1953. I decided I should probably learn more about history if I was going to keep this up.

A few minutes before four o'clock, I thanked the clerk and went outside to find the staff entrance. When Liz made an appearance, she was pulling gloves onto her hands as she pushed the door open with her hip.

"Liz?" I stepped away from the wall I was leaning against and called her name a little too eagerly.

She glanced toward the sound of my voice and gasped when she saw me. She dropped a red glove on the ground and left it there while she stared. I picked up her glove and handed it to her.

"It's Vanessa. Do you remember me?"

"You're not dead!" she said in a whisper.

"I'm not dead."

"Wait," she put her hand in the air to stop and think. "Did it happen yet? The accident?"

"The one where I got hit by a car? Yes, that happened."

"How long has it been for you?" She looked me up and down, eyes widened in shock. "You seem totally recovered."

"Like, two and a half months ago?"

She glanced around for eavesdroppers, and then wiped away a stray raindrop that splattered against her forehead. "It's awful out here. Will you come back to my place for a bit? I want to talk to you."

"I want to talk to you, too. That's kinda why I'm here." I shuffled my feet nervously as I gazed down the street. "Can we avoid Main Street, though? I don't want to see anyone."

She nodded in understanding. We crossed the road and she led me up the sloping hill in the direction of the high school. We were not heading toward the house on the south end of town where she was staying in the summer.

"You're not staying at Mrs. Barry's house anymore?" I asked.

"No. I got stuck with a new roommate and she wanted to talk too much. Asked too many questions. I found an apartment in a place where no one keeps track of me."

The raindrops froze and turned to snow pellets that bounced against our coats. We trudged against the stinging wind and snow in silence until we arrived at the gate of the Rockmore House.

Liz walked around the back of the house to an entrance I'd never noticed during my few visits there. The door to her apartment was the first in the hallway at the top of three flights of stairs. Her apartment was more like a bedroom with a sink. It was pretty spare, with a tiny Formica table with two metal chairs near the sink, a twin size bed and a dresser.

"Hot chocolate?" Liz asked as she dropped her coat on a chair near the door.

"Sure."

We sat at the table and I watched while Liz filled and plugged in an electric kettle, then scooped brown powder from a glass jar of Ovaltine into two mugs.

"Mmm, 'fortified food beverage,'" I read from the label.

"Hey, don't knock it 'till you try it," she said. "I live on this stuff."

The wind whistled at the window panes and a radiator hissed and clicked. Liz held her palms to her face to warm her pink-tinged cheeks as she looked at me curiously.

"So," she began, "the last time I saw you, your lifeless body was sinking into the pool in the middle of the night. I can't believe you're okay. You should've seen yourself." She shuddered. "So, you must have made it to a hospital right away once you got back? How'd you manage that?"

"No, I was better right away. That's normal, right?"

She studied my face for a long moment. "That hasn't been my experience. But, then again, none of this is normal," she said with a nonchalant shrug. "I've never been hit by a car or anything major like that. Maybe if you have life-threatening injuries it's different."

I could have told her that my injuries healed immediately on return to the present when I cut my finger and scraped my knees, too, but I kept that little spark and held it close. I had a feeling it might grow and become something bigger, later. But the cut on the back of my head was still healing, and I wasn't quite sure why.

"So, what are you doing back here?" she asked.

"You asked me to come. I saw you at a Halloween party and you didn't recognize me but you told me to find you here."

The kettle whistled and she poured hot water into the mugs. "Sounds familiar."

"I thought maybe I could help you find your sister." I swallowed hard and glanced down at my hands resting on my lap. "I'm not exactly sure what I can do to help, but if you have any ideas, I'm open."

When I looked up, Liz's gaze was stony. "And what do you want from me?"

"You already helped me find my grandma and get her back, so I thought I'd return the favor. And I was hoping to talk to you about all this time travel stuff. It's getting a little, um, out of control for me. In the summer I thought about stories my grandpa told me to travel back to 1953. And then he passed away, and it was over with Pete, you know, so I thought it would stop happening."

Liz crossed the room, opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a journal. I knew it was one of many; at Mrs. Barry's house she had an entire drawer full of them. She thumbed through the pages for a minute and then said, "But then you saw me at a Halloween party in 1924."

"Yeah, I was at a party at my friend's house and then I was there and it was totally accidental. And I can't figure out why I dropped into a party in the twenties. I thought I'd see my great-grandparents there, but I don't even know anything about them."

