Endless

by Amanda Gray

“Nah.” She could almost see him shaking his head. “My mom and I are sharing a computer right now. I don’t want to risk her seeing them and asking a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer even if I wanted to.”

  “Got it,” she said. “I’ll call or text you when I’m on my way home. We can get together later.”

  “Sounds good. And Jenny?”

  “Yeah?”

  He lowered his voice a little. “I’m glad we’re in this together. Whatever it is.”

  She nodded. “Me, too.”

  They said goodbye and she hung up the phone. She turned off the light and rolled over in bed, wondering if Ben would still be glad when he found out about Nikolai—and how things had changed so quickly that she even cared.

  TWENTY-THREE

  She was getting ready to go to Nikolai’s the next morning when she realized she had no idea if he had a car. She pulled out her phone to text him.

  Am I driving today?

  He responded less than a minute later. I’ve got that covered.

  She raised her eyebrows, intrigued.

  K, she typed back. But I’ll have to walk back from your house later. I haven’t figured out how to introduce you to my dad.

  Understood.

  She looked at the word on her phone, wondering how long she’d be able to keep her two worlds apart. Her guess was not long.

  She dressed in a lightweight skirt and T-shirt, opting for sandals instead of tennis shoes. Then she grabbed her bag and locked up the house before heading across the field to Nikolai’s.

  He was sitting in an Adirondack chair under one of the massive trees in the front yard, a steaming mug on a little wooden table next to him. She stopped, watching him for a few seconds from the woods.

  He held a book in one hand, his face intent as he stared at the page. It made him look like a worried little boy, and she felt a surge of affection for him so strong it nearly rocked her backward. He looked exactly like he did as the Nikolai in her dreams. Not a day older. It was only his eyes, when he looked up and saw her standing at the edge of the trees, that looked older than time.

  He stood. He was wearing a white linen shirt over faded jeans, somehow sexier for all their looseness. Something in her quickened at the sight of him. She stepped into his arms without a word.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” he said.

  She laughed into his shirt. “I’ve only been gone twelve hours.”

  He pulled back to look at her, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “It felt like a lifetime.”

  She smiled. “For me, too.”

  “So,” he said. “You ready?”

  “Yep. I have directions and everything on my phone.”

  “Alright, then. Let’s go.”

  She looked at the empty driveway, wondering how he planned to get them all the way to New York. “I thought you said I didn’t need to bring the car?”

  His eyes sparkled. “I told you, I’ve got that part covered.”

  * * *

  They sped through the countryside, the wind from the half-open window whipping Jenny’s hair. She didn’t know much about cars, but this one was an Audi, black, sleek and low to the ground. She shouldn’t have been surprised when Nikolai led her to the carriage house at the back of the Farnsworth property, opening the creaky doors to reveal the shimmering car. He had to get around somehow.

  They wound their way out of Stony Creek and past Acton, getting on Interstate 84 heading west toward New York. It turned out that Jenny didn’t need the directions on her phone. She gave the address to Nikolai, he typed it into the onboard GPS system, and a crisp British voice directed them at every turn. She wondered again how he managed to drive, use a cell phone, own a place like the Farnsworth property.

  She turned to him. “Nikolai?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “How long have you been here?”

  He glanced at her, his eyes flashing like shards of emerald in the sunlight. “In Stony Creek?”

  “Stony Creek, the US. Just … you know. Here.”

  “I came forward about four years ago.”

  “Four years,” she said. “That’s not very long.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. When he spoke his voice was heavy with sadness. “It’s a long time when you’re alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that you don’t look any older than you are in my dreams as Maria.”

  “Four years older, to be exact,” he said. “My mother saw to it that I didn’t grow older while I was healing. I only started aging again when I came forward.”

  Jenny couldn’t hide her shock. “She can do that?”

  He laughed softly. Was there an undercurrent of bitterness to it? “She can do many things,” he said cryptically. “Are you surprised?”

  “A lot of things surprise me.”

  He looked over at her, the sun streaming through the window making his hair shine like polished ebony. “Like what?”

  Jenny thought about it, trying to find a place to start. “Well, you speak English really well, for one. And you have this car and the Farnsworth house. You seem so … settled.”

  “My grandfather ensured that I spoke English even in Russia, though I didn’t have much opportunity to use it,” he explained. “Then when my mother was preparing me to come forward, we spoke only English.”

  “But how did you know I would be born here? That you would be coming to America?”

  “It’s like I said before; time isn’t linear. Right now, at this very moment, you could access any time and place if you had a full moon, a portal, and the knowledge to use it. All of eternity is happening right now, parallel to this time and place. We can’t see it, but my mother and others like her can. She simply looked forward.”

  Jenny thought about it again, imagining past Jenny—or Maria—out there somewhere, racing through the halls of the Winter Palace with that Nikolai at the same time as present Jenny sped toward New York with this one.

