Amber House (33 page)

I felt stiff when I woke the next morning — like I’d been in a fight with a pro. I went to dig some clothes out of the dresser and was surprised by what I found in the top drawer: Fiona’s journals, Ida’s notes, the old photos. With the amber pendant sitting on top.

Who had fished them out of the trash? Not my mom, never her. Rose, maybe? Or Sam. Maybe Sam.

I put the amber back around my neck. It hurt a little, because it rubbed the raw spot from the gold chain. But I left it there anyway.

When I went down to breakfast, Mom was at the kitchen table, hunched over her cup of coffee. The night’s festivities had taken their toll on her too — she looked almost sick from exhaustion.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said, smiling wearily. “Just let me get my morning cup in me. How about you? You looked kind of upset when you came in last night. And a little worse for wear.”

“I’m —” It flashed briefly through my mind to tell her about Richard, but then I thought that I could wait, I shouldn’t dump that on her now. “I’m a little tired, I guess. Just like you. That was some party.”

“That it was.” She drained her cup. “But it went pretty well, I thought.”

“Nobody’ll see another party like that for the rest of their lives.”

She shook her head, smiling again. “I dunno, hon. Party throwing is a competitive sport.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Haven’t seen him.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s weird. He never sleeps in.”

“It was a pretty big night for him too.”

I smiled, remembering. “He was great.”

“That he was. He’s a pretty great kid.”

That’s right
, I thought, surprised she knew it too. “Think I’ll go wake him up.”

“There’s something I should —” She stopped herself. “Never mind. Find Sam. Then I can talk to the both of you at once.”

I pushed myself back up the stairs, remembering Sammy on that stage, crowding the mic, edging Rafe to one side. My man, Sam, a firm believer in the old adage that if you wanted something done right —

He wasn’t in the nautical room. I went back downstairs to check the TV in Gramma’s room. He wasn’t there either.

I stood for a moment, trying to sense him. I conjured him up in my imagination. His sweet face. His grin.

Only the Sammy I imagined wasn’t smiling. His face was — smooth, like it had been wiped blank. I couldn’t get a sense of where he was.

“Sam?” I called, as I started checking all the rooms in the east wing. “Sammy?”

I hurried back to the entry and climbed the main stairs, two at a time. I checked the flowered room. I checked the Captain’s rooms. I opened Deirdre’s door.

“Sammy, where are you, bud?”

I trotted through the west wing, into Fiona’s room, to look out the window at the tree house. Out the doors to the conservatory, down the stairs, and along all the paths. A quick check of the ground floor, then outside by way of the sunroom. I wasn’t worried about the river this time — he was
some
where. I could feel him. I just had to find him.

Workers were dismantling the remains of the party — the stage, the dance floors, the lighting. I called to them, “Any of you guys seen a little boy?” I shouted down the stairs to the dock. “A little boy down there?” They all shook their heads.

He had to be in the maze.

I didn’t want to go in there. It brought to mind things I wasn’t ready to think about. But I concentrated on Sammy and ran in, sliding a little on the flagstones, still slick from the night’s rain.

Traces of gold glinted in the wet grass. That must have been how Richard had found me. Followed my snail trail right to the center —

I made the last turn. A limp mass lay across the steps of the gazebo, the small brown lump of Heavy Bear a few feet beyond.

“Oh, my God!” I yelled. “Sam!”

I knelt next to him, took his little pajama-clad body in my arms. “Sam,” I said, stroking his face, patting his arm. His cheek was cool to the touch, his lips slightly open. He was breathing shallowly.

I tried to raise him up, to sit him on my hip so I could carry him like I used to, when he was a toddler. But it was impossible without his legs holding on to my waist. “Come on, buddy, we’ve got to get you out of here.” I stood there crying, hugging him to me, his head lolling back, his arms hanging. I yelled to the sky, “Help me! Somebody please help me!”

Then Sam was lifted from my arms. Jackson had come. He turned and started to jog out of the maze. I grabbed Heavy Bear and followed.

Mom screamed when we came through the kitchen door. “Sammy! Did he fall? Was he in the tree?”

“He didn’t fall, Mom. I don’t know what happened. I found him lying in the maze.” What
had
happened? Why had he gone in there?

She grabbed the kitchen phone. “I need an emergency airlift,” she directed. “My son is unconscious. I want him taken to his father at Johns Hopkins.”

When we heard the helicopter coming down, Jackson carried Sammy to the door. The medics met us there with a gurney. They said they only had enough room for Mom to go with Sam. She looked at me. “You go,” I told her. “Rose’ll drive me.”

She nodded, climbed into the chopper, and they took off.

We went back in so I could grab a couple of things — my jacket, some cash. As I headed out the door, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Something in the hall mirror. I stared.

My legs gave way. I sat down heavily on the floor. Jackson knelt next to me.

“What is it?”

I was shaking and gasping. The little face, smooth and blank, surrounded by a darkness that seemed to have no depth, like the inside of a closet with no closet around it.

“Tell me,” Jackson said.

I could hardly get the words out. “Sammy’s in there,” I said. “Sammy’s in the mirror.”

It was a measure of what Jackson had lived with all his life — he never even doubted me. He helped me up and said, “We’ll figure this out.”

“‘We’ll figure this out’?” I repeated with rising hysteria.

“We have to,” he told me. “We’re the only ones who can.” He sat me in a chair and crouched down in front of me.

