“Yeah,” David said. “You were fourteen, but I recognized you. Haven’t changed that much.”
Jesse tried to laugh, but wound up coughing, a thin, airy hack.
“You knew we’d meet someday,” David said. The notion that Jesse had spent a lifetime with David’s and Xander’s faces in his memory, decades before they were born, fascinated him. This world was so much more magical and incredible than he’d ever known—than most people ever imagined. He said, “You knew when you left the house that you’d come back to help us. We told you, the young you, that you would.”
Jesse’s head moved on the pillow:
yes
. “Your visits,” he said slowly. “They were some of the best times I ever had. Thank you.”
“Visits?” Xander said.
“We go back again?” David said. “We see you again? We said we would, but I didn’t really know . . .”
Jesse frowned. The wrinkles around his eyes came down with the corners of his mouth. “You’ve been there . . . only once? Once so far?”
“That was yesterday,” David explained. “We haven’t had time—”
Jesse shook his head
no
. “You have to get back there.
Soon. So much you need to know.” He strained to lift his head.
“Jesse,” David said. “Take it easy.”
“Promise me,” he said. “Promise . . . you’ll go back. Soon.”
“Can’t you just tell us?”
Jesse’s face tightened in thought. He said, “I can’t. Something— Time or changes in history or old age—is keeping the details from me, but I know you must go back, I
know
it. Tell me you will.”
David looked at Xander, who said, “We will.”
David told Jesse, “I promise. As soon as we can.”
Jesse dropped his head down. His eyes closed.
David felt Jesse’s fingers curl around his own. He watched Jesse’s hand tremble as he tried to put strength into the squeeze.
A pinpoint of blood appeared through the gauze where his index finger used to be.
“Jesse . . .” David said, worried.
The old man was eyeing him again. He said, “I haven’t dreamed a change . . . since you saved Marguerite.” The little girl David saved from a German tank. When they changed the past, Jesse sensed it as a dream, a fading memory of the way things were before the change.
“We try not to mess with things when we go over,” David said. In truth, it was usually all they could do to take a quick look around for Mom and get out with their lives.
Jesse closed his eyes. Just when David thought they’d stay closed, they fluttered open. “You mustn’t simply . . . do nothing.”
“I don’t understand,” David said. “What are we supposed to do?”
“Fix things,” Jesse said. “That’s your purpose.”
David shook his head. “You said that before, but I don’t understand.”
Jesse breathed in deeply, then coughed out the air. He said, “We’re all put on this earth for a reason. Most people spend half their lives trying to figure out what it is they’re supposed to do.” He breathed, two, three breaths before continuing. “How wonderful it is to find out when you’re young.”
“But, Jesse,” Xander said, “this? The house? Going back in time?”
Jesse smiled at Xander, and David realized Jesse knew his brother as well as he did: This is not what Xander wanted to hear. He had other plans for his life. “I can’t tell you the reason, Xander,” Jesse said. “But our family, our bloodline, was meant to fix things in the past, things that people have messed up.” He raised his head slightly, seeming to draw energy from his words. “I don’t know how far back it goes, but my father thought maybe centuries . . . even longer. Forever.”
“The house hasn’t been around forever,” Xander said.
“And the time ripples, the portals, haven’t always been where they are now,” Jesse said. “They drift, they move.”
David nodded. The portals in other worlds drifted around.
He and Xander had witnessed it. It made sense that the currents of time here, in the present, would drift around, too.
Young Jesse had told them that his father thought that building the antechambers and the portal doors might somehow lock them in place—at least for a while. Seemed he was right.
Jesse continued: “Our family has always been drawn to them, no matter where they are. When we don’t fix the past—”
He dropped his head back onto the pillow and scanned the ceiling, as though looking for the words he wanted. “When we don’t . . . bad things happen.”
“Like what?” David whispered, not sure he wanted to know.
“Wars, diseases, sorrows,” Jesse said. “More grief than there has to be.”
“But you left,” Xander said. “Over thirty years ago, you just up and left.”
“I was old even then,” Jesse said. “I had a stroke. Couldn’t walk or use my left arm. Some of my motor skills eventually returned, but at the time, I could no longer do my job in the house. I had been going back into history for so long, Time kept pulling on me, trying to suck me back. I had to get away. But I contacted your grandfather and told him it was his turn.”
“And after Nana was kidnapped,” David said, “he couldn’t take it and left.”
“The world is darker for it, for Time not having a Gatekeeper for so long,” Jesse said. “I don’t know in what ways, but I know it’s true.” His eye shifted to David. “Who knows how many people like Marguerite he could have saved, how much pain he could have prevented?”
David glanced at Xander, who looked as baffled as David felt. “How are we supposed to know what to fix, where to look, what to do?”
“You’ll know.” His eyes turned away, then found David again. “The doctor.”
David turned to Keal. “He wants a doctor.”
“No,” Jesse said. “The one you told me about . . . in the Civil War.”
“Oh yeah,” David said. “There was a nurse calling for a doctor. She asked us to get him.”
“Did you?” Jesse asked.
“No, we had to go.”
Jesse didn’t say anything, just looked into David’s eyes.
“We were
supposed
to get him?” David said.
“It’s your purpose,” Jesse said. “The reason you and the house and that event in the Civil War came together.”
“But . . . we didn’t do it.”
Jesse smiled. “You’ll get another chance.”
David looked at Xander, at Keal. He felt that something big was happening, but wasn’t sure what it was.
