FIVE

“TESTING. ONE. TWO. TESTING.”

I pressed the receiver deeper into my ear and instantly regretted it. “I can hear you, Grant. God. You don’t have to yell.”

“Righto, boss,” he said, softer but still annoyingly loud. “We’re almost ready for you.”

“Wow. This is crazy.” Stephanie was practically jumping up and down, she was so excited. “Grant’s just going to push that little green button, and then this door”—she gestured to the shiny metal door that stood by itself in a frame in the center of the Transport Room—“this perfectly normal-looking door, is going to open up into Ethan Winters’s bedroom?”

“That’s how it works,” said Grant. “Neat, huh?”

“The neatest!” Stephanie gazed at him admiringly.

“If we can ever confirm the guy’s asleep.” Marty sounded uncharacteristically irritated. “What is taking so long, Grant?”

“We’re waiting for his heart rate to drop to the appropriate levels,” Grant informed him, watching the set of monitors that showed a darkened bedroom from several different angles.

Right on cue, Ethan began to snore.

“Oh, come on, he’s sleeping!” Marty said. “Let’s do this already!”

“It has to be a deep sleep, moron. We don’t want him to wake up in the middle, do we?” Grant retorted.

I sighed and walked back and forth across the Transport Room, stretching my arms and legs. I’d been in the minds of five Scrooges in my time at PS, week after week, month after month, year after year, more than a hundred memory sifts, if I stopped to count, but this time, this first time inside Ethan’s head, it felt different. I had butterflies flapping around my stomach.

Get a grip, I told myself. He’s just another Scrooge.

“Are we there yet?” Marty complained.

“Shut it, Marty.” Grant was sure taking his sweet time with the monitors. Then finally he smiled. “Okay, Holly. We’re live in five. Four. Three. Two.”

He pressed the green button.

The gateway door started humming, and then glowing.

I zipped up the Hoodie.

“Holy wow!” Stephanie gasped. “Holly?”

“Yes?”

“I can’t even see you at all!”

“That’s the point.”

She reached out toward me blindly and caught my arm. She gasped again. “You’re completely invisible! Neat!”

I sighed. “Stephanie?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got to let go of my arm now. And get back so I can, like, open the door.”

She released me, and I stepped up to the silver door and put my hand on the knob. It had a kind of electric energy that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Lights going out,” Grant said, and the room went black. “Now everybody needs to be absolutely quiet while the gateway is open.”

“That means you, Stephanie,” I added.

She didn’t answer. It was too dark to tell, but she was probably making that zipped-lips motion.

“Let’s do this,” I whispered.

Very, very slowly, I turned the doorknob.

There was a tiny click, and then the door swung silently outward, revealing Ethan’s bedroom. Another step and I’d gone from 195 Broadway to Sixty-Fourth Street, almost a hundred city blocks in the blink of an eye.

In other words: neat.

I shut the door carefully behind me. My heart was pounding in my ears. I always felt like a total criminal when I was in a Scrooge’s bedroom for the first time. A cat burglar. I loved every minute of it. Call me an adrenaline junkie, but the memory sifts were like the only time since I’d been dead that I felt truly alive.

Moonlight was leaking through the window, enough that I didn’t need the night-vision goggles I always wore around my neck. I crept toward the sleeping figure on the bed.

Hello, Prince Charming, I thought as I stared down at his peaceful face. Although right now he was technically more of a Sleeping Beauty type.

“Do you read us?” I heard Grant’s small voice in my ear.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Ethan was sleeping on his back, but he wasn’t snoring anymore. I took a small aerosol can out of my pocket and sprayed the air around his face. It smelled like lavender air freshener, but it was actually a mist that would make him sleep more deeply. Just in case.

“His heart rate’s still good,” Grant reported. “Proceed with the mind meld.”

I dug into my other pocket for the transducer, a delicate line of thin, almost translucent wire attached to a small silver electrode. This I stuck gently to Ethan’s forehead.

“He lives here all by himself,” Grant said. “Not even a goldfish. Now that is sad, in my opinion. Everyone needs a pet or something. Remember that little spaniel that Elizabeth Charles had? She freaking loved that dog. I had a good feeling about how things would turn out for her, seeing that. Nobody can be all bad if they like dogs.”

