"My God..." Shattered, Rose collapsed into a chair. "I missed it all, didn't I?"
Depressed, she wouldn't leave her room for days, until one day she decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. She saw amazing things that astounded her. A young woman walked down the sidewalk holding a tiny gadget to her ear and talking and giggling into it.
"What on earth is that?" Rose blurted abruptly.
"What's what?"
"That...thing you're holding to your ear..."
"Huh? It's my cell phone, duh!" the young woman said rudely.
"Cell phone?" Rose pondered aloud after the young woman had left.
She looked into a store window and was amazed to see what appeared to be computer screens inside thin briefcases. As she watched, mouth agape, a young man closed one of the briefcase-like items and walked out of the store with it. Curious, Rose followed him into a nearby fast food restaurant, where he flipped the briefcase-like item open and, once again, the computer screen appeared.
He noticed Rose staring and turned to her. "Do you mind?"
She was transfixed by what she was viewing on the computer screen. "What's that?"
"It's just the internet," the young man told Rose, who continued to stare wordlessly. "You know, the world wide web." He frowned. "What's wrong with you?"
Suddenly very frightened, Rose dashed out of the fast food restaurant and back onto the sidewalk, where she almost collided with another young man, this one wearing work-out clothes.
"Excuse me," he muttered. "I'm late for zumba."
"Zumba? What on earth is that?" asked Rose, but the young man had already disappeared.
Suddenly she brightened as she saw the entrance to the ice cream parlor. "Banana split," she muttered as she opened the door, only to be bewildered at what she saw.
The tables and chairs were still there, but instead of enjoying milkshakes and sundaes, the patrons drank from clear plastic cups containing frothy liquids of various colors. Rose looked at the list of menu items posted above the counter and noticed that they included 'celery smoothies' and 'dark chocolate acai with blueberries."
Feeling as if she'd just stepped off an airplane and found herself in China, she continued on. Suddenly she heard someone shouting her name and turned to confront a television reporter.
"It's now 2014," he said, shoving a microphone in front of Rose's face. "How does it feel to have lost twenty years of your life?"
"Well...I..."
"What does the doctor say? What's the prognosis?"
"It's good..." Overwhelmed, Rose turned away from the reporter and stumbled back home, realizing that her mother had indeed been telling the truth.
Dimitri entered the teacher's lounge to find Lissa pouring herself a cup of coffee. She glanced up as she heard him enter. "Want me to pour you one as well?"
"Yes, please. Two creams and two artificial sweeteners." He sat down at the table. "You'll never believe who's back."
"You mean here? At the school?"
He nodded.
"Who?"
"Remember Rose Hathaway?"
"Oh, that poor girl." Lissa brought Dimitri his coffee and sat down across from him. "Such a tragedy. I've thought about her so many times over the years, wondering what she would have become if she'd only had the chance. But now you say she's back? What do you mean?"
"Her mother tried her on the shots again, and they worked this time. She's out of her coma and up walking around again, Lissa. She came up to the school this morning. She seemed really confused but she remembered me. I made sure she got back home safely."
"That's wonderful!" Lissa exclaimed. "I'll have to pay her a visit as soon as possible. I'd love to see her again."
Janine took Rose to have dinner with Adrian, Sydney, and Mason. Sydney greeted and embraced her sister, and Adrian shook Rose's hand. "Mason should be down in a minute," he told her.
Suddenly the teenager appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Rose gasped. "Mason." Haltingly, her nephew came to her and embraced her. "We bumped into one another at the school one day," she remarked to the others.
"I'm sorry I ran away," Mason said. "I didn't know what else to do."
Later, the family sat around the table chatting over dinner. "Barack Obama?" Rose squealed with laughter. "What kind of name is that for a president?"
"His father was from Kenya, so he's half African," Mason explained.
"I bumped into Coach Belikov at the school too," Rose commented. "He walked me home."
"Dimitri's a really cool teacher," said Mason. "I like him."
"Dimitri? You mean Coach Belikov? I never knew his first name...he's from another country, isn't he?"
"Russia," Adrian told her. "He started teaching at the school twenty years ago, when he first came to the United States. We were his first class."
"And now he's Mason's teacher..."
"And football coach," Mason added.
Janine and Sydney met up in the kitchen. "She's having a blast!" Sydney complained, the image of Rose and Adrian talking and laughing together burning into her brain.
"Well, what do you expect?" asked Janine. "She was asleep for twenty years, Sydney. In her mind, she's still seventeen years old."
"Adrian's my husband," the younger woman pouted.
Later, Adrian walked Rose home. "You have to understand," Rose began. "To me, all those nights we went parking by the lake seem like only yesterday. I'm still in love with you, Adrian."
"But Rose, I'm married." Adrian tried, but failed, to understand his sister-in-law's anguish. "I have a son."
"When Mom first told me that you and Sydney were married, I wanted to kill her!" Rose exploded. "My first thought was, I'll do anything I can to get him back. Everything was taken away from me: my life, my future, you, everything! All that I had is gone, and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it!"