Amber House: Neverwas (39 page)

up a simple pointed opener.

“Sam again?” he said.

“Pretty strange, right? But come to think of it,” I said,

frowning a little, “I don’t think it was him. I think he said ‘s
he
’

told him.”

“She?”

“Yeah.
She
said I had to have this stuff with me.”

“Maggie?” he suggested. I shook my head. “Then Nanga,

maybe?”

“Maybe.” But I didn’t think that was the answer.

We pulled two chairs close to the fire, with one corner of the

table between us, and set about prying some food from the cans.

I hadn’t eaten since — I couldn’t remember when. A few

spoonfuls of cereal. Had that been just earlier this same day? It

felt like a million years ago.

256 O

Jackson handed me a can he’d opened with a full circle of

V-shaped cuts, together with his multitool pocketknife swiveled

open to a two-tine fork. “Ladies first,” he said.

I looked inside the jagged opening and saw the orange plump-

ness of peach halves in heavy syrup. I speared one into my mouth.

The sugar hit my tongue — cold, wet, and satisfying.

The act of eating made me realize how ravenous I was. I could

have sucked down the whole can. I made myself hold it out to

Jackson with the fork. “Your turn.”

He shook his head. “Got my own,” he said, holding up another

can of the same.

I shoveled three more into my mouth, one after the other,

hardly bothering to chew.

“Save room for some real food,” he said. He pulled a sandwich

out of a pocket in his backpack. “Meat loaf. Gran’s recipe, pre-

pared by yours truly. Naturally refrigerated all day.”

“I hate stealing your food,” I said.

“We’re in this together, Sare. We both have to make it to

the end.”

I accepted half the sandwich and took a healthy bite. It was
so

good
. Exactly the right combination of meat and bread that I needed to ease the hunger gnawing at me. It took me three bites

to realize the taste was pretty good too. “
You
made this?” I said around a full mouth.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Cooking is just chemical formulas you

can eat.”

“Right,” I said. “Science geek.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated.

I shoved in my last bite. I was beginning to feel better.

Warmer. Not so empty. “Then I guess all this ESP stuff must

kind of weird you out,” I said.

“Doesn’t weird you out?”

o257

I smiled. “It weirds me out, J, but not because I expect the

world to be all logical and scientific.”

He shook his head a little. “I figure it must have a scientific

basis. We just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe energy patterns

some people are more receptive to. Or time as a function of

perception rather than a constituent part of reality. Something

like that,” he said.

“Huh,” I said.

“What?”

“All these years I’ve known you, J,” I said teasingly, “I never

had you pegged for the brainy type.”

He shrugged. “All these years I’ve known you, Sare, I never

had you pegged as the perceptive type.”

I laughed out loud. It felt good. Stuck in the middle of

nowhere, in a drafty cabin in arctic weather, halfway between

Nazi-loving cops on one end and the attempted burglary of the

Metropolitan on the other, it felt good to be able to laugh.

We had to be out of our minds, the both of us.

“You seem so — calm — about all of this. I am so scared all

the time I can hardly stand being myself.”

“I’m scared too,” he said.

“You don’t seem like it.”

He gave me another of his little shrugs. “I’m scared for your

safety, I’m scared for mine. I’m scared about what happens if we

don’t succeed. I’m scared about what happens if we do.”

“If we do?”

“We just have to keep going. Do what makes sense in the

moment. Get the job done. See it through to the end.” He said it

quietly, even somberly. It gave me a chill. He caught my eye. “I

have faith in you, Sare.”

I felt a sudden sting of tears. I looked away and blinked

them back.

258 O

“Hey, now,” he said. “Enough of this. I think I saw —” He

stood and fished something from the back of the shelves, then

turned, victorious. “This.” He was holding up a cheap portable

radio as if it were a trophy. “Think it works?”

I summoned something like a smile. “You’re always a

dreamer, J.”

He started turning knobs. First it coughed out static, proving

it still had batteries with some juice. Then he zeroed in on a

couple of semi-audible signals — local news, some very fuzzy

classical music, an oldies station, and one pretty clear channel

playing upbeat pop. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said,

grabbing my hand and tugging me to my feet.

“It’s too cold to dance. And besides, I’m lousy at it.” But I held

out my hands obediently, one to reach for his shoulder, the other

to take his hand.

He looked at me and shook his head sadly. “You got to be kid-

ding, girl.”

“What?”

He took both my hands in his and lowered them to waist

level, then began to saw back and forth in time with the music.

“Now bend your knees,” he directed, showing me, “and swivel

your hips.”

I straightened up and pulled back a little. “I don’t know how,”

I said.

He tugged me back in. “Bend the knees. Swivel the hips. Get

your shoulders into it.” He demonstrated as he went along.

“There you go, Sare. Doing the twist.” He grinned wickedly.

“Look at that white girl go.”

I laughed. I stuck out my tongue. I leaned back like he was

leaning back. I lifted one knee like he was lifting one knee. He

was a good dancer. A lot better than I was. But it didn’t matter.

For the length of the song and the one that followed, I was doing

the twist.

o259

It was warmer after that or, I guessed, I was just warmer from

the blood flowing. The stove had built up a nice bed of coals, so

I added the biggest logs I could find, hoping they would burn

slower and steady. We cleaned up our trash, made every-

thing neat.

“It’ll be colder on the floor,” Jackson said, “but I really need

to lie down for a while. I feel beat up. Everything hurts.”

I knew how he felt.

We spread the newspaper on the floor as thick as we could.

We put a layer of clothes on that, and a blanket on top of that.

Then he stood there awkwardly for a moment. “Look, I

don’t know how to put this exactly, but to stay warm while we

sleep —”

“— we should spoon,” I finished for him.

