Page 26 of Across the Universe

The man offered Adeline a hand, which she took with some hesitation. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you up, then you can tell me who you are and where you came from.”

Adeline stood, somewhat unsteadily, and brushed the bits of straw from her dress—a dress that, as she looked down at it, registered as wholly unfamiliar. She looked right at the man as she fluffed her hair, freeing more bits of straw that came raining down around her.

“Sir,” she said, shaking her head. “My name is Adeline, and while I appreciate your kindness, I have to tell you I’m a little confused about who I am and where I came from myself.”

He frowned at her in confusion, then his look turned to one of amusement. “Well, you seem to knowwhoyou are, Adeline, but you really can’t tell me where you came from?”

Adeline glanced around her again; the world she lived in was not one of barns and animals that needed milking. She did not wear calico dresses, and never had she seen a man as handsome as the one standing before her.

“I come from…” she said, still taking in the structure in which she’d woken, the way the light fell across the man’s stubbled cheeks, and the old-fashioned cut of his trousers. “I come from a place where I don’t need glasses, because I have perfect vision.”

The man’s look of amusement faded. “I don’t understand,” he said, giving a single shake of his head.

Adeline, at a loss for words, felt her eyes sting with confused tears. “Neither do I.”

Jo stops typing here, feeling the tingle of excitement that comes with writing something that feels good—something that feels right. This is it, and she knows it. A story that has nothing to do with her own life. Well, okay, notnothing;she also feels as though she went to sleep in one life (her old, familiar life in Minnesota) and woke up somewhere foreign (the sunny, citrus-filled state she lives in now), but there’s nothing damning here. There’s nothing telling or personal or inflammatory. This will simply be a story of a woman who fell through time and into the arms of a man from another world.

Jo drains the rest of her orange juice with relish and then rinses out her glass. With a smile of satisfaction, she turns off the typewriter and puts away her writing paraphernalia. Before she knows it, she’ll have the first fifty pages of something new to send to Martin Snell of Snell & Banks Literary, just as he’d requested. She dearly wants to keep writing, but it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning now, and Bill will be up at six, hoping for fresh coffee and a hot breakfast before he starts his work day.

With visions of Adeline and the attractive farmer in her mind, Jo drifts to sleep, already excited for the next time she pulls out her Remington and falls into a world that’s entirely her own creation.

* * *

“Time travel? Well, I wouldn’t say it’simpossible,” Dr. Chavez says, looking up from the notes he’s jotting down about a patient in the room that Jo is about to enter. “As a man of science, I can’t rule it out entirely, no. Why do you ask?”

Jo is holding the handle of her cart as she stands there, tapping her toe against the linoleum floor behind her absentmindedly. She suddenly feels silly for having asked Dr. Chavez for his opinion on a topic that makes her sound like a flighty dingbat.

Looking at the books in her cart, Jo rearranges a few of them, stacking and moving things around to busy her hands. “Oh, you know, just an idea I had for a story.”

Dr. Chavez tucks his clipboard under one arm and clicks his ballpoint pen to retract the tip. He slides the pen into the breast pocket of his lab coat and looks at Jo with curiosity. “I’d like to hear about it. Do you have a second for a cup of coffee?”

Jo looks at her cart and feels conflicted. She’s a volunteer, not a paid employee, but she’s always taken her position seriously, and she knows that seeing her walk in the door with books, magazines, and snacks, is sometimes the only positive thing to happen for a patient on any given day.

“Leave it right there,” Dr. Chavez says, lifting his chin at the cart. “No one will bother with it, and if someone steals—“ He pauses and picks up one of the well-worn paperbacks, examining the cover, “—if someone decides they really need to filch a copy ofHer Lover’s Hot Tempest, then I think they probably need it more than you do.”

Jo stifles a giggle and nods. “Okay,” she says, pushing the cart up against the wall. “I’ve got five minutes.”

Dr. Chavez leads the way to the break room and pours them each a paper cup of coffee, nodding at the cream and sugar. “I’ll let you doctor your own drink, even though technically doctoring is my job.”

Again, Jo feels like giggling, which is ridiculous. For some reason, being around Dr. Chavez makes her act like a teenager with a crush, and she notices it each time she starts to blush. Her voice even inches up an octave in his presence, which she finds mortifying.

Once they’re seated at a small table by the window that overlooks the new garden two floors below, Jo clears her throat. “Okay, so the story I started writing the other night has really captured my imagination.”

“And my interest,” Dr. Chavez says, holding his cup with both hands on the top of the table that suddenly feels quite small between them. He’s not an overly large man, but his presence is formidable and reassuring, and the clean scent of soap and laundry detergent follows him everywhere he goes. “Carry on.”

Jo looks into her coffee, which she’s lightened with cream. “I was writing something else, which I scrapped entirely.” She waves a hand and flicks it at the window to mime throwing away her work. “I put in a fresh piece of paper and just let the scene unfold, and it turned out to be a woman who’d fallen through the cracks of time and ended up on a farm somewhere in the past. When she wakes up, a handsome farmer is standing over her, holding out a pair of eyeglasses for her. She puts them on and she can suddenly see that he’s quite handsome.”

Dr. Chavez’s smile quirks up on one side of his mouth. “Naturally.”

“Yes, of course,” Jo says, realizing the predictability of this scenario. But she knows what women want to read, and she is certain that this storyline will be a hit. “Anyway, he helps her up, and she tells him she isn’t sure where she is, where she’s from, or why she needs eyeglasses to see, as she doesn’t normally wear them.”

“I see,” Dr. Chavez says, then pauses with expectation. “Did you get what I did there? Eyeglasses… ‘I see’?”

Jo laughs appreciatively. For such an attractive, accomplished man, Dr. Chavez is one of the goofiest, most down-to-earth people she knows. “You’re good. Maybe you should write comedy.”

He holds up both hands and lets his head hang in mock defeat. “Alas, I have chosen my career path already, Josephine. I’ll leave the writing to you, and just cheer you on from the sidelines.”

“Thank you for that,” she says, feeling shy. “I really appreciate how much interest you show in my writing, and how encouraging you are.”

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