  Not as impossible to believe as she would have imagined.

  “But what did you do when you got here?” she asked. “How did you live? Where did you live?”

  He thought about the question. “There are those who assist travelers. And I don’t mean the Order. I mean people who defy them.”

  “But how did you find those people? Or … did they find you?”

  His eyes were focused on the road, but Jenny could tell he was thinking, trying to come up with the right words to explain everything to her. “When one is sent forward or back by an experienced mystic, it’s possible to be very precise with regards to time and location. My mother sent me to a long-standing member of the underground, a descendant of a family that has helped travelers for generations. Such a family isn’t surprised when someone occasionally shows up dressed oddly without a penny in their pocket.”

  “So they … what? Gave you a place to stay? A car and a new house?”

  Nikolai smiled. “The underground is populated by ex-members of the Order and other believers, many of them quite wealthy. There are always resources for those of us who wish to stay, though none of it is of much use if one ends up in the bardo. The house was purchased by a shell company set up in my name,” he continued. “I receive a salary from the company every month. It’s more than enough.”

  He was being more specific than she expected. She felt suddenly ashamed. Her dad always told her it was impolite to talk to people about money.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said softly.

  He reached over for her hand. “I’m here for you. What’s mine is yours. I’ll share everything I have with you—knowledge, money, all of it.”

  They were silent for a few minutes, his thumb stroking the side of her hand.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?”

  “There are things I don’t know about you, too.”

  She shrugged. “I thought you could see everything. All of time running parallel and
all that?”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “But then I would have to know what I was looking for.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Well, how old were you when your mother died?”

  “I was six,” she said, turning to look out the window.

  “How did it happen?”

  She thought about the few details she had. “My mother … took off a lot.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Took off?”

  “She’d just … leave, sometimes for weeks at a time, without telling anyone where she was going or when she’d be back.”

  “And she died while on one of these trips?”

  Jenny shook her head. “She left the house in the middle of the night and was hit by a car. She was in her nightgown, with no shoes or coat, when she was found.”

  “Did the person who hit her say how it happened?”

  “They didn’t stop.”

  “I’m sorry, Jenny.”

  She could tell from his voice that he was.

  They didn’t talk much the rest of the way, but the silences weren’t awkward. Jenny would be looking out the window, lost in thought, and realize that twenty minutes had passed with neither of them speaking.

  They reached the outskirts of Poughkeepsie about an hour and a half after leaving Stony Creek. Jenny’s stomach fluttered as they got closer. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to learn the truth—and she wasn’t sure what she would do with it once she did.

  But she had something to lose now—Nikolai. She couldn’t afford to hide her head in the sand anymore. Not if she didn’t want to lose him. If there was any possibility that her mother had been connected to the Order—any possibility that she had once had the Book of Time—Jenny had to face the truth.

  The entrance to the university looked more modern than she’d expected, stone half walls on either side of the road leading onto the grounds. To their right, a bunch of girls in uniform played soccer on a pristine, grassy field.

  Jenny pulled out the campus map she’d printed at home, looking for the soccer field as a landmark and tracing a path with her eyes to the library building she’d circled on the page.

  “It looks like we take this road to the right, there, where it forks up ahead.”

  Nikolai pulled the car forward, following her instructions. They curved behind one building and up a small incline. When they reached the top, the Hudson river came into view, stretched out below them.

  “Wow,” she said. “Pretty.”

  “Beautiful,” he agreed.

  The road wound down toward the water. To the right, a large complex of older buildings stretched beyond her line of sight. To the left, a long expanse of grass was broken only by a four-story building at the top of the hill and another building with a rounded front halfway to the bottom.

  Jenny looked at the map before pointing to the tall building. “That should be the library.”

  The nearest lot was at the bottom of the hill. Nikolai steered the car into an empty spot and they started the long climb to the top of the hill.

  They entered the building through the front entrance and took the escalators to the main floor. Jenny wasn’t sure where they’d go to find old yearbooks. Everything had happened so fast, the pictures from the retreat center turning into questions about her mom, the last-minute plan to drive to Marist. She hadn’t had time to call.

  She headed for a long desk with three people sitting behind it.

  “Excuse me,” she said to a young woman in front of a computer. “Can you tell me where I’d find old editions of your yearbook?”

  “The Marist yearbook?” she asked.

  “Yeah. From,” Jenny did some quick math in her head, “say, 1988 to 1992?”

  The woman swiveled in her chair, calling out to a gray-haired woman at another computer. “Ruth? Do we have old yearbooks here in the library?”

  The woman named Ruth looked up. “They’re in Special Collections. You have to make an appointment.”

  Jenny’s heart sank. “An appointment? I didn’t know … ”

  The younger woman smiled, pulling out a notebook. “It’s not as big of a deal as it sounds. Just call Marcy Baker at this number.” She wrote something down on the paper. “You could even call from your cell phone. She might have an appointment open today. They’re not exactly swamped down there, ya know what I mean?” She handed the piece of paper to Jenny.

