Amber House: Neverwas (21 page)

We were comfortable and happy in each other’s company, a fam-

ily, united. Not like the family of that other Sarah. It felt like

o111

part of her sat inside me, marveling at how easy we were

together.

Sammy passed out the fortune cookies, one to each person:

Mom, Dad, Maggie, and me.

“Read mine, Sarah,” he said, waving it in front of my face.

I trapped his hand. “Okay, bud, just hold it still.” I flattened it

out. “It says: ‘You will surprise people with your many hidden

talents.’ ”

Sammy smiled and made one firm nod. “What’s yours?”

I cracked the cookie and pulled out the little paper.

“ ‘Confucius says, It does not matter how slowly you go as long as

you do not stop.’ ”

“Oh, Sarah,” my brother said sympathetically, putting his

head in his hands, “you always get the crappy fortunes.”

N

We headed down to the sunroom with bowls of ice cream, to

watch
A Christmas Carol
on the TV. It was nice. It was normal. I forced myself to relax into it, to enjoy it, until the ghost of

Christmas Future pointed its bony finger at Scrooge’s grave.

That upset me for no reason I could understand. I guess I had

taken all I was able to endure for one day. I excused myself and

went back upstairs.

On the second-floor landing, the light changed. I could feel

that thickness in the air, as if I should not enter.
An echo.
My stomach went hollow and the desire to be back home, in our

little yellow house, bit so sharp I felt tears starting. But I forced myself to look — to
see
— whatever it was the house wanted to show me.

A young black woman in a long cotton skirt walked down the

hall with an armful of bed linens. She seemed as real, as fully

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fleshed, as Sam or Maggie walking the same route. I followed

her. She entered the Tower Room, only the room that I saw had

no tower — just four straight walls. I realized that where the

woman was,
when
she was, no tower had yet been built.

It was a child’s room, soft with pale fabrics, but the surfaces all

held scientific paraphernalia. Neat displays of labeled, dead insects covered the walls. The black woman set the linens on the bed and

went to stand beside a little white girl in a blue silk dress, her

chestnut curls held back from her face with matching ribbon.

They were looking at something in a bell jar. “The sac will

open soon,” the girl was saying. “She’ll loosen it from her back

and attach it elsewhere, lest the babies kill and consume her. We

must take her to the woods before then.”

I drew closer. Inside the bell jar, on a web woven in the fork

of a branch, perched a honey-colored spider. A Good Mother.

She carried a gray orb on her back, where the bulb of her abdo-

men joined the legged part of her body. I loathed her.

“Maybe ought to kill her, Sarah,” the woman said. “Crush

the sac.”

Sarah
. My seven-times-great-grandmother, Sarah-Louise

Foster, for whom I was named.

“Dangerous thing to try,” Sarah said. “The sac is very tough

and the babies very small. I’ve heard tell of men who stomped a

Good Mother and were made sick or even killed by the bites of

the hatchling spiders. Hard to crush them all.”

“Drown them in boiling water, then.”

“Because they are venomous? They eat many times their

weight each year in noxious pests — flies, mosquitos. And there

are so few left. This Good Mother is the first I’ve seen in my

whole life.” She smiled. “She shall go free, Nanga.”

“Nanga?” I repeated, struck by the name. I knew it. I’d heard

it before. “Nyangu.”

o113

Something opened between me and the woman. Her eyes got

wider.
She sees me
, I thought wildly, crazily, wanting to hide.

And then the scene shifted to the present. I was standing

alone in the room, with night beyond the tower’s windows.

I fled back down the hall.

The woman and the girl had felt
familiar
to me. Like people

I’d met before but couldn’t quite remember.

What had happened there at the end? Had Nyangu actually

seen me? How could that be if the echoes were just remnants of

the past? Yet, when I considered it, it seemed to me that I had

talked
to Nyangu once upon a time.

The other Sarah had done it
, I thought. Sarah One. I really was Sarah Two.

I put on my pajamas and brushed my teeth for bed. The girl I

saw in the mirror had changed. She felt more like me. I was

scared, a little, and confused. Uncertain what to do or think.

But the girl in the mirror felt right. Stronger. Bigger. I thought

maybe I would do what Maggie asked. Try to wait. To see what

happened. To give it —
the house
— a chance.

N

It is dark and I’m afraid of the dark. I sit up in my bed, wondering where
I am. Then I see the flowers climbing up the slanted ceiling. “Oh,” I tell
myself, “at Gramma’s.” We are leaving today to go home, so I will be back
in time to start school. Remembering that gives me butterflies. I hope my
teacher is nice, like Mommy.

Someone calls my name: “Sa-a-a-rah. Sa-a-a-a-rah!”

Mommy says I am not supposed to get out of bed in the night. But I
slip my feet out from under the covers and jump down.

“Sarah,” the voice whispers. I run on tiptoes to follow.

I think it is Amber. I see someone run into the other hall, and I think
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she is playing hide-and-seek. So silly. In the middle of the night. I am a
little cold, but I run to follow.

The first door is partway open and I see Amber’s hand on it, disappearing inside. I go push the door open all the way.

The moon is so bright I can see everything. Amber is hiding, but
another little girl is sleeping in the bed. She is very pretty. She has beautiful princess hair that spreads all over the pillow. Shiny, like a new
penny. She opens her eyes and looks at me.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Sarah. Who are you?”

“Fee.” She jumps out of bed, but part of her is still there, sleeping. She
says, “Want to see something? Come on.”

We sneak down the stairs and through the library, and outside through
the sunroom.

She runs across the patio and the grass, into the bushes, and I follow.

It is very exciting to be running outside in the nighttime. I feel wicked.