I didn’t like dogs. I wasn’t much of a pet person of any kind. Early on after I’d become the GCP, when the isolation of the whole thing was killing me, I’d gone to a pet shelter. I thought I might get myself a cat.

Cats, as it turned out, are not too fond of well-preserved zombies.

“It was a really cute dog,” Grant said, and I got the idea that he was talking to Stephanie, not me. “White with tan spots, big floppy ears, huge brown eyes. What was its name, Marty? . . . Oh, that’s right. Berkeley. The dog’s name was Berkeley. Which was funny because Mrs. Charles’s ex-husband was a Stanford man.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I am trying to work here,” I hissed.

“Roger that,” Grant said. “Sorry.”

Carefully I unspooled the wire until I reached the other electrode, which I placed against my own temple. Then I took Ethan’s hand in mine. That’s how it worked. I needed the electrical impulse and the skin-to-skin contact.

Science and magic.

His hand when I took it was warm, his fingers long and slender, nails neatly trimmed. I leaned closer. God. Even in the dark, he was wildly attractive.

Focus, Holly. I closed my eyes, and almost immediately I was sucked into his dream.

He was dreaming about . . . swimming?

I knew from Dave’s reports that Ethan spent most of his free time at the New York Athletic Club, swimming and playing racquetball and squash, fencing and boxing and running around the track. There’d already been an argument inside Project Scrooge about whether it was ethical to videotape the inside of what was essentially a gym, which was only a step up from a bathroom in some people’s—cough, Boz’s—prim and proper eyes. In the end it’d been decided that there would be no video in the athletic or dressing areas of the club, just the dining and sitting rooms. It wasn’t likely that Ethan was going to be doing anything significant or exciting in those off-limits places anyway, Dave had reasoned. He just went there to work out.

We’d never had a Scrooge who’d been into fitness before. Usually they tended to stay at home and count their money.

Anyway, in his dream, Ethan swam up and down lane three of an old-fashioned indoor swimming pool. I could feel him in the dream, the water sluicing off his body, the coolness of it, the light wavering under the surface. It was like that when I was connected with the Scrooges. I saw what they saw. I felt what they felt. I could feel the way Ethan used swimming to quiet his thoughts, pushing himself relentlessly through the water, one stroke after another.

As dreams went, it was pretty boring stuff. It was definitely time to move on. I squeezed his hand gently, strengthening the link between us, and guided his consciousness away from the dream and into the storehouse of his memory.

For the first few seconds I was swamped by the sudden onslaught of sensation—tastes and smells and sounds popping up everywhere, images flashing through my mind.

A giant, long-necked dinosaur made of bones.

A little girl in a tiara.

The sensation of being small and riding on a man’s shoulders through a crowd.

Watching my parents ice-skate at Rockefeller Center.

The sound of a phone ringing.

The feeling of a crisp hundred-dollar bill in my hand.

A policeman at the door, frowning.

An old man with cold blue eyes.

A man with warm blue eyes I didn’t want to think about.

A diamond bracelet in a velvet box.

A ring.

I struggled to keep us separate through it all—what was Ethan and what was me—but it was hard. It was always hard, especially at first. You could get lost in the other person’s mind, forget where you ended and the Scrooge began.

Find a Christmas, I reminded myself. Get your bearings in his life.

When I first started working on the Project I couldn’t understand what Christmas really added to the situation. Why the Ghost of Christmas Past, I wondered? Why not just the Ghost of the Past in general? But five years of sifting memories had shown me that a person’s memory was keener on special occasions. It didn’t matter if a person loved or hated Christmas (and I for one still hated it); their emotions always ran deeper that time of year. And when you’re rummaging through thousands of memories, it’s easy to pick out the Christmas trees and the twinkling colored lights and the stupid Christmas carols, and that’s how you can mark the progression of time, one Christmas after another.

Plus, there was that whole “spirit of Christmas” thing that Boz was always going on about. Which I didn’t buy.

