Predestination Unknown Page 4

  The nightdress was soft and enveloping, but too thin to keep me warm considering there wasn’t a heat source in the room, just like there weren’t any electrical outlets. I ran my hands over my arms.

  “We should get into bed,” Ezekiel said. “We’ll be warm enough under the covers.”

  “You really want me to share your bed?”

  “It’s been cold of a night with Robert gone. I’ll be glad for you.” He lifted the covers and crawled under them.

  I mirrored his actions. The bed was so narrow we nearly touched. I could feel his warmth through the small pocket of air between us and I shivered, wanting to press closer into his side. “I’ll be glad for you,” he’d said, like he wanted to press himself into me as much as I wanted to press myself into him. He was only referring to body heat, of course. He didn’t mean anything by it.

  I attempted to distract myself by returning to the conversation we’d been having before we got into bed. As far as I was concerned, he’d dodged a bullet by running the family farm instead of training to be a preacher, but he’d sounded more regretful than relieved, and though I hadn’t know him long he seemed like a generally happy dude.

  “Do you want to run the farm, though?” I asked. “Or did you want to go to seminary like your brother?

  He blew out the candle, then settled onto his back. “God doesn’t call me to preach His word.”

  Considering he’d already quoted scripture several times in the few hours I’d known him, it seemed like he did speak God’s word, and I didn’t miss the fact that he hadn’t answered the question. He’d told me what God wanted but not what he wanted. But I didn’t press him on it. Why worry at a sore spot?

  The room was dark and quiet and through the window on Ezekiel’s side of the bed, I could see a slice of that star-spangled sky that had amazed me earlier. His soft breathing was the only sound I could hear—no cars rushing past on the street below or laugh track playing from a television next door.

  The bed warmed, as he’d promised it would, and I found myself relaxing deeper into it. For all the comforts the rest of the house lacked, this bed was amazing—piled so thick with down on every side that it was like being enveloped by a giant marshmallow. Everything was soft except the body lying alongside mine, the one I brushed every time I shifted.

  Despite how exhausted I was, and despite the relief of being warm and fed and somewhere that was, at least for the moment, safe, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was homesick for the real world. I didn’t know whether I’d lost touch with reality or reality had lost touch with me. I wanted to believe this was all a dream, that I’d wake up in my own bed, in my own apartment, to the sound of my roommate taking a morning piss with the bathroom door open, but I’d never had a dream so long and so boring.

  Clomping by horseback down a dark dirt road? Listening to an obscure section of the Bible being read, word for word? No, that wasn’t the stuff of dreams. This was real life, for some definition of real.

  There were two possibilities, as far as I could figure. One was that a deranged set of religious extremists had drugged me in the mirror maze, transported me to Ezekiel’s barn, and now had me at their mercy where they were choosing to feed me, clothe me, and give me a bed for the night, all of which seemed a little pointless. If they were holding me for ransom, they’d chosen the wrong victim. My father and grandmother would be freaked when they realized I’d disappeared, but if they scraped together every penny they owned, it wouldn’t be enough to make me worth kidnapping.

  Which made my other theory, no matter how unlikely it might be, the likelier of the two. Time travel explained everything except how the fuck there was such a thing as time travel. I couldn’t hide from the truth any longer. It was time to flat out ask what year it was.

  “Ezekiel?”

  I whispered his name in case he was sleeping, though I was too attuned to him to believe that.

  “You call me by my Christian name?” he asked on a gasp.

  “Shit, sorry.” Then realizing that I’d just said shit, I apologized again. Of course I wasn’t supposed to call him Ezekiel. There’d been all that Mr. Johnson stuff downstairs. It was just an odd thing—sleeping with someone and not being allowed to use their first name.

  “I’ll not mind it,” he said when my apology stuttered to a halt. “You shall call me Ezekiel and I shall call you Luther and we shall be friends.”

  I felt a flutter against my arm and then his hand wrapped around mine with a gentle squeeze. His hand was so warm, so alive, so obviously not part of a dream.

  “All right,” I agreed.

  “Did your master name you Luther after the great Reverend?”

  “What?” I ripped my hand out of his and pushed myself up on one elbow to glare at him as best I could in the dark. “I told you I was a free man.”

  “But you were not born a free man?”

  “Yes, Ezekiel, I was born a free man, just like my father was born a free man and his father was born a free man.”

  “I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend you.”

  “Don’t say anything else about masters and we’ll be all right.” I flopped onto my back and resettled the covers around my neck. It was cold out there.

  “I’ve just never known a negro who was born free.”

  I groaned. “I don’t like that word either.”

  “Which word?”

  “Negro. Don’t say negro.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re a mulatto, of course.”

  I wanted to scream. “I’m not a mulatto, for God’s sake.”

  “Are you not? I thought from the color of your skin that your father—“

  “OK, yes, I’m of mixed race, but FYI it’s my mother who was white, not my father, so don’t start with any master/slave girl shit and don’t use the word mulatto.”

  “What word should I say then? I’ll not say ni—”

  “No! Not that one either. Definitely not that one.” I almost laughed. Somehow it’d become funny, even though it wasn’t. “I’m an African American.”

