Finn’s voice is soft. “You don’t know that, man.”
“We’ll be home in a few hours,” James says, and he stands there beside the phone until it stops ringing.
I shred my paper towel into little squares. God, why did I bring us here? Everything seemed so clear before, but now I feel muddled and ashamed of dragging James away from his family at such a time. All because of one odd conversation with Nate in the snow and a couple of letters he signed to me that I might not have even interpreted correctly. Maybe I really am losing it.
And James, he’s . . .
Finn finishes his sandwich and starts to tidy the kitchen island, replacing the jars and loaf of bread and wiping away the crumbs. “We should probably head back now, huh?” he says.
In my mind, I hear the crack of gunfire, see the blood and the scattering of people. James is safe here. I may not be sure of anything else, but at least I know that much.
“There are still places we haven’t looked,” I say. “We could still find something—”
“Damn it, Marina! This wild goose chase of yours has gone far enough,” Finn snaps. He turns to James. “I’m sorry, man, but she’s not doing you any favors by pretending there’s some neat solution to all of this. The truth is, the world is just a fucked up place sometimes.”
I’m not sure why I feel so wounded by the words. Maybe because they sound so true. But before I can figure it out, I hear myself flinging words back at Finn.
“No one made you come with us,” I say. “You could have stayed in D.C. Alone. As usual.”
Finn’s jaw tightens as the tension between us builds like gas in need of a single spark.
“He should be with his brother right now, and you know it,” he says. “Don’t take your guilt out on me—”
“I’m only trying to—”
“Stop, stop, stop!” James cries. He’s rocking back and forth on his feet, fingers clenched in his hair. “I can’t think!”
Finn and I exchange alarmed glances at the outburst, suddenly on the same team again. Thick, choking silence fills the air. I reach hesitantly for James. “Are you okay?”
“The safe.” James suddenly goes limp. “I’m so stupid.”
He rushes from the room without waiting for either of us.
“This isn’t good, M,” Finn whispers. “He’s really starting to worry me. This isn’t normal.”
“James isn’t normal,” I say, stuffing my own worry down. “He just thinks differently than we do. He’s fine.”
“Maybe, but—”
“No buts! He’s fine!”
We catch up to James on the third floor. He opens the door to a darkened room and flips the light switch, revealing a massive bed with a dozen pillows arranged perfectly against the headboard, a vanity littered with little bottles and brushes and a strand of pearls, and fine antique furniture in need of a good dusting.
“It’s my parents’ room,” James says, and I shiver, recognizing the room for what it is: a mausoleum. It looks like it hasn’t been touched except for an occasional cleaning since the day they died. “I saw Nate coming out of here one morning last week. He never comes in here.”
James walks to a bookshelf across from the bed and pulls at a book. A whole section of what looked like leather-bound volumes turns out to be a panel covering a small wall safe.
“Cool,” Finn whispers.
“Do you know the combination?” I ask.
“No, but Nate was terrible with numbers. He would have picked something he could remember.”
James punches in several combinations. Nate’s birthday; his birthday; their addresses in Georgetown, Martha’s Vineyard, the Chesapeake, and here. Each is followed by a blinking red light and a deepening of the wrinkles on James’s forehead.
“You have any other houses?” Finn asks.
“Don’t think so.”
James tries a few more combinations, and in the heartbeat between the numbers going in and the light turning red, I hold my breath. It’s here, I know it. Whatever it is Nate sent me to find, it’s in this safe. I see Finn looking at me from the corner of my eye, but I won’t look back at him. He may think this is a waste of time, but I’ll stand here while James enters numbers all night if I have to.
Two more combinations and the light turns green. James exhales. “Mom’s birthday.”
The handle makes a heavy clunking noise as he turns it and pulls the door open. Inside is a jewelry box, several stacks of foreign currency, and filing folders full of documents. On top of everything, one corner bent like it was shoved inside hastily, is a manila envelope. James reaches for it and holds it lightly in his hands, like he’s trying to weigh its contents.
“Open it,” I say.
He bends the brads that hold the envelope shut and pulls out the stack of papers inside. His eyes sweep across the top page, widening more and more as he reads.
“You were right, Marina,” he says.
I lean in so that I can see the sheet over his shoulder. It’s an e-mail, and I scan it quickly. I see Nate’s name, and James’s, and the bottom is signed CR. I check the e-mail address at the top to see who wrote it.
Chris Richter.
The three of us are so stunned that it takes us a moment to recognize the dim sound of the phone ringing in another room.
Eighteen
Em
Finn pulls the Honda off to the side of the road a hundred yards from the Shaws’ guardhouse and kills the lights.
“What do you think they’re doing in there?” I say.
“Don’t know. Maybe they just wanted to get out of the city?”
“Well, they’ll probably want to get some sleep, so I doubt they’ll leave before morning. Which means it’s going to be a long night for us.” I pop my seat back and ball one of the spare shirts Connor gave us under my head. “Ugh. I’m so sick of this car.”
“Me too. We should steal a new one soon. They’ll be looking for this one.”
“Can we get one with leather seats? And a better stereo?”
