Amber House: Neverwas (22 page)

the other 99 might be hidden in a sealed box in the attic.

The second page bore a “Note from the Author” beneath a

photo of Fiona, in her sixties perhaps but still beautiful.

o119

“Forgive an old woman her foolish notions,” she had written.

“As some people conceive the future — a branching path with a

multiplicity of possibilities — so I conceive the past. Only in the present moment are we unified, congealed. This book is a testa-ment to that vision.”

After the photo page came a poem. Not my bits-of-phrases

poem, which I’d mentally titled
Otherwhen
. This one was called something else just as odd.
Neverwas
.

But Time turns round, and turns round once again,

A restless hound intent to make her bed.

Indiff’rent to the happenstance of men,

Unheeding of the grieving and the dead.

One chance there is to bring this bitch to heel,

To wind back all the hours and the days

And hand in hand uncover what is real —

A pas de deux, a dance inside the maze.

What life, what light, what truth there is in Time

Derives from what is whispered heart to heart,

The hand that pulls us onward in our climb

To find again the place where we must start.

And if she glances backward as she does,

She’ll see it’s just a dream that neverwas.

It was no wonder people had thought my great-grandmother

was insane, writing poems like this. But perhaps she hadn’t been

at all. Seemed to me that maybe she’d just been more sensitive

than everyone else. She’d understood what they didn’t. That

time could
change
.

In that dream I’d had of her trying to tell her father that time

had gone wrong, she’d been convinced history had taken another

path. It didn’t seem as if she could see it, like I could. She just

sensed
it. I wondered how. And wondered what it meant. Because, 120 O

really, my saving Maggie couldn’t have changed time for Fiona,

a half century before I woke my aunt.

Maybe others had figured out how to use Amber House to

make things happen differently. Fiona thought of the past as

branching, changeable. The idea was unbearable somehow — it

made me feel like I stood on the edge of cliff. But maybe that was

what Fiona had been obsessed with. Maybe she’d discovered that

Amber had made Fiona’s time change — for the worse.

I flipped through the book’s pages, recognizing small repro-

ductions of the oil-painted ancestors who hung on the house’s

walls. I stopped on the chapter dedicated to Maeve McCallister.

The picture under the chapter heading showed the daguerrotype

I knew — the one of Maeve holding the “unidentified” child. I

studied the little girl in her white cotton dress. She evidently had not been able to sit still for the sixty seconds needed to make the

photograph. Her image was more blurred than Maeve’s. But she

looked like my Amber — a sweet-faced child, with large eyes

and a halo of dark hair.

I didn’t know what to think about it all. No matter which way

I approached it, the puzzle Amber presented was disturbing and

impossible to take hold of.

They’d treated Fiona for schizophrenia
, I thought.
How can someone
tell if she’s going crazy?
I could have been making the entire thing up in my head — Amber, the dreams, the poetry, the echoes,

even Maggie’s part in it. How could I be certain that I hadn’t?

I put the poetry back on the shelf, but I kept the Amber House

history. Hoping maybe Fiona would give me some answers.

Bedtime reading
, I thought. I carried it up to my room and hid it in a drawer. I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why I’d

taken it.

On the way back downstairs, I veered off. I paused at the foot

of the staircase up to the third floor. Fiona’s old writing office

o121

was up there. I doubted whether I could make myself climb

those steps again

The memory of Sarah One stumbling up those same steps

shamed me into it.
She was braver than you
, I scolded myself. But then I pushed the thought away and, as if to prove myself wrong,

mounted the stairs.

First door on the right — a smallish room overlooking the

hedge maze and the river. It was sparsely furnished: a desk, a

little cabinet, a chair, a lamp. I didn’t know what I thought I’d

find. Journals, maybe, telling me all about Maeve and the mys-

terious little girl. But the shelves, the drawers, were empty.

I spotted an odd door in the rear inner corner of the room,

small, with a slanted upper edge. I’d spent so little time on the

third floor, I’d never seen it before. As far as I could remember.

It opened into the attic space over the west wing. Small dor-

mer windows let in enough light for me to see the space, filled

with boxes and old furniture so thick with dust their outlines

were softened, like a landscape under snow. I had no desire to

disturb these pieces of the past.

I turned to push the door shut again when the light shifted. I

looked back.

I saw a girl — the other Sarah, not me — poking through

a box of what I recognized as my mother’s early paintings.

And Jackson was there, watching me, in the light of Maeve’s

oil lamp.

Sarah-One looked upset, betrayed. It seemed to me that I

could remember feeling that. I knew why, too. I —
she
—

hadn’t ever known that Mom was an artist because Mom had

hidden it away.

Why was Jackson there? What had we been looking for?

Treasure.

I closed the door.

122 O

As I went out the hall door, I heard a voice behind me. “Are

you watching?”

My shoulders felt naked under the weight of the empty room

I’d just left.

I made myself pivot.
A moth on a pin
.

Fiona was sitting there. She was perhaps in her middle twen-

ties, her russet hair bobbed short and set in finger waves, her

fine features frowning a little in concentration. She wasn’t look-

ing at me. She had a drawer inverted on the desktop and she was

working to squeeze something into a corner of the carved slits

that held the edges of the drawer bottom in place.

I walked closer, so close I could see the faint dusting of freck-

les on her ivory cheeks, the tiny curls that had drifted loose from

her soft bun. Then she looked up at me, but blindly. I knew I

wasn’t visible to her. She pointed to the envelope she’d wedged

in the drawer’s grooves. “Do you see?” she asked me. Me. The

one she knew would come.

