Revealed (25 page)

“My parents are waiting,” Jonah said. “Could you just tell me where the lost and found is, and I'll look myself?”

And grab whatever looks warm?
he thought to himself.

Probably the man could tell Jonah was thinking that, because the man shook his head. Slowly.

“Against . . . protocol,” he said, speaking as slowly as he walked. “I'm not allowed to give the key to anyone else. Because what if you didn't bring it back?”

Jonah might not have brought it back. Not now, not when everything was about to end.

They finally reached a nondescript door, and the man took forever putting the key in, unlocking the door, and turning on the lights.

“On that table,” the man said, gesturing toward a pile of mittens and gloves and scarves and even an odd coat or two.

There wasn't a single item that looked the slightest bit babyish.

Jonah took a deep breath, trying to come up with a convincing lie.

Maybe, “My parents don't believe in buying baby clothes? And they're penny-pinchers. So they bought Junior a coat he could wear until he's twenty or it falls apart, whichever comes first”?
Jonah thought.

Was that really the best he could come up with?

Before Jonah could say anything, the man let out a deep sigh.

“Look,” he said. “Everything on that side of the table has been here for ages. We're scheduled to donate all of it to a homeless shelter tomorrow. So just take whatever you think will keep your brother warm until you get home. Then have your mom or dad donate it themselves.”

“Thank you!” Jonah cried. “Thank you!”

It was strange how much Jonah felt like crying right now.

Because this must show that this was meant to be
, he thought.
My parents are supposed to get me. They are. They are. They are.

Jonah grabbed the nearest coat and took off running.

Jonah's luck held: The Holiday Inn Express shuttle was just pulling up to the curb as he sprinted toward the stop. He crowded up close to a couple with two little kids between them, so the shuttle driver would think Jonah and the baby were just the oldest and youngest brothers in the family.

Nobody said anything to him as he stepped onto the shuttle.

This is working, this is working . . . 
, Jonah told himself excitedly.

As long as he focused on delivering the baby to Mom and Dad, he wouldn't have to think about how he'd failed at everything else.

Jonah settled into a dark seat at the back of the shuttle bus. That wouldn't seem strange to anyone,
would it? Couldn't he just act like a surly teenager who resented getting stuck taking care of his baby brother?

If people only knew
, Jonah thought.

As the shuttle bus pulled away from the curb and out into traffic, Jonah stared back at the airport. Jonah hadn't exactly spent huge portions of his childhood hanging out at the airport, so he didn't have much to go on. But everything he could see looked calm and unremarkable: people walked in and out of the terminal at a normal pace; there were no screaming sirens and flashing lights, no emergency vehicles—or cars labeled FBI—speeding onto the scene.

It was strange how much the ordinary scene around Jonah made his heart ache.

This was supposed to be an incredible night
, Jonah told himself.
This was supposed to be a moment the FBI would still be puzzling over thirteen years from now.

But now this stream of time wouldn't even exist thirteen years from now; everything connecting Jonah to this time period would collapse and vanish.

In the other stream of time, Jonah guessed—the one that would be allowed to continue and flourish and lead to Gary and Hodge becoming incredibly wealthy by selling Jonah's sister and friends in the future—Jonah would just be an anonymous little boy who died of malnutrition in the 1930s.

Jonah looked down at the baby sleeping against his chest, huddled under the oversize coat Jonah had grabbed from the lost and found and wrapped around both of them.

“I'm doing the best I can for you,” Jonah whispered to the baby—whispered to himself. “If I could change anything else, I promise you, I would.”

The shuttle bus pulled onto the highway, then onto the Liston exit.

Jonah found he couldn't look out the window anymore. His brain still ticked off the sights he would be seeing at every stoplight:
the church where I would have had Cub Scout meetings, the Dairy Queen where my baseball team in third grade would have held its end-of-season party, the park where Mom would have taken Katherine and me when we were little kids . . .

The shuttle turned and stopped, and the motor sputtered into silence. They were at the hotel. Jonah got out behind everyone else.

Should I walk into the hotel and keep pretending I'm with that other family?
he wondered.
Just so nobody gets suspicious?

What did it matter if anyone suspected anything now? What was the shuttle driver going to do—threaten to take him back to the airport?

Jonah wrapped the oversized lost-and-found coat more securely around himself and the baby, and took off running into the darkness.

Everything looked strange around him. Wasn't there supposed to be a Walgreens on the corner of Main and Pine?

No, because they didn't build that until I was in kindergarten
, Jonah reminded himself.
Remember how I always made Mom and Dad drive past so I could see the bulldozers?

The entire Woodland Falls subdivision was missing too. The house at the corner of Archer Springs was yellow when it should have been brown. An auto parts store stood in front of the Kroger where there should have been an insurance office.

I guess thirteen years is a long time
, Jonah thought.
Time enough for lots of things to change.

Time enough for lots of things to be undone if you went back thirteen years in time.

Jonah tried to make himself focus solely on running. He turned onto Harley Street, which had no sidewalks, and he had to run on the uneven ground alongside the road. The jostling made the baby moan.

Yeah, I agree, kid
, Jonah thought.
But we're almost there, and time hasn't run out on us yet. . . .

His house was in the fourth subdivision along Harley. First came Forest Glen, then Summer Vista, then River Gable . . . Jonah's feet pounded faster and faster. He turned in to his own neighborhood, sped around the corner toward his own house—and stopped.

Even his own house looked unfamiliar. The picket fence out front was missing.

Duh
, Jonah told himself.
Mom and Dad put that up when you and Katherine were little—remember? When the neighbors got a big dog?

The trees and bushes were too small, too—
duh again
, Jonah scolded himself.
Everything would be thirteen years smaller, right?

