Amber House: Neverwas (20 page)

Once.
When?

Mom started to laugh.

“What?” I asked.

o103

“Good thing your gramma wasn’t there.”

And I started to laugh too. “Oh, my God,” I said. “
Such
a

good thing.”

She laughed harder. “Remember when that realtor came

knocking on the door?”

“She didn’t know what hit her. Gramma was so outraged.

‘What do you mean, if I ever decide I want to sell Amber

House?!’ ”

“That Nazi wouldn’t have known what hit him either.” She

was wiping tears from her eyes, laughing so hard. “We wouldn’t

have needed the zombies.”

“Oh, my God,” I wheezed. “Gramma would have chewed him

up and spit him out.” We laughed a little more, then tapered off

to smiles.

My mom said, “You won’t forget her, will you? You’ll tell

your children?” More tears were in her eyes. Different tears.

“I’ll tell them, Mom. I’ll remember everything.”

She nodded. “Good.”

Then I asked her the same question I’d asked Maggie. “Do you

remember your gramma? Fiona?”

She looked off, distantly. “I guess I haven’t told you much

about her.” She looked back at me. “I remember her. She always

scared me a little — maybe that’s why I don’t talk about her

much. She —” Mom searched for the right words. “She never

seemed happy to me. I knew she loved Gramma and Maggie and

me, but she always seemed a little — distanced from every-

thing. Maybe it was because of the things they did to her when

she was young. She might have been schizophrenic — they

didn’t know about that back then. They gave her electroshock

treatments, and other things. . . . I think they were trying to

help her.”

“Do you think she was crazy?”

104 O

“My mother did. I suppose I did too. I tell you, it’s no fun

growing up convinced that crazy runs in the family.” She

shook her head a little. “She was a dreamer. In her own way, a

remarkable woman. A writer. A poet. She published several vol-

umes, you know.”

Crazy runs in the family
. Maybe Maggie was right — I should wait a little longer before I told my mother I was seeing things.

We gathered together the packing tape and scissors to return

them to their kitchen drawers. Without Rose in it, the kitchen

was cold. I stirred the coals with a poker and threw another

couple logs onto them. I noticed I’d missed a smear of blood

when I’d cleaned up. It reminded me of the word I thought

Jackson had scrawled.

“Mom, you ever heard of a ‘janus’?”

“Jay-nus,” she said, correcting my pronunciation. “He was a

Roman god.”

“Really? God of what?”

“Janus was the two-faced god,” she said. “One face was sup-

posed to be of a handsome boy and the other of an old, bearded

man. Symbolically, the old guy looked into the past; the young

guy, into the future. He was the god of beginnings and endings.

The god of time. January is named for him. Why do you ask?”

“Jackson — mentioned him,” I said. “Impressive Roman god

expertise, Mom. Thanks.”

Dad came in.

“Where is he?” I asked.

He looked puzzled for a half second. “Oh. I drove Jackson

straight home.”

“He’s all right?”

“Yeah, he’s fine, honey. You know that Jackson has had sei-

zures since the accident. He’s learned how to handle it.”

Yeah, I knew it. But I’d never witnessed it before. The vio-

lence of it, the blood — what an awful thing to have hanging

o105

over his head. It was terrible that someone had to learn how to

“handle” something like that.

Mom drafted Dad to carry our sealed boxes to the car. “I have

to get them in to the freight office before five o’clock,” she said,

“so they’ll be shipped in the morning.”

I waved them off. When I went back inside and closed the

front door, thoughts of the echoes, the attic, slammed back

down around me. I lifted my eyes to the stairs. Maggie was

standing there.

“Did you tell her?”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

“Just try to wait,” she said. “See what happens.”

There was an insane question that I realized I’d left unasked

since she’d first mentioned the attic.

“Maggie, if you were dreaming when I found you as a child in

the attic, how could I have talked to you? That wasn’t an echo,

was it?”

“You were seeing the past, so it was an echo for you.”

“All right,” I said. “But what about you?”

“I was dreaming the past — a dream echo.”

“You can go to the past in your dreams?”

She nodded and shrugged a little. “Sometimes you’re just

watching, but sometimes you’re right inside the person, think-

ing their thoughts. Have you ever had that happen?”

Yes
, I realized,
I had. Maybe my dreams about little Deirdre and
Fiona had actually been echoes.
“But how come we could talk, could see each other?”

She shrugged again. “I think, maybe, psychic experiences

have something to do with energy. I guess, wherever we were,

your energy could see my energy, and vice versa.” I must have

looked dubious; she struggled to explain. “You know what I

learned once from a science teacher? If the nucleus of an atom

was blown up to the size of a pea, its electrons would be the size

106 O

of pinpricks orbiting that pea —
at the width of a soccer field
. Can you imagine that? A pea, pinpricks shooting around at the edges

of a soccer field, and all the rest just empty space.”

I shook my head, waiting for the punch line.

“See, we think of ourselves as solid stuff” — she slapped her

arm — “but we’re
not
. We’re really mostly empty. What makes us
seem
solid is the energy holding us together. That’s what we are. We
are
the energy. And energy isn’t ruled by time or space.

It’s all part of spirit. In the attic, we’d
both
gone back to the same moment in the past. We were
in
an echo, but neither one of us was
part
of the echo. So we could see each other, and talk to each other. Maybe.”

Yeah, maybe
, I thought. Maybe I didn’t need to know the exact answer. But there was something I did need to know: “Can the

echoes hurt me?”

“I don’t think so. They’re kind of like watching a movie. Some

of them aren’t as nice as others, but I don’t see how they can

hurt you.”

“What would have happened to you and Sam if I didn’t wake

you up?”