  Jenny returned her smile. “Okay, thanks.”

  She and Nikolai went out into the main hallway. There were some small tables and chairs off to the side, some of them occupied by students working on laptops or holding books. Jenny and Nikolai sat at one of the empty tables while Jenny dialed the number the young woman had given her.

  Marcy Baker wasn’t in, but someone else asked Jenny what she wanted to view. Jenny explained about the yearbooks and the editions she wanted to see, stumbling a little when the man asked her what she intended to use them for. She finally went with something vague (“research”) and was given an appointment later that day.

  Jenny shut her phone with a sigh. “I’m sorry, but the earliest I could get was one o’clock. I didn’t even think about calling first.”

  “It’s fine,” Nikolai said. “It’s nice out. Let’s get lunch while we wait.”

  They asked one of the students at an adjacent table where they could grab a bite to eat and were directed to the Rotunda. Based on the directions they were given and the description of the building, Jenny guessed it was the big building with the rounded front below the library.

  Nikolai took Jenny’s hand as they started out across the lawn. The campus was gorgeous, with Adirondack chairs placed on terraces overlooking the river. But for all its beauty, Jenny had a hard time imagining her mom here. Jenny didn’t remember everything about her, but she remembered that she liked long flowy dresses and picking wild daisies. Marist seemed too pristine, too formal and exacting for the mother she remembered.

  Then again, it was becoming more and more obvious that she really didn’t know her mother at all.

  The Rotunda was a large building with a bookstore and several conference-type rooms. After asking a red-jacketed staff member where to find food, they discovered a small market upstairs where they purchased sandwiches, apples, and two bottles of water.

  They took their lunch outside, walking past the lot where they’d parked to a row of chairs just above the water. The sun shimmered on the river, tree-covered hills rising on the other side. Jenny could make out at least six boats, the crisp white triangle of their sails standing in contrast to the deep blue of the river.

  “Are you nervous?” Nikolai asked as he unwrapped his sandwich.

  Jenny thought about it. “Not really. I just want to know.”

  He nodded slowly. “Not knowing is always the hardest part.”

  She caught a hint of sorrow in his voice. “Did you always know you would find me?” she asked.

  He looked into her eyes. “Always. But I didn’t know if you would remember.”

  “What would have happened then?”

  He shrugged. “It was a risk, one Dolia—”

  “Dolia?”

  “My mother.”

  A shiver ran up her spine as she remembered the words scrawled haphazardly on a piece of paper when they’d been playing with the Ouija board at Amber’s house.

  I am Dolia.

  Jenny’s instincts had been right. Someone had been sending her a message.

  “Anyway,” Nikolai continued, “Dolia warned me that it was a risk. She could send me forward, but once here it would be up to me to make my way. If you remembered, there was the possibility we could be together again. If you didn’t, I would be stranded here alone.”

  Jenny had a hard time swallowing the bite of apple she’d just taken. “That’s a pretty big risk.”

  “I’d do it a thousand times over for one chance to spend my life with you.”

  She had no doubt that he meant it.

  She t
ook a drink of her water, thinking. “There’s something else I still don’t understand.”

  “What is it?”

  “You said you’ve been here for four years. Why did you wait so long to come? You must have bought the Farnsworth place right when you got here. I remember when it sold.”

  “We always knew where you were. It isn’t difficult for a mystic like Dolia to discern such things. But it wouldn’t have been wise to make myself known to you before it was time.”

  “How did you know it was time?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t. But Dolia saw a moment when a spiritual door would open in your mind.”

  “What kind of spiritual door?”

  “There are all kinds of things that open such doors. I don’t know what happened to open the one between us, but before I was sent forward, Dolia gave me the exact date I should approach you.”

  Jenny had a flash of Tiffany, the night they used the Ouija board. You have to open your mind for them to work, she had said.

  “The Ouija board,” she murmured. “I used one with friends. I felt … a presence. And then I started to dream about when I was Maria.”

  “That makes sense,” he said. “Psychic bonds can exist between two people in different places and times. A mystic—or a Seer—can use those bonds to make bridges through time, especially when the mind is free of conscious constraints.”

  “What’s a Seer?”

  He hesitated, weighing his words. “You can see the past, can’t you? You can look at people and visualize their sadness and loss? The things that are still unresolved?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I think I can.”

  He nodded. “You’re a Seer. A powerful one.”

  She thought about it. About everything it explained and everything it meant.

  “Why me?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said simply. “But if your mother was part of the Order, it would go a long way toward explaining it.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Special Collections section was downstairs, in the basement of the library. Jenny and Nikolai walked through a pair of glass double doors and were instantly cocooned in silence. As hushed as the upstairs portion of the library had been, Special Collections took quiet to a whole new level.