All Our Yesterdays (24 page)

“You okay?” he says. “What did you see?”

I shake my head. I don’t want to talk about it. “How long was I gone this time?”

“Ten minutes,” he says. “Maybe fifteen. It felt like forever.”

I shiver. The hood of the Honda is cold beneath us, and the chill of the night has seeped into my bloodstream. “What’s happening to us?”

“You . . .” Finn hesitates and shakes his head, and I realize how pale he is. “While you were out, you sort of . . .
flickered
for a second. Like a hologram or something. I was afraid you were going to disappear.” He touches my cheek. “Like, really afraid.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I try to imagine how scared I’d be if I thought Finn was disappearing and leaving me to face all of this alone, but I stop myself because it’s too horrible to even think about.

He smiles. “I think I can forgive you.”

“James always said time must have a mechanism for fixing paradoxes,” I say. “Maybe it’s trying to figure out where we actually belong. Maybe it’s trying to erase us.”

“Each flash seems to be lasting longer and longer,” Finn says. “Do you think that means—”

I nod. I may not be a scientific genius, but I feel the truth of it. Time is coming for us, and coming fast. “We don’t have much time.”

That’s when the police cruiser passes us, headed toward the Shaw house.

Nineteen

Marina

James runs for the phone, and Finn and I follow. He takes one look at the caller ID and swears. He grabs the receiver.

“Mark?” I hear the guard’s faint voice on the other end, and James swears again. “Thanks.” He hangs up and runs for the stairs, calling behind him, “The cops are on their way up to the house!”

“It’s okay!” Finn shouts after him. “We just won’t answer the door!”

“Yeah, but the car is out front!”

Finn and I chase after James and catch him by the front door. I snatch the car keys out of his hand.

“Let me,” I say. “They don’t care about me. You stay here.”

“Marina—”

“Shut up and turn off the lights,” I say. “They’ll be out of the trees any minute.”

I dash out of the door and toward the BMW. As I slide into the driver’s seat, I glance at the driveway, but it’s still clear. I start the car and realize I have no idea where to take it. There’s a garage at the side of the house, but the door is closed. I flip open James’s visor and his glove compartment, rifling through the contents a little wildly, but I don’t see a remote control. I could just drive it around to the back of the house, but what if the cops see tire tracks in the grass?

I look at the driveway again. No sign of anyone yet, but it won’t be long. I imagine I can see the glow of headlights through the trees.

Screw it. It’s dark, and I don’t have any other choice. I press my foot to the gas and pull off of the driveway, bumping over the curb and onto the lawn. I try to visualize the car floating, tires barely touching the grass as I drive around the side of the house and park the BMW at the back, out of sight from the driveway. I run up to the back door and knock, and Finn’s right there to let me in.

“Nice driving,” he says.

“Hilarious.” I struggle to catch my breath. “Where’s James?”

Finn leads me through the dark house to where James is standing behind the front door. Seconds later, headlights sweep across the front of the house, and Finn grabs my wrist, pulling me away from a window. We press ourselves close to the wall so that we can’t be seen.

Outside, a car door closes. We hear the crunch of hard-soled shoes against gravel, and a motion-activated security light turns on. The knock against the door is like an explosion, echoing through the house. It makes the chime of the doorbell that follows it sound delicate and sweet.

“Mr. Shaw?” a voice calls. “This is the state police. Are you inside?”

James inches toward the peephole and looks out.

“Mr. Shaw, we just want to make sure you’re safe,” the cop says. He presses the doorbell again.

James continues to watch through the peephole, and we stand, frozen. I try not to breathe. After a minute, James whispers, “They’re leaving.”

We’re silent, and beyond the door is the crunch of gravel, the closing of a car door, and the roar of an engine. We hear the cruiser pull away, and James steps away from the peephole.

“They’re gone,” he says.

“Well, that was terrifying,” Finn says. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a fugitive.”

“Let’s give them a few minutes to clear out, and then we’re going back to D.C.,” James says. He holds up the file folder. “Someone needs to see this.”

“I knew Richter was hiding something,” James says as he guides the car back toward I–95 South. As soon as we got on the road, he reassembled his cell phone and called Vivianne to tell her we were on our way home and to call off the search dogs. He didn’t tell her about the file folder we found.

I click on the dashboard light and read the printed-out e-mail exchange that was at the top of the folder again.

From:
Chris Richter

Date:
November 16, 2013 3:48:02 EDT

To:
Joshua Schweiger

He’s gonna have a big future.

> Our source in his office says yes. He’s protective, doesn’t trust us. What do you want the kid for?

> > I want him. Will the congressman be an impediment?

> > > James Shaw. IQ 168. Briefly institutionalized after the death of his parents in ’08, still under psychiatric care. Skipped 4th and 8th grades. Graduated first in class from Sidwell at 15. Completed his BS in Science at Georgetown University in eighteen months. Currently working on his PhD in Applied Physics and Mathematics at Johns Hopkins, under the mentorship of Dr. Ari Feinberg. Doing his dissertation on some aspect of relativity, real secretive.

> > > > Just do it.

> > > > > You want me to look up the grades on his report card?

> > > > > > Everything. Especially his education.

> > > > > > > What do you want?

> > > > > > > > Can you get me info on the Shaw kid? The congressman’s younger brother, James.

I look closely at the e-mail address: [email protected]
A
-
I
-
R
. Nate wasn’t trying to tell me he couldn’t breathe; he was trying to tell me something about an organization Chris Richter works with.

