Annum Guard: Blackout Part 10

CHAPTER 9.

It's still light out when Abe parks the Chevy on the street, between Ariel's rusted old Toyota and the next-door neighbor's 5 Series. Well, tries to park the Chevy. He grumbles and pulls forward so that he's next to the Toyota again.

"Are you sure you don't want me to do it?" I ask. I lean my head back against the seat. This is ridiculous. Abe can parallel park a car in his sleep. This is nothing more than a delay tactic.

He hits the curb and slaps the top of the steering wheel. "I do not need my girlfriend to park a car for me, thank you very much."

I shut my mouth. At least he called me his girlfriend. That's the most I've gotten all day. I'm starting to get angry, too. Yes, I haven't been entirely fair to Abe or treated our relations.h.i.+p with all of the respect it needs. But h.e.l.lo, relations.h.i.+ps are a two-way street, and it's really unfair of Abe to wait until he's at the point of no return to say something to me. But I'm not in the mood for another fight right now. I need to keep my head clear.

"Just park the car, Abe," I say in my softest voice.

He relaxes next to me. A breath escapes his lips. He looks at me, and I see the guy I fell in love with three years ago. The guy who promised he'd keep me anch.o.r.ed to reality when the storm that is my mom started surging. He's still looking at me, not the road, when he zips into the spot.

I open the door. We're a perfect six inches from the curb.

"I don't want to do this."

I'm silent as I get out, mostly because I don't know if Abe is talking about dinner tonight, fighting with me, or our relations.h.i.+p in general. And I don't know if I want the answer. Instead I reach down and interlace my fingers with Abe's, like nothing's wrong. His fingers tense, but only for a moment. Then he squeezes mine. Even though we're in a rough patch, it makes me know we'll be okay. We have to be.

"We're in this together," I remind him. I'm not just talking about dinner.

Abe nods, and together we climb the three steps to the front stoop. Abe raises his hand to knock, but at the last second he turns to me.

"You sure you don't want to call your mom? Leave her a voice mail?"

My mom was discharged this morning. I haven't called her yet. I should, but I don't think she wants to hear from me. And I don't really want to talk to her right now either. The more I think about her, the madder I get. Because she can make herself well. She has done it. She's just too scared to try again, and screw that.

"Positive." I nudge past him and rap my knuckles against the door. "Stop stalling."

There's a shuffling inside and the sound of a chain being slid from a lock.

And then Mona is staring at us. I'm not sure when her last chemo treatment was, but she looks worse than the last time I saw her. A sweater hangs from her bony shoulders, and she has a blue-and-yellow silk scarf tied around her head, hiding the fact that she has no hair. I'm hit with a pang of guilt because this is my fault. I saved Mona from an early death caused by lung cancer, but then I plunked her down into a present where she has stage IV lymphoma.

"Hi, Gran," Abe says gently.

Mona smiles. "Abraham." She throws her arms around him, then opens her arms to pull me into the hug. "Amanda. I'm so glad you both came."

"Is Grandpa?" Abe asks.

"He will be," Mona says as she ushers us inside the living room and shuts the door.

The dining room-slash-kitchen is right off the living room, so I can see that there are only four places set. Part of me was hoping Abe's parents would be here, too. Ariel was dead set against Abe joining the Guard, but Abe's dad was for it. It would have been nice to have another buffer here.

Abe isn't saying anything. I see him trying to be inconspicuous as he peers into the kitchen to check if Ariel is there. This has to be killing him. It's his family. I like to think that I'm his family, too. And we're all in various states of turmoil.

No, I tell myself. Not now. I remember Orange and what we're here for. It's time to stop the pouting already. Both of us.

"What can I do to help?" I ask Mona as I sweep into the kitchen, knowing full well that she's going to tell me to sit down and relax. It didn't take me long to realize she's the type of person who won't let you lift a finger to help.

"Sit down and relax," Mona says, and I smile. Then Ariel wanders in from the hallway that leads to his office.

"Are we eating?" he asks brusquely. "Let's eat. I'm hungry."

Mona nods, and formalities are skipped as we all sit down at the table. Ariel takes the head seat, and Abe and I sit next to him across from each other. Mona sets a brisket on a chipped serving platter in the center of the table, and hands a bowl of vegetables to me and a bowl of roasted potatoes to Abe. Then she sits in the last empty chair.

Abe smacks a spoonful of potatoes onto his plate, and two of them roll from his plate onto the floor. Ariel's shoulders tense.

I gingerly set some carrots onto my plate. They smell like they've been cooked in the brisket juices, and my stomach growls. "How's work going, Ariel?" I ask as I hand him the veggies. I figure that's an easy, neutral question.

