Torn-missing 4 (28 page)

Jonah stood in front of the open refrigerator.

“Turkey, ham, pepperoni, Swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, mustard …,” he muttered as he grabbed each item.

“Jonah, what are you doing?” his mother asked behind him. “You just had breakfast an hour ago.”

Jonah shrugged.

“I’m hungry again,” he said. “Any sourdough bread left?”

“Yes—er, no. Katherine finished it yesterday. Have the whole wheat.” Mom handed it to him. “How could you both be having such massive growth spurts at the same time?” she asked.

Jonah decided not to tell his mother the real reason he and Katherine were eating like starving people—because
they
had
been starving. It’d been a week since they’d arrived home from their time travels, and Jonah still felt as if he needed to make up for all the calories he’d missed in 1600 and 1611.

Now Jonah had all the food he wanted, but he still stood in front of the refrigerator admiring everything that was available to him: the full gallon jug of milk, the brightly colored carton of orange juice, the Tupperware container of beef stew left over from last night …

Hmm. Maybe that would be good with my sandwich,
he thought.
Or maybe as another snack in an hour or so.

“Jonah?” Mom said. “If you’re going to be doubling our grocery bills, could you at least try to keep the electricity bill down?”

“Huh?” Jonah said.

“Shut the refrigerator!” Mom said. But she didn’t sound mad. Just puzzled. She kept watching Jonah as he jumped back and shoved the door forward. “People warned me the teen years would be interesting,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

Jonah assembled his sandwich as quickly as he could, and took it outside to eat. He didn’t want Mom noticing anything else. It wasn’t as if he thought Mom would actually figure out on her own,
Oh, yeah! Jonah and Katherine have been flitting in and out of various life-threatening situations in history!
That’s
why they’re acting weird!
But she seemed to know that something was going on.

And Jonah still didn’t quite trust himself not to throw his arms around his mother and cry out, “Thank you for having food in the house! Thank you for not making me hunt for it myself! And thank you for not sending me off to be a ship’s boy with a bunch of mean sailors when I was a little kid!”

This past week he’d been even more tempted to tell too much to his dad. On Tuesday night, when Dad was helping Jonah with his math homework, Jonah had come very close to slipping and saying, “Dad, I’m really glad
you
didn’t want your name written on the tablets of the sea! You may not go down in history, but I’d rather have you as my dad than crazy old Henry Hudson!”

Maybe Jonah just needed to avoid both his parents for a little while. At least he could still talk to Katherine.

As soon as Jonah stepped out onto the front porch, Katherine yelled over to him from the driveway.

“Want to play basketball?” she asked. “We were just getting started.”

She was with their friend Chip. The last time the three of them had played basketball in the driveway—along with another friend, Alex—JB had shown up and whisked the two siblings off to the 1600s. As far as Chip or Alex
could tell, on that Saturday afternoon a week ago, no time at all had passed before Jonah and Katherine were back again.

“I think time travel has kind of ruined basketball for me,” Jonah said now, trying to keep his voice even. “Want to walk over to the park and see if anyone’s got a game of soccer going?”

“No, thanks,” Katherine said.

Jonah looked to Chip, then realized that Katherine had spoken for him, too. Jonah and Chip had been friends before Chip and Katherine had become boyfriend-girlfriend, but suddenly Jonah felt like an outsider in his own front yard.

A third wheel.

“Okay,” Jonah said. “See you later.”

He went into the garage to grab a soccer ball as he gobbled down his sandwich. He yelled into the house to let Mom know where he was going.

“Take your cell phone!” Mom called after him.

Jonah wished he could see how she’d react if he said,
You know, Katherine and I were roaming around a remote area of oldtimey Canada without a cell phone or a working Elucidator, and we had to deal with a crazy guy who didn’t care who lived or died—and we did just fine. Do you really think it’s going to be that dangerous for me, just walking over to the park?

Actually, he probably didn’t want to see how she’d react to that. What if she believed him?

Jonah kicked at dead leaves on the sidewalk as he headed toward the park. It was the second week of November, but still warmer than June had been in James Bay back in 1611. Several of his neighbors were out in their yards raking leaves, reseeding their grass, or planting flower bulbs that would bloom in the spring.