Underneath the e-mail are photocopies of pages in James’s handwriting, shadowy lines of formulas and theorems that could be written in Chinese for all the sense they make to me. It reminds me that I have the pages James was writing in the hospital in my front pocket. He seems to have completely forgotten about them. He’ll only lose them again if I give them to him now, so I make a mental note to hand them over once we get home.

Along with the e-mail and photocopies are a dozen more documents. There’s something that looks like an official government report, almost half of which has been blacked out with a thick marker, more e-mails, something that looks suspiciously like photocopies of medical records with James’s name at the top, and notes Nate was making for himself of the goings-on of the SIA, another acronym agency I’ve never heard of. Whatever they were up to, Nate didn’t like it.

“This must be the investigation Nate told me about,” I say. “He was looking into something called the SIA, or maybe the AIR? It’s hard to tell which one, but it sounds like they were going to offer you a job. Who do you think they are?”

James shrugs. “A subset of the CIA, maybe? Richter could be overseeing them as part of his job at the DNI. My uncle once told me the Agency has several covert arms that do the kinds of things even the CIA can’t be seen to be doing.”

I shiver. “Creepy.”

“But those pages from my notebook,” he says. “That’s what really concerns me. I don’t know why Nate went looking for those.”

“What are they?” Finn asks. He reaches for the stack of papers, and I reluctantly pass them back.

“It’s some of the latest work I’ve been doing for Dr. Feinberg.” James veers a little too sharply into the next lane, and I brace myself against the armrest. “I made a big breakthrough recently, but I didn’t tell Nate about it. He doesn’t like my research, thinks it isn’t healthy for me to be so focused on the past.”

“Where do you think he got them from?” Finn asks.

“Don’t know. Maybe Dr. Feinberg, or maybe he went through my things.”

I catch a flash of James’s thin, straight handwriting as Finn flips through the pages. I have a sudden realization that makes my heart sink, even though it shouldn’t matter after everything that’s happened.

“Is that breakthrough what you were going to tell me about?” I say. “The night you came home?”

James nods but doesn’t look away from the road. “Yeah.”

“What is it?” Finn asks.

“It’s something I’ve been working on for a long time. I’m finally starting to make some real progress, and those pages there are the crux of my formulations.”

“What are they for?”

“Travel in the fourth dimension.”

“Huh?”

James’s gaze flicks into the rearview mirror and back again. “Time travel.”

I’ve listened to James talk about this for years, so it doesn’t faze me, but Finn clicks off his seat belt and scoots up between us. “Say
what
now?”

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think it’s possible, and Dr. Feinberg agrees. When I finish those formulas, I’ll prove it.” James’s fingers tighten around the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. His passion has always been one of the things I love most about him, but it worries me, too. I’ve learned a lot about James these last two days, and I see more than ever now how he’s like forged metal, strong but brittle, unable to bend.

“What happens when you prove it?” Finn asks.

“We fix the world.”

Only four little words, ones I’ve heard from James a thousand times before, but for some reason they unsettle me to my core this time.

“What do you mean?” Finn asks.

“Imagine what we could change,” James says, “if we could use time. The wars that could be averted, the natural disasters that could be planned for. We could erase so many terrible, senseless things.”

“Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” Finn says. “You don’t know what you could accidentally change. You could, like, kill your grandfather and then you’d never have been born, right?”

James smiles dryly. “Time isn’t quite that simple. For one thing, it isn’t linear, the way we perceive it. And the current research suggests there’s some unknown variable that eliminates threats to time, like the paradox you’re talking about. My theory is that time has a sentient element. It fixes events in place to stop paradoxes from happening. So, in theory, if I were to go back in time to kill my grandfather, that event would become fixed by my action. Because he’s dead, I would never be born, but a remnant of me from my original time, a kind of shadow, would always be there to kill my grandfather and ensure he stayed dead.”

Finn blinks. “I didn’t remotely understand that.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Could you use smaller words?”

“Those
were
my small words.”

“It still sounds dangerous to me,” Finn says. “So much could go wrong.”

“There are risks,” James concedes, “but progress is always dangerous, isn’t it? Most of the time, walls don’t get dismantled brick by brick. Someone has to crash through them.”

Someone has to crash through them.
A pall descends over the car. It sounds so foreboding.

Finn raps his knuckles against the back of James’s skull. “Then I guess it’s a good thing you’ve got such a hard head.”

I roll my eyes. Trust Finn to lighten the mood.

“Ow!” James says, but he’s smiling. He swats at Finn blindly. “You’re lucky I’m driving.”

“I’m not,” I say. It’s so good to see James smile that I want to prolong the moment. I go to knock Finn on the head, but he dodges deeper into the recesses of the backseat.

“Stay away, woman!”

Spurred on by James’s laughter, I unbuckle my seat belt and try again. Finn catches my fist midswing, and I pull back, but he doesn’t let go.

“Hey!” I kneel in my seat for better leverage and pull, but his hand is tight around my wrist now. “Let go!”

“No, you’ll hit me!”

“How old are you two?” James says.

Finn yanks my hand, and I tumble into the backseat with a shriek. Despite my squirming, he manages to catch me in a headlock and muss my hair. I elbow him in the stomach, and I hear James laugh again over the sound of Finn’s grunt.

“You want a piece of this?” Finn says. “You think you can take me, Marchetti?”

Distantly, I hear the sound of James’s cell phone ringing, but now I’m too focused on trying to pry Finn’s fingers off my wrist. I bend his pinkie back until he yelps and lets go, and then I throw myself at him. It seems only fair that I get to mess up his hair, too, but he’s too strong and keeps wrestling me away. I accidentally jam my elbow into his ribs and am shocked when he lets out a girlish, shrieking giggle.