Chapter Three Emma Baldwin #2
Papa steps out of one of them. Beams of moonlight bounce brightly off the jeweled buttons of his ringmaster suit as he runs his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. “You made a mess, huh, baby girl?” He gives me a quick hug and a smile that can’t mask the disappointment in his eyes.
A branch snaps nearby, and goose bumps rise on my arms. I look around, filling with panic. Has the mob found us?
Papa opens his palm, and the image of a clock floats in the air, shimmering as if it’s reflected on water. “Hurry. We’re outta time.”
Demetri opens the trunks so Mom can load our things telepathically.
She mutters words like “reckless” and “irresponsible.” When the last trunk slams on the final bag, she turns to me with narrowed eyes.
“You got us all looking ridiculous. And now I gotta head to the past and deal with crap from my mother because you can’t seem to listen. Emma, you better get it together.”
Tears slip from the corners of my eyes. “Mom … I…”
Her eyes soften unexpectedly. She sighs and cradles me in her arms. “I know, child.”
My tears dampen her collar.
“I know you didn’t mean it. But we have rules for a reason.
To protect us, and not just from the racist-ass white folks, but our own, too.
Our enemies killed your sister, and they’re still out there.
I’m hard on you for your own good, Emma.
As a Black mother, the threat of losing your baby to a world that doesn’t love them like you do is always present.
And our family has lost too much already.
You and Demetri are all your father and I have left. I must protect you both until—”
Suddenly a raven flies by too close, too fast, landing on a tree branch above our heads.
Mom shivers, keeping her eye on the bird. “We’ve got no room for you to be impulsive. I hope you learned that lesson tonight. Obedience is as important as oxygen.” With those cryptic words, Mom climbs into the car.
I trudge toward a different Bentley, wrench open the door, and sink into my seat. The door glides shut behind me.
Papa rolls down his window and snaps his fingers. The circus illusion fades away as if it were nothing more than a child’s chalkboard drawing washed away by a spring rain. Nothing is left but an abandoned parking lot, a mob of confused, angry people, and a dead body.
Demetri sits next to me in the driver’s seat. He flashes me a somber smile. “You okay?”
“Like you really care.”
He plays with the glowing buttons on the dashboard and jerks the key, and the Bentley rumbles on. The other cars follow under Mom’s command.
The car rolls around to the front of where the circus just stood, speeding by the memory of our striped tents. I close my eyes, the family crest blazing in my mind, mocking me.
When I was a child, Grandmère had explained our family seal to me. “The moon is our essence, our power. The ouroboros, a reminder. The snake will eat its own tail because nothing can be created without destruction first. It is the eternal dance.”
As I open my eyes, the snake on the gate brightens to gold for a second, before shifting to a bloody shade of red. The crescent moon in the center of the ouroboros glows in a shimmering white ice. Frozen. Just like the blood in my veins when an angry crowd surges toward us.
The streets of Harlem glow like an electric circus.
Red taillights, white streetlights, and yellow cabs with black-and-white checkered stripes roll by.
I hold my breath until the mob chasing us becomes nothing but fading dots in the rearview mirror.
“We barely made it.” Demetri flicks his turn signal on.
We glide past three-story brick row homes with cracked stairs and smudged window ledges.
Colorful curtains whip outward from open windows, catching the steamy breeze, twisting and flapping in the air.
A child screeches, “Grandma!,” his head bobbing out of a window as he tries to get the attention of an old lady in a tattered housedress.
A red bandana rests over her hair curlers as she sits on a stoop, cooling herself with a flowered fan.
Black men with short beards and tall hats hang on the corner smoking by a store.
“Is this how it’s always gonna be, Demetri?
Running, just to perform the same acts for a bunch of white folks who don’t see what we can really do?
” I lean my forehead on the cool glass, inhaling the scent of sweat as I study the tall buildings and trolleys beyond my sad reflection.
I envy the people out there, the normal lives they live.
“Granting a stranger’s wish without knowing what it was? That kind of impulsiveness puts us all in danger.”
“Thanks. I’d rather be eaten by a lion than listen to another lecture. Maybe we should have let them catch us, because living like this? We’re dead already.”
“Nah, Em. I’ve never felt more alive.” Demetri glances quickly at the people we pass. “We live a life others dream of.”
