A Tin of Keys (3 of 6)
The Tambour
I didn’t sleep well that night, thinking about Anna and her baby, Rachel—and how I was somehow inextricably woven into their story.
Despite my wonderful life—my four children, my wife—I missed them. Somehow. I’d only spent a few days with the family. One evening with Clara, when Anna was twelve. Four days with Anna, when she was forty-one. But it felt like a whole other life. A life I had lived. A life I had lost.
I no longer believed the visits were hallucinations. They were adventures of some mysterious kind, and I was ready for more.
I started carrying the keys with me. Not all of them—just one at a time, rotating them in and out of my pocket like lucky charms. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t invoke the magic (or science or mystery) that had sent me back the first two times.
Two years passed. My daughter, Emily, was now eight—and a handful already.
Back when I was in the Navy, we lived in Maryland. I worked for the National Security Agency, in Foreign Satellite Operations. I was a software engineer for a now-declassified system called ECHELON, which made the news in the late nineties and early 2000s.
My wife became pregnant in November 1991. We’d only been married five months, and we were as excited as you can imagine. I’d wanted to be a dad since I was ten, so for it to happen so quickly felt like a miracle.
It had taken her parents seven years to conceive their first. I know many couples struggle—so I don’t say “miracle” lightly. I say it with gratitude.
She was born in 1992—our only daughter. Three boys and one girl. Just like Anna, except we had our girl first.
We used a midwife, and it was an incredible experience. Her pediatrician was a 5’2” Chinese man named Dr. Lee, who worked at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Kind, brilliant, and gentle—though English was about his sixth language.
Once, in those early, exhausted weeks, my wife asked, “How often should I wake the baby to feed her?”
“No. No. No,” Dr. Lee said. “Do not wake baby. Momma need sleep. Baby need sleep. Baby not starve. Baby wake up when hungry. Then feed. Not before.”
His advice was always wise—but one bit left me resentful for years.
When our daughter was about one, we mentioned how my wife never had a hot meal. Dr. Lee said, “You no feed baby first. Feed Momma first. Put food on plate. Baby feed self. Baby be independent. You feed after if baby still hungry.”
At the time, it felt wrong—selfish, even. And then I began to hate that advice. She became too independent.
Her favorite phrase? “Emy do.”
Time to change her diaper? “Emy do.”
Bath? “Emy do.”
Getting dressed? “Emy do.”
Lunch? “Emy do.”
Time to drive to the doctor?
She’d scramble into the driver’s seat, grip the wheel with both hands, and beam:
“Emy do.”
Now, years later, I get it. She’s always been strong. Independent. Capable of anything she sets her hand to.
Honestly, my daughter reminded me of Anna more and more—strong, stubborn, whip-smart, and unwilling to be pitied. It wasn’t something I said out loud, not even to my wife, but I noticed it. And I wondered.
Was there something to it? Some thread that ran through time, through keys, through blood?
I couldn’t say.
This is not to say that I felt at all unfulfilled in my life—with a wife I loved and four wonderful children who filled my days with joy and chaos in equal measure. But I discovered long ago that I have a heart big enough for everyone.
Love doesn’t obey the rules of time. Or logic. Or scarcity.
And so I missed Anna. And Rachel. And the quiet strength of that life I’d only brushed against.
At times, I’m sure, my wife wondered. She’d catch me staring off into space. I’d be wondering about them. Who they really were and what their lives had been like. Then I’d turn and see her looking at me.
“Where were you just now?” she’d ask.
“1912,” I’d tell her.
I didn’t tell her about Clara, Anna, Henry, Elliott, or Chase. Or the two men I had been—only for moments.
Or the rifle hidden in the wall. Or the Packard. Or the grandfather clock that knew more than it should.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. I trusted her with everything.
It’s just… some things are too strange to share. Too sacred. Too other. Like dreams you never quite wake from, or stories you’re not sure you were meant to be part of.
And maybe I didn’t want her to see the ache in my chest when I said their names out loud.
So I told her about the Titanic. And Fenway Park. And the Armenians. Events from 1912.
But I kept the rest tucked away in the back pocket of memory.
Right next to the keys.
On Thanksgiving Day, 2000, I was carrying a parlor key with me that went to nothing. Just a key from the can.
At first, I’d carried them hoping to return. But over time, they’d become lucky charms—tokens of possibility. This one was a small brass skeleton key, with delicate bowwork that curled like filigree vines. It had a warm, honey-brown tarnish, soft with age.
I often wondered what it might have opened. An ornate liquor cabinet? A music box? A case tucked behind a velvet curtain?
It seemed like the kind of key that kept secrets.
And I could not have been more right.
I had just sat down on the couch with my wife, a glass of port in my hand, having handed the other to her.
“I told Kathy about your New Year’s Eve trick,” she said. “She laughed for five straight minutes.”
It was a good trick.
At the time, I was working in IT—self-employed and doing well. In 2000, I made a small fortune helping companies prepare for Y2K. Computers so old they couldn’t roll over the date from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
For two years, we’d been bombarded with doomsday talk—power grids collapsing, planes falling, banks freezing, hospitals crashing. The end of the digital world, all because of a date glitch.
It was nonsense. But nonsense pays well.