All this could have been different,
Jonah thought.
Or—all this could have ceased to exist.

Was that still possible?

Jonah decided he’d concentrate on kicking the soccer ball along the sidewalk, rather than thinking about the fate of the world. He went five blocks without losing control of the ball. Then he had to give it an extra-hard kick to cross Albans Street.

A man bent over to scoop up the ball on the opposite corner. When he stood up, Jonah saw who it was: JB.

Jonah felt like turning around and running back to his house. And then maybe going up to his room and locking the door and climbing into bed and pulling the covers over his face.

“I’m not ready,” Jonah said. “If you’re here to send me on another trip through time—”

JB held up his hands like he was surrendering.

“No one’s ready,” JB said. “No more trips through time for a while. I promise.”

He tossed the ball back to Jonah. Jonah caught it and finished crossing the street.

“Then why are you here?” Jonah asked. The words were out of his mouth before he realized how rude they sounded. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” JB said. “I came to walk to the park with you.”

He began heading on down Albans.

“You know, it’s really creepy that you know where I’m going,” Jonah objected.

“Soccer ball, soccer fields,” JB said, pointing first to the ball Jonah was carrying, then toward the park just around the next corner. “It was a deduction, not any time-travel spying.”

“Oh,” Jonah said. He caught up with JB.

“I thought I’d let you and Katherine know how things stand with Second’s little, uh, time experiment,” JB said. “But when I checked in at your house, it looked like Katherine was busy.”

“Ugh,” Jonah said, making a disgusted face. “Don’t remind me.”

“She and Chip are only playing basketball,” JB said, looking down at the screen of something that appeared to
be an iPhone but was probably his Elucidator. “Though it seems like an unusually
friendly
competition.”

Jonah rolled his eyes.

“Have the time police caught up with Second yet?” he asked, ready to change the subject.

“No,” JB said. “And unless we make some massive advance in our understanding of time travel, they never will. He’s sealed off his new version of time so well that no one can get to him.”

Jonah thought about the duplicated versions of the crew members on the
Discovery,
sailing along Second’s made-up Northwest Passage. Would Staffe be all right? Would Henry Hudson? What would any of them think when they found nothing left of John Hudson but his cape?

“Katherine and I should have stopped Second when we had the chance,” Jonah said.

“No, you did exactly what you needed to do,” JB said. “You really did save all of time. Not that you’ll ever be able to put that on your—what’s that thing that’s really important for kids in your time period? Oh, yeah—college applications. It’s a shame you won’t be able to put any of this on your college applications.”

“College is a long way away,” Jonah mumbled, slightly embarrassed by the admiration shining in JB’s eyes.
“Besides, it’s not like me and Katherine really deserve that much credit. We just did what Second expected us to do.”

“No,” JB said, shaking his head fiercely. “You deserve a lot of credit. Second just thought he knew what you would do—he thought it’d bother you that he was so blatant, sailing the ship from the wrong direction. He thought the more he tried to distract you from Wydowse’s death, the more you’d focus on it. And—”

“That’s what I mean,” Jonah muttered. “Second manipulated us the whole time.”

JB’s head-shaking became even more vehement.

“Second could only manipulate the circumstances,” JB said. “It was still you and Katherine making your own choices. You still had free will. So the world owes you for caring about Wydowse, for caring about me and Brendan and Antonio and Andrea—and for caring about all the natives in the burning village. If you hadn’t started saving everyone, John Hudson would have perished too.”

“And that would have been enough to mess up time forever?” Jonah asked.

“Yes,” JB said grimly. “Can you see why we’re suspending time travel for a while?”

Jonah almost dropped his soccer ball.

“Wait—you mean, it’s not just my trip back to my … my other identity that’s being postponed?” Jonah asked.

“No,” JB said. “It’s all trips before the twenty-first century. What you heard me say when you first got to 1611, about how many mistakes we made—that’s all true. Second’s escapades pointed out dozens of misconceptions we still need to overcome. We have to make sure we’re not going to make an even bigger mess of things before we go back to replacing missing children in time.”