She stood there, silent a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t really

remember. We would have woken up ourselves sooner or later,

I guess.”

You guess?

She gave me a hug. Maybe it helped. She continued on her way.

CH A P T ER ELE V E N

K

Even after all of Maggie’s explanations, I still couldn’t under-

stand: What had I seen in the third floor garret?

The question would not let go of me and would not be

answered. If an echo was something that came from the past,

why couldn’t I remember having been there, having said and

done those things? The events I had witnessed certainly weren’t

something someone could forget, yet before today, I hadn’t had

any memory of it at all. But I also recognized that, as I’d watched, I did have the feeling that I
almost
remembered. That I knew what would come next. That sense of knowing in advance —

did that suggest that I could see the future even though Maggie

couldn’t? And did that mean I still had the events in the old nurs-

ery to look forward to?

The thought made me shudder. I didn’t want to be that

Sarah. Ever.

At the top of the stairs, I spotted Sam at his work table, still

fiddling with the gutted radio. I sat down beside him.

“You all right, Sarah?” he asked, as he focused on twisting out

a screw.

No
, I thought but didn’t say. “Bud? Can I ask you something?”

“Sure you can,” he answered generously. He put down the

screwdriver and gave me his full attention.

“Do you . . . remember when I . . . found you?”

He looked down, moved some of his pieces slightly. “You’re

always finding me.”

108 O

Hotter, Colder
, I thought. Maybe that had something to do

with Maggie’s
energy
too. “This was in the attic,” I said. “In a nursery.”

“Oh, the nursery,” he said, concentrating on a circuit he’d

picked up. “I remember.”

“I don’t.”

He considered. “Gramma said you would need to

remember.”

Gramma?

He put the piece he was holding back in its place. “I don’t

remember it all exactly good either, Sarah.”

“Tell me anything you got, Samwise.”

“Well, I went to the pretend nursery that Mama made, where

Maggie was before she got big. Only I forgot it was pretend, so I

couldn’t get back. And then you finded me, and you told me

I had to remember, and showed me I wasn’t in the mirror. So I

said, ‘You’re my Jack,’ and then I could go.” He held out one

little hand, palm up, a platter of clarity. “You see?”

And oddly enough, I did see. When I shut my eyes, I could

see a red and white nursery full of toys. A music box. Sammy,

not knowing who I was or who he was. But I had made him

remember.

I’d been afraid, so terribly afraid, that I wouldn’t be able to do

it. Find him and wake him. “What would have happened, Sam,

if I hadn’t found you?”

He shrugged it away. “You
always
find me, Sarah. That’s what was
s’posed
to happen. You fixed it.”

“Can it happen again?”

“No,” he said. “You fixed it. You made
her
remember. It won’t happen anymore.”

I’d made Maggie remember.

“How come I didn’t remember about being in the attic until

today? How come I can’t remember anything else about it, how

o109

I got there, what happened before or after?”
How come I’m asking
my six-year-old brother?

He was poking in his radio again. “I don’t really remember

much about what happened
before
either. How could we, Sarah,”

he asked in a reasonable voice, “when you made it all different?”

“Made
what
all different, bud?”

He spoke as if I was failing to understand the simplest thing.

“You woke up Maggie,” he said. “You changed what happened.”

N

I wasn’t quite sure how I escaped from Sammy’s room. Every-

thing I’d seen and heard that day had been nearly impossible to

believe, if it hadn’t happened to me. But that last thing Sam’d

said hit me so hard I couldn’t think. It kept ricocheting in my

head.
You changed what happened you changed what happened you

changed what happened.

When I’d woken up my aunt, I’d changed the
past
. Which had

changed everything that came after. Our present. Once there

was a
time
, a history, that just wasn’t anymore.

I couldn’t process the idea, couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

Where did the other time go?

When I made myself quiet and stilled the thoughts scamper-

ing around inside my head, I could even remember pieces of that

other past. That other time, when Maggie had been dead.

Like, in-the-ground dead.

I went into my room, leaned against the closed door and slid

down it until my butt connected with floor. I let more memories

come. When Maggie was little, she’d fallen from the tree fort

in the old oak — just as she had in this time — except in that

other time that was gone now, Maggie had
died
instead of waking up from her coma. And her death had hurt everyone in ways that

never healed. I remembered. It was awful. Gramma had blamed

110 O

my mom, and Mom had blamed herself. She’d never painted

again and kept herself distant from everyone, even Sammy and

me. Gramma had died from liver disease because of drinking.

My parents had separated. The images rose in my mind, one

after the other — a parade of misery. Shifting and not quite in

focus. Like photos under water.

All of us had been
different
. We’d started out the same, but ended up different. Even me. That other Sarah had been — less

happy, maybe. More alone. But stronger. I thought of that girl

I’d seen struggling to climb the stairs. She’d been bitten by a

spider. She was poisoned, maybe dying. But she’d finished.

She’d saved Sammy. She wasn’t me. I didn’t have that kind of

strength.

I knew now, finally, why I’d felt I’d been missing pieces of

myself. I’d been missing
her
.

I sat in the gathering darkness, every part of me too drained

to move ever again, trying to remember what it had felt like to

be that other Sarah.

N

My parents came home with Chinese takeout. Sammy came to

my door and slapped the wood. “Come, Sarah. We’re gonna eat

with sticks.”

I found a smile somewhere and put it on to go down the stairs

with my little brother.

We laughed and chatted, my parents, my aunt, Sammy, and I.

Sharing in-jokes. Agreeing that the contents of our cardboard

cartons weren’t as good as the real thing “back home,” prepared

by real Chinese immigrants who’d fled the Japanese occupation.