Our house was the usual gathering spot for New Year’s. We weren’t big drinkers, but there was always some mooning at midnight, a lot of laughter, and the kind of memories that only happen when you’ve known people forever. Everyone always made it home safely.
That year, I couldn’t resist a little mischief.
Just before midnight, I slipped down to the basement. I knew some guests were still quietly worried about Y2K.
At the stroke of midnight, I flipped the main breaker.
The house went dark.
Gasps. Shrill laughter. Someone yelled, “It’s happening!”
A full minute of chaos.
Then I flipped the power back on.
Back in the present, I said, “Kathy’s great.”
“She is,” my wife agreed.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and the parlor key fell on the couch between us.
“Another one of your keys,” my wife said. “Weirdo.”
“You’re not wrong.”
She picked it up and handed it to me.
And then I heard her saying, “Stephen?” as if she were at the end of a long hallway, yelling to me.
She faded from view.
I blinked.
The room was gone.
So was the port, the couch, the gentle weight of her hand brushing mine.
In its place: quiet. Faint music from a phonograph. The smell of lemon oil and coal smoke. Afternoon light slanting through lace curtains.
I was in a parlor.
The same one, I realized, where I had sat with Anna when she was forty-one. Only everything here was newer. The wallpaper fresh. The upholstery unfrayed. The tambour desk gleamed, its roll-top slats reflecting the flickering light of lamps.
I was still in my house, but the question was, when? Before electricity in my house at least, in a rural location in Maine. By 1941, the last time I had gone backwards, electricity had been there following the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
That meant I had gone back in time, before 1941. The Packard didn’t exist yet.
Upstairs, I heard the soft, unmistakable cry of a baby, just as the grandfather clock struck 8 p.m.
Who am I now?
Resisting the urge to run to the water closet to find out, I looked around the parlor. No liquor cabinet. I wondered if it was during Prohibition. Seemed about right.
My eyes traveled to the roll-top desk.
There was a keyhole.
I was alone.
I sat down at the desk, at a swivel-topped chair I decided was really a piano stool. It brought back memories of spinning the one at my parents’ house to raise and lower myself repeatedly when I was eight.
I swiveled in the chair, alone in the room and listened.
The baby was quieter.
I stuck the key in the desk, and it opened.
A Farmer’s Almanac calendar, pinned to the desk, bore the year 1918. Anna, born in 1900, would be eighteen now. Each day was struck through with a bold X, marking time’s steady march. It was November 7th, the calendar’s latest scar confirming she was no longer a girl but a young woman.
She must have been in her senior year of high school.
So, if I was the same guy as before, the man who was her husband in 1941, I wouldn’t be her husband yet. That required a different form of decorum, which I was certainly no expert in, especially the decorum of a man visiting a young woman in 1918.
I wasn’t trying to snoop.
But I did.
The key opened a second drawer in the desk below the rolltop.
I opened it.
There were various letters and notes, pencils, erasers, pens, a clunky antique stapler that looked brand new, and an ornate letter opener that looked like a miniature sword for a cavalry officer, complete with blue lacquered scabbard.
I saw Anna’s name on one letter. It was already opened.
I listened for any movement, but heard none, and pulled out the letter. It was shocking. It was an acceptance letter for Cornell University.
She had a full scholarship.
I also found a doctor’s note confirming that she had become pregnant around Christmas of 1917.
I found a love letter to her from someone named Harold, with a promise that he would marry her when he returned from Europe, but that Uncle Sam had things for him to do first.
“We will be our own family. And we will be together,” he said. He signed the letter, “With all my love, Harold.”
And there was a telegram from the U.S. Army confirming that Harold had been shot and killed in Argonne just days before the Armistice.
I stared at them in horror.
She had celebrated Armistice Day, only to learn by telegram afterward that her fiancé, Harold, was already dead.
The father of her child was gone.
Her love was gone.
I stuffed the things back into the desk and put the key in the lock, but Anna stepped into the parlor before I could lock it.
She was beautiful. Young. But tired-looking.
“He’s asleep,” she said. “I’m sorry Mr. Whitney.”
Formality. I stood, feeling like it was the right thing to do when she entered the room.
“It’s perfectly fine, Anna,” I said. “Children must come first.”
She looked at me, an odd expression on her face.
“You’re right, Mr. Whitney. In this world, as it is now, the children must come first. I wish more people understood that.”
“I understand it,” I said to her, touching an eyelid with a knuckle.
“Are you okay, Mr. Whitney?” she asked. “Your eyes are red.”
“I—uh,” I said, unsure what to say. There had been tears.
She looked at me, expectantly, and I had an overwhelming urge to take her in my arms. To kiss her. To comfort her from her hurt.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I said, “I am in love with you, Anna.”
I can’t tell you what compelled me to say it. It wasn’t something in my mind, but something in whatever body I inhabited. Like the body was in control now and my mind had taken the back seat to something more raw than intellectual thought. It was almost as if I was only an observer to my own words.
She looked at me for a long time, and then she began to cry. She wasn’t sobbing. She wasn’t wailing, but a few tears were dripping down her cheeks.
“I was hoping you would say that,” Anna said to me.
We looked at each other for thirty seconds, and then she took a single, hesitating step toward me, her hands coming up to reach for me.
I turned the key surreptitiously behind my back, realizing just before she reached me it felt warm.
“Where were you just now?” my wife asked.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.