A Rip Through Time(31)

She turns and puts out her hand. With a sigh, I drop the coin into it.

“Davina,” she says, closes her hand, and walks away.





ELEVEN


By the time I get home, I’m starving, and I’ve missed dinner. I’m not even sure I’d have been entitled to it on my day off. While I doubt Gray would have begrudged me an extra meal, Mrs. Wallace is an entirely different matter.

I stand in the doorway of the darkened kitchen. It’s past eight, and the housekeeper has cleaned up and gone to her quarters. There’s food here somewhere. Catriona wouldn’t think twice about taking it, and if I want to convince them I’m Catriona, I should do the same. Yet I can’t bring myself to step into the kitchen.

I’m not Catriona. I don’t want to be her.

At first, hearing of her “felonious past,” I’d been intrigued and a little impressed. Not such a meek housemaid after all. A cop shouldn’t be impressed by a thief, but I’ve always had a keen appreciation for circumstances. As a patrol officer, if I got a call for some kid in two-hundred-dollar running shoes swiping a candy bar, you can bet your ass I’d be speaking to her parents and writing it up. Make that a teen runaway swiping condoms so he doesn’t knock up his girlfriend, and I’d point him to the nearest Planned Parenthood and persuade the shop owner not to lay charges.

I do not judge lives that have seen the kind of hardship I struggle to comprehend. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, the only child of a tenured professor and a law-firm partner. My parents made damn sure I understood just how much privilege I had, whether it was weekends on the farm or weeknights in a soup kitchen.

I’d imagined Catriona as a girl who’d grown up fighting for scraps. A victim of circumstance who’d done what she had to and “worked up” to housemaid in a prosperous home owned by a decent man. It might not seem like much to me, but it was a Victorian success story.

Except that’s not how it went at all, was it? Catriona didn’t grow up in Old Town poverty. That doesn’t mean she didn’t escape horrors of another kind at home, but I’m getting the sense she’s less a scrappy success story than a remorseless criminal.

Maybe there’s more to her. Maybe, even if there isn’t, I can’t completely blame her, given the restrictions she faces in this world. But I know one thing: I don’t want to be her.

If I’m temporarily stuck here, then I will become Catriona version 2. Gray mentioned that brain damage can cause personality shifts. I remember the case of Phineas Gage from Psych 101. The guy got a railroad spike through his head, and it completely changed his personality. While I think that kind of shift only occurs with actual damage to the brain, if Gray—as a doctor—doesn’t know better, I should take full advantage.

Yep, a blow to the head changed my personality. It made me, apparently, better spoken and better mannered, which would be hilarious to anyone who knows me. I might come from privilege, but I’ve always been what one might call a little rough around the edges, more of a beer and nachos, jeans and sneakers, rough-and-tumble kind of girl.

Ironically, compared to Catriona, I am the sweet-tempered housemaid I expected her to be. I can make adjustments, though, closer to the real me. Catriona clearly had an edge, and therefore so can I. She had a brain, and she had an attitude, and she had a healthy dose of self-confidence. Therefore, I do not need to rein in that side of myself as much.

As Catriona v2, do I want to steal from the larder? No. Or that’s a fine excuse. The truth is that as I stand in the kitchen doorway, the despair from earlier rushes back. I think of my apartment, where the only question would be whether there’s anything I want to eat in the fridge. I never even had to sneak cookies as a child. My parents kept a shelf of kid-friendly snacks, and I was welcome to help myself. Nan had fruit on the counter and the ever-present biscuit tin. Even my dad’s parents, as strict as they were, bought little boxes of raisins and animal crackers for my visits long after I passed the age for either.

Access to food. It’s a silly thing that looms huge right now. A symbol of what I had and what I face. A life where if I miss dinner, I go hungry until breakfast. A life where there aren’t coins in my pocket to slip out and buy something to eat. A life where I’m not allowed to just “slip out,” and even if I did, I’m not sure where to find dinner or if I’d be welcome, as a young woman alone.

This world may not be hell, but it is another sort of nightmare, one where my rights and freedoms have been snatched away, and I am powerless to fight back.

That might be the worst of it. I want to fight, and I cannot because it would land me in the streets or an insane asylum.

Be a good girl. Do as you’re told. Don’t make waves.

Words so many other women grew up with. Sentiments I was never taught. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not sure I can.

I want to go home. I just want to go home. I need to get to Nan, if I can. If she’s still alive. And if she’s not? Were her dying hours spent frantically wondering what happened to me and then passing without ever knowing the truth? And my parents. Oh God, my parents. They’d have been notified I was missing and would have dropped everything to fly to Edinburgh. Instead of spending Nan’s final days with her, did they spend them looking for me? Were they facing the possibility of grieving us both?

Am I missing? I realize with a jolt that I might not be missing at all. I might be walking around the modern world … with Catriona puppeteering me.