Amber House: Neverwas (11 page)

keep pace with her, she directed, “Throw on some work clothes,

eat that breakfast, and then come back and start covering the

wires holding the swag with bows of that ribbon.” She pointed to

a stack of spooled red velvet. “Three-foot lengths. Sound good?”

“Sounds perfect.” I sighed.

36 O

She nodded and headed off toward her room briskly, her heels

clicking on the hardwood floor.

I staggered like a condemned woman up the stairs, my head

lolling back, my eyes closed.

“Suck it up, Sare,” Jackson said with amusement. “It’s

Christmas. Best time of the year.”

“I’m pretty sure I hate Christmas,” I said, catching him in the

corner of my eye and giving him my tiniest smile. And stag-

gered on.

Every year up till now, when we’d come to visit my grand-

mother, most of the house’s Christmas decorations had already

been taken care of, so my family had only helped with the tree

trimming. This time, we were working double time to get

caught up. It was looking to be a long day.

When I returned with a pair of scissors and a yard stick, the

men were gone, but Jackson was still there, busy unraveling

strands of tiny white lights for the tree. There were a lot of them.

“Jeez,” I said, “that’s going to take a while.”

“An hour.” He shrugged. “I’ve had a few years of practice.”

“Then you’ll be finished before I will,” I muttered. I unwound

a three-foot length of ribbon and cut it. Then I tied my first bow

over the wire on the lowest newel post.

“Sare,” Jackson said.

“What?”

“The bows” — he shook his head a little —”they should be

level.”

I looked at my unfortunate product, hanging drunkenly to

the side, one dangling leg showing nothing but ribbon back. I

wasn’t sure I cared. “You think
any
body is going to notice my cruddy bows?”

He squinted a little at me. “Come on. Why you even asking

me that? You do a job, you do it right and see it through.”

o37

“You read that in a book somewhere?”

He smiled at my sarcasm. “What’s the matter? They don’t

teach kids that in the fancy private schools?”

He left his lights and untied my bow, then readjusted the

knot. “See,” he explained as he worked, “make the top piece a

little longer, then use the lower piece to make the first loop.” I

watched his fingers, his hands. They were long fingers and clever

hands. Like my father’s. “Come
over
and then under with the top piece, twisting it as you go to keep the velvet-side out —” He

pulled his loops tight; a perky
level
bow now hung on the newel, with nothing but velvet showing. “Scissors,” he said, holding his

hand out like a surgeon awaiting a scalpel. I slapped them in

his palm. He made two quick snips. “Finish by trimming the

ends into matching points. Your gramma was pretty particular

about that.”

He looked up at me and smiled his old smile, the gentle and

generous smile I had come to expect and rely on. I wondered

again why he always seemed to be irritated with me now.

I was standing so close to him I could smell all his scents: the

strong clean soap Rose favored, the fir tree resin on his arms,

the trace of summer hay from the stables, where he must have

gone before coming here. I thought as I stood there that the sense

of smell, more than any other, had a way of erasing time. That a

fragrance could carry you back to another moment with such

force, such drawing power, that you felt you should be able to

open the door to that moment and step into it again. The past

pressed in all around me, almost tangible, as I stood above

Jackson and breathed in his scent, and I wanted it. I wanted the

way Jackson and I used to be.

“You awake?” he said.

I snapped back. I rolled off another three-foot length of rib-

bon and held it out. “Could you show me one more time, please?”

38 O

N

We managed to chat as we worked our way upward — he, the

tree and I, the stair rail. I felt awkward, but it helped that I had bow-tying to focus on — my bows improved as I rose.

“Gran said Saint Ignatius accepted you?” he asked.

“They didn’t want to, but Hathaway made them.”

“The senator?”

“He and Mom are old friends. I think he might be my godfa-

ther, actually.”

“Handy,” he observed.

“How do you like . . . ?”

“Severna High? It’s decent. It’s been integrated since the

eighties.”

“You’re graduating this year. What’ll you do next?” I won-

dered why I had no idea what Jackson wanted out of life.

“I don’t like to talk about the future,” he said.

“It isn’t the future anymore,” I said. “It’s the next step. It’s

where you’re applying right now.”

He hesitated, as if considering whether he wanted to tell me.

It hurt that he didn’t trust me. “I want to do premed at Hopkins,”

he finally answered quietly.

“Hopkins?” I shouldn’t have sounded so startled, but it was as

if he’d said he wanted to go to the moon. A poor black kid from

nowhere admitted to Johns Hopkins University? The school had

an international student body composed of the best and bright-

est, but when it came to diversity, its stats skewed heavily white

and male. This was the Confederation, after all.

“Your dad said he would try to help me get in.”

“Wow,” I said, making myself sound enthusiastic. A recom-

mendation from my dad, a Hopkins alumnus, a respected

member of its faculty, and an internationally renowned surgeon,

o39

might
help overcome the prejudice Jackson would face.
Might.

“You must have crazy-good grades. You want to be a doctor?”

“I’m going to be a doctor,” he said firmly. “Some time.” But he

looked down and inside as he said it.

“You’ll do it, J,” I said, meaning it sincerely. “Hopkins ain’t

gonna know what hit it.”

His eyes softened into a tiny smile. “Thanks.” He stood there

silently for a half beat, as if there was something else he wanted

to say. But then he brushed his hands on the legs of his pants and

said briskly, “Got to fetch the ladder. Catch you later.”

N

I was just finishing the bows when Maggie and Sam arrived with

a basket of four-inch stuffed bears and an armload of dried baby’s

breath. Gramma’s stair swag was
always
decorated with her

antique bears tucked among a “snow” of tiny blossoms.

