Come Down In Time (A Time Travel Romance) by Jennifer Ransom

Granny, who had been
standing there without talking for several minutes. “Come on,
Granny,” she said. “We need to leave now.”
    Tommy walked over to his
grandmother. He took her arm and led her out to his grandfather’s
car. He put her in the front seat and Jamie got in the back.
    “ We need to let your parents
know,” Jamie said as they drove down the dirt road and past his
parents’ house. “I’ll call them.”
    At the emergency room, the same
hospital where Tommy had been taken in that far away world, Tommy and
his grandmother went back to the room where his grandfather was.
Jamie waited in the waiting room with Tommy’s parents.
    “ I think he’s going to be
okay,” she assured them. “His pulse was strong when the ambulance
got there.”
    Tommy’s mother looked at her
gratefully. “Thank you,” she said.
    Eventually, Tommy came out
through the doors and sat down with them. “He’s doing pretty
good,” he said. “Mom, you should go back now and see him. Granny
won’t leave and they only let two people at a time.”
    Tommy’s mother got up and
walked through the swinging doors into the emergency department.
Jamie knew how it would be back there. A nurses’ station, people on
hospital beds in the hallway waiting for x-rays, people in rooms
waiting for the doctor.
    “ I think I’ll go outside for
a smoke,” Tommy’s father said getting up from his orange plastic
covered chair.
    After Tommy’s father had left
the waiting room, Tommy turned to her.
    “ The doctor said you saved his
life,” Tommy said. “I told him what you did when Grandpa passed
out. The doctor wants to know if you’re a doctor. I told him no.”
    “ I’m just glad I could help
him,” Jamie said. She wanted to say that she was, in fact, a
doctor. She had been forgetting about that, pushing that to the
furthest reaches of her mind for several months. But at the end of
the day, Jamie was a doctor. She had attended medical school,
followed by an internship, then a residency. She had worked in
emergency rooms. She was a doctor.
    Tommy took her hands in his.
“Thank you, sugar. I’m going to be grateful to you for the rest
of my life for saving Grandpa. I don’t know how you knew what to
do, but I’m glad you did.”
    “ Me too,” she said.
    “ I’ve never seen you so in
charge,” Tommy said. “It’s like you knew exactly what you were
doing.”
    She wanted to tell Tommy that she
did know exactly what she was doing. That she was a doctor. But she
didn’t know how to tell him that she had lived another life that
went on for over a decade after high school. She didn’t know how to
tell him that he had died on their graduation day. For the first time
since the beginning of her strange journey, Jamie wondered if she
needed to explain things to Tommy. For the first time since then, she
realized that she really had been living another life. That she
really was a doctor.
    Tommy’s father came back
through the emergency room doors and the three of them sat in the
waiting room for a long time. Finally, Mrs. Grisham came through the
swinging doors.
    “ They’re moving him to the
cardiac ICU now. Granny wants to stay with him tonight,” she said.
“I can’t talk her out of it.”
    “ I’ll stay with her,” Tommy
said, looking at Jamie. She nodded her head.
    “ He wants to see you,” Mrs.
Grisham said to Jamie.
    “ I’ll go up with Tommy,”
she said.
    Tommy’s parents left then and
she and Tommy asked the nurse what room his grandfather was being
moved to. “Room 307,” she said. She and Tommy walked over to the
elevator and took it to the third floor. Grandpa was being wheeled
into the room when they walked up.
    The attendants moved Grandpa from
the rolling bed onto his permanent bed. Grandpa was wearing a
hospital gown by that time and he wasn’t happy about it.
    “ I don’t know why I have to
wear this,” he said. “I’ve got pajamas of my own.”
    “ It’s the hospital rules,”
Jamie said.