All Our Yesterdays (16 page)

But he waves me off and disappears inside the station. What the hell is he doing? I slam the door shut and cross my arms over my chest, like I could contain the panicked beating of my heart. Every second takes Marina and James farther away from me and deeper into the unknown.

I’m still leaning against the car waiting for Finn when he comes back. “What the hell was that about?” I say. “We’ve lost them now!”

“No, we haven’t.” He starts to pump the gas. “I know where they’re going.”

“What? Where?”

“My house.”

“Oh.” My anger instantly cools. I don’t know what to say. Even when things were really bad and we were trying to think of a way to get past the checkpoints and out of D.C., Finn always wanted to meet in coffee shops and fast-food restaurants. He said he didn’t want his family getting involved, which I believe, but I think he also didn’t want me to see where he lived. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just . . .” He replaces the pump. “That poor kid. He’s not ready for this.”

We drive at a more leisurely pace now that Finn knows exactly where we’re headed. I watch the houses outside the window get smaller and smaller, grubbier and grubbier. Finn hadn’t told me how badly off his family was until we’d been on the run together for a couple of months, and even then it was only little hints at first. I don’t think he was ashamed, exactly. More like he was scared how James and I, and the other privileged kids at our school, would react if we’d known, how differently we might have treated him. He was right to worry. The shallow, sheltered girl I was then
would
have treated him differently, but once he and I were traveling across state lines in the back of trucks and going days without seeing a bar of soap, his fear of judgment and my snobbery quickly became things of the past.

But his seventeen-year-old self, who is so sensitive under his bravado, is now showing my spoiled sixteen-year-old self his secret, exposing his weakness to her. I can only hope she won’t hurt him. I cover Finn’s hand where it rests on the console between us.

He parks a block away from the Crown Vic that’s stationed outside of the small row house I now know is his. With Marina and the younger Finn in there with James, there’s nothing to do but wait. We can’t risk coming face-to-face with our younger selves; we have to wait until James is alone.

“I wish I could see my mom,” Finn says. “It’s weird that she’s right there.”

I nod as though I understand, but I don’t. Not really. Even when we’d been right outside my house, my parents had barely crossed my mind. I never really missed them after I ran away. When I was scared or tired and would close my eyes and wish for someone to hold me and take my burdens away, the face attached to those arms was more often Luz or even James than it was Mom or Dad. There was a bitterness in that, a special pain that came from
not
missing them.

But Finn was always different, especially when it came to his mother. He wrote his parents postcards while we were gone, and he’d give them to people we met on the road to mail when they got wherever they were going so we couldn’t be traced by the postmarks. Once I found him sitting in the dark outside the motel we were crashing in, crying like his heart was breaking. We’d already been to hell and back running from James, but that was the first time I ever saw him cry. It was a night of firsts. It was his mother’s birthday, he said, and he wasn’t even sure if she was alive or dead. He told me about her for the first time, and it was the first time I ever really understood him.

It was also the first time I ever hugged him. He held on to me so tightly that I could feel his heart beating against me.

“Just think,” I say. “When we’re done here, you’ll never have to leave her.”

He goes suddenly, unnaturally still. He’s looking at me, but his eyes have gone vacant, like he’s no longer seeing me.

“Finn?”

His eyes roll back in his head and his eyelids start to flutter spasmodically, the only part of his body not frozen into place. I put a hand on his arm, which is rigid under my touch. When he doesn’t respond, I shake him.

“Finn?” I say again. I can feel the hysteria rising within me. I’m sure he’s having a seizure or something when it hits me that this must be what happened to me earlier in the parking lot. Finn has been swept away to some other place inside his mind, like I was when I saw the day I met James. He neglected to mention how terrifying it is. Finn is gone, and nothing but his body is left. I shake him again, even though I know it will do no good.

I’m not sure how long the fit lasts—thirty seconds? forty?—but it feels like longer. Finally he blinks, slowly, and the light comes back into his eyes. I let out the breath I’ve been holding.

“Em?” he says.

“You okay?” I try to sound calm. “You sort of went away there for a minute.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Did you see something?” I ask. “Was it a memory?”

He rubs a hand over his face and nods. “It was that house we stayed in for a few weeks in Delaware. Remember? It was right after the attack in Providence, and everyone was jumpy as hell. Pete and I were watching the news in the basement. It was the night the president announced that Congress had pushed through Patriot Act IV. I went to wake you up so you could watch with us.”

“I remember,” I say. I had shoved him for waking me, but he caught my hand and quietly told me about the new laws Congress had passed in the middle of the night. No unauthorized interstate travel, harsher punishments for citizens refusing to present government-approved ID cards, a repeal of the ban on military personnel policing American streets. We both knew James was behind it.

“What is this? Why does this keep happening?” I say. Seeing Finn yanked away from me like that, feeling so suddenly alone in this world that’s not really mine, has left me shaken.

“I don’t know,” he says.

We sit in silence and stare at the little green row house down the street, and I cross my arms to ward off the chill from the cold air that blows in through the smashed window. I don’t want to remember these things. But James always said time is complicated, that it has a mind of its own. Maybe this is its way of punishing us for messing with it.

Finn eventually falls asleep, his forehead pressed against the glass. I swear he can sleep anywhere. My eyes are heavy and itching but remain fixed on the house. My resolve has returned. I don’t want Marina to ever have to hide out in Nowhere, Delaware, and watch the world end on an ancient little television in a basement that smells like mold and stale air freshener.

I try to imagine what Marina is doing at this moment. It’s so strange that she’s experiencing things now that I never have. It makes me feel distant from her—from myself—like we’re really two different people. In a way, I guess, we are now.

Which is sort of the point of all of this.