“That was what I was thinking,” he said.

He opened the stove and added a couple more chunks of

wood, then piled more within easy reach, to feed in during the

night.

He blew out the lamp and sat down beside me. I curled up on

my side, my arm under my head. He folded himself in behind

me, tucking the last two blankets around us, leaning the back-

packs against his backside for a little more insulation.

I was grateful for the warmth of him behind me. I felt — safe.

I felt not alone. He was in this with me. To the end.

“You still on board, Sare? You going to be able to see this

through?”

“Yeah, I’m still on board. It’s my mess.”

“It’s not your mess,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m still on board, J,” I repeated. “Thank you for sticking

with me.”

“I have my own reasons, good reasons, to want this to work,

Sare, to want time to change. There’s a better future out there,

and I want that guy, that other Jackson, to have it. But even if I

260 O

didn’t have those reasons, I’d still have to keep going, right? I

mean, in this other time, this other future, the Nazis lost.

Slavery ended in the 1800s. Life will be better for a lot of people.

We don’t have a right to stop.”

I realized I didn’t think about it that way. I was always focused

on my own little part.
I
had made a mess that
I
had to clean up.

As best I could, I had to put things right.

The fire crackled, filling up the silence that had settled on us.

Outside, a winter wind hunted, looking for ways in. But I felt

safe with Jackson at my back.

“What am I like,” I said, “in that other future you see?”

“I don’t know how to explain it, really. You’re —” He strug-

gled to find the words. “You’re mostly the same. Snarky-funny,

spunky, kind, observant, stubborn.”

I savored the words.

“But you have this other thing. Something more grown-up,

maybe. It’s like you’ve known sadness, grief. You see the world

with more compassion.”

I could hear the admiration in his voice. For someone I
wasn’t
.

It hurt a little.

“What did you mean,” I said, “when you said ‘that other

Jackson’?”

“Well, it won’t be me, will it? It’ll be some other Jackson who

lived some other life. He won’t even remember me. I’ll just

be gone.”

I felt tears start again. This is what he believed? And he was

still going forward? I couldn’t speak, but I wanted to tell him

there was no other Jackson. He didn’t change. He was constant.

And
I
would remember him.

“It’ll be all right,” he said soothingly into my hair. “It’ll be all right. Everything is going to be all right.”

I fell asleep on those words, playing them over and over in my

head. Words I wanted to believe. And they worked their way

o261

down to another level of me, the Sarah who had heard them

before. Standing on a dock, brokenhearted, while this boy, this

same boy, told me he’d known me before he met me, known me

through visions of a future we would spend together.

Together
.

I dreamed and woke, slept and dreamed again. A familiar

dream of running in a dress of drifting gold. Flying down stone

steps. Coming to the dock on the river, and finding someone

standing there, silhouetted on the face of a pumpkin moon.

When he turned, I saw it was Jackson.

“I have to tell you something,” he said thickly. “My visions —”

“
My
visions —”

We finished together: “are all about you.”

We danced, like floating on a floor of stars, and I wept on the

shoulder of the boy who saw a future he thought could never be.

A future where he loved me. And I loved him.

Again and for always.

CH A P T ER TW E N T Y-EIGHT

K

I woke before dawn, too cold to stay asleep. Jackson had rolled

onto his back sometime in the night. He was making the noise of

dreaming. I turned quietly so I could see him.

His head rocked slightly in denial; the suggestions of winces

flickered on his face. Despite the cold, I saw a trickle of sweat on his forehead. His sounds were unborn groans. They rose in volume until he jolted awake.

“Hey,” I said. “You were having a nightmare.”

He looked at me, his face still taut. Slowly, his features soft-

ened and he smiled. A sad smile. “Was I? I don’t remember.” He

rose. “We have a mile or two to walk. We’d better get moving.”

I stood, straightening my clothes, the mess of my hair. I had

not forgotten my dream. It made me feel out of place, ill at ease,

unable to hide.

In that other time, I had loved Jackson and he had loved me.

And the truth was, I still loved Jackson. He just didn’t love me

anymore. He had moved on to someone better suited to him —

more serious, more committed. A gentle and decent person, just

like he was. The one thing this whole mess had taught me was

the fact that I didn’t measure up as a mature, responsible, and

compassionate human being. I was too quick to judge, too self-

ish, too soft. Not like him.

It must show
, I thought.
He must be able to see this thing inside me,
so enormous I can hardly breathe around it.
I wished I could tell him what I had remembered in my dream. But it wouldn’t be fair to

put that on him. This Jackson had Helen.

o263

I tugged a comb through my hair and longed for my tooth-

brush. Why hadn’t Sammy packed me one of those?

Jackson opened another can of peaches for us to fill our stom-

achs. “It’ll take us at least a couple hours to get to New York.”

We put things back the way we had found them. Jackson

left a twenty-dollar bill on the shelf pinned under a can. Then

we headed out into the bitter cold morning of the last day of

the year.

As the world turned gray, we followed the double ruts of an

overgrown dirt road to a local highway. We didn’t speak. About

a mile farther on, we reached the edge of a town. We bore

left — north — toward the tracks we’d left earlier, and soon

found the train station.

“You go in first, get a ticket to New York. In about ten min-

utes, I’ll go in and get a ticket for some place beyond. Don’t look

at me. Pretend you don’t know me.”

“You think that’s necessary? Here, in the middle of nowhere?”

“Look, Sare. Someone was trying to stop me, stop
us
, back in Severna. Now I’ve escaped from a cop. It’s just better, I think, if

we’re not seen together.”

We waited in our own corners of the train station. We stood