The Flight of the Silvers (49 page)

Amanda felt a hot stab of anguish at the mention of Zack. She clenched her jaw and kept working.

“He’s not afraid of you,” she uttered.

“Then why did he call me a psychopath?”

“For the same reason you called me stupid, okay? He was upset. If you had stayed in the kitchen ten more seconds, he would have apologized.”

David eyed her with sharp surprise. He’d noticed her tension from the moment she entered the room. Now the woman who’d handled him so calmly yesterday seemed to be coming unglued.

“Amanda, I’m sorry for the way I behaved yesterday. I really am.”

“That’s not why I’m . . .” Her eyes darted back and forth in quandary. “Can I pick your brain about something? In absolute confidence.”

“Of course. What about?”

“Esis.”

His sandy eyebrows rose in intrigue. “Wow. Okay. I mean I’m not sure how much insight I can give you. I only met her once.”

“Well, you’re the only other person I know who’s spoken to her. She . . .”

Amanda fought to explain her conundrum. All throughout her sleepless day, she’d replayed her back-alley encounter with Esis, reconstructing it word by word. By sundown, she’d pieced together the woman’s full warning.
Do not entwine with the funny artist. I grow tired of telling you this. You entwine with your own, you won’t be a flower. You’ll just be dirt.

David listened to the story with abject fascination, stroking his chin with the arched brow of a sleuth.

“Wow. That’s . . . huh. At the risk of embarrassing you, it seems fairly obvious who she was referring to, and what she meant by ‘entwine.’”

Amanda nodded brusquely. “Yes. I know that. But how did she even . . . I mean . . .”

“How did she know that you and Zack would become intimate?”

She flinched in discomfort. “We haven’t. Not yet. But she gave me that warning before I even met him.”

“Well, clearly Esis is an augur of some sort. It’s not like we don’t know any.”

“But why would she care who I . . . entwine with?”

The boy gazed ahead in deep rumination. He started and stopped himself twice before speaking.

“She did say something odd to us, me and my father. He was with me when she gave me my bracelet. She just popped into our living room through a glowing white portal in the wall. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s the same temporal mechanism that Mia uses for her notes.”

Amanda wound her finger impatiently. “What did she say?”

“She told us the world was ending in minutes, that I was moving on and my father wasn’t. Had the portal not lent her a certain latitude for wild assertions, we might have dismissed her as a lunatic. But my father certainly listened. The whole thing made him rather . . . Well, if you knew him, you’d know how rarely he shows emotion. But at that moment, he was overcome.”

David pressed his knuckles to his lips, his face marred with twitchy grief.

“I half expected him to plead for his life, so he could continue the work that was so important to him. But to my surprise, his one pressing question to Esis was ‘Will my son be all right?’”

Amanda held his arm. She could understand now how David had become so resilient. The poor boy had practically been raising himself since he was ten.

“Anyway, Esis was sympathetic,” he said. “She assured my father that I’d be in good health and excellent company. I remember her exact words on this. She said, ‘He’ll only be alone for a short while. Then he’ll be joined with his brothers and sisters.’”

The floor of Amanda’s stomach dropped. The room suddenly felt three times smaller.

David shrugged pensively. “I’d always assumed Esis was being figurative. But now—”

“That’s not it,” Amanda stammered. “That’s crazy. I know who I come from.”

“And I know who I come from. I’ve seen the video of my birth. Doesn’t rule out the possibility that our mothers were surrogates.”

“How can you even say that?”

“I’m just exploring the options, Amanda. We know the Pelletiers existed on our world. We know they chose us. We just don’t know when. Maybe they had an active role in our creation, forging us all from the same genetic template. If that doesn’t describe siblings, what does?”

Amanda stood up on watery legs. She leaned against the dresser.

“That’s insane. We can’t all be related. I mean Theo’s . . .”

“Asian. Yes. He might be an exception. Or perhaps their genetic engineering capabilities are more advanced than we realize.”

