Time and Trouble Read Online Free Page A

Ages. She ’ d been invited to join in, re-create and relocate herself in their world. They had even put together a makeshift costume for her, but she still felt too lost to start out in any direction. She wanted to watch for a while.
    Serious rains had begun early this winter, making this clear day precious. The gold-brown meadow of summer now blazed green. She was amazed by how the earth repainted itself after the first downpour. She thought of the seeds buried below the surface, capsules of greenness, and envisioned them curled like fetuses through dry seasons and drought, waiting to be born and rain-baptized.
    And then to dry into brown ghosts that blew and burned in the winds of summer fires.
    She shook her head, physically dislodging the image and concentrating on the present, on the sunny field filled with furled banners, silvery shields, and chiffon scarves.
    People called these games make-believe. The same people called what she ’ d left ten miles away real. By sleight of hand, “ home, ” a rotting container tottering on barren ground — by some dark magic, that place passed as a quaint Queen Anne Victorian with shining bay windows edged with boxes of petunias, and veiled by camellias, fuchsia, and flowering plums.
    Inside, her so-called family was mottled and dark, gangrenous from the pressure of secrets and rage beneath their skin.
    The biggest lie was that they were a family. Not because of the steps and halfs before their relationships, but because family meant you were connected, had something in common. This group on the field had different last names and mostly lived apart one from the other. But they were family. The people in the house in San Rafael were boarders who swept their secrets into corners until they piled so high, they stained the walls.
    Nothing was real there. Nothing was hers. Nothing was safe.
    But here, she could become someone new. She could take a new name, become Gwyneth, leave that world and join this one. The people on the field were her kin. They, too, saw the ugliness around them and invented their own better universe, their own escape hatch. The Middle Ages as they should have been. Chivalry, courtesy, and honor. That ’ s what bound them.
    She looked beyond the jousting knights to where Luke watched from the far side of the field. He wore a thickly belted chamois vest (kirtle! — she had to start thinking in the right terms) and had a small falcon on his glove. She loved Luke ’ s face, the way the muscles below his skin held his features almost regally, but kindly. Her first impression of him had been that he was astoundingly clean, even if she couldn ’ t explain what that meant. He would have been a genuine knight, if such things still existed.
    He must have felt her eyes on him, because he turned, smiled, half waved.
    A breeze ruffled her hair as she returned the greeting and for once, she didn ’ t mind. Her hair ’ s wildness had bothered her until Luke praised it, saying her red curls —“ the color and movement of firelight, ” his words — were like a princess ’ s in a fairytale.
    In the distance, thick-faced cows regarded the goings-on with low-grade interest. They didn ’ t seem to care that medieval cavorting was decidedly odd in their twentieth-century pasture, or that this attempt at time-travel was, frankly, amateurish. The jousters ’ broadswords were rattan wrapped in duct tape, their shields, aluminum foil over cardboard. Some knights were female.
    And Luke ’ s hawk had been rehabilitated after being grazed by a semiautomatic bullet. Not a King Arthur kind of injury. Hand-raised, the kestrel couldn ’ t be released back to the wild and wasn ’ t much of a hunter. A few years ago, Luke had adopted her and stocked his parents ’ freezer with “ kestrel chow ”— mouse carcasses, which infuriated his mother so much she ordered her son, his bird, and his bird ’ s mice out of her house.
    Which was fine with him. You have to know what you