Jonah felt a wave of relief. Maybe he could even live out his whole life before JB got around to coming back for him. Maybe it would never matter again that Jonah belonged in a different time and place.

“Yeah, you know, time travel—what’s it really good for if I could save the whole world and not even get a girlfriend out of it?” Jonah asked, the relief making him a little giddy.

“Jonah, about Andrea—,” JB began.

“Forget I said anything,” Jonah said, suddenly embarrassed.

“No, you have to understand—the poor girl’s been through a lot,” JB said. “It’s nothing personal against you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jonah said. “Whatever.”

“Jonah, you—oh!” JB stared down at his Elucidator in surprise. “It appears that Andrea is on her way here right now, to talk to you. She just stopped at your house, and Katherine told her where to find you.”

“Something else to be annoyed with Katherine about,” Jonah muttered.

But when Andrea showed up a few minutes later with a woman in a white Honda, Jonah couldn’t help being happy to see her.

She didn’t look like she was eighteen anymore. When she got out of the passenger side of the car, she stood shorter than Jonah once again.

“Aunt Patty, I kind of need to talk to Jonah privately,” she called back to the woman in the car.

“That’s fine,” the woman said patiently.

“Want to go sit on those swings?” Andrea asked, pointing across the park.

“Sure,” Jonah said.

He saw that JB leaned in to talk to Andrea’s aunt while they waited. Jonah wondered what JB could possibly find to say without bringing up some touchy topic:
Hey, sorry about kidnapping your niece and taking her four hundred years back in time. Sorry she got stuck there for five years. Sorry we had to count on a thirteen-year-old to rescue her. Oh, wait—you don’t know about any of that, do you?

Then Jonah and Andrea reached the swings, and Jonah couldn’t think of anything safe to talk about with her, either.

“Have you seen Brendan and Antonio since we got back?” Andrea asked.

“No,” Jonah said. “I tried to call Brendan once, but his mom said he was busy painting.”

“It’s a good thing they’ve got their art,” Andrea said. “That’s how they’re dealing with all of this. Let me tell you, they’re both furious at having to live through being thirteen all over again.”

“What about you?” Jonah said. He didn’t quite dare to look at her.

“I’m looking at it as another chance,” Andrea said. “There are things I didn’t see before. … I was really mean to Aunt Patty and Uncle Rob, and I shouldn’t have been. They’re almost as sad as I am about my parents dying. And now I’ve had five years of dealing with the grief that they haven’t had yet. So it’s like it’s my job now to comfort them.”

“That’s weird,” Jonah said. He sat down in one of the swings and pushed off, letting the momentum carry him back and forth.

Andrea giggled.

“They think my ‘new mature attitude’ is all because I signed up for an adopt-a-grandparent program at a local nursing home,” she said. “And I’ve hit it off with a slightly senile old man who has the delusion that he’s from the past.”

“JB let your real grandfather come to the twenty-first century?” Jonah asked in amazement.

Andrea nodded. “
And
JB relocated all the Native Americans from the village to a nature preserve in the future,” she said.

“JB’s gone soft,” Jonah said. “He cares about a lot more besides time now.”

“Yeah,” Andrea said. “It’s hard to know where this is all going to end.”

She sat down in the swing beside Jonah’s and turned toward him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That JB’s gone soft?” Jonah asked.

“No—that we’re not going to be girlfriend-boyfriend like Katherine and Chip are girlfriend-boyfriend,” Andrea said.

Jonah almost fell out of the swing.

“I’m not Second,” he said. “
I
wouldn’t want to go around manipulating people into doing things they don’t want to do.”

“It’s not that,” Andrea said. “It’s just that there’s so much else to deal with. I was eighteen, now I’m thirteen. I was Virginia Dare, now I’m Andrea Crowell again. I was used to living in the woods and cooking over an open flame and owning exactly one outfit—and now I’ve got to remember how to use my iPod and computer again. And don’t get me started on how hard it is to remember if
Hollister clothes are cooler than Abercrombie and Fitch, or if it’s the other way around. Everything’s just too weird right now for me to think about anything else.”