“But no one warned Hannah about entwining with Theo.”
Did they?
she suddenly wondered.

David chucked his good hand in a listless shrug. “I don’t know. In any case, if the Pelletiers are indeed augurs, then perhaps they knew that Hannah and Theo were destined to fail as a couple. Maybe they foresaw a more lasting union between you and Zack.”

Her throat closed tighter. “That’s not . . . You’re just guessing all this. None of this is proof.”

“Proof? No. But Esis did warn you about entwining with your own. And there’s one other thing I neglected to mention, something I’ve pondered every day. Maybe it’s why he didn’t ask more questions . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

David sighed. “When Esis appeared in our house, my father already knew her name.”

Amanda closed her eyes, fighting to hold herself together. She thought back to the incident on the Massachusetts Turnpike, seventeen years ago. Her father never uttered the Pelletiers’ names. But then he never asked for them either. Did he already know? Did both her parents know them?

She rushed to David’s side, squeezing his biceps with rigid fingers. “Listen to me. Whether you’re right or wrong about this, we have to keep it to ourselves. You hear me? Until we get absolute proof, we don’t breathe a word of this to the others.”

“If you wish.”

“You especially don’t tell Hannah and Theo. They don’t need this.”

“I said okay, Amanda.”

David watched her cautiously as she cleaned up the bandage debris. “Guess you have strong feelings for him.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough. But Amanda, there’s something you need to consider . . .”

“No.”

“Yes. This needs to be said. Whether you believe we’re all siblings or not, you know for a fact that Esis doesn’t want you entwining with Zack. You know she gets angry about it.”

“What are you saying?”

David studied his bandaged hand with dark and heavy eyes.

“I’m saying that for your sake and his, you might want to start thinking of him as a brother.”

—

At a quarter to three, David joined the others in the kitchen for breakfast. Mia was thrilled to see him swap warm apologies with Zack, and beamed with gushing relief when he squeezed her hand under the table. It scared her how easily David could move her to good and bad places. She wondered if that was a sign of being in love.

The bacon and waffles were nearly all gone by the time Amanda came downstairs. She met Zack’s bright cheer with a nervous half grin, then avoided his gaze for the rest of the meal.

Soon Theo sucked a sharp breath in pain, grinding all conversation to a halt. He glanced around at his worried friends, then sighed with futility.

“Yeah. I think it’s coming back.”

Zack tapped the table in tense resolve. “All right then. That settles that.”

“What settles what?”

“As soon as we’re ready, we’re saying good-bye to the cat and hello to Peter.”

He scanned the faces of the others, lingering an extra second on Amanda. “Anyone have a problem with that?”

Hannah, Theo, and Mia slowly shook their heads, censoring their many leery doubts about Peter. Amanda merely stared at her empty plate, deeply lost in other concerns.

David was the only one who smiled. No one needed to ask him how he felt on the matter.

—

The bathroom mirror was nothing more than a floating lumic projection. It was impervious to fogging, and could reflect at six different viewing angles.

As Mia finished drying herself, her elbow brushed a button on the wall. Suddenly the picture changed to a rear view. Unhappy to be mooning herself, she reverted to the traditional reflection, then squinted curiously at her body. There seemed less of her now than usual. She must have shed at least ten pounds since fleeing Terra Vista.

She slipped on her clothes and ran a drying wand over her hair, examining herself with sunny awe. Between the weight loss and David’s forgiveness, her mood was nearly healed from the battering it took earlier, when she received the cruelest message yet from future times.

I hate you. I despise you with every fiber of my being. You’re so hopeless, so clueless, so utterly blind to the things happening right under your nose. The Pelletiers are laughing at you, Mia. Semerjean is laughing.

I’d spoil the joke for you if I could, but it really doesn’t matter. Just take my advice and kill yourself. We should have never come to this world. We should have died in the basement with Nana.

