Amber House: Neverwas (6 page)

Families of

compiled by fiona campbell Warren in 1933

Sarah-Louise Foster

Anderson Tate

1762- 1835

1762- 1842

Eleanor Tate

Gideon Atwood

1791- 1852

1786- 1847

Bessie Atwood

Quincy McCallister

1812- 1860

1806- 1848

Maeve McCallister

Ambrose Webster

1836- 1909

1824- 1895

Jessamine Campbell

Tobias Webster

1881- 1926

1869- 1926

Fiona Campbell Webster

Dennis Warren

1903-

1900-

Ida Warren

1933-

A spider the color of amber spun a web before me. Her threads formed a
maze I knew I must unravel to find the treasure hidden at its heart.

I followed the twisting path, running lightly in autumn gold slippers,
the night held back by candle lanterns, the leafy branches of the walls
plucking at my gown. The hedges grew into a forest all around, but I
knew which way the spider’s web had revealed.

Right, skip, right, left, skip, left.

A little girl in white observed me, her eyes — green eyes — filled
with hope.

At the center of the maze, I found the chest inside the spider’s house,
wrought in curlicues that told words that whispered. The spider or the
little girl tempted me: “Don’t you want to look inside?”

I knelt on the black-and-white floor before the puzzle of the box, shifting the panels to solve the secret of its opening. But when the catch at
last came loose and the box cracked open, black miseries scuttled out on
eight legs.

The dark creatures ran for the people frozen in the heart — Sam,
Mom and Dad, Maggie, Jackson, Richard. I used a broom to sweep the
things away. Then I picked up my people and put them in my purse.

But the creatures swarmed over the little girl in white and she disappeared before me, one spider-bite at a time.

I watched and wept tears that fell from the hem of my dress.

I could not have the treasure yet. I had to try to solve the puzzle again.

CH A P T ER ON E

K

I was sixteen the second time I had my first kiss.

Maybe we all have more than one first kiss — maybe an infi-

nite number — and we just don’t remember. First kisses. First

loves. First sorrows. Until we get it right. Until we become who

we were meant to be.

But this first kiss I wish never to forget.

So I make myself remember it all. From beginning to end. My

grandmother’s stroke in mid-October. Her funeral, when we

buried her beside my grandfather in the family plot on the hill

above the river. My parents’ hidden conversations that I eaves-

dropped on — about whether they could go back “there” now,

to Maryland, whether things had changed enough. The events

that took us back, and threw us forward. Again.

N

The home I’d grown up in — a sweet yellow Victorian that sat

on the water’s edge on the west side of Seattle — sold just two

weeks after the realtor posted her sign. Thirty days later, my

father, mother, brother and I were on our way to my grand-

mother’s house.
Amber House
. Now ours.

That first day — when we drove up in our station wagon,

with me asleep, wedged in the back seat — I felt the place even

before I saw it. I woke to the sensation of all the little hairs on my arms standing on end. Dad turned in the front gate, carving a

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solitary pair of tire tracks in the snow-smooth drive. The house

sat on a bluff above the Severn River at the distant edge of there

under the gray sky of late afternoon, its blank eyes regarding our

approach.

The estate was famous — one of the oldest in North America,

owned by a single family, my family, since the 1600s. Dormant

gardens surrounded the house, which was all white clapboard

and pillars, brick and green trim. Not stately so much as solid.

Filled with time.

My grandmother used to tell me how three hundred and fifty

years of my ancestors had added to Amber House — a wing

here, a porch there, a balcony, a turret. Decade after decade.

Generation after generation. Century after century. As a child,

I’d had a hazy notion of the house having slowly shrugged up out

of the earth.

A beautiful place. A remarkable home. No question. I just

didn’t want to live there. I remembered once wandering its

hedge maze, thinking with gladness about becoming a part of

Amber House — but that day in December when we took pos-

session, I no longer remembered why.

It wasn’t simply that I was homesick, though that was a part of

it. It was if something was out of place, missing, but I was the

only one who noticed. A phantom limb with pain I couldn’t numb.

The feeling had grown as I’d entered the front door. I’d

stopped still, looking at all of my grandmother’s familiar things

now made unfamiliar because she was gone. It was like the first

time I’d ever seen them for what they were — not just my

grandmother’s
stuff
, but
her
grandmother’s, and
her
grandmother’s before her. As if some kind of thread, spun of place and

possessions, tied us all together down through the generations in

both directions. A lifeline. A chain.