“Jesse,” he said. “I don’t understand. Out of all the people who died in the Civil War, why
that
guy? Why do I have to help save
him
?”
“David,” Jesse said, “your job is not to help save him.”
“It’s not? But—”
Jesse squeezed his hand again. “Your job is to get the doctor. That’s what you were asked to do.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
Jesse waggled his head. “Maybe . . . maybe not. What happens afterward is not your concern. If someone you trust asks you to do a task, you just do it. You trust they have a good reason for asking.”
“But, Jesse,” David said, “who’s asking?”
Jesse smiled. “Who do you think? Who set it all in motion?
Who made time? Who made you?”
David opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked at Xander and Keal, but their expressions reflected his own confusion. He turned back to Jesse. He whispered, “God?”
Jesse’s smile widened. His eyes slowly closed.
“Jesse?” David said.
The old man began to snore.
FRIDAY, 7:13 A . M.
“You heard him,” Xander said. “We need to go back to Young Jesse’s time right away.” He was turned sideways in the front passenger seat of Keal’s rented Dodge Charger. “David promised him. Right, Dae?” He looked over the seat at David.
David shrugged, not wanting to get involved. This time, he did think Xander had a point, but he liked Keal and didn’t want the guy ticked at him.
“David said you guys would do it as soon as you could,”
Keal said, “and that’s not now.” He pulled off Main Street to the frontage road that led to Pinedale Middle and Senior High School.
When Xander saw how close they were, he slapped the dash and said, “No, no, no! Come on, Keal, be cool.”
Keal cast Xander a sharp eye. “You think I’m
not
cool?”
Xander looked stricken. “No . . . I mean . . . yeah, you’re cool, but it’s not cool we have to go to school.”
Keal grinned back at David, who laughed, slapped his brother on the shoulder, and said, “He so played you.”
David thought Keal was way too cool to ever
worry
about being cool. Keal didn’t care if Xander thought he was cool or not.
Keal said, “Xander, I promised your dad I’d get you to school.”
“Call him!” Xander said. “You’re going to go buy those phones he talked about, right? That could be the first call we make. The store’s like a mile from here. It’d take ten minutes.”
Keal checked the clock on the dash. “He’s in the air, and he doesn’t have the phone. Now, stop. Don’t you get tired of arguing the same thing over and over?”
Xander humphed, straightened in his seat, and folded his arms across his chest. He mumbled, “Maybe it’s a teenage thing.”
Keal pulled into the school’s drop-off lane and waited to move forward. “Got lunch money?” he asked.
When Xander ignored him, David said, “It’s on an account.”
Keal pulled up, and Xander hopped out.
“Thanks, Keal,” David said. “See you at three.” He caught up with Xander and told him, “You shouldn’t treat Keal that way.”
“Why not?”
“He’s on our side,” David said. “He’s just doing what he promised Dad. He’s right, you know.”
“What, that we should keep up appearances, that we go to school, even though it’s doing nothing to rescue—”
He stopped, and David knew why: there were too many kids around to have this conversation. About a dozen of those kids jostled against the brothers getting through the main doors. Xander turned left, heading for the high school wing. David grabbed his arm.
“I mean you arguing the same thing over and over,” David said. “We know you’re gung ho and Dad’s more cautious. Why can’t you just go along for a while? Dad’s starting to get it. He’s doing more. Give him some time.”
Xander got a handful of David’s shirt and pulled him out of the student traffic. He pushed him against a locker and leaned close. “We don’t have time,” he whispered harshly. “Even Jesse thinks we don’t.” He lowered his gaze to his fist, entwined with the shirt and pressed against David’s breastbone. He frowned, released his grip, and smoothed the material over David’s chest.
Then he turned, pressed his back against a locker, and slid down until he was sitting on the floor.
David did the same, saying nothing.
“Sorry, Dae,” Xander said.
They pulled their legs up to keep them from being trampled.
“Remember the other day,” Xander said, “when I said it felt like things were building up, that something big was going to happen and we had to prepare for it?”
David nodded. He had been taking a bath after returning from the
Titanic
. Xander had tromped in, saying things like
We’ll sleep when we’re dead.
It had worried David because it seemed that his brother was going crazy from stress and frustration and exhaustion. He wanted to do everything all at once: secure the house, go into as many worlds as possible, without planning, without thought—anything to get Mom, get her now! Dad and Keal had slammed on the brakes, forcing Xander to sleep. It had helped his brother’s craziness—or so David had thought.
“I still feel that way,” Xander said. “Even more. All that stuff with Taksidian yesterday. What Jesse said today.” He rolled his head toward David. “Don’t you feel it?”
David felt a lot of things. They were juggling too many problems—needing to find Mom, trying to survive the horrors of the worlds they had to go into to find her, staying alive in
this
world, keeping the house so they could keep looking . . . not to mention all the emotions that came with everything they’d experienced.
He said, “Feel what, exactly?”
“Like . . .” Xander rocked his head back and forth, thinking. “Like there’s a ticking bomb under us, and it’s getting ready to go off.”
David nodded. “Now that you put it that way.”
“Dae,” Xander said, “I don’t think we have all the time in the world. I don’t think Mom does.”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t—” Xander stopped. He looked down the hallway, one way, then the other. The mass of kids had thinned out as they hurried to class before first bell. “Yes, I do know.” He stood, then helped David up.
“What?” David said.
“What we can, when we can,” he said with a smile David didn’t like. “Right?”
“Well . . . yeah.” Simple enough. David still had to get to his locker before class. He said, “I gotta go—”