Amber House (32 page)

The little girl in white stood in the gap in the hedge wall. Looking at me.

I thought briefly that I ought to be alarmed, afraid. What was she? How could she see me? Then the desire to meet, to speak to
her, swelled inside my chest like pain. Without being able to stop myself, I turned and started to run.

I ducked back into the east wing and ran to the door at its end. Then I ran right along the stone paths that led to the maze. I saw the girl spin around and start running, down the tunnel of green, making the first right. I plunged in after her.

The path of flagstones shone silver in the light of the moon, still radiant through fingers of purple cloud brushing its face.

Left, skip, left
, I ran, chasing glimpses of white. The sounds of the party followed me dimly, as if from another world. We were heading for the heart of the maze. I gathered handfuls of skirt to free my legs for running. The twig bones of the hedge walls plucked at the billowing tulle. The air tingled against my skin — the static of energy building before a storm.

Right, left
, I ran, then dodged right and turned left again.

Ahead I saw the sketching of the gazebo, black lines rising into the purple of the night, its roof seemingly held aloft by the arms of the ancient wisterias. It glimmered softly, candlelit. The child stood on the marble steps, walking back and up, back and in.

“Wait,” I cried to her.

But when I reached the little fretwork house, she wasn’t there.

Jackson was.

“Did you see her?” I asked him, breathless.

He looked at me strangely. “Yes, I saw her. But I don’t know how you did.”

“What? Why not?”

“She isn’t a ghost from the past.”

“Who is she, then?”

“She —” He walked toward me a couple steps but stopped. “I’ve seen you in this dress before, when I was —”

And I finished his sentence with him: “— a little boy.”

“You
saw
me.”

“I told you my name.”

“That’s right,” he said. He almost smiled — his eyes smiled, but his lips did not.

“I’m sorry,” he began, slowly, “if what I said the other day — if it upset you. I didn’t know if I should tell you. But I felt it’d be like lying if I didn’t.”

“Like you lied about the diamonds?” That was blunt, but pretty justified, I thought.

“Yeah, well, that was more exaggeration than lie. The diamonds
are
a local legend. And I knew you’d never believe the truth. How could you? Even I think I’m crazy most of the time.”

I thought of that sweet-faced little boy I’d met in the upper gallery.

“First time, I hadn’t even started school yet. Your grandmother was showing me photos she took when she visited your
family.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking off to one side, focused on his memory. “You were in one of them, sitting next to her beside a Christmas tree. It was that photo that did it. Set it off somehow.

“It was just sounds, feelings. I thought it was my imagination. But, over time, it got more — real. Whole memories, almost, that I’d never lived yet. Or scenes, like they were being acted out in front of me. They were always random. But they all involved you.

“And it didn’t — I mean, I’d never met you. It didn’t make any sort of sense. I
knew
it was crazy. I thought there was something wrong with me, that God was punishing me. And I was afraid to tell anyone. Gran isn’t from here, and she wouldn’t have understood. But — sometimes I thought Ida suspected. She’d try to tell me things when Gran wasn’t around. About my family, and yours.”

How many years had Jackson kept his gift a shameful secret? My heart ached for that boy, cut off from every other soul by the things that he saw without wanting to. I, at least, had known I wasn’t the only one.

“But then I saw a vision of her funeral, and I knew how and when she died. Wasn’t anything I could do about it — what was I supposed to say? ‘If you don’t stop drinking, you’re going to die of liver failure before the age of seventy?’ Was she going to believe me? Maybe part of her would have, but mostly she would have thought I was a smart-mouthed kid butting his nose in, making up stories. And even I didn’t know whether what I saw would actually happen. So I — kept it to myself.

“Much later, when she did pass away, exactly when I knew she would, I saw you there at her graveside with Sam and your parents. Just the way I’d seen it all those years before. You can’t imagine what that day was like for me. Because then I
knew
. I knew that it had been real all along. I started to
believe
.”

