Amber House: Neverwas (23 page)

Dead and gone about two centuries.

Her head turned, as if she saw something I didn’t. “Here

comes my little friend now. My solace. I thought her one I’d

dreamed. But she grows clearer. Each time she comes, she grows

clearer.”

She looked toward me again, but I didn’t think she could see

me anymore. She spoke blindly. “You go find Jackson. Now.”

Then the bubble of time that had held us dissolved, and she

was gone. But not before I noticed a small trickle of blood from

her nose.

I stood there a moment more, in a maze turned back to win-

ter poverty. I felt unwilling to move, caught up in some game I

didn’t know the rules of. It didn’t seem fair. I didn’t want to play.

Then I turned and backtracked my footprints out of the maze.

I was going to go find Jackson.

N

Nanga’s words kept turning over in my head.
The change. The time
that is no more.
There were ugly possibilities in those phrases.

What did I do, what did I change? Did I make things worse?
But that was absurd. Maggie was alive, I told myself, over and over.

Everyone was happier. Things were better.
Weren’t they?
I wanted to believe it.

I went inside through the kitchen heading for the stairs. But

then I heard the voices of my parents, coming through the swing-

ing door to the dining room. Loud and angry. My mother,

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practically snarling: “Let’s not even plug money into the equa-

tion, Tom. Maybe I just think it’ll be important to Sarah,

someday, to look back on this party in her family’s house. How

come it never occurs to you that I might be thinking of someone

besides myself?”

My dad, heavy with sarcasm: “Maybe because that’s how I’ve

experienced our life together.”

“Oh, great,” my mom came back at him. “Let’s just open up

all the old wounds, shall we? Rehash it all. Because I’m not the

one who betrayed our marriage.”

I realized the voices didn’t belong to my real mom and dad —

they belonged to the other ones, the ones that didn’t exist

anymore. Sarah One’s parents. But I pushed the door open any-

way. Just to make sure.

And the dining room was deserted. Thank God. But I was

relieved to have heard, remembered, that argument. Things

couldn’t be much worse than that was.

I heard three quick raps on the door I’d just closed behind me.

I turned and saw a young version of my father entering, his hair

absurdly long and unruly, a big grin on his face, dressed in dun-

garees and deck shoes.

“Lord, Parsons, you here again?” my mother said. I looked

toward the table. She was sitting there, her hair long and curled

at the bottom, her mouth turned up in a teasing smile. She wasn’t

much older than I.

“I just wanted to give you another chance to knock me into

the bay with the boom.”

“You’re putting the blame on me?” my mother said, lifting her

eyebrows, making her face innocent. “Half the boats on the river

heard me yelling ‘Jibe ho!’ You’re supposed to duck, Parsons.

But I always heard New Englanders don’t make very good sailors.”

“You just dunked me because I criticized your anchor

hitch knot.”

o129

“Maybe,” young Mom said, reaching up and grabbing hold of

my dad’s shirt front. “But I’ll never confess.” She pulled him

down until their lips met in a kiss that made me look away.

When I turned back, they were gone.

It was as if Amber House was trying to set my mind at ease.
I

had made things better.

But I felt as if I was on overload. I just wanted the visions

to stop.

I sped up the stairs two at a time, ran a brush through my hair,

put on a bit of mascara and lip gloss, and then ran back down-

stairs and out the front door. I was glad to go look for Jackson. I

needed a break from that house.

N

Just as I had before, I followed my sense of Jackson, and just as

before, it led me back to the same clapboard church. Where I

found him waiting for me, standing outside the door with his

arms crossed.

“How’d you know I was coming?” I asked.

“Sort of the same way you can always find me. Didn’t you

promise not to do this?”

Yes, I had promised
, I thought with some resentment.
You insisted
I promise because you want to keep secrets from me.

“Someone told me to come,” I said defiantly.

“Who would that be?”

“Nanga. Nanga told me.”

I didn’t know what I expected, but the effect that name had on

Jackson astonished me. He looked stunned, and yet —
hopeful
.

Confused, maybe even calculating, but trying to contain it all, keep it all inside. Finally he said, “Then I guess you’d better come in.”

I wasn’t all that surprised that it wasn’t actually a Bible study

meeting. It looked more like something — political. The Asian

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girl I’d seen with Jackson before turned around as we came

through the door. She shot me a suspicious look. At the front of

the room, a New Englander in a suit was addressing a mostly

black crowd.

“. . . a new encryption code that Jewish Intelligence hasn’t

cracked, but the sheer number of communications with German

agents in North America indicate that the operation is major and

imminent — a high-magnitude threat. We are encouraging all

of our allies and activists to be watchful and as prepared as pos-

sible for an incident that may involve a large number of civilian

casualties.”

I thought I must have misheard. I turned to Jackson. “Did he

just say ‘a large numb —’?”

Jackson shushed me with his hand; he was trying to listen. A

member of the audience rose with a question: “Wouldn’t such an

incident be considered an act of war?”

“H.I. says the Nazi action will be directed toward destabiliz-

ing and/or sabotaging the Unification movement. Whatever

occurs will be masked in such a way as to throw suspicion on

another group. The action almost certainly is not intended to

precipitate war. As far as we are able to discern, neither the

Germans nor the Japanese Empire are yet prepared to resume a

policy of military expansionism.”

I plucked at Jackson’s sleeve a little frantically. “Is this guy

for real?”

He looked at me with something like exasperation. “It’s all for

real, Sare. I don’t want to scare you, but like I keep telling you,

time is running out.”