“Sammy told me he saw people in the mirror,” I babbled, weeping steadily. “I didn’t believe him.”

“There’s an old superstition that spirits can be trapped in mirrors. You’re supposed to cover them when someone dies.”

“Rose said — it’s not that they’re
in
the mirror, but that the mirror shows you the other side. A place where the dead can get stuck. But — Sam’s not dead.”

“No. He’s still alive.”

That word,
still
, slammed into me. “You think he’s dying?”

“I think we have to get him out of that mirror-world. The sooner the better.”

A thought struck me then, a horrible thought. I grabbed Jackson’s shirtfront with violence boiling inside me. “Did you know this would happen? Did you know and do nothing to stop it?” I was nearly shrieking.

He covered my clenched hand with his own. He shook his head and spoke softly, forcefully. “No. I swear I didn’t know, Sarah. I wouldn’t have let this happen to Sam without trying
some
thing to stop it.”

“No,” I said, still furious. “You knew Richard might come. How could you
not
know about Sam?”

“That point of darkness I’ve always had to travel through — it’s like Sammy was in the middle of it and I couldn’t see him.” He ducked his head to look me in the eyes. “I didn’t know, Sarah. I didn’t see it.
Please
believe me and let me help you now.”

I didn’t want to believe. I wanted someone to blame. Shaking off his hand, I snarled a reply, “How can you help me if you can’t see Sammy?”

Who could help me? Maybe — someone who had helped me before. Someone who, oddly, had asked me twice if Sammy was all right.

I jumped up and started out the door. Jackson followed. “Where are you going?”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I could hardly breathe around the knot in my chest, and I had to save my breath for running. I sprinted across the meadow and plunged heedlessly into the woods, leaping fallen logs, crashing through the brush.

Nanga had asked about Sammy. Nanga might know what to do.

I staggered up the hill face, and Jackson was beside me. I felt his hand under my arm, helping me on. I broke into the clearing.

And found a ruin. Four sagging walls. Broken glass, broken chimney. Young trees growing up in the middle. It was the same cabin. Only, nobody had lived there for a century.

I sobbed for air, utterly defeated. “I saw her. Sitting on that porch. With smoke coming up from that chimney.”

Jackson held me up.

“She was dead,” I said. “I’ve been talking to a ghost.”

“You said there are no ghosts in Amber House.”

“
She
told me that. How else could she talk to me?”

“You talked with me in the past.”

“Because you could see the future,” I said, and then pieced it together. “
She
can see the future. And because I can see the past, we could talk to each other. Then she’s got to know how to help. Do you know who she was?”

“She was a slave,” he said. “She belonged to the Captain. She was my grandmother, seven times removed. The children called her Nanga, but she called herself Nyangu.”

The woman, I realized, who’d been raped by the Captain. It was too horrible to think about right now, when Sammy needed me. I went to the rotted steps and started up them.

“Don’t —”

“Don’t tell me ‘don’t,’” I snapped. “You already said we might not have much time.”

I crawled across the remnants of the porch boards, spreading
my weight, praying that I didn’t break through. I touched the seatless, broken frame of an old rocker, hoping it was the same.

“There, there, Sarah, girl,” I heard her say in her strangely accented voice, but it wasn’t to me she was speaking. The chestnut curls of Sarah-Louise spilled across Nanga’s lap as the slave stroked the girl’s head.

The woman who sat there offering patient comfort wasn’t aware of me, and she wasn’t my old woman. She was younger by decades, but older than when I’d seen her last — saving her drowning baby. She was a beautiful woman, with high, strong cheekbones and large, dark eyes. Nanga and Nyangu both, I realized now.

“She won’t wake,” Sarah-Louise sobbed. “It’s been ten days now. Each time she sleeps, Mama takes longer to wake, and each time, she grows weaker.”

“She has happiness in her dreaming, child — happiness she never found here.”

“She didn’t recognize me when I roused her. She pushed me away and told me her ‘little ones’ were calling her.”

“You need to be ready, Sarah-girl. You know what I’ve seen. I don’t think she will wake ever again.”

“How can I deal with the Captain without her? He and Camilla will take everything. Amber House will be lost. You and I will be lost.”

I felt sick trying to intrude on this scene of grief, but Sammy needed me and I needed Nanga. Putting all my focus on trying to get through to her, I reached out my hand to touch hers.
“Nanga,”
I whispered, and felt a spark of static at the tip of my finger.

Her head lifted, as if she heard, and she said, “Hush now, Sarah-Louise, there be someone here who needs me.” The girl sat back, trying to quiet.

Nanga turned toward me, blindly, and said, “Speak my name again, friend.”

“Nang —” I started, but it seemed disrespectful to call her that. I tried again. “Nyangu.”

Her head jerked and she stiffened, gasping.
Like Jackson
, I thought. And then a bubble opened and I realized I had, until that moment, been in the
wrong space
, but we were now together. As we had been before. Nyangu’s eyes widened, and she seemed to see me for the first time.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m Sarah. You said if I needed help, I could ask you.”

“We spoke?”

“Twice. You were a lot older.”

She thought about that for a moment. “Then I’m thinking, Sarah, maybe you need to find the Nanga you met, because I don’t know how to help you yet.”

Sarah-Louise interrupted. “She has my name?”

The bubble burst. I could still see them both, but I knew Nyangu could no longer see me.