I gasped slightly, and my great-grandmother disappeared.

Moving mechanically, I slid the same drawer out of the desk.

When I turned it over, the envelope was still there, still fixed

in its place. I pressed on the wood of the drawer bottom to

loosen it and tugged the yellowed paper free.

The envelope held a card with a paragraph written in ink, in

my great-grandmother’s graceful script:

I let them believe they cured me with their pills and shocks

and “analysis.” But I still know the truth. Things are not as

they should be. The girl is connected to it, somehow, but I

have never been able to discover in what way. I believe she is

my grandmother’s mixed-race adopted daughter, who disap-

peared so long ago. I will search until I find her. I will leave
her story behind me, so you will know. So you can make

things right.

o123

I put the card back in its envelope. Wedged the envelope back

in its place. Put the drawer back in the desk. Closed the door on

the room.

Everything in Amber House had a place, I thought, as I walked

numbly down the stairs. A place in which it rested patiently, bid-

ingly, until it was needed once again.

CH A P T ER THI RT EE N

K

On the second-floor landing, I saw her. Looking up at the win-

dow I was looking out. She stood in the entrance to the maze,

dressed, as always, in the gauze of summer.
Amber.

I turned, hurried down the stairs to the front hall closet,

pulled on boots and a coat.

Amber House’s hedge maze was a famous landmark all by

itself. The entire continent of North America had only four hedge

mazes. Ours was small compared to the others, but cleverly

made and comparatively ancient. My mother hadn’t particularly

liked it when Jackson and I played in there when we were little,

but that never stopped us. The place offered an irresistible com-

bination of sunlight and mystery.

It also offered a challenging puzzle, very possible to get lost

in — if you didn’t know the key. Right, skip, right, left, skip, left, right, skip; then left, skip, left, right, skip, right, left, skip. Followed faithfully, the pattern would lead you directly to the

heart. But it seemed this time that was not where I was headed.

The entrance to the maze opened onto a long straight corri-

dor. The plants that formed its walls were so old and thick that,

even stripped for winter, one could not see through them. The

snow lay on the hedge tops and maze floor, an unbroken foam of

white. No footprints ran after the little girl who stood at the

corridor’s end.

The ghost of Maeve’s lost adopted child.

She turned and darted left behind the hedge. And I went after

her. As I knew I must.

o125

At the corridor’s end, the passage continued both left and

right. I cut left and ran to a corner that bent left again. Halfway

down the next corridor, two passages crossed, and looking right,

I saw a flash of movement. I dashed after it and hit another choice

of turns. A left took me to a dead end.

I’d lost her.

I walked back, following my footsteps, when a little bit of

color peeking from the snow caught my eye. I bent to pick it

up. A mottled green pebble. I’d held it before, I realized. In

this same spot. Only then the hedge had been dressed in leaves

turning gold. I even knew what I’d find around the next

corner —

— a summertime maze with hedges no higher than my head.

An echo.
A marble bench stood in a small alcove in the maze, and on the bench sat an old black woman. She looked toward

me, squinting, and a smile spread across her face. She spoke.

“Sarah, girl, here you are again.”

I felt short of breath, like I’d been punched in the stomach.

An echo who
knows
me
, I amended. And some part of me was completely unsurprised.

I made myself inhale, then I made myself speak. “You’re from

the past, right?”

She laughed, warm and throaty. “Feels mighty present to me.

But yes, your past, I guess.”

“How come you can see me? How come we can talk?”

“Not sure,” she said. “I can see the future, like you can see the

past. Somehow our sights meet.”

Energy
, I thought again. “How do you know my name?”

She looked confused then. “We’ve talked many times

afore now.”

Sarah One
, I thought.

“How could you not know me?” she said, puzzling it out.

“This ain’t the first time we met — ’cause I remember that time.

126 O

You can’t have two first times.” A queer note had crept into her

voice.

I wondered what I was supposed to say to this apparition,

whether I should keep my secrets safe from her. I had no reason

to trust her except a gut feeling left over, I supposed, from Sarah

One. Yet I
wanted
to talk to someone. I decided to take a chance.

“Maybe you can,” I said.

She looked at me keenly. “Tell me,” she said.

“My brother —”

“Sammy,” she said.

“Yes. Sammy got stuck in an echo while he was unconscious,

but I was able to find him and wake him up. Except my child-

aged aunt was with him and —”

“And you woke Maggie too,” she said.

“Yes.” This was the part that was hard to say. “But I can

remember a different time when she never woke up. When

she died.”

The woman pressed her hands to her cheeks as if to hold her-

self together. “You did it,” she whispered. “You changed time.”

Her eyes glinted, moving as if seeing a multitude. “She said it

was possible, but I did not actually believe it. I couldn’t see the

path. But she can.”

“Who?”

She ignored my question. “Do you remember the time before?

The time that is no more?”

The time that is no more?
Was it gone, then? As if it had never happened? “Seems like I’m the only one who does. Sam and

Maggie remember me waking them up, but they don’t remem-

ber what happened before that. Not in the other time.”

“They remember the change because they were there.”

The change.
The words made me feel tenuous, as if I were

spreading out thinner and thinner. I found I was rubbing my

o127

temples. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember ever meeting you before.

Who are you?”

“They call me Nanga.”

I recognized her then — the older version of the young

woman I’d seen with Sarah-Louise and the Good Mother spider.