Suddenly the smallest weight is lifted from my chest. Abe. My mom. They might not be gone from my life forever. If I make it through this—no, when I make it through this—I can see them. I can be with Abe. I can get my mom help.
I smile for the first time in a while. “That’s . . . really great. I just assumed—”
“Look, do you want to stand here and have a joint therapy session, or do you want to go to Dallas?” She raises an eyebrow at me and closes her fist around the earring. “I’ll be right back.”
She shakes her head as she walks out of the jewelry store a few minutes later, and I force myself to stop thinking about Abe. Stop imagining how our potential reunion would play out.
“Come on.” Her voice is heavy and sad, and she’s making me feel incredibly guilty. She leads me to a big brownstone on Washington Street, right where Macy’s is today. Iron letters float on a ledge welcoming us to Jordan Marsh & Company. Once inside, we wave off a petite sales clerk who attacks us with a perfume bottle that reeks like little old ladies. I leave the shopping to Yellow, and she buys us two very plain, pencil-thin dresses, one in a dark gray and one in a brown tweed, both of which look seriously itchy. Also, pencil skirts and I don’t exactly get along. But I squeeze myself into the gray dress, and we head to Logan.
Even at the ticket counter, I realize that air travel is completely different in 1963 from what it is today. Everyone in line is dressed in their Sunday best. Suits and ties for the men. Dresses, hose, hats, and gloves for the women. We buy our tickets from a young, chirpy blond who takes our money and hands us tickets. Just like that. She doesn’t even ask for ID. Security is nonexistent. We just walk up to the gate, and no one seems to care that we’re traveling without bags. I mean, come on; Yellow and I are hitting just about every suspicious-traveler check mark that exists in the present, but no one bats an eyelash.
“This is weird, right?” I ask Yellow.
“Totally weird.” She points to the window and squints. “Are those . . . passengers out there? Having a picnic on the tarmac?”
The flight is even weirder. We go outside and climb a metal staircase to board. Everyone makes a huge deal that we’re on the plane. A perky young flight attendant who can’t be much older than I am asks me if it’s my first time flying as we board. I mutter that it’s not and push my way to my seat as I try to ignore the fact that the whole plane smells like a stale ashtray in a dingy New England crab shack.
I give Yellow the window seat and take the middle. A businessman in a suit and tie slides in next to us and immediately lights up a cigarette. Well, that explains the smell. I cough and pivot in my seat so that my knees are practically on top of Yellow’s, but either the man doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care. Probably the latter. Yellow and I spend the entire flight trying to make a plan by writing notes on cocktail napkins. There are some things you just can’t say out loud, and the fact that President Kennedy is less than twenty-four hours away from being dead is one of them.
We touch down in Dallas, and the flight attendant wishes everyone a great day as they start down the staircase. Except for me. She purses her lips shut and glares at me. I think it might be because I politely shook her off when she tried to serve me a hot meal that smelled like plastic and preservatives. There was no way I was eating it.
We hop in a cab and tell the driver to take us to Dealey Plaza.
“Dealey, eh?” the driver says in a slow voice. “You girls know the president is going to be riding through that plaza tomorrow, don’t you?”
“Mmm,” I say. “Yes.” I look at Yellow, and I see it written all over her face that the enormity of the situation has just hit her. The Kennedy assassination. We’re going to witness the Kennedy assassination. It’s one of those things that happened so long ago—I mean, before my mom was even born—but I’ve seen the video. I’ve read about it in the history books.
And all I can think about is my dad. He’s going to be there. Trying to stop it. And he’s going to die.
The driver drops us off in front of the Dallas County Records Building, a white, window-filled building that rises several stories in the air. The weather is crisp—almost cold. Across the street, kitty-corner to where we’re standing, is the seven-story, redbrick Texas School Book Depository.
“That’s it,” Yellow whispers.
I nod my head and look to a window on the corner of the sixth floor. That’s where Lee Harvey Oswald is going to be when he shoots and kills President Kennedy tomorrow. And where Alpha is going to try to earn a boatload of money off of stopping it.
I feel sick.
If this was a normal mission, I would be all over that building, all over this plaza. I’d scour every inch of the place and come up with a plan of attack. But it’s not a normal mission. I don’t even know what we’re doing here. How on earth are we supposed to figure out who CE is?
Yellow and I check into the cheapest motel we can find. There are two double beds covered in thread-bare dark-green comforters, a wobbly night table between them, a beat-up old dresser, and carpeting that I assume used to be beige at one time.
“I can’t believe we wasted all that money on the Parker House,” Yellow says as she drops down onto one of the beds.
“Mmm-hmm.” I stare at the dresser. There are scratches on the top of it, dozens of them. I trace my finger along the deepest ridge and wonder how it got there. Hotel key? That’s a scratch of anger. Of contempt. That scratch makes me think of Alpha.
“Iris,” Yellow says.
I turn.
“You need to be honest with me right now.” She drops her voice to a whisper. “Are you planning on stopping the assassination tomorrow?”
“No.” I drum my fingers across the dresser, then wipe them on my dress. Dusty. “Why would I stop it? If I do, Alpha gets ten million dollars, and who knows how we’d affect the world. I’m not going to risk it.”
Yellow nods her head, moving barely more than an inch in either direction. “And what about the other assassination?” She holds up a hand. “I’m not judging, but I need to be prepared.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Yellow raises an eyebrow. “Honestly, I don’t. I just . . . want to be there . . . when it happens. It’s the only lead we have right now.”
Yellow doesn’t say anything for a while. Then she simply says, “Okay.”
I don’t sleep very well. I toss. I turn. I imagine my dad’s face. I wonder if I’ll recognize him. There are only two pictures of my dad in my house. One sits on a side table in the living room. It’s a picture of my dad holding me as a baby, staring down into my eyes. My mom stands above him, watching us. My dad’s face is hidden, partially obscured behind a mop of floppy hair that covers his eyes. That picture is part of the reason I have such a complicated relationship with my mom, because you can see it written all over her face in the photo: She only has eyes for him. She tolerates me, but she loves my dad.
Except that now I know she did love me. She tried so hard to protect me. I shake my head; but the guilt remains, firmly nuzzled, no intention of budging.
The second picture sits on my mom’s dresser in her bedroom. It was taken on their wedding day. They’re looking right at the camera. I spent hours staring at that picture as a child. I used to talk to it. Talk to my dad.
In my head, my dad is going to look exactly like that picture tomorrow. Young. Handsome. Wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie.
Okay, that’s probably not going to happen. But it might.
I wake up Yellow at six the next morning, mainly because I’m jumpy, and I can’t sit there and watch her sleep anymore.
“Plan,” Yellow says as she flops our cocktail napkins full of poorly thought-out gibberish onto the bed. “We need to have a better idea what we’re doing.”