He points her to some of Kevin’s letters in a drawer, and says he will mail a letter if Dana writes one. They talk amiably, Dana telling him a bit about her time traveling. The next day Dana sits with Rufus as he eats. Dana grabs her modern medicine and talks briefly to Nigel, intimating that Isaac and Alice got away. Sarah comes to say hello and whispers that Margaret had left for Baltimore, adding she’d tell Dana more later on. She wonders what Kevin did to earn the moniker of “damn fool.”ĭana takes care of Rufus but he grows sick. He grudgingly says Dana can stay there but will work by taking care of Rufus. He softens when she asks about Kevin, and says “the damn fool” (130) went north. Weylin looks closely at Dana and seems to be angry, not grateful, about Rufus. A wagon comes around to take them out to Rufus, and Dana is pleased to see Nigel in it. He looks at Dana and asks what happened, then tells the man–Jake–to send for the doctor. Weylin comes in, a little grayer and grimmer now. There she runs into Carrie, now grown up and pregnant. To her surprise, he curses Rufus but takes her to the house. She rubs her scars to help her remember the truth about it, but concedes there is some comfort in just embracing this reality for now.Ī white man approaches her and she tells him about Rufus. When Dana gets close to the house, she is surprised to think of it as home.
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He tells her how to go get help for him, and she heads off to the road. She needs him to help with finding Kevin, and he agrees. It seems like Rufus has broken ribs but Dana does not want to leave him without some sort of understanding.
Dana is disgusted but she starts to see that he is actually in love with Alice, which in this society is more shameful than just wanting to rape her.
He does not care that she will be a slave if she is caught he plans to buy her with no regard to Isaac. She wonders why he would do this if they used to be friends, and he says, frustrated, that she would not give in to him. She asks if he actually raped Alice, and he says no. She tells him seriously that he needs to say that white men beat him up he needs to repay Alice and her for having his life from Isaac. He tries to sit up but can’t, and groans that he needs to know where Isaac is because he has to pay. She wonders if he is still the boy she knew, and hopes he will see that the two of them need each other. Dana starts wondering where he might have gone.ĭana tends to Rufus’s wounds and waits for him to wake after Isaac and Alice flee. Alice softly tells Dana that Kevin went away after waiting a long time for her–somewhere North. Rufus had been trying to seduce her.ĭana says she will stay with Rufus but will not tell him where Isaac and Alice go. Alice had married Isaac last year before her mother died. Dana realizes this girl is Alice, and Alice remembers Dana as well. The black girl begs him–Isaac–not to kill Rufus, and to run away instead. The black man knocks Rufus (the white man) out.ĭana urgently speaks to the black man and warns him he shouldn't kill this white man. She is thrown into a scene of a white man losing a fight to a black man while a black girl, her clothes ripped, looks on. It is eight days before the dizziness returns and she finds herself back in Rufus’s time. She reads one of Kevin’s WWII books, saddened by the similarities between antebellum whites and Nazis. She considers writing about what happened but cannot, and throws away the pages.Īfraid to leave the house, she stays indoors and has a cousin bring her food. Dana realizes she’d been gone for two months but came back the same day she’d left.
She tosses a paperback history of slavery with maps of Maryland into the bag.Įverything feels surreal, today and yesterday not making any sense together. She prepares in case she is called back to the past again, readying her clothes and bag. She is miserable, wondering about Kevin’s fate. Pain is ever-present but she washes herself and sleeps. Returning to the main narrative, Dana wakes up in her own home, her blouse cut up and stuck to her. A check for Dana’s first published story was waiting upon their return. They ended up going to Vegas and getting married, then returning to their apartment. Dana’s aunt and uncle were also wary her aunt perhaps being fine because of the possibility of light-skinned children, but her uncle upset because he thought she should marry a black man. Kevin did not think his sister would have a problem, but sadly and surprisingly to him, she did. They had decided to get married after dating for four months, and discussed whether their families would be okay with their mixed-race marriage. The narrative returns to the story of Dana and Kevin’s history.
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