Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 21
After discovering Jenny’s portrait on the pharmacy wall, Adam and I had realized that the picture itself could be the token to take us to her. He had carefully chipped off a bit of the painted brick and handed it to me. Now we just needed a way down to the portals. And that meant getting past the guards at the school.
“There’s another problem anyway,” Sage added now that she was back on her feet, straightening her crumpled pants. She held up the two military IDs she had taken from my mother’s drawer. My mother’s photograph looked enough like me that I could pass for her. I wasn’t the problem.
The problem was Adam.
I held up John’s fake ID next to Adam’s face, and it was immediately obvious that they weren’t the same person. Everything from their coloring to their jawline was different. Adam looked at the picture and frowned.
“We could cut the photo out of the ID Milo made,” I suggested.
“It won’t look the same.”
“Close enough, though?”
Adam shrugged, digging out the paperwork Milo had prepared from his pocket and comparing it to the Russian ID. “It’ll have to be.”
While Adam got to work peeling back the plastic cover of his ID to remove the photograph, Sage pulled me aside. Her mouth had turned down, and she seemed to be balancing too many thoughts in her head.
“What is it?” I asked softly.
“Are you sure about this? Once you go down . . .”
I stiffened as a military car drove by slowly on the road in front of my mother’s house—very slowly. The two men inside were looking around the neighborhood, their jaws stiff under their caps, like they were looking for someone they could mess with. They slowed to a crawl when they saw the three of us standing on the lawn by the side of the house.
Sage waved to them with a sarcastic smile on her face.
One of the men clenched his already stoic face, and then the two of them drove on.
“If you look right at them, they figure you have nothing to hide,” she advised.
“Good to know.”
Sage looked aimlessly around the street, her body slumping with a weariness that I knew would eventually overtake her in this world. Even at seventeen, life was taking its toll on her. Some people, I figured, never really get a chance to be young.
“Once you go down, you were saying?”
“Yeah.” She nodded, looking back at me with a resigned smile.
“Once you get a taste, you just want more and more. The best thing to do is never start.”
“I understand. But we don’t have a choice.”
“Everybody has a choice,” she countered. “But it seems like you’ve already made yours.”
I glanced over at Adam, who nodded to me that the photograph was fitting in well enough. Then I turned back to Sage, giving her a warm hug. “Thank you, Sage. For everything.”
° ° °
I rubbed my thumb somewhat neurotically over the rough nugget of brick that Adam and I had chipped off Jenny’s painting—a bit with a swirl of golden hair—which I now kept in my uniform pants pocket.
We were standing at the edge of the woods by the school, exactly where we had been the night before, and Adam was finishing shoveling the dirt back over the hole in the ground where we had buried our backpacks. I twirled Sage’s grandmother’s ring, which was back on my right ring finger now, and took a deep, steadying breath. Adam laughed when he noticed me.
“What?”
“This cap is too big on you,” he said, trying to straighten it, but it kept sliding back down. “Hold your head up.”
I did, which left me staring right up into his eyes. He cleared his throat, taking his hands away.
“How’s mine?” he asked, jutting out his chin a bit under his own cap.
“You look perfect.” I smiled, admiring how Adam’s broad shoulders stretched the thin fabric of the uniform a bit too taut. He seemed to enjoy the compliment.
“Hey, we got this, right?” he said, a shade of worry overtaking his face.
“Yeah, of course. Just look like you know what you’re doing and you’re in a huge hurry and you’re really important. That’s what Sage said.”
“So, be myself?” he joked.
“Exactly.”
With stiffened backs and heads held high, we marched past the high school entrance, around the side of the building, and into the fort.
Following Adam’s lead, I confidently flashed my ID badge at the guards who stood sentinel at every turn and entryway.
They were mostly kids, as my mother had said they would be, somewhere between my age and Adam’s. Their eyes ranged from bored to vacant, with the occasional peppering of cruel. Being handed a gun in a holster and the instructions to stand still for hours on end tends to bring out one of those two dispositions in people.
Frankly, I was more afraid of the bored ones than the cruel ones.
Idle hands and all that.
We had never gone to the portals this way, of course, but my intrinsic knowledge of the layout of the building, of the placement of those portals and the curve of the decades-old hallways, gave me a sense of where to go. Adam seemed to have it too, because every time we reached a fork in the road, we both seemed to turn, acting completely on instinct, in the same direction.
Finally, we reached a hallway that, despite the erasure of two decades, looked almost the same as it had the night—or the two nights, rather—that I had walked down it with my brother and my friends, heading for Yesterday.
“This is right,” I whispered to Adam, and the slight “Mmm” he gave in response made it all feel real suddenly.
I had taken a lot of risks in the portals before. I’d gone into other dimensions and other times. I’d survived the interdimensional train that showed me glimpses of a thousand other lives led by a million other people, all blissfully ignorant of one another’s existences.
But this would be the farthest I’d ever gone.
The moment the portals were built.