I saw the past in everything. The gleaming stretch of the

golden-hued floor polished by the feet of centuries. The Windsor

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chairs built wide to hold hooped skirts. The tall-case clock with

stars painted on its face, still numbering the minutes between

then and now. Candlesticks, leather-bound books, china as frag-

ile as dried leaves, the sea chest that had been around the Horn,

and some part of me with it, in the man who brought it home to

Amber House.

All of it pulled on me somehow. As if I
owed
the House some-

thing. As if the oil-painted faces of my ancestors, staring down

at me from every wall, were waiting. And day by day, the feel-

ing grew.

Outside was no better than in. The stable with its sweet-sour

smell of horses; the tree house hidden in the high limbs of the

ancient oak; the dock on the river where my grandparents’

sloop, the
Liquid Amber
, rested on blocks until spring; the silence-drifted corridors of the hedge maze — they no longer felt like

the places I had always loved playing during all my visits from the

time I was small. Yet they hadn’t changed. So I must have. I just

didn’t fit. I felt incomplete, deficient.

Beyond the fences bounding the estate, however, that feeling

ebbed. So I developed a need to escape. The Saturday after we

moved in, I was trying to coax my little brother, Sammy, into

walking once again to Severna, the only place we could reach

on foot.

“Nope,” he told me. “I’m busy, Sarah.” He was sitting in front

of a disemboweled radio, most of its guts arranged on the table-

top. He’d turned six the month before; this more grown-up

Sammy didn’t have the same endless enthusiasm he used to for

my various plans and propositions.

“I’ll buy you an ice cream,” I said.

He sighed and pointed out the obvious: “It’s snowing.”

“Hot chocolate, then,” I begged. “You like hot chocolate.”

He finally consented. Not because he wanted the cocoa but

because he’d heard the begging.

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As we shuffled out the front door, my mother appeared in the

arch to the living room. “Going into town
again
?” she said.

Apparently my obsession with being elsewhere was worrying

her. So I shrugged. “I need something,” I said.

“What?”

I considered telling her I needed to get out, but I knew I

wouldn’t be able to explain it. “Chocolate,” I said. “I promised

Sammy hot chocolate.”

Her lips pursed a little. Ever since Sammy’s diagnosis, she’d

honed “concerned parenting” to an art form. It was almost a

supernatural talent. I could tell
she
could tell I was withholding information, but she decided to let it slide. “Make sure to

take Sam’s hand —” she started, with her usual rising note of

anxiety.

“— take his hand on the main road,” I finished, nodding. I

pulled the door closed before she could think of some other

advice to give.

It was a fifteen-minute walk, mostly across parkland that

spread between Amber House and town. When we reached

Severna, I paid Sam back for his kindness in coming with me by

taking him to the hardware store. Sammy had a deep apprecia-

tion for hardware stores. He was all about connecting things, so

the million parts and pieces were like treasure to him. He wan-

dered the aisles the way other people wandered a zoo, staring at

the strange things, occasionally reaching out to touch one. This

trip, he came to rest in the plumbing department. I stood and

watched him for a few minutes as he made a roadmap of copper

tubes and elbows on the floor.

Across the aisle from the bins of pipe, a dozen Sarahs in a

dozen vanity mirrors considered me. Each surface held a slightly

different girl — taller, wider, sharper, pinker. One mirror was

gold-veined, its Sarah caught in a metallic web. I stared at the

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images. For the past couple months, something about my reflec-

tion kept surprising me.

A voice spoke from just behind me. “This is not a toy store.”

I turned, startled, embarrassed. It was the owner. “Sorry,”

I said. “I’ll get all the pieces put back in their correct bins

right away.”

“I’m sure you will,” he said, leaving us to it.

We cleaned up and slunk out, emerging into a moving

crowd — the sidewalks had filled with people heading toward

the center of town.

“What’s happening, Sarah?” Sammy asked.

“I don’t know, bud.”

Someone called my name. “Parsons!”

I searched through unfamiliar faces and then finally spotted

Richard Hathaway zeroing in on me. Wheat hair over bronze

skin; blue topaz eyes; square-cut features that framed a square-

cut smile, just slightly crooked. He was without a doubt the

best-looking boy I had ever met. Plus, athletic, funny, charming,

and smart. The son of my parents’ old friends, who were also

our neighbors. As far as I was concerned, Richard was maybe the

only real benefit to living in Maryland. “Hathaway,” I answered.

“Needed nails?” he asked.