Amber House: Neverwas (30 page)

marble steps and crowning domes. Four of these structures

flanked a long central park of grass and trees and fountains.

Richard acted as tour guide.

“The congressional building is on the west side. On the south,

the president’s mansion. The east, the Supreme Court, and the

north, a monument to the heroes of the Confederation.”

John deposited us at the bottom of a lengthy flight of stone

steps. At the top, Richard was greeted politely by the guards. He

led me to his father’s office, a suite of rooms filled with mahog-

any desks and leather chairs, brass lamps and oil paintings. A

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pretty raven-haired secretary bubbled over to offer us coffee

or tea.

“The tape been delivered yet, Stacey?” Richard asked.

She blinked. “Didn’t somebody tell you? President Stevenson

has that waiting for you across the street.”

Richard kind of startled at that. “God. I had no idea.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The president is expecting us,” Richard said.

N

We were escorted to President Stevenson’s mansion — a white-

washed brick building in the Greek Revival style. We didn’t use

the front door; a guard led us around to a businesslike side

entrance. A man in a charcoal suit and yellow tie came out of

nowhere and rushed forward to shake Richard’s hand. “Right

this way.”

Thick blue carpeting ran down the length of a wide hall

flanked with what might have once been bedrooms but now

were busy offices. People looked up from their work as we were

ushered past. Most of them sat in front of TV screens attached by

snaking cables to banks of metal cabinets punctuated with wink-

ing lights. Computers. Of course the president would have the

latest technology.

Up an elevator, down another carpeted hall, closing in on the

“executive residence,” as the charcoal-suited man explained.

Our pace was brisk, but I took in as much as I could, peering up

stairwells, down bisecting corridors. The complex was massive,

palatial, with arched doorways, elaborate woodwork, and panel-

ing on the walls. All of it was painted butter yellow, or sky blue,

or mint green. I wondered if Claire Hathaway would “revise” the

color scheme when she became first lady.

o185

Our guide led us to a sitting room. Its windows overlooked

the central park of the governmental buildings. From here, in

wintertime, it all looked unpalatably gray.

“He should be ready for you shortly,” the man said.

A crowd stood outside the iron fence at the end of the sweep-

ing lawn. They waved signs and chanted. Many of them wore

red armbands marked with a black figure.
Swastikas.

“Who are they?” I asked Richard.

A hoarse voice answered me: “A small but growing part

of my constituency, I’m afraid. Fools looking for a ‘stronger’

government.”

I turned. President Stevenson was making his way over to the

window, leaning heavily on a cane. I hardly recognized him from

the photos I had seen — he had the same lion’s mane of white

hair, the same shrewd eyes, but his face was older, drawn, lined,

weary. He snorted his disgust at the demonstrators. “Lunatics.

More and more of ’em every day.”

He held out a gnarled hand to Richard, who stepped forward

to take it. “Richard, is it?” the president said.

“Yes, sir.”

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “The young prince in

line for the throne. Your father’s smart to be training you.” He

regarded me. “Who’s this?”

“My neighbor, actually, Mr. President,” Richard said. He ges-

tured ever so slightly with his head for me to step forward. I

honestly didn’t know what was expected — was I supposed to

curtsy or something? I stuck out my hand.

“Sarah Parsons, Mr. President.”

The man in the charcoal suit seemed to materialize from

nowhere, stepping forward to whisper in the president’s ear.

“Ah. The heiress of Amber House,” Stevenson said, taking my

hand in his. “Suitable,” he commented.

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For what?
I wondered as he released me. Fixed with the weight of Stevenson’s stare, I found myself wishing I hadn’t come.

Richard broke the silence: “On my father’s behalf, I’d like to

thank you, sir —”

“Your father’s a smart man.” Stevenson put an empty hand out

to Charcoal Suit, who swiftly filled it with a small film canister.

“Don’t much like his politics. Never did. But he’s the right man

for the job in front of us.”

He held the canister out to Richard, who stepped forward to

take it. “Thank you, President Stevenson.”

Stevenson didn’t release his hold on the canister, pinning

Richard in place. “Don’t thank me, boy. I’m not sure I’m doing

your father any favor. Just tell him he has to act fast. Time’s run-

ning out. I’m too old and set in my ways to do it myself.”

“To do what, sir?” Richard asked.

The president let go of the film reel and looked at Richard as

if he hadn’t been paying attention to the obvious. “Prevent a

world war, of course.” He turned and started back out of the

room, done with us. I heard him mutter, “Time for a change.”

Charcoal Suit led us back out. He also had a message for

Richard to give to Senator Hathaway. “Your father should be

careful. Jewish Intelligence says the Reich isn’t happy with him,

and our own agency agrees. They’ll stop him if they can.”

N

John was waiting with the car just outside the side gate. He held

open a briefcase when Richard reached him, and Richard put

the movie reel in it. Then John locked the case and put it in the

trunk of the car.

We climbed in. Richard was quiet. After a moment, he shiv-

ered involuntarily. “Creepy old man. Did you feel the power

radiating off him?”

o187

Maybe I had. “Do you think he’s right?” I asked. “Do you

think there’ll be a war?”

“Stevenson’s nearing eighty. He’s going senile.”

“What a comforting thought. Dotty old man running a

country.”

Richard shrugged, almost shaking off his glum mood. “Well,

you heard what he said, didn’t you? ‘Time for a change.’ At least

he knows it’s time for him to step aside.”

I wanted to ask Richard whether he thought his father could

handle the responsibility. Whether he could really do what

Stevenson hoped he could.

Change the world.