What would it look like? This was the very facility where the first fission reactor went critical—the splitting nucleus of one atom smashing into the neighboring atoms and splitting them in turn, creating a chain reaction. Somewhere else on these grounds, the enriched uranium itself had been produced. That was where Cherie’s mother had worked, monitoring the gauges. Would I be able to get back onto the grounds, see that lab? Watch those scientists at work?
The greatest physics lesson in history was on the other side of the door I was about to cross. The most significant scientific break-through of all time. The most brilliant minds. I had never been so excited. I rubbed my sweating palms on my pants.
Adam and I flashed our IDs one more time to the guards at the end of the hallway that led to the science lab, and one of them—a young man with acne on his chin—actually yawned as he looked at them.
No wonder it had been so easy for John and my mother to sneak in the other night. Nobody was really paying attention. People only balk at the unusual. That was one thing I’d learned in my travels. As long as things seemed normal, felt right, you could get away with murder. And everything can be normalized in the end.
We made it to the science lab, locking the door behind us. I couldn’t help but laugh. It looked exactly the same.
“Has this place ever changed?” I asked.
But that’s when I noticed that Adam looked a bit green.
“Are you all right?”
He coughed into his palm, and when he looked at me again, his face had turned deadly serious. “We’re going a long way back, Marina. I’ve never gone this far.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s a risk. The physical portals won’t even be there yet. We’ll have to wait for them to be built before we can come back.”
Footsteps in the hallway were followed by an older man’s booming voice, asking a series of questions. A squeaky voice, which I could only assume belonged to the kid with the chin acne, answered back, uncertain in tone. And then the man’s footsteps grew closer.
“We don’t have time for this, Adam. What are you saying?”
His eyes searched mine for a moment, affection tinged with sadness. He reached into his pocket and held out a flattened penny, offering it to me. “I want you to go into Today.”
“No.”
“Your father will be worried about you.”
“He won’t. We’ll go back home together . . . when we’re done.”
“I’m worried about you. It’s too risky.”
“You need me, Adam. I need to get into this lab and see how exactly these portals were built—what it is that Jenny did that gave all the power to the Russians.”
“I can get into the lab myself.”
“What do you know about physics?” I teased, but he only looked angry in response.
The rattling of the doorknob told us that our new friend was close. The man outside could be heard muttering to himself as his keys began to jangle.
Adam grabbed my hand, and we ran together down the spiral staircase. We had only moments to decide. He pressed the penny into my palm, his eyes imploring. We were standing in front of Today.
But with my other hand, I brought out the piece of brick with Jenny’s yellow hair on it, and I pulled him with me towards the Yesterday door.
“You told me to trust you once,” I reminded him. “Trust me now. We’ll go home when we’ve finished this.”
Footsteps passed overhead, heavy and stiff. It was now or never, but Adam’s face had not relaxed.
I reached to put the flattened coin into the slot of Yesterday, but Adam stopped my hand in midair before it could get there. He took a step closer then and slid my cap off my head, peering down at me, our faces almost close enough to touch. My heart was racing as I got lost in the bottomless well of his green eyes.
Was he right? Could he continue without me?
Am I just not ready to leave him yet?
All these thoughts would have to find some other refuge, because the heavy soles of officious feet were clomping down the spiral stairs, and, holding tight to Adam’s hand, I inserted the penny into the slot and all but pulled him with me into the past.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was a bright and sunny summer day in front of Groussman’s Pharmacy as a painter in a white jacket and pants put the finishing touches on a golden curl of hair, advertising a dance hall just opening down the road.
We had landed in an alley on the side of the building, and as we stepped out into the stark daylight, I couldn’t help but feel like we were entering a Technicolor film, bursting with a shock of blue sky and white puffs of cloud. Bacon was frying somewhere, and the unmistakable stench of diesel fuel wafted towards our noses, competing with the bacon for our attention. A radio somewhere was blaring a tune with lots of brass horns and piano.
Spinning slowly in circles, Adam and I must have looked like we’d blown in on a strange wind, wearing our incongruous Russian uniforms and gaping open-mouthed at the enormous automobiles buzzing by, their fenders shining in the afternoon sun.
The town was alive, with many of those huge cars pulling into the parking lot of the train station across the street to catch a shiny silver passenger train brimming with commuters. Women wearing elaborate updos and bright red lipstick gave us strange looks as they passed by, some pushing white-lace-covered baby strollers or balancing packages from a day of shopping.
But there were other women too, wearing men’s trousers with their hair tied up in bandanas and smudges of dirt on their faces, carrying paper sacks stained with grease in the direction of Fort Pryman Shard—racing back to work.
I turned in awe towards Adam, but he didn’t seem to be noticing any of it anymore. His eyes were glued on just one thing: Jenny’s portrait, being constructed in front of our eyes like Frankenstein’s monster rising from the dead.
Her crystal-blue eyes had an innocence in this picture that they lacked in real life, clearly an intentional effort on the part of the painter to entice men with a certain kind of fetish into visiting the dance hall.