It was horrifying, really. He’d been haunted his whole life by ghosts from an unknown future. Haunted by me. And then I had come, a ghost made flesh. An impossibility made almost real.

And he had treated me with such — gentleness. Such restraint. And I had treated him like a lunatic.

“I know it’s not possible,” he said. “You can’t change the past. My parents are dead. You being here can’t bring them back. I know that. Of course I know that. Except part of me just keeps thinking, maybe it
is
possible.”

The night crowding the edges of the gazebo grew darker; the gathering clouds at last had covered the face of the moon. It felt like we were cut off, caught in a little bubble of lamplight trapped inside the wisteria’s arms.

“I can’t see much of anything anymore,” he said, “besides little bits and pieces. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Maybe because your mom’s selling the house and you’re going home, and the —
opening
— is gone.” He shrugged slightly. “So many paths branch off from every choice made. I try to hold on to the thread that will lead me to the future I saw. I try to be in the right place, do the right thing. I try not to do anything that will make it all” — his clenched fingers opened, releasing nothingness — “make it all disappear.” He shook his head. “Maybe what I saw all my life was just a might-have-been, if things had happened differently.”

“An otherwhen,” I said.

He looked at me and nodded, wistful. “It was — a good life that I saw. Worth fighting for.” He shrugged again. Then a smile coaxed one corner of his mouth up. “Do you dance?”

And, as if on cue, I heard the wisps of music from the party he hadn’t attended.

“Not really,” I said. “I never learned. I’m like the least graceful person on the planet.”

“A friend of my mother’s taught me. They both went to New York to be dancers.”

“Where your dad first met your mom,” I remembered.

“That’s right,” he said, smiling. “I learned to dance so I could be a little more connected to her.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Cecelia.” He stepped forward, his hands raised, his arms open. “Would you dance with me?”

He stood there, vulnerable, waiting for my answer. This boy, who’d known I loved cherry Coke. Who’d taken me crabbing, and pulled me back from the cliff, and dried my tears when I was brokenhearted. This boy, who was as damned as I was with voices from another time.

Of course
, I thought to myself. Of course I’d dance with Jackson.

I reached out and took his hand.

“It’s easy, really,” he said. “You just step, one-two-three, and go where my hands lead.” He put his hand on the small of my back. “Catch up your train,” he advised. He listened for the beat. “Now, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.”

My feet fell into the pattern of the music. We spun slowly in a circle. I could feel the pressure of his right hand, more in his fingertips, less in his palm, urging me in a counterclockwise twirl, talking to me without words; his left hand agreeing with the smallest pull.

I closed my eyes, to concentrate on the whispers of his hands. The pressure changed, and we turned in a new direction. Our steps grew longer. I relaxed back into his palm so that I could listen more closely. It was lovely to be part of a conversation so quiet, so subtle.

“See?” Jackson said. “You
are
graceful.”

I
felt
graceful, floating on my toes. I wasn’t thinking about the steps anymore. I was sailing on a river of sound, with Jackson’s hands guiding me from this current to that. Music and motion filled the endless spaces behind my closed eyes with color and radiance. I felt like I was dancing on a carpet of stars.

Then strong fingers wrapped around my arm, and we were ripped apart.

“What are you doing?”

Richard stood there, breathing heavily, his face twisted with anger, and hurt, and disbelief. “What the
hell
are you doing?”

I could smell the sour notes of champagne, and I could hear it in his voice. I didn’t know what to say to him.

Jackson spoke. “I was just teaching her to d —”

Richard turned and struck him in the face. “Shut up!”

Blood beaded on Jackson’s lip, purple-red in the half light. His hands clenched and his eyes darkened, but he otherwise might have been made of stone.

I lunged forward, furious, my hands shaped into fists. “Are you out of your —” The look on Richard’s face stopped me cold.