  “African American,” Ezekiel repeated slowly. “Because you were from the continent of Africa and now you’re on the continent of America.”

  “Yes, and just so you know, Africa is full of dark-skinned people who were born free. We were all born free until white people came mucking around.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I guess it wasn’t you who did it.”

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. By the light of the moon through the window, I could pick out the wood roof over our heads—a dark, rough solid—and the lighter hue of the comforter under my chin. I reached up to adjust it to cover a draft and when I slid my hand back under the covers, Ezekiel took it again.

  “Where be your parents now?” he asked.

  “My father’s at home. Connecticut,” I clarified. “I need to get back there. He’ll be worried. My mother died when I was young.”

  “Mine as well. There were a smallpox epidemic and it took my mother and two of my brothers.”

  Jesus. There’d been two more of them at one point. I never expected to have a personal need for birth control, but I felt a new appreciation for it.

  “So Mrs. Cheever is Abigail’s mother?”

  “She be my father’s second wife and a fine mother to us all. I’m grateful for Abigail and Tom and for Abraham perhaps as well, though he be too young still to say for certain.”

  Ezekiel’s humorous tone made me smile and also to wish, not for the first time, that I’d had brothers or sisters. If I never came home, my father would be all alone.

  “My father never remarried,” I told Ezekiel.

  “Who then raised you?”

  “My father,” I said grumpily. “Well, my grandmother helped, but my father raised me.”

  He’d devoted himself to me. No one could have been a better parent. Between my father and grandmother I’d barely even noticed I was missing something other children took for granted. My disappearance would abso
lutely slay them. I settled into a sad silence at the thought.

  “You meant to ask me something earlier,” Ezekiel said after a moment. “We did wander from your question.”

  Oh, right. The year. I’d been so busy getting Ezekiel to stop using racist terms to describe me, I’d forgotten that the real problem wasn’t him inadvertently using racist terms. It was that I might have stumbled my way into an entirely racist century.

  “I was going to ask the date.”

  “It’s the twenty-eighth.”

  “Of what?”

  “Why, February, of course.”

  If he thought my not knowing the month was weird, I was about to blow his mind. “I meant the year. What year is it?”

  He paused for only a moment before squeezing my hand and answering. “It’s the year of our Lord, Sixteen Ninety-Two. February 28th, 1692.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  It hurt to hear it confirmed. It hurt because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I was going to change it. My father, my grandmother, my friends. And shit, that job. It’d been a plum job—something I’d worked towards through four years of college, including two summers interning—and on Monday I wouldn’t be showing up for it.

  I pulled my hand free because that small spot of comfort only made it harder not to cry. I turned on my side, my back to Ezekiel, and tucked my face into my arm, pushing against it like I could physically hold back the tears.

  “Where are you really from, Luther? ’Tis not Connecticut, I don’t think. You don’t talk like us. Less even do you talk like other n— like other African Americans. Is it far, where you’re from?”

  I had no way to explain to Ezekiel where I was from. Far was as good a description as any.

  “Very far,” I agreed, my voice smothered in cotton and down. “I’m not sure how to get back there.”

  “You said you had friends at Salem.”

  “I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure. I may have been confused about when I was supposed to meet them.” Like by three hundred years.

  I’d had my hopes pinned on Salem, but what did I think I’d find there? My friends waiting on a street corner, scrolling through their phones, bitching about why I hadn’t answered their texts? A sign advertising time transport services, guaranteed delivery to the century of your choice and half-off after eight o’clock? A fucking mirror maze?

  And now the tears did come. They dampened the cotton of my pillowcase and the sleeve of my nightdress when I wiped an arm across my eyes.

  “You’ll stay here then,” Ezekiel said. He slid across the space between and snaked his arm around me. “If your friends aren’t in Salem, you’ll stay with us until you find them.”

  I tried to feel grateful, but the fact that all I had in this world to be grateful for was an invitation to spend another few nights with the Cheevers really released the flood gates. I cried while he rubbed my chest and said, “there, there,” like he was mimicking something he remembered his dead mother doing.

  Eventually my tears dried up. I ran the sleeve of my nightdress across my face again. I didn’t usually sleep in anything more than shorts, but nightgowns made good hankies if nothing else. I rotated around to face him. His face was a silhouette against the moonlit window, but I could make out the shape of his mouth, the swell of his lips. I leaned forward and pressed my mouth lightly to his, tasting the salt of my tears on our joined lips.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked when I drew back. His expression was frozen with something like fear, but there was a tone of wonderment in his voice.

  “I thought you might like it. Did you?”

  He rolled away, putting space between us. “I think I ought not to.”

  “I won’t do it again if you don’t want me to.” I only had one friend in this century and there was no point in fucking that up, but I couldn’t have misread the hand-holding and chest-rubbing so completely, could I have? Shit, that had been a stupid move. I’d be lucky to not end up out in the barn after all. Or worse.

  I lowered myself down so that we lay shoulder to shoulder again, taking care not to jostle him as I did.

  “Is it a custom where you’re from?” he asked. “That men should kiss men?”

