Free Valley of the Moon by Melanie Gideon Page B

nodded at me gratefully. She’d been too polite to turn down Fancy’s invitation, but she really did need to sit down. She looked quite pale.
    “I suppose you’ve had quite a shock,” said Fancy.
    “Well, you’ve had quite a shock, too,” said Lux.
    Fancy was usually steadfastly upbeat, it was one of her great strengths. But this was not one of those times; she now slumped in despair. I drew my sister to me. She laid her head against my shoulder and sighed.
    “Yes, I guess we have,” she said.
    —
    Dinner was a strange affair. Some people came and paid their respects to Lux; they bobbed and curtseyed and welcomed her, making me feel I was sitting next to royalty. Others avoided her like a leper, going out of their way to bypass her, walking down another row so they wouldn’t risk having to say hello.
    It was terribly awkward. Twice I got up to leave and twice Martha stopped me.
    “They are looking to you to set an example,” she said. “They’re nervous. They don’t know how to make sense of what’s happening. Give them some time.”
    Lux was polite. She greeted everybody with the same warmth. She looked them in the eyes and shook their hands like somebody who wanted desperately to be accepted. She started on another round of
I’m sorries
—“Sorry for what’s befallen you,” “Sorry it hasn’t befallen me,” “Sorry I’m free and you’re not”—but I kneed her under the table and she immediately stopped.
    “Sorry,” she said to me under her breath. “This is just so weird. I don’t know what to say.”
    “Do something,” said Martha to me.
    I stood and clinked on my glass with a knife. The room quieted.
    “Listen up,” I said. “These are the facts. This is what we know. This woman, Lux, accidentally found her way here through the fog. It seems she can come and go through the fog, though we cannot.”
    I couldn’t bring myself to voice the unfathomable, that according to Lux, on the other side of the fogbank it was 1975. I paused, expecting somebody to start interrogating me about it, but the room was complicit with silence. We all needed some time to grapple with this news.
    “I know you want answers. You want to know what’s happening. What does this mean? Her arrival.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think it means anything.”
    This was a lie. Her arrival changed everything and we all knew it, but because we didn’t know what it
really
meant for us, everybody agreed to let this lie stand for now.
    “Not for us, anyway. For us life goes on as it has for the past four months. Nothing has changed. We will get up in the morning and meet with our crews and put in a good day’s work, and then we will sleep, knowing we’ve earned our rest. And the next day we will wake up and do it all over again.”
    “Is she staying?” Matteo asked.
    I looked down at Lux.
    “I’d like to stay a few days, if you’ll let me,” she said quietly, so only I could hear.
    I fought to keep a neutral expression on my face, as if it didn’t matter to me whether she stayed or left.
    “For a while,” I confirmed. “Treat her like one of us.”
    “Yes, please,” said Lux. She got to her feet. “I don’t want any special treatment.”
    Oh, but she was special; this was clear the moment she stood. Even if she wasn’t from the future, she could travel freely through the fog and we could not. She blinked once, twice, and took her seat.
    —
    I sat on the porch in the dark. I couldn’t sleep; I’d been sitting there for hours. I heard Lux before I saw her. The sound of her bare feet creeping down the stairs. The squeak of the door opening. She padded to the railing in a muslin nightgown (Fancy must have lent it to her), put her hands on the railing, arched her back, and sighed.
    I cleared my throat, announcing myself, and she jumped.
    “You could have told me you were there,” she said.
    “My apologies,” I said.
    My eyes had acclimated to the night long ago, so I took the opportunity to