“You bet.” Finn unbuckles his seat belt. “Come on, let’s get out of here for a while.”
“What?”
He opens his door, which lets a frigid blast of air into the car. “Hurry up!”
“It’s freezing!” I say, but I’m already zipping up my hoodie as far as it will go and climbing out of the car.
Finn hops up onto the hood and offers me a hand. “It’s nice and toasty up here.”
“You are such a weirdo.” But I climb onto the hood next to him. It is warm, from hours of the engine running and heating the metal. He lies back, folding his hands under his head, and I do, too.
The stars are shocking. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them, and I swear they’ve multiplied in my absence. Out here, away from the city, they’re like tiny explosions of light. Thousands of diamonds lodged in the atmosphere.
“Wow,” I whisper.
“Yeah. I’d forgotten they were so bright.”
We sit in silence, staring up at the sky, and after a few minutes Finn takes my hand and rubs it in his own to warm it.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
“Connor’s pancakes.”
“Mmm. And hot chocolate.”
“Oh God,” he groans. “I could kill you for making me think of hot chocolate right now. I’d do anything for some of that.”
“You started it with your pancake talk!”
“You asked! And besides—”
The world spins underneath me, and the rest of what Finn says gets lost. I know what it is now, but I’m not sure if that makes it easier to take or even more terrifying. I just have time to grip Finn’s hand before the chain wraps itself around my middle and yanks me out of the present.
It’s dark, only the faintest blue safety light from the hallway creeping in through the window of my cell door. Taminez, one of our usual night guards, turned the lights out a long time ago, but I haven’t been able to sleep.
Finn,
of course, has been out for hours. The jerk.
I hear footsteps outside and sit up on my cot. A soldier I don’t recognize slides open my cell door, and the doctor walks in.
“Thanks, Greggson,” he says. “You can leave us.”
So it’s going to be one of those nights.
The soldier salutes and shuts the door behind him. The doctor sits down on the floor of my cell, facing me. It’s strange to see him there on the concrete floor in his white lab coat and expensive slacks, looking up at me. It makes him look small. I pull the blanket tighter around myself and wait.
His eyes drop to his lap. “I miss you, Marina.”
I hate these nights. I think I hate them more than anything else.
“I’m right here,” I say. “You’re the one who’s gone.”
“I understand, you know, why you hate me.” He examines his hands closely. “I’ve done terrible things.”
“Do you want my forgiveness? Is that why you came here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He takes a shaky breath. My God, is he crying? “Maybe I just needed to be with a friend tonight.”
“I’m not your friend,” I say. “You can hold me here forever and confide in me every night, but I’ll never be your friend again.”
“Marina, it’s not like you think,” he says, and the desperation in his voice is palpable now. “If you knew what I know . . . It requires some terrible sacrifice, but we’re doing good things—”
“I’m tired. Can I go back to sleep now?”
He reaches for me. “Please, I need you to understand—”
“Good night, doctor.”
His hand hovers in midair, trembling, and falls to his side. He moves like an old man as he gets to his feet and knocks on the door to be let out. The soldier I don’t know reappears and slides the door open.
The soldier I don’t know.
“Where’s Taminez?” I say. “It’s his shift.”
The doctor stops but doesn’t look at me.
My stomach clenches. I suddenly realize why the doctor is here. “Oh God. What did you send him back to do?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” the doctor says, and the door closes behind him with a clang.
“Em!”
I blink and inhale. The world rights itself, and I see stars, real ones.
“Em, wake up!” Finn’s voice is choked. “You’re breaking my fingers.”
I feel Finn’s hand in mine. I’m squeezing it with all of my strength. I drop it, and he cradles the appendage to his chest.
“Damn, girl,” he says. “When did you get so freakishly strong?”
“I-I’m sorry.” I push myself into a sitting position and rub my eyes. The memory may have been a brief one, but the effects of it are lingering the longest. I can still feel the dread in the pit of my stomach and see the shadow of my cell walls in front of my eyes.
“You okay?” he says. “What did you see?”
I shake my head. I don’t want to talk about it. “How long was I gone this time?”
“Ten minutes,” he says. “Maybe fifteen. It felt like forever.”
I shiver. The hood of the Honda is cold beneath us, and the chill of the night has seeped into my bloodstream. “What’s happening to us?”
“You . . .” Finn hesitates and shakes his head, and I realize how pale he is. “While you were out, you sort of . . . flickered for a second. Like a hologram or something. I was afraid you were going to disappear.” He touches my cheek. “Like, really afraid.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I try to imagine how scared I’d be if I thought Finn was disappearing and leaving me to face all of this alone, but I stop myself because it’s too horrible to even think about.
He smiles. “I think I can forgive you.”
“James always said time must have a mechanism for fixing paradoxes,” I say. “Maybe it’s trying to figure out where we actually belong. Maybe it’s trying to erase us.”
“Each flash seems to be lasting longer and longer,” Finn says. “Do you think that means—”
I nod. I may not be a scientific genius, but I feel the truth of it. Time is coming for us, and coming fast. “We don’t have much time.”
