Free Where Yesterday Lives by Karen Kingsbury Page A

their children played in the yard.
    Occasionally Jane and Ellen would call each other and spend half an hour on the telephone making small talk. Jane remembered once, after such a conversation, Troy had walked into the room and found her crying, her face buried in her hands.
    “Honey what is it?” He was at her side, sliding his arm around her shoulders, holding her close.
    Jane drew a ragged breath and shook her head. “It’s Ellen. She called.”
    “Did you two get into it again?”
    “No.” Jane was still crying, but she fought to regain her composure. “It’s just that she and my dad are so close and…I don’t know, maybe I am jealous of that.”
    She fell silent, but she saw Troy studying her closely watching her face.
    “You sure nothing else is bothering you, honey?”
    “No, really. I’m fine.” Jane forced a smile and patted Troy’s hand. He seemed satisfied that she was telling him the truth and he got up and went back into their home office.
    Jane remembered watching him go and feeling a stab of guilt. The rest of that evening she had wondered if she would ever have the strength to tell him the truth about that terrible, painful dark night. The night her life changed forever.

Five
    T he plane rumbled monotonously and Ellen drew a deep breath, fighting to clear her head. Nine years had passed since she had seen Jake Sadler. There was no reason why he should be making appearances in her current thoughts as if they’d only broken up yesterday.
    The flight attendant arrived and handed her a tray of food which she ate absentmindedly When she finished she looked out the window.
    Jake had been there for the good years, the times when her father was strong and healthy, and she and her sisters and brother got along with each other. Maybe that’s why he was on her mind now. Jake would understand what the years had stolen from her. He’d understand more than Mike ever could.
    She leaned her head back wearily. Even Jake didn’t know about the early days, when the Barrett family was just beginning. Back then her father had worked for IBM, which everyone in the family always took to mean “I’ve Been Moved.” They lived in seven different cities in seven years and never had time to build relationships with anyone except the people who shared their breakfast table.
    I wonder if Aaron and Jane and the others remember how good those times were?
Ellen squeezed her eyes tightly closed, freeing two errant teardrops. She knew what she needed to do…what she needed to allow.
    She needed to remember.
    The tears flowed freely now, and she was thankful for the dark glasses. Allowing the memories meant going to a place where her father still lived and laughed, where he still sharedhis contagious enthusiasm for life. She was afraid that once she found that place, she would never want to leave.
    Normally, Ellen did not believe anything good could come from wallowing in days gone by the way some people did, spending a decade recounting it and paying a stranger to analyze it. Still, just this once, as she hung thirty thousand feet in the air, suspended between her present and past, she would go back. She would allow herself to find that faraway place where families are born and love begins. Perhaps if she spent some time remembering her past she would find answers for today and tomorrow She closed her eyes and savored the moment, slipping slowly into a cavern of scenes from a hundred yesterdays, drifting back to a handful of cities across the country.
    Fairfax, Detroit, Jamestown, Kansas City, Dallas, Livonia, and finally Ann Arbor. Ellen had been born in Fairfax; Jane and Megan, in Detroit. The three girls were barely school age when the Barrett family moved to Jamestown, a small country town in upper New York where there had been a hundred things for a child to do. Ellen kept her eyes closed until finally she could hear their voices….
    “Ellen, look what I found!” A towheaded Jane, barely four years old, came