I wanted to stay and help, because this was the fun part, but

Mom had different ideas. She handed me a bundle of mixed ever-

green boughs and directed me to deck the dining room table and

mantel. I set to work layering the branches down the length of

the table’s red brocade runner, while I listened enviously to Sam,

Maggie, and Jackson talking and laughing in the entry. I was just

finishing up when Maggie and Sam came in with an ancient

Noah’s Ark filled with small wooden animals to set amidst more

baby’s breath. Gramma’s dining table was
always
decorated with three dozen pairs of animals trouping across the evergreens to

Noah’s opened boat.

As I reached for the giraffes, I had the sense of generations of

hands making the same motion. Generations of my family stand-

ing here in this same spot, doing this same task. I wondered if

they’d wondered too — about the ones to come who would

40 O

stand where they stood. Family. Part of me resented the burden

of that history. But part of me realized it was something vener-

able. Primal.

“Sarah?” Mom’s voice. She came in with more boughs for the

table next to the front door, and both the living room and library

mantels. I sighed again. It was only one o’clock and I was already

exhausted.

But it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

N

After that, we had to get going on the tree. The four of us —

Jackson, Maggie, Sam, and I — headed up to the storeroom on

the third floor to fetch Gramma’s mountain of neatly organized

ornament boxes.

I’d hardly ever gone up to the third floor when I was young.

Most kids believe that “the monster” lives in some part or other

of their house. I had always had that hinky feeling about the long

garret room at the end of the stairs.

There were two smaller rooms off the third landing. The first

room on the left had been my mother’s studio when she was a

girl. I spotted a fresh canvas clamped in an easel, marked with

Mom’s usual bold charcoal strokes. She painted in a style I

thought of as heightened realism — her colors were all a bit

more vivid than anything real-life had to offer, creating a kind

of dream effect. Sometimes I wondered if she actually saw the

world that way. Tucked slightly behind my mom’s canvas was a

smaller, quieter work of a cat licking her paw. Maggie’s. My aunt

didn’t share my mother’s obsessive appetite to paint, but she did

have talent. She contented herself with doing some of the illus-

trations for the children’s books she wrote.

The room on the right was a deserted office; a writing table

and a glassed-in cabinet. I could see that a woman had once worked

o41

here; small bits of comfort and beauty — a flowered pillow, a

gold-framed mirror, a portrait of a dimpled child — testified to

that. I had the impression this was where my great-grandmother

Fiona had retreated to write her strange poetry.

The last room took up most of the level. It was dedicated to

storage now, but Gramma had always called it the “old nursery.”

Our target mountain of boxes stood in the center of the room.

I stopped in the doorway for a moment, unable to step in.

I could feel the little hairs on my arms prickling into vertical.

I wasn’t a kid anymore, but my monster still lived in this attic.

Chinks and gaps in the walls let the wind through, so that the

whole room seemed to sigh. Even Sam and Maggie had fallen

silent. Jackson was the only one unaffected.

I walked in and quickly picked out the smallest box for Sam to

carry, since I wanted him to be able to see his footing on the way

down. “Here, Sammy.”

He came to take it from me, his head down. He was humming

something so quietly I almost didn’t hear. A simple variation on

a handful of notes. It seemed familiar to me.
The tune through the
heating vent.
“What song is that, bud?”

He shook his head without lifting his eyes. “A song I used to

know. I don’t sing it anymore.”

Maggie took that moment to swoop in and scoop up her own

stack of three boxes. “Come on, Sam, let’s get out of here.”

“Me too.” I sounded a lot more anxious than I’d meant to. I

picked up my stack of three and saw there would still be another

half dozen boxes left after Jackson took his.

He saw my face and chuckled the smallest bit. “I’ll get the

rest. I’ll make two trips.”

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” he said. We started down the stairs. “As long as I’ve

known you, Sare, you’ve always hated the third floor. I guess

some things never change.”

42 O

Some things?
I thought to myself.
Nothing
ever changed at Amber House. Except him.

N

One of my ancestors had been obsessed with angels, so her father,

a world traveler, had always brought one home to her. From

every continent, from dozens of countries. From jeweled and

ornate to primitive wood carving. Having every shade of skin

color and every shape of eyes. When Christmas trees came into

style sometime in the late 1800s, my family had pulled out the

angel collection to decorate the very first Amber House tree.

And of course, every generation had added to the flock. I stared

miserably at all the opened storage boxes. The entire host of

heaven, and we had to hang every single one.

Jackson came down the stairs with the last of the boxes, and I

went to help him unload. “You staying?” I asked hopefully.

“Nah,” he said. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” I was used to him helping us with the tree.

“We —
I
— have to do something.”

“Yeah?” I said, waiting for an explanation.

He didn’t offer one. Or the true one, anyway. “Gran . . .

asked me to do something for her at home.”

“Oh,” I said.

He said good-bye to everyone and slipped out the front. I walked

to the window to watch him turn — not west, toward his house

on the river, but north toward the road to town. Jackson was not

only keeping secrets from me but lying to me as well.

“Sarah?” Mom called. “We have to —”

“— get a move on,” I said. I turned away from the window.

CH A P T ER FI V E

K

We managed to finish the hall tree before dinner — “Sunday

supper,” Rose called it, serving up a Southern feast, right down

to the fried chicken and grits.

That whole thing with Jackson had left me short tempered.

“So,” I asked, passing the basket of warm rolls to my father,

“when were you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what, sweetheart?” he said, passing the basket on.

“Tell me that this whole Amber House exhibit is a really big