"Same as always." Ariel sets the bowl down by Abe without looking at him. I wait, but it becomes obvious that's the only answer I'm getting.

I look to Mona. "Thanks for having us to dinner. It smells amazing. You wouldn't believe how the quality of food has gone down at Annum Hall in the last few months."

Mona laughs politely, but Ariel slams his fork on the table. "Yes, that's what we should all be focusing on. The fact that the food is bad, not that the entire organization is so corrupt that no amount of investigation or rehabilitation will ever revive it."

"She was making a joke, Grandpa," Abe says.

"It's not a joking matter, Abraham."

"You know," Abe says, and now it's my turn to tense. No good has ever come from Abe starting a conversation with those two words. Those are his fighting words. "Just because you couldn't hack it in the Guard is no reason to take it out on me."

"Abe!" I gasp.

Ariel shoves back his chair. Then his finger is in Abe's face. "Two things," he says. "One. You were not raised to say those things to me, and don't you forget your manners just because I happen to disagree with your choices. And two. Hacking it has nothing to do with my leaving the Guard. Nothing." He turns to his wife, and immediately his body relaxes and his eyes soften. "This smells delicious, my darling, but I fear I've lost my appet.i.te for the time being." And then he walks down the hallway toward his office. The door slams shut soon after.

"I'm not hungry either. Sorry, Gran." Abe stands and goes out the back door onto the porch.

I bite my bottom lip. "I'm so sorry, Mona."

She waves her hand in the air. "Don't be sorry. Serve yourself the brisket. I didn't spend all day cooking this d.a.m.n meal for no one to eat it."

I smile, then load my plate with the meat and a few potatoes. I tip the platter toward Mona, although I know she'll decline. Her appet.i.te is next to nothing these days.

I pick up my fork, but I can't stop looking at the back door. At where Abe is probably sitting on the wicker bench on the porch, pouting. Or down the hallway to where Ariel is probably sitting at his desk. Stewing.

I finish eating and stand to take my plate to the sink, but Mona waves and takes it from me. "Go talk some sense into him," she says.

"Which one?"

Mona's brown eyes sparkle with life. "The one you came to see."

I nod, but then I hesitate outside Ariel's door. I can't believe how much things have changed in less than six months. Since I discovered that my boyfriend's grandfather was the mastermind behind a top-secret, time-traveling government agency.

I knock to be polite, but I've already opened the door. Ariel sits at his desk with his back to me, looking out over the yard. I wonder if he's looking at Abe. The tiny office is crammed with shelves of books. Books piled haphazardly on top of one another. Books lying on their sides on top of books standing up straight. Books stacked like dominoes on the floor.

I step over a pile. "Hi."

"h.e.l.lo, Amanda." Ariel doesn't turn.

"Thank you," I say, and he does turn. "For calling me Amanda. It makes me feel normal."

Ariel doesn't say anything. Finally he sighs and his shoulders slump. "I'm not mad at you. Or Abraham, for that matter. But I don't know what the two of you want from me. I'm never going to be happy that Annum Guard exists."

I choose my words carefully. This is the calmest, most even-tempered that Ariel has been in months. "And I guess I'm having a hard time figuring out why."

Ariel takes off his gla.s.ses and rubs the bridge of his nose. "Time is a dangerous game. Back when I was young and naive, I thought changing the past for the better was the right thing to do. I've borne witness to a great number of horrors in my lifetime." He pauses, and I know why. He was born in Berlin. His father took a professors.h.i.+p at Harvard when Ariel was a child, before the n.a.z.is banned German Jews from traveling, but the rest of his family wasn't so lucky. His mother was from Poland. Ariel grew up without a single cousin, not one uncle or aunt, no grandparents.

Ariel goes on. "But the organization that I helped found is so different from the one that exists today. It used to have a purpose."

"It still has a purpose."

"And what's that? Profiteering?"

"No," I say, standing straighter. "We improve people's lives. I mean, I saved half a billion dollars worth of art a few months ago-"

"Art! That's the example you're going to give me? Art! A few splashes of color on canvas, hanging on a wall somewhere, all so a gaggle of pretentious phonies can make self-important statements about how living a cultured life makes them feel. You're going to have to do better than that, Amanda."

My teeth tug at my bottom lip. I swore I'd never tell Ariel about how I saved Mona. Swore it up and down. I decided that wasn't the kind of news I'd ever want to know. But maybe I should tell him now, to make him see things my way.

No. No, I shouldn't. Stick to why you came here.

But before I can say anything, Ariel tells me, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't take my anger out on you." Then he gestures. "Shut the door." His voice is different. The veiled hostility is gone, and I see a glimpse of the man I know and admire. The man who welcomed me into his home and his family.

