Squealing, the kids ran to him, and Olivia gave him a look of thanks. Twenty minutes later, she was downstairs and telling Ace he was named Harry Potter and Letty was Hermione and they were at wizard school. Everyone ate in silence as Olivia told the story.
After the dishes were washed and the oldest and youngest were gluing together pointed wizard hats and painting sticks to be magic wands, Kit told Livie that Nina would look after them so they could go out.
At first Olivia thought he meant that they’d go somewhere and make love. But there was no way on earth that she was going to let him touch her. She wasn’t going to tempt destiny so that when he went away she was left behind carrying his child.
As for the marriage... If she wasn’t expecting a baby, there was no need to rush into that. Maybe she would go to Broadway and try it again. She’d see Kit when he returned.
He saw the way she pulled away from him. He didn’t comment but she felt him stiffen. “You said it helped with what you need to do if you see people. I thought we’d go to town and look.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said formally. Arrieta had said that she could only change things that related to her, to Olivia. But how far did that extend? In her little town, tragedies affected everyone. If she could help just one person, she’d feel she’d accomplished something great.
Besides, Olivia was not from the ME generation. She picked up a pen and a spiral notebook off the phone table and she was ready.
She directed Kit to drive her around the streets of Summer Hill as she thought about the owners. There were several people she hadn’t met, but she knew the majority of them.
There were few families that hadn’t been struck by that awful word tragedy. Some of them no one would know about until the next generation. A man abuses his children and they do it to theirs. A girl molested as a child goes berserk when she’s an adult.
There were accidents that could have been prevented, diseases that if detected earlier wouldn’t have killed.
Olivia and Kit rode in silence as she made notes. How could she prevent these coming catastrophes? She knew that as she was now, if she went to the authorities and reported rape, incest, abuse, she wouldn’t be believed. Her youth and inexperience would be against her.
Besides, she thought with a grimace, it was the times. In the 1970s if a woman accused a man of rape, she was put on trial. She had led him on, entrapped him. If she’d worn a low-cut blouse years before, she was considered a slut an
d the man was innocent. Olivia wanted to scream that every item in every store was packaged attractively but if you stole it, you were prosecuted. Why were women considered less than a stick of deodorant?
Kit reached across the seat, took her hand, and squeezed it. “If you want to talk, I’m here.”
“Thank you.” She pulled her hand away as she looked at the next house. The Nelsons, a lovely family. When little Lisa was fourteen years old, she would slit her wrists and die before she was found. In the school locker room, some girls had stolen her clothes, then let the boys in. Lisa didn’t think she could live with the shame. How did Olivia stop something that wouldn’t happen for years?
For the next three days, Olivia lived in a haze of trying to prevent the horrors that she knew would happen. She called people—using the annoying rotary dial phone—and wrote letters—with a typewriter, no less. Using every lie she could imagine, she said she had a dream, a premonition, she saw something, someone told her something. Whatever she could think of to warn people, she said it.
She was aware of the people around her at Tattwell, but only vaguely. Kit seemed to be taking care of them. He allowed the youngest pair to bother her twice a day to ask for more about what Letty was calling The Story of the Girl Wizard. She wanted to hear how smart Hermione was, and Ace wanted her to tell how brave Harry Potter was.
Uncle Freddy made them laugh when he said he wanted to be Voldemort, the personification of evil.
After only minutes, Kit ushered them all out and let Olivia get back to her phone and typewriter.
“But even if I do this, will it all be forgotten at the end of three weeks?” she said aloud, her head in her hands.
It was on the afternoon of the fourth day that she fell back in her chair and was ready to admit defeat. When she was an older woman, people listened to her, but when she was barely out of her teens, they dismissed her. She was hung up on, yelled at, called a liar. Three people reported her to the police. The sheriff called and cautioned her. He said that what people did in the privacy of their own homes was their business.
“It’s going to take forty years to show people that that’s not true,” she said.
“Then, Livie, you call me back in forty years and I’ll listen to what you have to say. Until then, leave the residents of Summer Hill alone.” The sheriff hung up.
In the end, Olivia ran away. She’d had days of trying to prevent disasters, tragedies, accidents, and crimes, but she didn’t seem to have made any progress.
She ran through the kitchen and out the back door. No one was about, but she didn’t wonder where they were. All she could see were the visions in her mind. Funerals, mothers crying, fathers in a rage, people in handcuffs, neglected children, abused children.
She often told people of the peacefulness of their dear little town, of the almost-nonexistent crime. But over the years many things had happened. When she looked back over that long expanse, there was time between the bad. Years would go by and nothing bad would happen. But now she saw it all. A lifetime of preventable misery was screaming through her mind.
But she couldn’t do anything about it!
The feeling of helplessness was sucking the energy out of her.
She ran through the garden and stopped at the big magnolia tree. Why had she been sent back in time if she had no power to change anything? Forget the big horrors, the wars and bombings. She couldn’t even prevent the suicide of a girl who was going to be bullied at school.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back against the old tree. Last year she’d ridden in a little red truck with her friend Casey past this tree. Olivia had told how Alan had lied and cheated, and how he’d taken away the business that Olivia had built. Casey was the wife of Tate who was going to be the son of five-year-old Letty. Olivia had talked to people who didn’t yet exist!