CH A P T ER TW E N T Y

K

Richard had a couple of things to pick up, so we swung by the

Hathaways’ capital residence, in a nearby neighborhood of digni-

fied homes looming over manicured lawns. “This won’t take

long,” he said. “You can wait in the car if you like.”

And miss the chance to see the inside of that house? My curi-

osity must have shown on my face.

“Come in,” he laughed, as he climbed out of the limo. “Look

around.”

While Richard hurried upstairs to fetch a pair of “lucky” cuff

links his father wanted to wear when he announced his candi-

dacy, I wandered into the living room. Claire’s telltale minimalist

aesthetic was present yet again. That soothing palette of neu-

trals. My eye was drawn to a wall of framed black-and-white

photos. A swathed baby in a bassinet; a pearly toothed toddler

being pushed in a swing. The same towheaded boy building

sand castles on the beach, running through fall leaves, put-

ting the finishing touches on a snowman. In many of them, a

blond woman stood off to one side, watching fondly — Claire

Hathaway admiring her perfect son.

But in that other time, she left him. Why was it different? What had
Fiona wanted me to see in baby Amber’s eyes?

“Um.” Richard had appeared in the doorway, just in time to

notice my path forward to get a closer look.

“You were a pretty cute kid,” I said.

He smiled at that. That winning hybrid of Claire’s tilted smile

and Robert’s square grin.

o189

He took me to a charming French bistro for a late lunch. The

food was fabulous — Richmond had an enclave of French refu-

gees who’d fled Europe in the forties and fifties, but had not

wanted to join their compatriots in the French nation west of the

Mississippi River.

We drove back through the capital’s center on our way out of

town. Richard must have noticed the longing on my face as we

passed the Jackson Memorial, because he asked John to stop.

We climbed the smooth steps slowly. The spot was nearly

deserted now, so late in the day. A chill wind blew in from the

west, buffeting me from behind, sending my skirt dancing

around my knees. Inside the monument, the wind rose to an

audible sigh, whipping through the open spaces around the stone

columns. The high pitch of it seemed to catch in my ears as I

focused on the pale, carved seated statue before me.

It was — all wrong, somehow.

The blind eyes gazing out through the columns to the future

of the country he helped to build. The gentle craggy face, slashed

by a long scar. The beloved first president of the ACS, Andrew

Jackson. Behind him, etched in the marble walls, a roll call

of the Confederation’s cherished fallen, the soldiers who died in

the brief, successful revolution against England in 1833.

I thought,
Someone else should be sitting in that marble seat.

N

John secured the briefcase in the Messerschmitt, then we pow-

ered up and taxied to the runway. “I want you to keep your eyes

open as we lift off, coz. I special-ordered this sunset for you.”

We took off and flew west-northwest into a pink-orange sky

darkening to purple. Richard acted as tour guide. “That’s

Charlottesville down there on the left. Several of the most

important leaders of the colonial revolt came from there. The

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guy who wrote the document that they sent to King George —

he lived a little to the southeast of the town. His estate is still

standing, although it was confiscated by the Crown. He called it

something like Montevideo or —”

“Monticello,” I murmured.

“Yeah, that’s right. You’ve heard of him, then.”

No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t ever heard any of this. Had I?

“It’s really a neat place. Beautiful architecture. We should go

see it sometime.”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“Outside of the colony of Massachusetts, Virginia had the

greatest number of insurrectionists, most of them really wealthy

landowners. And most of them probably related in one way or

another to your ancestors.”

He banked north. Ahead, the land was split by a wide river

that bled, shining, into the Chesapeake — the Potomac. We

were nearing home.

“Another one of the old estates, maybe even bigger than

Amber House, off to the left there, near Alexandria. It’s still

standing because the property actually belonged to the wife.

Her second husband — I forget his name — was one of the reb-

els wiped out by Loyalist agents in the 1770s, at the beginning

of the insurrection. The house was called —” He thought a

moment. “Mount something.”

“Vernon.” It swam forward, unbidden and unuttered. In Sarah

One’s time, the owner hadn’t been some failed rebel officer. He

had been called the father of a country — a country that would

never be.

Near Annapolis, Richard stopped chatting to focus on his

landing. I was grateful for the silence. It had become impossible

for me to follow his conversation. I was hunting — searching

the spaces inside me for traces of another world, another time

that — what? Never was? I was gathering embers that I piled

o191

one next to the other in the hope their heat would build until my

mind was filled with it, until it was a roaring flame that would

light every corner.

I hardly noticed Richard’s landing. The wind was harsher

here, farther north, sweeping in off the Chesapeake after its

race across leagues of cold, gray ocean. When I opened the pas-

senger door, my hair rose like snakes, whipping at my nose and

eyes and ears. The door was yanked from my hold, slam-

ming shut.

Richard put an arm around my shoulders and hurried me to

the car, helping me in, closing the door, stilling the wind that

blew outside. He climbed into the driver’s seat. Ever so gently,

the tips of his fingers swept the wild pieces of my hair back

behind my ear. And lingered on my neck.

“You all right?”

“I don’t think so, Hathaway. I have to get back to Amber

House. I have to get home.”

He was stung, but there were ashes and embers of another

Richard inside me too. I couldn’t deal with seeing the shadow

of Richard-past in the Richard who was watching me with such

concern. I needed to go back.

N

The closer I drew to Amber House, the worse the double-image

chaos in my head became. Bright, hot images from the dead past

casting light perversely on all the things of now that hadn’t been

before. I remembered ripped jeans and a palm-sized phone and a

black president of the American nation. Not corseted dresses.

Not a dying Rose. Not a segregated movie theater. Computers