We creep along a dirt path, bent over beneath the branches. It is dark
under the bushes, but I can see her white nightgown. She stops and pushes
a branch away to make a hole. “See?” she whispers.

I peek through the hole. A woman in raggedy clothes is stepping out of
the bushes. More people are there, but I can’t see them good because they
stay in the bushes. The woman is walking across the grass. She is holding
her side. There is a dark spot on the back of her coat.

Another woman is on the patio, lifting up a light. She is tall with
brown hair. She is wearing a pretty nightgown and a bathrobe. She is
trying to see in the dark. She says, “Who is there?”

The first woman walks into the light, and I see she is a black woman.

She says, “Miss McCallister? We need help.” Then she falls down.

The other woman sets down the lantern and gets on her knees next to
the black woman, turning her over a little. “You’re bleeding,” she says.

The black woman says, “Got shot. But I trusted we’d be safe at

Amber House.”

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“You were right,” the tall woman says. “You will be safe.” Then she
says, “Come on out now and help me get her in the house.”

And I think she is talking to us, so I start to go forward, but Fee giggles and says, “Not you, goose.” I see five more raggedy people come out of
the bushes.

“How did you know to come here?” the tall woman asks. “Do I

know you?”

The black woman shakes her head. She says, “Amber House knows me.”

CH A P T ER TW ELV E

K

Sunlight slanting through glass woke me.

My first thought:
Why did I dream that?

I lay quiet, giving myself time to reconstruct my nighttime

adventure. It was like I had had the dream before. When I was

little. Only now I was thinking maybe it hadn’t been a dream at

all. Maybe it had been an echo that the child-me had interpreted

as a dream. Maybe I had been seeing echoes all along, without

ever realizing it.

The pretty red-haired girl must have been my great-

grandmother Fiona, showing me an even earlier grandmother. I

suspected the woman had been Maeve McCallister, although

with her hair down, in the darkness, it was hard to match the

dream face with the one I knew from sepia daguerreotypes.

The really eerie part, though, was that Amber had been there

in the dream, playing hide-and-seek, as she always did. Not a

creature of my imagination, but something else. If she was the

same child in the photographs with Maeve, what did that make

her — a ghost who had played with me and Jackson? Who’d led

me on a chase through the snow?

Because I knew Amber wasn’t another echo — she’d
inter-

acted
with me. I wondered if Jackson had ever seen her, or had just pretended to. I wondered if she’d ever appeared to anybody

else. The Fiona in my dream had spoken of a mixed-race child.

The letters on the dedication plaque at the hospital wing —

A.M.
— were someone’s initials. It struck me as completely crazy and, therefore, completely possible that Fiona had meant

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them to be Amber McCallister’s. That my great-grandmother

had seen my ghost-friend too.

The white light bouncing off the snow outside drew me to the

window. The world was dusted in diamonds under a cloudless

sky, every detail sharp in the cold air. I could see across the river to the sweep of hills beyond — a sketched landscape of charcoal

trees holding up a sparkling lace canopy, each shard of light

piercing me, swelling my heart.

The moment passed. My thoughts resurged, filling my head

with tangles, a child’s furious scribblings, crossing and

knotting.

Why was I seeing all this?
What
, I wondered,
was the house trying to tell me?

Maggie’s way of thinking had infected me.

N

Downstairs in the kitchen, Sam was busy fixing animal pancakes

with Maggie. “Hi, Sarah-too,” she said with a sweet smile. “Want

a mouse or an elephant?”

“Elephant,” I said, on the theory that it would be bigger, which

turned out to be wrong. Sam sat down happily with a mouse

head made of three giant pancakes and a manic blueberry smile.

“How are you doing?” Maggie asked as she set my plate in

front of me.

“I’m —” How could I even put it into words? I couldn’t. I

shook my head a bit and shrugged. “I’m — trying to wait. Like

you said. Giving it a chance.”

“You’ll see,” she said, smiling, nodding. “It’ll work out.”

“How can you be
sure
, Maggie? What makes you think so?”

She dipped her head and caught my eyes reassuringly. “This

old house has kept our family safe and warm for centuries. Don’t

you think it wants what’s best for us?”

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I stuffed a pancake bite in my mouth. I didn’t want to answer

that question — did the house want what was best for us? If

Maggie was right, if Amber House really did have some kind of

spirit or soul . . . I thought of the woman in my dream, beaten

near to death and left as garbage under a tarp. I thought of the

grief and anger of the slaves forced to labor here for generations,

until Sarah-Louise was able to free them in the early 1800s. And

I thought but didn’t say,
Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe its soulless. And heart-less. Like any other house.

To thank Maggie for my breakfast, I did the dishes, standing

at the sink, thinking about Fiona. It seemed like the entire time

we’d been here, since moving in, Fiona had been trying to say

something to me. The poem fragments. The dreams.

Well, maybe not to me, exactly. Maybe just someone, any-

one, from the future who could hear her. Who could help her.

She’d said, “Something has gone wrong.” I needed to find out

what, exactly, she thought that
something
was.

Mom had told me Fiona published “several volumes” of poetry.

After the last dish was dry, I headed for the library. I figured

there had to be copies of the books in there. This
was
Amber House, after all, where nothing was ever discarded or lost.

I found them in the shelves below the brass plaque fiction,

alphabetized by author. Under
W
for Warren. A few little dusty leather-bound books embossed with gold vines, leaned against a

larger volume by the same author. I took them all to one of the

tufted leather chairs.

The big one was pressed with ornate lettering:
Amber House
. The publisher’s information on the back of the title page announced:

“McCauley Printers, Ltd., 1 of 100,” which meant it had been

self-published, with a run of just a hundred copies. I suspected