“You told me you couldn’t dance,” Richard accused me. His face was ugly, but he looked like he might start to cry. “I thought — you and I —”

I was mute with horror. I wanted to say —
something
, but the words were sticking in my throat, jammed behind the painful lump that had formed there. What he had done to Jackson was beyond unacceptable. But the truth was, the wild infatuation I had felt for Richard was gone, had evaporated some time in the middle of that dance. The truth was, however unintentionally, I had betrayed this boy.

The sky took that moment to give way, to release its burden. Fat drops of rain started to detonate on the metal roof above us.

Quietly he said, “How could you do this to me?” Then his hand shot out, his fingers closing around the gold leaves at my throat. I cried out as I was jerked forward, the chain white-hot on the back of my neck before the clasp gave way.

He stood there, swaying the slightest bit, staring at the dead thing in his hand. “Oh, God,” he said dully. “I’m so — Please. Forgive me.” He turned and walked out into the rain and darkness.

I felt sick with disbelief and anger and sorrow and mortification.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to Jackson. I moved to inspect his lip. “There’s so much blood —”

He turned his head to one side. “It’s all right,” he said.

“We should get inside. We’ll get my dad to —”

“It’s all
right
,” he repeated. “There’s something else you need to understand.” He walked to pick up something leaning against a post. He turned back, opening an umbrella he held out.

I stared at it. “You
knew
it would rain.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you know Richard would come too?”

He shook his head. He seemed to be searching for words to explain. He finally shrugged. “I knew he
might
. But I knew I had to be here. I knew we had to talk. I’m sorry. I can’t see it all — I can’t even see most of it. I’m just trying to hold on to the right thread.”

The black umbrella fascinated and repelled me. I felt sad. The past and the future had gotten confused somehow, here in this place. I didn’t like it. I just wanted to be my old self again. Someone simpler. Someone
innocent
.

“Thanks for the umbrella,” I said, holding out my hand without looking at him. He put it in my fingers. I took it and left.

The party was over. I saw Mom in the front hall saying good night to the last of the guests. She raised her eyebrows. I must have looked like hell. I would tell her tomorrow about what had happened. When I could talk about it.

As I passed the mirror, I saw I had a red welt around my neck. Most of Angelique’s bobby pins had fallen out and my curls were hanging limply about my shoulders. All the gleam had sweated off my skin, and my makeup was streaked where tears had started to mix with mascara.

But my insides felt worse than my outsides.

I retreated up the stairs, afraid I would start crying at any second. I shed my golden gown and draped it over a chair, then slid into my pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. I washed off the rest of Mr. Poole’s handiwork and curled up like a small animal under the tree on my quilt.

I felt as tired and old as a brand-new sixteen-year-old possibly could.

The moon sailed high overhead. I was dancing with Jackson, dancing on a black and white floor that floated in the middle of the ocean. A huge fish rose from the depths and swallowed the moon that sailed upon the water’s surface.

Then Jackson was gone and there were walls all around me, with three tall windows to either side. The windows were open, and I had to close them so the little girl would not climb out and jump into the sea. All the corners of the room were soft with spider silk.

The room was full of school desks, and I — Deirdre — sat at the head of the room in a throne, holding a sword. The blond man wearing a captain’s coat smiled cruelly. “Please give me back my child,” I begged. And the Captain said, “You’ll have him nevermore.”

The spider spun a shining thread, and the pale woman followed it, down and down the secret stairs, and at the bottom, through a trapdoor
and down again, into a darkened house where seven golden cups sat on a dust-laden table, and nine swords pierced the wall. The thread led on into a maze full of moon shadows, where a little boy ran, crying, “Sarah, Sarah, where is my box?”

But my mouth was sealed with spiderwebs that I had to tear away. My lips were joined with spider silk, but I forced them apart, forced them open. And I willed a word to fly out of my mouth, emerging hard like a dark bat —

“Sammy!”

I opened my eyes to morning, still hearing the sound of my little brother’s name.