But it was enough to make Jonah wonder: What if other, more important things had changed too? What if Jonah was wrong about how everything worked, and Mom and Dad didn't even live here now?

A shadow moved across the front window, which was oddly unprotected by any curtains or blinds. Jonah stepped a little closer so his view wasn't blocked by the tree in the front yard. Now he could see into the well-lit house, even though he was pretty sure he was still far enough away that no one looking out would see him in the dark yard.

Oh
, Jonah realized.
Mom and Dad are painting the living room. That's why the curtains are down.

Dimly he remembered that in some versions of the “night that we got Jonah” story there was a mention of Mom and Dad being in the middle of a painting project. Even more dimly he could sort of remember Katherine—and
maybe Jonah, as well—complaining that that detail wasn't important enough to talk about. Who cared about paint on walls? Who cared that much about anything that had happened before Mom and Dad became parents, before Jonah and Katherine had arrived on the scene?

But now Jonah watched the steady way Mom ran her paintbrush up and down in the corners while Dad used the roller behind her.

They were a good team, even before they were parents
, Jonah thought, blinking hard.
I was really lucky, getting them.

Jonah recognized the paisley bandanna tied around Mom's hair, the dark T-shirt Dad was wearing—those were details from Jonah's earliest baby pictures. Jonah definitely had the right moment for giving them the baby in his arms.

But how do I do it?
he wondered.

He thought about putting the baby on the doorstep and ringing the doorbell and running away. But that was too much like the ding-dong-ditch pranks that all the boys in the neighborhood had started doing in sixth grade—had it been sixth grade? Just last year?

You don't ding-dong-ditch and leave a baby behind
, Jonah thought.

Leaving a baby behind made it—what? Child abandonment? Child cruelty?

Whatever it was called, it'd be something Mom and Dad would be horrified by. Something that would make them look at him differently the rest of his life.

And even if the rest of his life with them was only a matter of minutes or hours or days, he didn't want to ruin it.

So I ring the doorbell and hand them the baby directly and tell them a story that makes them think I'm just someone from the adoption agency?

Jonah did not look like a grown-up. Even if he hadn't been wearing a ridiculously large coat and a nerdy-looking sweater and goofy knickers, there was no way he could pass himself off as an adoption agency employee.

So . . . do I have to tell them the truth?

Just as Jonah thought that, he heard a car pulling up behind him. He turned around to see a window gliding down in a dark car.

And then a woman's voice called out to him: “Are you the boy who's bringing the baby for the Skidmores to adopt?”

“Y-yes?” Jonah said, squinting toward the car. “I mean, yes. Absolutely. This is the Skidmores' baby.”

He took a few steps closer to the car and lifted the infant sleeping in his arms. But his mind was racing:
Besides Gary and Hodge, who knows I'm here in this time period? Who would know that I'm not only in this time period but standing in front of my own house? Time agents? Wouldn't a time agent just say, “Jonah, let's get you out of here! Let's fix this mess!”

The woman in the car opened her door and stepped out. She was shorter than Jonah and middle-aged lumpy, but maybe she just looked that way because she was wearing a bulky coat. She stuck out her hand.

“Eva Ronkowski from the Hope for Children adoption agency,” she said, introducing herself.

Didn't Dad say the social worker who helped them get me was
named Eva?
Jonah thought, stunned.
And didn't she work for the Hope for Children agency?

But how would she have known that Jonah was here, now, with the baby? Why would she think the baby for the Skidmores would be delivered by a teenage boy standing in the middle of their yard?

Automatically Jonah put out his own hand and shook Eva's.

“I'm Jonah Sk—” He barely managed to stop himself from saying his last name. “Just call me Jonah.”

The woman regarded him solemnly.

“It's okay—I understand that you probably feel strange about this whole business,” she said. “Please don't be mad at your older sister. It's a very difficult decision, putting a child up for adoption. This is one of the most unorthodox ways I've ever handled it, but your sister was most insistent yesterday when she came in to sign all the paperwork. She must trust you a lot, that she wants you to be the one who sees where the baby goes. And the Skidmores were willing to go with the idea of an open adoption, so if she changes her mind, and she wants to make arrangements to meet with them herself at some point in the future, then . . .”

The woman was still talking, but Jonah blanked out from listening.

Sister? Yesterday? Paperwork? Open adoption?

None of it made any sense.

“Could I get a look at the little fellow?” Eva asked.

Numbly Jonah shrugged back one side of the coat. The sleeping baby stiffened at the cold air rushing in.

“It's too cold for him,” Jonah explained.

“Of course,” Eva said, nodding as if she was proud of Jonah for noticing that. “I can see that you're a good uncle. It's probably hard for you, too, to give him up.”

Jonah didn't know what to say to that. Eva filled in the silence.

“Perhaps we should get the baby inside as quickly as possible?” she suggested.

Did she mean that she and Jonah together were supposed to ring the doorbell and walk inside? Is that what Jonah's supposed “older sister” had told Eva yesterday that he'd want to do?

Is this “older sister” on my side?
Jonah wondered.
Or Gary and Hodge's? Why would Gary and Hodge make these arrangements for a time after they'd already won? Why would they care what happened when this time period is about to collapse anyhow?

While Jonah was pondering all this, Eva had started easing the baby from his arms.

Jonah let her.

“Your sister said you might not want to wait for me to come back out of the house,” Eva said. “But if you do, I
would be happy to give you a ride home afterward.”

“No thanks,” Jonah said, shocked into answering.

He was afraid she'd ask for a reason, and in the stunned state he was in, he might accidentally tell the truth:
Because I don't have a home anymore. This is the only home I've ever known. Where else could I go?

Eva just nodded as if she understood.