“Says the liar…”
“Trust is a two-way street.” He sighs. “If we can’t trust you to play by the rules, why would we trust you with—” He stops short and bites his lip.
“With what?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Tell me the truth.” My heart sinks.
I knew my family was keeping secrets, but it still hurts to know the people who love me best don’t trust me.
“You know I’ve had a mental block since the accident and the trauma of Grace’s death.
It’s not fair to hide things, to keep me in the dark. ”
“Change the station. 1922,” he says.
I turn the dial back from 1943. Crunchy static fills the car, setting my teeth on edge until the crooning voice of Josephine Baker trickles out of the speakers.
I let my fingers rest on the console; it always makes me proud that one of my great-grandfathers used his gift, the only bright spot of this terrible curse, to build these everlasting vehicles, easing our ability to move through time.
Demetri stays silent, and I let it go. Nothing could pry information from Demetri that he doesn’t want to give. I hate and love his stubborn streak. It’s the one thing we have in common. But I will get to the bottom of this, somehow.
I lean back in my seat as time unravels beyond the window. Old buildings become newer, sagging porches lift. Near the highway on-ramp, gloomy candlelight dances behind the black wooden slats boarding the window of a ragged hotel with charred bricks.
“Slow down,” I say. “This is the best part!”
“What? The way the music takes us through time?”
“No, silly. Seeing it change. When you drive too fast, it blurs too much.”
Demetri slows the car. I stare at the hotel window. The boards that cover it vanish, and smooth glass replaces them as time rewinds, like a movie played in reverse.
The row houses ignite with flames, fire lapping at their walls. “This place burned?”
Smoke leaches into the dark sky above the hotel. A brown face pushes through the haze inside the building. It’s a teenage girl, with eyes that are wild and frenzied. She’s shrieking as she bangs on the window. The right side of her flesh is covered in burns, but the left side is beautiful.
“Oh my God!” I grip the door handle, instinctively trying to jump out and help her.
“She’s been dead for years,” Demetri says, the reminder hitting me in the chest.
The red embers around her turn to a tangerine gold. The bright colors of the world fade to a sepia-toned hue and shift into black-and-white.
Demetri inches the car forward. “The car door won’t open until we reach our destination. You know that. Get it together.”
I press my palm to my chest. The Bentley is sealed tight as a tomb.
“Lots of people died in those flames,” he says.
“But they had hopes, dreams—”
“Had is the key word,” Demetri says. “Living this life is hard. Seeing what we see, moving the way we do. But we can’t stop anything or meddle. No matter what. You know the rules.”
“But why can’t we? Like really?” The waves of the fire grow lower as we continue our journey backward in time, but her terror echoes. “What’s the point of having power if you’re scared to use it? People need us.”
“I told you a million times. Mom’s told you.
We can’t intervene, not like you did tonight.
We might accidentally erase the moments that led to important events, births, deaths,” Demetri says.
“We don’t get to change history or risk causing a ripple effect in the future that we’ll regret.
” He grips the wheel. “Hell,” my brother adds, “one wrong move in the past could prolong slavery or one of the world wars, killing millions. That’s why our rules are important.
An angry white mob—kind of like the one you caused—could’ve burned Harlem to the ground, like Greenwood, Black Wall Street. ”
The fire shrinks. The moon glows, the sun rises and sets, and the moon blinks by again with bobbles of sun in between as Demetri accelerates and the days flip by.
Rain pours and dries up; sparrows extend their shiny wings and soar backward in the sky above us. Rainbows flash above and flicker away.
Demetri’s the history buff in our family. He spends his free time reading up on each location we travel to, his way of trying to make sure we’re safe no matter where or when we go. We can’t go too far back without trouble, and we always have to be prepared.
We roll farther back in time. The hotel is whole now, restored.
Sparkling glass shimmers in its windows, and a fresh-painted sign reads SPECTOR INN.
The hotel’s once-saggy, charred roof lifts, pointing to heaven, and its ragged columns become a flawless ivory.
The hotel’s formerly abandoned balconies are alive with booming music. Luxurious drapes adorn the windows.
“Think of the people we pass as ghosts,” Demetri says. “Shadows from a past most don’t see.”