Page 139 of Strangers in Time

“May I please go and see my mother now?” said Molly.

“Yes, at once.”

He led them through a labyrinth of hallways, their footfalls echoing off the walls.

“This looks like an old castle or fortress,” noted Oliver.

Stephens nodded. “I believe that is exactly what it once was. Abandoned for a long time, but perfect for our patients. Peaceful and isolated. At least it was before the war,” he added in a grim tone.

He led them up a short flight of stone steps until they came to a room with a brass name holder.

Molly read off the name:ELOISE MARY WAKEFIELD. Molly hadn’t yet turned eleven when she’d last seen her mother.Will she even recognize me?

Stephens unlocked the door. That it would be locked surprised Molly, but she supposed it was for safety reasons.

He motioned them in.

Molly gingerly stepped over the threshold, as though she were about to enter a venue holding unpleasantness and even terror for her.

The room held a bed, a chair, a table, a lamp, and an old, battered armoire. Molly’s glances shot across the space and fixed on the large monogrammed steamer trunk set next to the armoire. She instantlyrecognized it as her mother’s. It had been bought at Harrods. As a child she had loved to run her fingers along the stylishly threaded letters of her mother’s initials.

Then Molly leveled her gaze on the person in the bed.

She blinked several times and still that did not seem to help. She looked at Oliver and Charlie, who were also staring at the woman.

Molly felt something touch her shoulder and she jumped.

Stephens advised, “Why don’t you go sit by the bed, Molly? If you speak to her quietly and gently, she might rally a bit.”

Molly crept over to the bed and sat down. She thought after Dr. Stephens’s warning letter that she would be looking at an emaciated woman with a bony face clinging to life. But her mother looked bloated; her skin, instead of being pulled tight against her facial bones, seemed to float above them, like a full pond with submerged logs.

Eloise Wakefield’s hair was shot thickly with gray, the beautiful auburn locks of Molly’s childhood gone forever. Even with the bloat, her mother’s face was heavily lined, the etch work like whorls on fingertips. She appeared smaller than Molly remembered. But then Molly remembered that she had grown over seven inches in the interim, while her mother had not only not advanced a jot during that time, but seemed, instead, to have shrunk in stature.

She reached out and tentatively touched her mother’s exposed hand. It was puffy and coarse looking, the nails irregular and jagged, nothing like the elegant, refined hand of Molly’s youthful memories. And she found her mother warm, disturbingly so.

“Mummy? It’s me, Molly.”

Her mother’s eyes did not open. They were periwinkle blue, and Molly had always loved those eyes.

“Mummy?”

The eyelids quivered now, then opened, closed, and opened once more, holding this time. The pupils drifted from side to side, reaching Molly then passing back before once more swinging to her daughter and then remaining on her.

Molly noted what looked to be crusted, reddened wounds that were present in the corners of both of her mother’s eye sockets.

The smile emerged on her mother’s face like a crack opening along an eggshell.

“Mummy? Do you recognize me? I’m Molly.”

Never did Molly think she would have to introduce herself to her mother.

But the hand she was holding squeezed hers just a bit and her mother’s mouth moved, though nothing came out at first. Then—

“M-Molly?”

“Molly, yes. It’s Molly. I’m here, Mummy.”

The smile broadened and spread across her face, the eyes lifted, the delicate cheekbones raised as the doughy, translucent skin receded a bit. A strand of hair drifted into her mother’s face, and Molly moved it back into place.

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