"Well, I was there. Maybe you missed me," Liz quipped.

I huffed a laugh. "I don't think that was it. No offense."

"No, I'm serious. You wouldn't have showed up at a party where you knew no one but me if you didn't want to see me."

"I guess I thought I had to have a family member there. Last summer at least one of my grandparents was always nearby when it happened."

"You used memories of theirs to visualize the moment you'd visit, but was it actually them you wanted to see? Or was it him?"

"It was him," I admitted.

"Who did you want to see today?"

"You. Because you asked me to," I reminded her.

She sat across from me again and wrapped her hands around the warm mug.

"Well, that's good. Because he's not here. He left town and hasn't come back."

Even though I was nervous about possibly seeing Pete, this news made my heart drop into my stomach.

But somehow I already knew he was gone. I felt even more disconnected than usual, like I'd stepped onto a movie set and nothing was real. To me, the storefronts and houses in Palmer seemed like flat facades. Lives went on behind them, without Pete, without me.

"He was supposed to go on a road trip with his friends," I remembered. "Three months is a long road trip."

"His friends never went. He left on his own. I wouldn't go asking around for him," she warned, as if she read my mind. "You won't really stick in anyone's memory because you were never meant to be here. I think it's another one of those protections against changing the past. Everyone you knew when you were here this summer has probably forgotten you."

"Everyone?"

"Everyone. Even him."

"But Pete remembered me. Every time I saw him."

"Those visits were a couple of weeks apart. After a few months or a year?" She shook her head and shrugged apologetically. "Gone."

So that was it then. I was haunted with memories of him while he continued living as if I never existed. It didn't seem fair. But it made sense. Time didn't want to be messed with and it did what it could to make things go its way.

"The people I work with remember me because they see me all the time," Liz explained. "And I can clean rooms at the inn and change bed sheets because I've been here so long. The more time I spend here, the stronger I get. It's like after a while I faded from my old life and I'm acclimated to this one now."

I blinked away tears and reached into my belt for the printout of my time travel notes so I could add this new information. Liz leaned over and watched as I scrawled.

"Mind if I?" she asked, with her hand on the creased paper.

"Go ahead."

As she read I took a sip of Ovaltine that scalded my tongue and then burned my throat as I swallowed it quickly. Outside the window, leafless branches clattered against each other in the wind and snow was accumulating on the roof of the barn behind the house, blotting out the darkness of the shingles. I wondered if Pete was somewhere warmer. He'd planned to drive to California with his friends in early September, but it sounded like things hadn't gone according to plan.

After the accident, before he let me go in the pool, Pete told me not to try to find him because he wouldn't be around anymore. I assumed Pete planned to leave town because he thought Frank had suffered a fatal head injury that he would've been blamed for, which was why I tried to warn him ahead of time that day at the beach by telling him Frank would be fine. But it didn't work. Or he left for another reason.

"You need to add a couple more columns to your table," Liz said. "There are a lot of factors that work together to make time travel happen." She grabbed the pen and added boxes onto the table. "You have location, and what or who you were thinking of at the time, but it's everything. Any similarities like time of day, time of year, weather, all increase the chance of it happening. Little things can worm their way into your mind beforehand that may seem insignificant but add to these other factors. Especially if it's accidental. If you're not going on purpose, there must be a whole lot of things working together to pull you there."

She drew a star next to the first column. "Location is probably most important. I've always landed in the same spot that I left. A place can hold a lot of emotional energy if you're sensitive to it. And it can draw you back in time if you're like us."

"That makes sense. The emotional energy part," I said as a memory came back to me. "It reminds me of when we went to Washington D.C. in eighth grade. We went to Ford's Theater, where President Lincoln was assassinated, and being in the room where it happened was really heavy. It was like I could smell fear and sweat and hear people screaming. But when I saw the actual chair he was sitting in at a museum once, it wasn't the same. It was an old chair with blood on it."

"Michelle described it as lifting an invisible veil. That same day I took her with me, before I lost her, I told her I could time travel and she told me she could see visions of the past as if she was there. I never figured out if we were describing the same thing." She cleared her throat and continued, "And there are places around here that have that energy and it's related to people you're actually connected to, so it has an even stronger pull."

"Even if I usually don't notice it because I see the same places in Palmer all the time."

"Exactly." Her blue eyes met mine over her mug as she took a sip. She set her drink down and folded her arms on the tabletop as a grim smile crossed her face. "So, do you really want to help me? Because I've already had a lot of time to come up with ideas."