Marina has finally seen Finn’s secret, which he hid so carefully from me for so long. Maybe she’s even met his mother, who he would only ever speak to me about when it was dark and quiet and he could talk in a whisper, as though keeping her a secret between us and the night would keep her protected somehow. Marina comforted James after his brother’s shooting, which I did once, but also after someone shot at him, too. She could be doing anything right now: sleeping or showering or booking a plane ticket to Buenos Aires for all I know.

The thought sends a shiver up my spine. Is she okay, there inside that house, divorced from me? I suddenly have to know. I can’t stand this feeling of separateness from myself.

Quietly, careful not to wake Finn, who would only tell me what a monumentally terrible idea this is, I unfold my frozen limbs and slip out of the Honda. I don’t close the door behind me, just let it rest shut. The agents assigned to James are still camped in front of Finn’s house, but the street is deserted and silent this early in the morning. I hop the fence into the backyard of the house on the corner. That’s one advantage of row houses: there are no spaces in between where the agents might glimpse me approaching the Abbotts’. As long as I’m quiet, they should never know I’m here. The yards are separated by chain-link fences that are easy to climb over, and I’m soon in Finn’s tiny backyard, which is even more overgrown than the front. I creep up the back steps, freezing when one squeaks under my weight. I take the next two steps more carefully, keeping my feet as close to the edges as possible.

I inch toward one of the two windows, which is dark with dust and the netting of a black screen.

Inside is a woman in bed, an oversize sweater pulled around her body, her hair swept up into a messy ponytail. She shares Finn’s coloring, and she was obviously pretty once, before illness dulled her skin and hollowed her cheeks. She’s watching television, flipping the channels in a listless way, like she’s already been through them a dozen times.

I don’t linger at the window. Spying on Finn’s mother like this makes me feel like some kind of thief.

Instead, I tiptoe to the second window and peer inside.

What I see stops my heart.

Thirteen

Marina

I sleep fitfully. I’m exhausted but I can’t seem to get comfortable or switch off my brain. Maybe I’m
too
exhausted. I fade in and out of consciousness, dreaming that I’m still at the hospital and waking up grasping for things that aren’t there before slipping under again.

At some point, I open my eyes and the drowsiness drops away long enough for me to realize how thirsty I am. I get up and creep over Finn, who’s sound asleep on the floor, his face buried so deeply into his pillow that I have no idea how he’s breathing. I slip into the kitchen and drink straight from the tap, cupping my hands under the flow of water, too sleep-addled to bother looking for a glass. I take gulp after gulp of the water, which is too warm to be refreshing but tastes almost sweet against my parched tongue.

“Finn, is that you?”

I straighten and twist off the tap. “No, Mrs. Abbott. It’s Marina.”

“Oh, come here!” she says. “I want to have a look at you.”

I pad on bare feet toward the door of the master bedroom and push it open. Mrs. Abbott is lying down, flopped back against a sea of pillows. There’s a bar along her side of the bed, which gives me a terrible flashback to Nate in the hospital, looking pale and absent. In fact, there are bars all over the room and a walker by the bedside table, which is littered with prescription pill bottles. Suddenly Finn’s demeanor in the hospital makes sense.

“Oh, Marina,” she says. She looks just like Finn—blond-haired, blue-eyed, with the same mischievous curl to the lips—except she seems faded, like a bad photocopy of herself. “It’s so good to finally put a face to the name. Finn’s told me so much about you.”

“Really?” I hover in the doorway, feeling uncertain and foolish. I’ve never been around a sick person before. And . . . Finn’s told her about me?

“Oh yes,” she says. “You and James are practically all he talks about.”

I don’t know what to say. Mrs. Abbott struggles to sit up straighter against the pillows, and I think maybe I should offer to help, but I can’t move from this spot.

“That’s nice. . . .” I say.

“Well.” Mrs. Abbott smiles at me. “I’ll let you get back to sleep. It was nice meeting you.”

I swallow. “You too.”

I close the door and turn back to the living room, but my gaze snags on the door to Finn’s bedroom. Has James managed to fall asleep? I don’t like the idea of him lying there awake and alone. Finn may think I’m smothering James, but I know him better than Finn does, and he shouldn’t be alone right now. Besides, the last time I left him alone, he was
shot
at. I knock on the door with one knuckle, lightly enough that it won’t wake him if he’s asleep.

“Come in, Marina.”

I push open the door and find him sitting up in Finn’s bed, the blanket twisted around his feet.

“You haven’t slept?” I say.

“A little, I think,” he says, “but my mind keeps going around in circles. I just . . . I can’t believe things changed so much, so quickly.”

I sit beside him on the narrow twin bed, which dips under my weight, tilting him toward me. “I know.”

“If he dies . . .” James stares forward at something I can’t see. “I can’t live in a world with no Nate in it.”

“He’s going to be okay,” I say, even though the words taste empty on my tongue. “Everything’ll be fine.”

James’s face collapses, like the facade of a building crumbling into a pile of bricks, and he starts to cry into his hands. I’m relieved. Racking sobs shake his whole body, but it’s so much easier to take than the blank face and dead eyes he’s been wearing for hours. I wrap my arms around him, and he leans into me.

“Can you stay?” he asks.

I nod, and we lie back on the bed. His arms curl around my waist, and he buries his face into the crook of my shoulder. I’ve never been this close to him, and I’m a terrible person for enjoying it a little. How many nights have I lain in bed by myself, imagining James beside me? Just last night I was plotting to have sex with him. My mind knows this is only a sick mockery of my fantasies, but my body doesn’t quite realize it. He’s so warm. I run my hand up and down his back, and I’m sure no one else would feel this good.

When his sobs start to subside, James presses a kiss to my jaw and rests his forehead against my temple.