  “Yes,” I answered with a sigh. “Where I’m from, men can kiss men if they want to. Not all men want to, but some do.”

  “Like you?”

  “Yes, like me.”

  “And like me.” There was that tone of wonderment again. Because of course Ezekiel knew he was attracted to men—I hadn’t been wrong about that—he just didn’t have the right words for it. Or know that it was OK.

  “Luther.” He scrambled onto his side and I rolled to face him, hoping he’d changed his mind about more kissing. “Luther, if you come from a place where you can kiss other men and sit at the same table with them, then you should go back here.” He said it like I’d teleported here straight from heaven, which I now realized I just about had. The twenty-first century wasn’t perfect by a long shot but it looked hella good in comparison.

  “I wish I could bring you with me.” I let my hand drift through his hair, pushing back at the fine strands that were nearly as dark as my own in the dim light.

  “I could not go, for I have work here, but you—you must go home. We’ll find a way to get you there, Luther. I promise it.”

  I couldn’t resist. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his again and though he didn’t open his mouth or press forward into my kiss, he didn’t pull back from me either. I tilted my head and slipped my tongue lightly into the seam between his lips, adding moisture, tasting him. He pulled back then with a gasp. He flopped onto his back and gave a little giggle as he brought his hand up to his mouth.

  “Never did I think when I awoke this morning how this day would end,” he said.

  Yeah, me neither.

  Chapter 5

  I was relieved to learn there was such a thing as coffee in the 1600s. I’d already pulled on Robert’s outcast long underwear, apparently too worn through for seminary but certainly better than freezing in my own short underwear, made a visit to the outhouse out back, and washed my hands and face and not much more in freezing water. My day could only improve, and having Abigail deliver a cup of steaming coffee to me at the plank table was a definite step in the right direction.

  I didn’t bother to ask if there was such a thing as cream and sugar, and I didn’t expect much from the dark fluid in the rough pottery cup, but the coffee was surprisingly good. It tasted like coffee anyway—rich and dark and full-bodied and some other words that I could have equally applied to my last lover.

  I was served a bowl of oatmeal too, or porridge as Abigail called it when she placed it in front of me. She gave me a big smile and returned to the stove to get a bowl for her brother.

  “There was a man what called for you,” Mr. Cheever said when Ezekiel took his place across from me.

  “Already this morning?”

  “Aye, here with the rooster. Looking for you to help with some court business this morning up at Salem. Told him you’d go as soon as you’d eaten.”

  “We planned to travel this morn to Salem anyway. Mr. Johnson hopes to rendezvous with his friends there.”

  “It’s a strange happenstance,” Mr. Cheever said.

  “Mr. Johnson’s friends?”

  “No, this court business. Seems Salem might be host to a coven of witches.”

  Oh, God. 1692. Was that—? Of course it fucking was. I’d landed in Salem at the start of the witch trials. Because where else would you go if you crashed through a mirror in a haunted house in Salem on Halloween?

  “Witches?” Mrs. Cheever repeated from the stove. “What makes them think so?”

  “You remember the Parris girl as has been ailing?” Mr. Cheever asked.

  I got up and carried my dish and mug over to the basin where Mrs. Cheever washed dishes. It was how I’d been raised and I didn’t need to hear Mr. Cheever explain what I already knew. Ther
e were two children in the Parris household having what the seventeenth century called “fits” who’d become convinced that their fits were caused by witchcraft.

  My host family was buying the witch theory wholesale. Of course. The whole town would buy it and some people who were, as far as history could judge, decent people would be strung up as a result.

  I really didn’t want to be around to see it. There were a lot of good reasons not to live in 1692—Black and gay being two of them—but there was an extra good reason not to live in Salem in 1692. I’d never read anything about a queer Black dude from the future getting hanged for a witch, but I had a feeling that was how I’d end up if I lingered.

  I went out to the outhouse to rub one out before being forced to spend three, swaying miles with my groin pressed into Ezekiel’s ass, but I couldn’t find the motivation while staring down into the dark maw of a pit toilet, smelling the fumes that wafted out of it. Not even memories of sleeping alongside Ezekiel’s warm body could get me up.

  So I was relieved when he hitched Daffy to a wagon instead of putting a saddle on her.

  “We’re too much weight together for such a long ride,” he said when he caught me eyeing the wagon appreciatively.

  “We’ll be more comfortable this way,” I agreed.

  “I wasn’t uncomfortable.” He gave me a shy smile before hoisting himself up into the wagon, which proved easier to mount than Daffy had been. Once I was beside him, he flicked the reins and Daffy set off like she knew where she was going.

  The day was bright, but cold, one of those pre-spring days that looked like summer from inside but felt like winter outside. I huddled into the extra cloak Ezekiel had unearthed, grateful for it and for Robert’s long-sleeved shirt beneath my doublet. Ezekiel hadn’t been able to find a frock coat for me, but I was two layers warmer than I’d been the day before.

  There wasn’t much to see along the way, and we weren’t seeing it very fast. Driving a wagon—or whatever you called sitting behind a horse’s ass on a wooden bench holding the reins—didn’t take the kind of attention driving a car did. Daffy trucked along, not needing anything from the two of us