“Time for what?” I asked, but he’d turned back to listen. The

black minister I had met two days before — Pastor Howe —

had risen and was shaking hands with the speaker.

“Thank you, Rabbi Hillel.” The pastor took over the podium.

“It doesn’t appear that either the New English government or

o131

our own is releasing this information to the general public, so

spread awareness where you can. We do not want to promote

panic, but we do want to promote preparedness. We also want

people to know that Germany is actively trying to undermine

the Unification movement, which means the Nazis must per-

ceive it as a critical threat. Which makes its success of critical

importance.”

With that, the meeting evidently ended. The audience was

gathering up coats and gloves from their seats, their faces seri-

ous and troubled, when the pastor claimed another moment of

silence. “I want to remind you that our Christmas Eve candle

service and remembrance begins at ten p.m., but do try to get

here early. The inspiring Diane Nash will talk about the days

when she and our own Addison Valois” — he gestured toward

Jackson, and people turned to nod — “worked together to build

the liberation movement in this area.” The pastor noticed me,

then, standing next to Jackson. He concluded, “And I want to

welcome all new visitors to our Bible study group” — this pro-

voked a smattering of chuckles — “and encourage them to come

again. We need the participation of all people of goodwill.”

Jackson tugged me into the stream of departing people,

working his way against the current. He told me, “I want you to

meet someone.”

I followed reluctantly. I had a pretty good idea who that some-

one was, and I wasn’t all that keen on meeting her. “Haiyun!”

Jackson said over the crowd.

The girl turned and smiled.
She’s lovely
, I thought, a bit resentfully. Jackson tugged me in closer: “I want you to meet my best

friend — Sarah Parsons.”
Best friend.
I was a little surprised that he’d meant me. “Sarah, this is Kim Haiyun.”

“Helen,” she corrected him. “Helen Kim. Sounds more

Confederate.” She smiled at me. “I am very happy to meet you.”

She extended her hand.

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I took it. “And I’m pleased to meet you.” I couldn’t help but

smile back. “Kim — is that a Chinese name?”

“My family is from the place once known as Korea.”

She had the accent — very slight — of a non-native speaker.

Which meant that she and her family had escaped the Empire. I

had met quite a few refugees back home and heard their stories.

I knew that successful escapes took a small fortune in bribes or

incredible luck or heroic daring, and most often some combina-

tion of all three. “The Confederation is fortunate to have you.”

She smiled again, and nodded. “Thank you. I wish the gov-

ernment shared your opinion.” She turned to Jackson, “I will see

you Friday?”

“I’ll be there,” he said. “You need someone to walk you home?”

She shook her head. “My brother is picking me up, but thank

you.” She slipped past us, saying as she went. “Good night,

Sarah.”

Jackson bent to gather his possessions from the pew. Which

confirmed he
had
been sitting next to her. I must have seemed a little miserable, because he looked at me quizzically. I shook my

head slightly and put on another small smile. “I guess you can

walk
me
home, then.”

“Yep.”

I was second-best now. But that was all right. If I actually was

still Jackson’s best friend, I guessed I could get used to it.

CH A P T ER FOU RT EE N

K

Outside the church, the clear sunshine of the morning was gone;

clouds from the Atlantic had blown in. My brain was a welter of

questions. About Jewish Intelligence and fake Bible study groups

and a lovely Korean girl. Not to mention — “How is it you know

Nanga?”

“I don’t know Nanga,” he said. “I know
of
her. She’s my great-grandmother about eight times removed. Dead one hundred

and eighty years. The more interesting question is, how do
you

know her?”

I thought about lying. Passing it off somehow — a joke, a ref-

erence in Fiona’s
Amber House
book, something or other I’d seen in the house that could explain why I’d used that name to justify

my hunting Jackson down.

Because I didn’t see how I could tell him the truth without

making him think I was a lunatic.

“May I guess?” he asked calmly. I nodded, thinking I’d love

for him to give me an explanation that would get me off the

hook. But then he said, “She talked to you in an echo.”

I stopped dead still. “You’re telling me you already know

about the echoes?”

He stopped too. “Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

He was studying his shoes. “Maybe ten years.”

“For God’s sake, J. Why didn’t you tell me about them?”

He looked up at me, shrugging just a little. “I didn’t want you

to think I was a lunatic.”

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And I had to smile at that. “Fine,” I said. “How’d you find out

about them?”

“Someone told me.”

“Who?”

His forehead had a little furrow in it. Like this was going to be

hard to say. Or maybe hard to hear.

“You did, Sare.”

I just shook my head. That didn’t make any sense at all. I

hadn’t told him — I hadn’t even known ten years ago. “What are

you talking about?”

He look down, trying to find words. “I have to tell you some-

thing,” he said, and I was hit again with that too-familiar feeling

of déjà vu. He’d said that to me before. I knew it. I could — I

could remember it. From the other time. We’d been standing

on the Amber House river dock. He’d been afraid that time too.

Afraid to tell me the next thing, to tell me —

“You have a gift too,” I said.

He looked disconcerted. “Yes.”

“Ten years ago you saw
me
telling you about the echoes because you had a vision of this conversation,” I said. “Because you can

see the future.”

“Wow,” he said, stunned. “How did you know that?”

All right
, I thought,
now we
are
verging on true lunacy
. How in God’s name was I supposed to explain to him that he told me

about his gift on that river dock, in a time that ceased to be? “I

know that,” I said, “because you told me once before.”

He snorted as if I was kidding. Then he saw I was serious. “I

think I’d remember telling you something that important,”

he said.

I lifted my eyebrows all the way and shook my head a little.

This had to be the most insane conversation of all time. I forced