As You Wish Read online

  “And meeting people will help with your destiny,” Olivia said. “I can’t imagine that what you say you can do is possible.”

  “It is. We just have to be careful who we tell about it. Dr. Hightower has referred a lot of people to my aunts—and now me.”

  “I’m curious. Was Ray or Kathy the original target for this...opportunity?”

  “Kathy,” Arrieta said. “It was never Ray. Dr. Hightower thought you should hear him tell how he treats his wife because Kathy might not say anything. She’s good at keeping things to herself. But Ray is fine—thanks to his wife taking such good care of him. She’s the one who has the problems.”

  “How did you get her here?”

  Arrieta shrugged. “My aunts know lots of people so some calls were made and voilà! Ray leaves the country and Kathy goes to Dr. Hightower’s house. It all worked out.” Olivia didn’t have to ask about Elise.

  “Dr. Hightower wants to retire.” Arrieta said this with an intense look at Olivia. “Rescuing Elise was Jeanne’s final straw. She can’t take any more and we need someone to fill her role—someone who will send the right people our way.”

  “I think you’ll need a very special person who believes in... What do you call this? Time travel?” Olivia’s tone told how ridiculous she thought it all was.

  Arrieta looked at her nails. “If you returned to 1970, you could go back to school while Mr. Montgomery was in the Middle East. By now you’d be a qualified therapist.”

  Olivia was too stunned by that statement to speak.

  “I told Aunt Primrose that you’d never agree to this.”

  “You’re making it sound like you planned for me to come into the kitchen so I could hear about this.”

  “Cale said you would.”

  “Cale? Kit’s cousin? The writer? I hardly know her.”

  “She’s friends with Ellie Abbot, who my aunt sent back. Cale said you were insatiably curious and the most capable woman she’s ever met.”

  “Oh,” Olivia said. “I had no idea. That’s a wonderful compliment.”

  “Of course none of it would start until now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You can go back to 1970, marry Mr. Montgomery, and begin to study to be a psychologist. When he comes back from his secret mission, you and your family can live all over the world, then—zap!—you return here and use your certification to help us. The aunts and me, that is. You’ll help find people who need us.”

  It was all too fanciful for Olivia to comprehend. She just sat there blinking.

  “I guess I should tell you about the memory. When you get back here, after your, uh, journey, you can choose to remember or not. My guess is that Elise won’t want to remember what her family did to her. Kathy will need to remember that big, lusty Ray is a no-no. And you’ll want to know everything about both your marriages because you like a full mind. Actually, you need to remember all about your late husband and your dreadful daughter-in-law—I met her—so you can help other people.”

  Olivia was trying to digest this. “Will Elise remember us?”

  “Only the hate will be removed from her memory. Not the love.”

  “Can I tell Kit?”

  “If you wish. Your life is your own.”

  “If...if I did...uh, return to the past, could I tell him I’m from the future?”

  “You can, but it’ll be like that man with the songs. You can tell him about computers and cell phones and 9/11, everything. But at the end of three weeks it will all disappear. You’ll return here to this house and you’ll be this age. You will have gone through the years together but neither of you will have known the future.”

  “I was trained for the stage, so how will I remember that I need to study to become a psychologist?”

  Arrieta smiled. “That’s exactly what I asked my aunts. They said that if you’d really and truly liked being an actress you would have continued to be one.”

  At that, Olivia gave a bit of a smile. She’d never admitted to anyone but Kit that she’d loved the first week she’d been on Broadway, but doing it over and over, night after night, had bored her.

  “My aunt Primrose said that if you’d had Mr. Montgomery and been happy you would have gone back to school. And she believes you would have studied psychology.”

  “I did take a few courses in college and I loved them, but the stage seemed to be calling me.” She looked at Arrieta for a few moments. “The man with the songs wasn’t the only time it didn’t produce good, was it?”

  “No. Sometimes there are disasters.” Arrieta leaned forward. “Sometimes people are so joyous to be young again that they’re reckless and get themselves maimed, or even killed. They say they want to experience a different side of life so they run off with dreadful people. When they get back to the present, they nearly always choose to stay with the life they had before. Especially if they died in the second visit.”

  “I would think so!” Olivia paused. “But even with all the bad, when they returned, it would release that feeling of regret. It’s something that haunts me every day. I recently had a new one put onto me. I thought I was a good mother to my stepson, but I found out that he thinks I only cared about money. It’s made me worry that I wouldn’t be a good mother to anyone.”

  “Your stepson is a greedy little bastard,” Arrieta said vehemently. “Sorry, but this is a small town. When Josh was doing the renovations, your stepson came here. He and his wife are planning to add an entertainment wing onto their big house. They said that Mr. Montgomery was going to pay for it.”

  It took Olivia some moments to fully understand what she was hearing. After all the protests that Kevin and Hildy had made about her marriage to Kit, they were actually planning to benefit with his family’s wealth. That was more than Olivia could take. “All right, I’ll try it—but only if you tell me how you do it.”

  Arrieta shrugged. “Actually, it’s up to the people. I just have to think hard, and if they really and truly want to go, then it happens. I have no idea how. It’s just something some of the women in my family can do. We—” She clamped her mouth shut, not saying any more, then she got up and put the teapot on a tray. “Are you ready to go back in time?”

  “I think I am,” Olivia said, and they left the kitchen.

  When they were in the empty little library, Arrieta put the tea tray on the desk and handed each woman a cup. While they drank, she explained about memory.

  Elise said, “I don’t want to remember what my parents and Kent did to me!” Arrieta and Olivia exchanged looks. It’s what they’d predicted she would say.

  When they finished their tea, Arrieta took the empty cups and put them on the tray.

  After a moment’s thought, she moved her chair from behind the desk and sat down in front of the three women. “Shall we get started? All you have to do is tell me when you want to go back to, then close your eyes and think really hard about that time. I’ll do the rest.”

  Instantly, Elise nestled her hands in her lap, then closed her eyes. Her whole body seemed to relax.

  Arrieta looked away from Elise. “She’s already there. She wanted to get out of this world so very much. But if you two don’t want to go...”

  “Sorry,” Olivia said. Elise was smiling. She looked like she was sleeping—and like she was very, very happy. Whatever she was dreaming of, she was enjoying it. Olivia looked back at Arrieta. Whether what she was proposing was true or not, Olivia would like to again feel as happy as Elise looked. “I want to go back to exactly three weeks before they came to get Kit. I want every second I can get to change a lot of things with many people. I want—” She didn’t say any more because she felt herself drifting off, floating. Kit, Kit, Kit, she thought. With a smile, she imagined Uncle Freddy and Mr. Gates, the children, her parents, and... She felt too good to do any more thinking. She just gave herself over to the