That’s when the police cruiser passes us, headed toward the Shaw house.
Nineteen
Marina
James runs for the phone, and Finn and I follow. He takes one look at the caller ID and swears. He grabs the receiver.
“Mark?” I hear the guard’s faint voice on the other end, and James swears again. “Thanks.” He hangs up and runs for the stairs, calling behind him, “The cops are on their way up to the house!”
“It’s okay!” Finn shouts after him. “We just won’t answer the door!”
“Yeah, but the car is out front!”
Finn and I chase after James and catch him by the front door. I snatch the car keys out of his hand.
“Let me,” I say. “They don’t care about me. You stay here.”
“Marina—”
“Shut up and turn off the lights,” I say. “They’ll be out of the trees any minute.”
I dash out of the door and toward the BMW. As I slide into the driver’s seat, I glance at the driveway, but it’s still clear. I start the car and realize I have no idea where to take it. There’s a garage at the side of the house, but the door is closed. I flip open James’s visor and his glove compartment, rifling through the contents a little wildly, but I don’t see a remote control. I could just drive it around to the back of the house, but what if the cops see tire tracks in the grass?
I look at the driveway again. No sign of anyone yet, but it won’t be long. I imagine I can see the glow of headlights through the trees.
Screw it. It’s dark, and I don’t have any other choice. I press my foot to the gas and pull off of the driveway, bumping over the curb and onto the lawn. I try to visualize the car floating, tires barely touching the grass as I drive around the side of the house and park the BMW at the back, out of sight from the driveway. I run up to the back door and knock, and Finn’s right there to let me in.
“Nice driving,” he says.
“Hilarious.” I struggle to catch my breath. “Where’s James?”
Finn leads me through the dark house to where James is standing behind the front door. Seconds later, headlights sweep across the front of the house, and Finn grabs my wrist, pulling me away from a window. We press ourselves close to the wall so that we can’t be seen.
Outside, a car door closes. We hear the crunch of hard-soled shoes against gravel, and a motion-activated security light turns on. The knock against the door is like an explosion, echoing through the house. It makes the chime of the doorbell that follows it sound delicate and sweet.
“Mr. Shaw?” a voice calls. “This is the state police. Are you inside?”
James inches toward the peephole and looks out.
“Mr. Shaw, we just want to make sure you’re safe,” the cop says. He presses the doorbell again.
James continues to watch through the peephole, and we stand, frozen. I try not to breathe. After a minute, James whispers, “They’re leaving.”
We’re silent, and beyond the door is the crunch of gravel, the closing of a car door, and the roar of an engine. We hear the cruiser pull away, and James steps away from the peephole.
“They’re gone,” he says.
“Well, that was terrifying,” Finn says. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a fugitive.”
“Let’s give them a few minutes to clear out, and then we’re going back to D.C.,” James says. He holds up the file folder. “Someone needs to see this.”
“I knew Richter was hiding something,” James says as he guides the car back toward I–95 South. As soon as we got on the road, he reassembled his cell phone and called Vivianne to tell her we were on our way home and to call off the search dogs. He didn’t tell her about the file folder we found.
I click on the dashboard light and read the printed-out e-mail exch
ange that was at the top of the folder again.
From: Chris Richter
Date: November 16, 2013 3:48:02 EDT
To: Joshua Schweiger
He’s gonna have a big future.
> Our source in his office says yes. He’s protective, doesn’t trust us. What do you want the kid for?
> > I want him. Will the congressman be an impediment?
> > > James Shaw. IQ 168. Briefly institutionalized after the death of his parents in ’08, still under psychiatric care. Skipped 4th and 8th grades. Graduated first in class from Sidwell at 15. Completed his BS in Science at Georgetown University in eighteen months. Currently working on his PhD in Applied Physics and Mathematics at Johns Hopkins, under the mentorship of Dr. Ari Feinberg. Doing his dissertation on some aspect of relativity, real secretive.
> > > > Just do it.
> > > > > You want me to look up the grades on his report card?
> > > > > > Everything. Especially his education.
> > > > > > > What do you want?
> > > > > > > > Can you get me info on the Shaw kid? The congressman’s younger brother, James.
I look closely at the e-mail address: [email protected]. A-I-R. Nate wasn’t trying to tell me he couldn’t breathe; he was trying to tell me something about an organization Chris Richter works with.
Underneath the e-mail are photocopies of pages in James’s handwriting, shadowy lines of formulas and theorems that could be written in Chinese for all the sense they make to me. It reminds me that I have the pages James was writing in the hospital in my front pocket. He seems to have completely forgotten about them. He’ll only lose them again if I give them to him now, so I make a mental note to hand them over once we get home.
Along with the e-mail and photocopies are a dozen more documents. There’s something that looks like an official government report, almost half of which has been blacked out with a thick marker, more e-mails, something that looks suspiciously like photocopies of medical records with James’s name at the top, and notes Nate was making for himself of the goings-on of the SIA, another acronym agency I’ve never heard of. Whatever they were up to, Nate didn’t like it.
All Our Yesterdays Page 17