Even now, hours later, Mia reeled from her own venom. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life as the whipping girl for every Future Mia in a black mood. If the girl with two watches was right, then the problem would only get worse.

Mia suddenly heard sharp, angry voices outside the door.

“Okay! All right! I was just asking, Hannah!”

“You’re not asking! You’re blaming!”

Mia put down the heat wand and groaned.
God. Not this. Not now.

The sisters stomped through the bedroom, both half-dressed and flailing in jittery rage. While Hannah stuffed unfolded garments into duffel bags, Amanda rummaged through Xander’s closet.

“There’s a difference between being upset and being upset at
you
,” the widow snapped. “I’m upset because I only own one shoe now!”

“And you’re upset at
me
because I left your other pair at the lake house!”

“Did I say that? Did you actually hear me use those words?”

“You didn’t have to. It was all in your tone. Do you think we just met?”

Amanda shook her head in trembling pique, throwing shoe after shoe over her shoulder. Of course the old man had the narrow feet of a ballerina. She was destined to go barefoot to Brooklyn.

“You always do this, Hannah. Always.”

“Always do what?”

“Take your bad moods out on me. I know what you’re really upset about.”

“Oh do you now?”

“You hurt that agent. I get it. I hurt two cops so I know exactly what you’re going through. But do you come to me for help? Of course
not. You decide to yell and scream at me,
just like you always do
!”

“Excuse me. Who’s screaming now?”

Amanda jumped up from the floor. “I am! I’m screaming at you now because I can’t take it anymore! You wear me out!”

Hannah clenched her jaw and looked away, her foot tapping maniacally.

“You think I’m weak. You think I’m so goddamn weak. Have you considered the fact that maybe I’m only weak around you? Maybe
you’re
the one who—”

The bathroom door flew open. Mia barged into the room, her wet hair throwing droplets in arcs. She snatched a pair of sandals from under the bed and chucked one at the feet of each sister. She waved a quivering finger back and forth between them.

“No more. I’m not sharing a room with either of you ever again. I don’t care if I have to sleep outside in a dumpster. I can’t do this anymore.”

Amanda and Hannah watched her in matching stupor as she stormed back to the bathroom. She spun around at the door, fighting tears.

“You think I wouldn’t kill to have my brothers here? You think Zack wouldn’t kill to have his brother here? You have no idea how lucky you are, and yet all you do is fight. There’s something seriously wrong with both of you.”

“Mia—”

She slammed the door behind her, jostling a picture from the wall.

Dead-faced, silent, Hannah made a slow trek out of the room. Amanda sat down on the bed and calmly gathered the sandals. As she slipped them over her feet, she thought once again about David’s theory and realized that the DNA didn’t matter. The six of them lived and screamed and hurt each other like family. They were all siblings down to the bone.

—

The Silvers rode the final leg of their journey in dismal silence. Xander’s red Cameron Arrow was a skinny little car with two platform rows that were better suited for couples. Zack’s arm brushed Mia every time he turned the steering wheel. She could feel Theo’s body tense up whenever he suffered a new flash of pain. She held his hand, caressing it with worry. Her future self once told her that it was more important to get to New York in a strong state of mind than it was to get there fast. She had no illusions about anyone’s current condition.

David slept soundly in the back, his head flopping in turns between each sister’s shoulder. As Hannah fixed her surly gaze out the window, her dark emotions flew back and forth across the car. She faulted Amanda, then faulted herself. She hated Amanda, then hated herself.

By the time she snapped out of her doleful trance, the Arrow had shot out of a tunnel and into a great urban thoroughfare.

Hannah blinked at the sight of yellow taxis and Jewish delis. “Wait. Are we . . . ? Is this . . . ?”

Zack shined his searchlight gaze around at all the lumic signs and tempic storefronts, these alien embellishments to the city he once knew. Though he was finally back in his native Manhattan, the cartoonist never felt farther from home.

“This is it,” he said, with a nervous exhale. “We’re here.”