I felt like an intruder standing there, watching him have this private moment with a girl who now seemed as close as that fresh wet paint.
A nearby newspaper dispenser was full to bursting, and I leaned over to look at the date: July 7, 1944. It was a full year before the bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima, but after the date Cherie said the nuclear reactor went critical. And Jenny was already having her likeness painted on a wall. I had no idea how long she’d been here, but she’d apparently made quite an impression.
“Adam, take off the hat and the jacket,” I whispered as more people began to stare at us. He finally seemed to come back into the moment, and once he had removed the two articles of clothing, he actually looked a lot like all the other men passing by. Except all of them were in a different kind of uniform: American World War II fatigues.
I took off my own jacket and draped it over my arm, trying to look like the girls heading back to the fort. It wasn’t quite right, however. I needed something in my hair.
“We should walk,” I suggested, and he nodded. As we did so, I tried to rip the sleeve off the coat, but I wasn’t strong enough.
Adam chuckled when he realized what I was doing and grabbed it out of my hands, finishing the job for me. I took the sleeve and tied it up in my hair like a bandana.
“Perfect,” he said, smiling.
As we passed the corner, we threw everything else into a trash bin.
The ad for the dance hall said it was in a building that had already been a dozen other things by the time I was born. In my world, it had been a Sears at one point—a fact that I was aware of only because they didn’t take the signage down for about a decade after the last Sears had come and gone—and then it was temporarily a community center that no one in the community ever actually used.
For a while, when I was maybe ten years old, a sign had advertised church services in the abandoned building. But one day, about a year after that, I was driving by with my dad and roughly a dozen police cars were surrounding the place, leading people away in handcuffs. I had asked my father what was going on, and he had mumbled something about bad men.
It took me years to discover that it had never been a church but only a front for drug dealers.
The last time I had noticed the building, maybe a year ago, it had become a quinceañera emporium, selling everything from flowing, flouncy evening gowns to piñatas. I never went inside it, though.
After my mother left, anything Mexican had only reminded my father of her. I’d never had a quinceañera.
None of that mattered now anyway, eighty years in the past, because here it was something else entirely.
Squatting alone on an otherwise not-yet-developed street, it was a fat, white two-story building with a large sign over the front door that simply said gentlemen’s club. As we approached, a gruff-looking man with a shaggy beard opened the front door and set up a stool to block it from closing again, plopping his oversized behind on it and sipping at a tin mug of coffee.
“We don’t open till six,” he informed Adam when he noticed him standing there.
“We’re just looking for an old friend,” Adam answered, angling his body a bit to shield me from seeing anything inside the door.
The man on the stool noticed me then, peering around the large chest blocking his view to try to check me out. “You lookin’ for work, sweetheart?”
“She’s not,” Adam answered for me. “Like I said, just looking for a friend.”
“Well, that’s just as well,” the man returned in his sandpaper voice, his eyes working their way down my legs, “owner likes ’em whiter than that.”
Adam must’ve heard me inhale in shock because he all but pushed me behind him at that point.
“No offense meant,” the man laughed. “I think you’re beautiful, honey. If it were up to me.”
“Her name is Jenny,” Adam interrupted, his fists clenching by his sides. “I believe she works here. We just want to have a word.”
The man’s face changed then, falling under a bit of a dark cloud. “You Jenny’s man?” he asked, his tone sounding suddenly disappointed.
“I am.”
“Thought you were overseas.”
“I’m back.”
The man burst out with an enormous chainsaw laugh, so loud that I actually flinched away from the sound. “Yeah,” he said between raspy breaths, “I’m back too!” And with that, he pulled up his pant leg to show us the wooden stump in place of his foot.
Adam’s muscles softened at the sight of the false appendage, and his voice came out softer than a moment ago. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” the man joked. “Rather have no leg than still be in that hell swamp in the South Pacific!”
Adam nodded in response. “I hear you.”
“Eh, go on in. But have that girl out by six, you hear me? This is a gentlemen’s establishment.”
“Yes, sir,” Adam replied as he led me under cover of his arm into the building.
The place was still being set up for the night, with a frail old man taking chairs off small, round tables and a couple of girls on stage stretching out their legs. “Stay close,” Adam whispered at the sight of the girls.
“Where am I gonna go?” I whispered back.
My eyes were still adjusting to the darkened lights inside, distracted temporarily by the clanking of glass as a middle-aged woman lined up bottles on the shelves behind the bar, when I heard a gasp several feet away.
I turned my head, and there she was. Jenny still looked the same age she had on the beach that day twelve years ago, which made me realize that she probably hadn’t been down here that long. And it was also immediately clear that John had been right about her: she had the exact right kind of look for the 1940s. Her hair was pin-curled and her makeup done to perfection. She was wearing some sort of spangly showgirl outfit that managed to be even more revealing than the bikini I’d last seen her in.
And she was staring right at Adam, who was staring back.
“Adam,” she breathed, and tears sprang to her sapphire eyes.