I do as I'm told, then sit on a leather ottoman tucked away beside a stack of books.

"Do you know why Annum Guard was founded?" he asks.

"I . . . I don't."

"Okay, then tell me what you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis."

"Well . . ."

Ariel sighs. "Honestly, kids these days." Before I can protest that I know the basics, he's speaking again. "In 1959, Fidel Castro a.s.sumed power of Cuba. Castro was a good friend of the Soviets, which was alarming given how close Cuba is to the US. In 1961, the US embarra.s.sed itself in a disastrous failed attempt to remove Castro from power. The Bay of Pigs Invasion."

I nod because this much is familiar. But I'm not about to tell Ariel that I only know about all of this because of a song that came out before I was even born.

"All that failure did was strengthen the relations.h.i.+p between Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev convinced Castro to place nuclear missiles on his island, aimed at the US, and when we found out about it, we had an international crisis."

I nod again. "And then Kennedy was able to avert the crisis," I say. I remember covering this for like five minutes at the tail end of my eighth-grade American history cla.s.s. We seemed to spend like two months memorizing the names of the governors of the colonies, and then we flew through the next three hundred years at a breakneck pace. American Revolution . . . blink . . . Civil War . . . blink . . . Industrial Revolution . . . Great Depression . . . FDR . . . a jumbled mess of everything that's happened since then. And my cla.s.ses at Peel focused more on current events than historical ones.

"Wrong," Ariel says.

My head snaps up. "What do you mean, wrong?"

"I mean," Ariel says slowly, "that the crisis was not averted."

I press my lips together and say nothing.

"On October 27, 1962, in response to the shooting down of an American reconnaissance airplane over Cuba, the US launched a series of long-range nuclear missiles from Turkey that completely obliterated Moscow. The Soviets responded by launching their own weapons at our capital, and by October 28, the island of Cuba, all of DC, and most of northern Virginia and southern Maryland were no more."

I'm dizzy.

"The world spent all of early November plunged into an economic depression. Several European economies were on the verge of bankruptcy. And let's not talk about what happened in the US. Some one million Americans lost their lives. Six million Soviets. Nearly eight million Cubans. Men, women, children. The elderly, the infirm, babes in the womb-none were spared. Some died in the blast; some died of radiation poisoning in the days and weeks that followed."

My brain can't process this. The magnitude of what he's telling me is our real history. Fifteen million people. I . . . I can't. I stare at Ariel. I forget to blink. I think I forget to breathe.

"And on November 11, 1962, I got a phone call that changed my life. A phone call from President Kennedy himself. Was.h.i.+ngton had already been aware that I was developing a device that would allow man to travel through time." I nod. I know this. I first visited Ariel in March of 1962, and that's when he told me the Department of Defense was interested in the Annum watches. "And exactly one month later, I went on the very first Annum Guard mission, two and a half years before Annum Guard was officially founded."

"You changed the past," I whispered.

"You're d.a.m.n right I did. I saved all of those lives. I saved Earth, if you want to know the direction the crisis was headed. The world would not have recovered."

"Why don't I know about this?"

"Why would you expect that to be common knowledge? The only other people who knew at the time were John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and they've been gone a long time now."

I don't tell Ariel that JFK died only because my father helped kill him.

"So besides officials with the highest clearance levels, you and I are the only ones who know. Everyone else s.h.i.+fted into a parallel present the moment I returned from averting the crisis. No one has any idea how close we all came to being wiped off the face of the earth."

"How did you do it?" I hear the awe in my voice.

"Does it matter?" Ariel shoots back.

"Sorry. It's just . . . that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard."

Ariel pauses. "This is extremely cla.s.sified. This entire conversation is cla.s.sified."

I nod. "Of course."

He takes another breath. "I infiltrated NASA. I went back months before the bombing and was hired by NASA in the communications department. I-"

"Hang on, you stayed in the past? For months? How much time did you lose in the present?"

Ariel waves his hand at me. "Thirty-seven days. A minor sacrifice. I didn't go back far, Amanda, so I lost less time. I a.s.sume you know how that works.

"I planted an encrypted telegram supposedly addressed to James Webb, NASA's administrator at the time, that I said was sent by Khrushchev through the Soviet s.p.a.ce program. A back channel communication meant to fly under the radar screen for political purposes. I basically said that I-Khrushchev-wasn't advancing any further hostilities but couldn't say so publicly. Webb and I had known each other for a while-we'd both served on the Draper Committee in '58-so he trusted me to hand-deliver the telegram to the White House, and we never dropped the first bomb."

"Why are you telling me all of this now?"

"Because that is why I founded Annum Guard. Saving humanity. Reversing the true horrors that threaten our very existence. Not bailing out a museum from its embarra.s.sing lack of security."