Amber House: Neverwas (28 page)

What was I doing there? Avoiding the burden of telling my

parents about Richard by fobbing off on Jackson a too-expensive

Christmas present that he didn’t need and wouldn’t want?

Thereby invading his privacy, and Rose’s privacy. I was an idiot.

“I’m catching you at a bad time,” I apologized, standing up to

leave.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. That came out

really — unwelcoming. It’s just that Gran is worse than usual

today. I gave her some painkillers. She’ll sleep for a couple

hours.”

“ ‘Worse than usual’? What’s wrong?”

“Your parents didn’t tell you?”

“My parents never tell me anything.”

He smiled. “That’s because they know you can’t keep a secret.”

“I can keep a secret,” I said, indignant.

He shook his head, still smiling. “You never have and you

never will. It’s just not in your skill set.”

I never will?
I thought.

o167

“Gran was always a big smoker,” he said. “Even though she

knew it was stupid. She has cancer.”

“Oh, my God. I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing anything else to

offer.

A memory from the other time welled up in me. That Rose

hadn’t had cancer. She hadn’t been Gramma’s housekeeper

either. She’d . . . I struggled to remember. She’d been a nurse

at — Johns Hopkins.

Why?
I wondered. I felt confused. Why would my saving

Maggie have changed things for Rose? And changed them for the

worse?

“I’ll walk you back,” Jackson said. An invitation to leave, but

at least it was a nice invitation.

Jackson went ahead of me up the narrow path, turning at

times to make sure I was keeping clear of trouble spots. I had to

work to keep up with his long strides. The present in my pocket

was weighing heavier with every step. What if Jackson misun-

derstood? It really was too expensive a gift between friends. I

didn’t know what I’d been thinking. I should have listened to my

mother.

I raised the subject of Helen, lightly, to show him I knew and

it didn’t matter. “How long have you and Helen . . .” I trailed

off.
Stupid.
Started again. “. . . have you and Helen been — part of the movement?”

He turned and held out a hand to help me up a large rock step,

then pulled me up level with him. He was watching me. He

seemed amused.

“I’ve been going to meetings since I was fourteen. Helen’s

only been coming a few months.”

“Oh,” I said. Letting go of his hand. Taking the lead. “She

seems very nice.”

“She is,” he said. “Very gutsy, too. She’s organizing opposition

to the government’s policy of Asian deportation.”

168 O

“Wow,” I said, wondering why he still seemed amused.

We walked clear of the woods, coming out on the grassy bluff

to the west of Amber House. As we neared the fenced-in grave-

yard holding generations of my family, Jackson turned aside to

open the iron gate. “Let’s sit a minute and you can tell me why

you came by.”

I busied myself brushing the snow off the bench just inside the

gate, stalling. I arranged my gloves on the seat to keep my rear

end off its cold stones. I tucked my hands into the opposite

sleeves of my coat, like a muff. Then I finally looked up. He was

waiting, his eyes on my face.

“Why are you always doing that?” I said. “Why are you always

watching me?”

“I want to know what you’re thinking.”

“Is it written there? Plain as day?”

“Pretty much,” he said, hiding a smile.

“Lord,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m like a five-year-old. Can’t

hide a thing.”

“Not ‘can’t,’ Sare. You just don’t. I think it’s really brave. I

wish I was more like that.”

“Yeah?” I said, turning a little pink. Pleased.

“Yeah,” he said. “So, now tell me, Miss Forthright, why the

Christmas visit?”

I laughed. He’d trapped me into coming clean. I shook my

head a little. “Mostly, I just wanted to give you your Christmas

present, only —”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“It’s a kind of crazy gift, but I saw it and —” I pulled the box

from my pocket and handed it over. “I don’t know why, it had

your name on it.”

He untied the bow, pulled off the paper, and opened the box.

“Wow,” he said.

o169

I rushed on to explain, “Sammy got you that really great old

thing —”

“The stethoscope.”

“Right,” I said, “and I thought this was something else a doctor

might need —”

“A really great old pocket watch to go with it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You know, to keep track of your appoint-

ments and everything.”

He smiled. “It’s terrific, Sare,” he said, easily, lightly. “I love

it. Thank you.”

It was fine. He loved it. Why had I thought that was going to

be such a problem? He twisted the little knob, winding it, and

pushed back his sweatshirt hood to hold it to his ear. I saw the

neat row of thread Xes my father had put in his forehead.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I remember what I wanted to tell you.”

“What?”

“That word you wrote on the hearth, when you bumped

your head —”

“I wrote something?”

I nodded. “Janus.”

“The two-faced god. For whom the Romans named the month

of January.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And I found it. The thing connected to

Janus.”

I wasn’t prepared for the blaze of hope I saw in his eyes. “What

is it?” he said.

“It’s a coin. A really old coin. Not Amber House old. Like

ancient. Maybe Roman. It has two faces on it, one young and one

old, although I’ve only seen the young one.”

“
Where
did you see it?”

“Well, I saw it in a dream. An echo dream last night. According

to that, it used to belong to an ancestor of mine named Captain

170 O

Foster, and to his wife’s father before that. They both thought

it was lucky. But I also saw it in real life. Yesterday. At the

Hathaways’.”

He stood up, his face excited, intense. He walked away from

me, deeper into the graveyard. He was holding his head. He

turned back, pressing his nose with his sleeve. I realized he must

have just seen something in the future. “We have to get it,”

he said.

“Why? Why is it important?”

“It’s the key,” he said. “That’s why I saw it, in my vision.”

“The key to what?”

“To changing time again.”

