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“Come on, Mom,” Jacob Landry called from the front porch. “It’s time.”
It wasn’t as though Del needed a reminder, of course. She’d had little else on her mind since the trip had initially been planned - and she expected Elijah felt similarly.
Occasionally you heard stories about people who had been raised by foster or adoptive parents, one day getting the opportunity to have members of their two families meet. Del, however, couldn’t imagine anyone else ever being in the position of holding such a meeting when over two centuries divided the two groups’ lives.
Looking at it logically, Elijah Landry and his wife Rebecca had been dead for over 200 years now. The very idea of such people having shared in the raising of Del’s 34-year-old son was inconceivable. But of course, there was little to nothing that wasn’t mind-boggling when it came to the pond and time traveling. No wonder Kat and Alice had behaved so strangely on numerous occasions before Del was privy to knowing why. Del marveled at how well they’d managed to keep a lid on the whole thing, all things considered.
A few minutes later, she and her son were standing before the pond.
Although Del didn't anticipate any problems, she couldn't help but hesitate momentarily. What if she learned things about Jacob's past that she might rather not know? After all, he had spent two-thirds of his existence in this other place, with other people. It would stand to reason that Jacob had to change from the little boy his mother had last known in 1999. There would be no undoing whatever new information this visit provided.
But the hesitation was brief. No matter what this day brought, Del knew she needed to follow through. If for no other reason, she needed to understand Jacob’s past in order to help him heal from the trauma of living in different time periods yet feeling he didn’t truly belong to any.
Holding firmly onto her son's upper arm, Del jumped into the water with him. Closing her eyes and holding her breath, she ducked down beneath the water's surface.
Moments later, Del felt the weeds lining the bottom of the pond start moving, wrapping themselves around her. She heard the strange murmurs, distant voices she almost thought she could recognize. And then, gasping, she and Jacob were again able to break through the water’s surface.
It was the same pond Del had known for most of her life - and yet it wasn't. Some indescribable feeling in her gut told Del, without a doubt, that the familiar landscape she was currently seeing was part of a different world.
Before she could give it much thought, however, she noticed a man around her age standing nearby.
“Welcome,” Elijah Landry called, ambling toward them. “I'm glad you could make it.”
A dripping Jacob grinned, giving his adoptive father a half embrace, which the latter couldn't have appreciated too much, considering he was wearing clothes that were likely his Sunday best.
“I told you I'd come and bring her, didn't I?” Jacob teased.
Although Elijah smiled in response, his words were serious.
“Certainly, you did,” he said. “But I've been alive long enough to know that unforeseen obstacles often get in the way of plans. And aside from that, perhaps your mother might have…reconsidered.”
“No,” Del interjected. “I wouldn't have done that. I couldn't.”
Elijah again smiled.
“In that case, why don't you come to the house? We'll get you dry and then sit down a while.”
Shortly after, Del was seated at the kitchen table, holding a steaming mug of tea. As Jacob had opted to visit some friends in town, it was just her and Elijah.
Despite having run through this moment inside her own mind so many times, Del found herself unable to begin. How exactly was a person supposed to go about this?
Luckily, Elijah seemed to understand her difficulty.
“I thank you, Delilah, for the gift of helping raise your son,” he said. “Of course, I understand that it wasn’t as though you wished to give him away. This entire situation is still…beyond my comprehension, and likely yours.”
Del nodded. “I’ve spent most of my life living by that pond and never had the slightest idea what it could do,” she said. “Of course, when my husband and I were young, his granny used to tell us stories about it. But Colton always just said she was getting older and her mind wasn’t what it used to be. No one seemed to pay much attention, so I suppose I didn’t either.”
“And then when Jacob disappeared? I’m not sure what my children have told you about that day, but it was the fall festival, one of the most crowded and hectic days. We had the entire town searching for him, practically all of Canada. My husband hired a private detective. We were heartbroken and desperate. But it really never occurred to me to something like this could have happened, either.”
Del’s voice suddenly broke off. She wrapped her hands around the mug of tea Elijah had given her, her eyes gazing at the dark liquid as though she were seeing images of that horrible time within it.
“Rest assured, Delilah, that Jacob had a good life here with us,” Elijah said. “My wife and I were happy to have him become part of our family. We have always loved him and treated him like our own. When he first arrived, it was something of a dark time for us. But from the first moment she saw him, Rebecca was certain that he was a gift from the Lord, sent to us to make things better. And so he was.”
While Del could understand that - and indeed, it did bring some peace and comfort to her heart, knowing that the years of Jacob’s life she had missed had been full of love and happiness - she still couldn’t just forget the decades of indescribable pain she had had to live through.
But how on earth could she tell this kind man something like that? It wasn’t his fault that Jacob had managed to fall through a crack in time. It wasn’t anyone’s. Above all, Del admonished herself, she had to remember to be grateful for the fact that Elijah and Rebecca had even agreed to take her boy in, much less given him the life they had. What if they had not wanted to adopt him? What if they had simply concluded they could not afford another child? Jacob could have been sent to an orphanage, or perhaps become an indentured servant to an indifferent or even cruel master. From what Del had read about life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these things had been the sad reality for many orphaned or unwanted children.
No, her son had been very, very fortunate. Despite her own anguish over his loss, Del knew that Jacob’s life could have taken a horrifically different turn if not for this man sitting before her.
The two continued to chat for some time, with Elijah sharing anecdotes about Jacob’s adolescent pranks and his relationship with his younger brother William, as well as the young nephew named after him. Del, in turn, tried her best to fill in some of the gaps for Elijah. She described Jacob as a baby and a toddler, then the little boy who loved drawing and following his big sister Kat everywhere she went.
Del wanted desperately to give Elijah some idea of what Jacob’s current life was like - a sort of mental image he could conjure whenever he felt his adopted son’s absence most keenly and imagine Jacob within. But she knew there were so many things she could not mention, both because much of 21st-century life was outside the man’s understanding, as well as the fact that Jacob was not adjusting as well as she had hoped. After all, there was no point in causing the man to worry about things he could not help fix. So Del merely told him about all the farm improvements Jacob had been working on, about the old friends with whom he was reconnecting, and how good it was to have both her children and her granddaughter under the same roof again.
Just then, the subject of discussion returned, entering the kitchen noisily enough to break Del and Elijah’s moment. She took Jacob’s reappearance as her cue.
“Well, I suppose we should be going,” Del said, beginning to push her chair back from the table and get to her feet. “We’ve taken enough of your time, and I’m sure you have chores that still need doing.”
“No matter,” Elijah said firmly. “There are some things that are more important.”
Del agreed mentally as the three headed toward the pond. As difficult as this day had been, she knew it had been necessary - for both herself and Elijah. All good parents knew they had to go through whatever it took to help their children get through challenging times.
No matter what happened next, Jacob would have unconditional love and support from all sides.