CH A P T ER EIGHT EE N

K

No. I realized I was shaking my head.
No.

I understood what Jackson was thinking. Honestly, I did. He

wanted to save his parents. If your friend has the superhero

power of changing time, why shouldn’t she do that for you? I’d

want him to do it for me.

But the very thought made my insides shriek with anxiety.
I

don’t know how. And what if I screw things up?

“Look,” Jackson said, “I realize that sounded a little —

crazy, maybe? But if you knew what I know, if you’d seen what

I’ve seen —”

“I haven’t,” I said. “And it is crazy.” I bit my tongue. I tried

to calm down, to explain. “I don’t even know how that —

time-changing thing — happened before. I can’t just
make
it happen because I want to. I have nightmares about my great-grandmother saying something went wrong.
What if I did that?

What if I went back in time and made everything worse?”

“Saving my parents is going to make everything
worse
?”

“You change one little thing in the past, and the whole world

could end up changed.”

“Did saving Maggie make the world worse?”

“I didn’t set out to save Maggie. It just
happened
. And I don’t know what else I did. I don’t know what price we
all
paid for that. You don’t know either.”

“Sarah, the future I see is
better
than this,” he said softly.

“What if you make everything better?”

I was still shaking my head. I felt my cheeks wet. I wanted to

172 O

help him — I really did. Jackson was — I shied away from put-

ting a word there. Important. He was important to me. He

looked so bewildered and disbelieving. I couldn’t bear it. I stood

abruptly, “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

I started running and didn’t slow down until I hit the spiral

stairs in the conservatory. Behind me, Pandora wept into the

pool. I understood her tears. I hid in my room until mine

stopped.

N

When I went down to the kitchen, my parents were standing

shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen sink. Talking, laughing, pre-

paring our Christmas feast. Christmas was another one of those

holidays when it seemed necessary to fix a small mountain of

food — not as bad as New England’s Thanksgiving Day, but

pretty close. We always had goose with mashed potatoes and all

the trimmings, finished with a choice of three desserts.

I watched my mother deadpan a joke that made my father

laugh out loud. Jackson was sharing Christmas with his dying

grandmother in a darkened house.

A lump began to form in my throat, so I forcibly pushed the

thought from my mind. I would think about it later.

Instead, I gutted myself up to tell my parents about my plans

with Richard. But it seemed I didn’t need to. When my mother

noticed my arrival, she said, “Richard called while you were

out,” with one eyebrow raised. “He asked me to tell you he wants

to leave a half hour later.”

Oh.

My father said, “In the future, please don’t make plans for

cross-country trips without consulting us first. You’re not quite

an adult yet.”

o173

I felt kind of relieved — apparently I wouldn’t be going after

all. “I promise,” I said.

“It’s not that we don’t trust your judgment, honey,” Dad said.

“But you still have to follow protocols, no matter how grown up

you’re getting.”

“That being said,” my mother added with a smile, “how excit-

ing this is!”

Oh. I
was
going?

“You know why Richard is making the trip?” my father added

with a bewildering amount of enthusiasm.

I shrugged a little. “To pick something up?”

My father looked at me disbelievingly. “President Stevenson

called and told Robert he would give him a taped endorsement

to play the night Robert announces his candidacy.”

“That’s — great?” I said.

“Sarah, honey,” Dad said patiently, “you evidently don’t
get

how important this is. Unprecedented, really. Stevenson is so

well loved in the ACS that he has held the office of the presi-

dency your entire life. And now he
is crossing party lines
” — I swore Dad said this with italics — “to endorse Robert as his suc-cessor. It’s unheard-of! That kind of thing just doesn’t happen!

This will make Robert a shoo-in!
Every
body is going to take his message seriously.”

“Why is Stevenson doing that? Backing Richard’s dad instead

of his party’s guy?”

“Because Stevenson understands how important it is, now

more than ever, to pull together the U-O-A. He knows it will

take a man like Robert — someone with a reasoned and lib-

eral attitude toward race relations — to build up stronger

alliances.”

“The U-O-A?”

“The Union of the Americas.”

174 O

“They said something about that the other day, at Jackson’s

church. That the Nazis were going to try something to sabotage

the Unification movement.”

“Who said that?” my father asked.

I shook my head, trying to remember. “Some New English

man. A rabbi. He said he’d been told by Jewish —” I searched

for the word.

“Jewish Intelligence,” my dad finished for me. “They know

more about the Germans than anyone else. Did he say what the

Nazis were going to do?”

“He didn’t say anything specific. Something about being pre-

pared for a lot of civilian casualties.” I felt stupid. I should have taken notes. And maybe should have mentioned it to my parents

a little sooner?

“You think —?” Mom was concerned. “Should we tell Robert?”

My father shook his head. “If Pastor Howe knows, I’m sure

Robert’s also been informed.”

“Why would the Germans want to do something like that?” I

asked.

“Tom,” my mother interrupted, raising her eyebrows at my

father, “we don’t need to be too — graphic.”

“Sarah’s almost a grown woman, Anne. She still can’t do much

to change things, but she should understand.” My father put his

hand on my shoulder. “You know that the Reich has had more

than sixty years to solidify its hold on Europe and North Africa.”

“So?”

“And the Japanese Empire has done the same in the Pacific.

They took Australia almost thirty years ago now.”

“I passed world history.”

“Well, sweetie, who do you think is next on their agenda?”

To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought about them having an

agenda. Didn’t they already have what they wanted? It hadn’t

occurred to me they thought they needed more.

o175

“The time has come to strengthen our position globally by

uniting in common cause with the other American countries —

North and South. We’ve got to make these aggressive regimes