The first Christmas I picked up with Ethan was one when he was very young. At first all I could see was his snow boots. I felt them, too, on little-kid Ethan’s feet as he ran along some sort of path through a blanket of fresh snow. There was snow in the air. The path was lined with a wire fence and black lampposts every few yards, each post adorned with a red bow to celebrate the season. On the other side of the fence was a forest of leafless trees, their branches black and snow-laden. It was almost dark, the way it sometimes gets during a storm, and the sky and the ground were both muted shades of blue.

I could feel Ethan’s nose like it was my nose—it was cold, and his legs were tired, but it felt good to run after being cooped up so he didn’t care—he loved being the first person to make tracks in the new snow. He was smiling as he ran.

“Hey, buddy, come back!” came a voice from behind him. “Don’t get too far ahead.”

He stopped and turned around, breathless. Two figures came toward him up the path—a man in a gray wool jacket with a red plaid scarf and a girl in a puffy purple coat.

The man was his dad, I felt. He was the man with the warm blue eyes.

The girl was . . . Jack—that was the name Ethan labeled her with in his mind. His sister. She was older, maybe ten or eleven. Her cheeks were rosy, and her eyes were blue, too, bright with mischief. She reached down and grabbed a handful of snow and lobbed it at their dad, who roared in good-humored outrage and bent to scoop up his own snowball.

“Oh, you are going to pay for that,” his dad panted, and then he tried to tackle her, but she danced out of the way, laughing, and Ethan joined in the fight.

They went on playing in the snow—running and dodging and hurling snowballs at one another, completely destroying the serenity of this winter wonderland. The blue of the sky grew deeper. Suddenly the lamps went on, and then the trees lit up, too, each tree along the path wrapped in thousands of tiny white lights, like entire galaxies of stars against the backdrop of the snowy park. For a minute, Ethan and his dad and sister just stood there, spellbound by the sight. Then from somewhere in the distance came the muted sounds of a Christmas song played on a saxophone.

Ethan’s dad put his arms around his children and sang along. “Have yourselves a merry little Christmas. . . .” The words almost seemed to float in the air around them. “Let your heart be light. . . . From now on our troubles will be out of sight.”

Jack checked her watch.

“We should go, Dad,” she said. “Mom will be wondering what happened to us.”

I knew through Ethan that they’d been at the Museum of Natural History all afternoon. Ethan had liked the dinosaurs more than anything else. And his mom had promised to make spaghetti for dinner. His favorite.

“All right, we can go home,” his dad fake grumbled. “Let’s get you warmed up.” He tousled Ethan’s hair and pulled him into his chest. Ethan remembered exactly the way his dad had smelled that day—the mixture of deodorant and shaving cream and wet wool from his snow-sodden hat. That smell reminded him of happiness.

He hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

His mind jumped to another memory, which happened sometimes—one memory leading to another without me directing it. I tended to follow the Scrooge’s train of thought in those instances. It was usually connected, somehow, to something important. Like with this memory with the same little boy, a few years older, standing in front of a coffin.

Ethan didn’t linger there. He didn’t like to remember, even in his subconscious mind. He pressed the memory deep down inside him and moved on.

In the next memory his dad had been dead for more than a year. His mother was out working late, and his sister was at a friend’s. There was a nanny now, but she was in another room on the phone with her boyfriend, by the sound of it. Ethan was alone in the glow of the television. He was watching a commercial that showed a family having breakfast together before opening their presents around a beautiful Christmas tree. A coffee commercial playing a familiar song.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas. . . .

Ethan’s teeth clenched. I could feel the hate welling inside him, like a bitter taste in his mouth. He detested that family and their breakfast table and their stack of French toast and their steaming cups of supposedly delicious coffee. He loathed their Christmas tree and their presents and their matching pajamas. But most of all, he despised their smiling, happy faces.

He didn’t say the words, but they were there just the same.

Bah, humbug.

I knew exactly how he felt.

“Good sift tonight, Holly,” Grant said after I came back through the Portal.

“Yeah,” said Marty. “You’re a pro.”

“Thanks,” I said absently. Of course, Grant and Marty couldn’t know how the sift had actually gone. They could only see what the cameras saw—a dark bedroom and me standing over Ethan while he slept. I was the only one who truly knew what had been going on in the Scrooge’s mind.

“Now you’re supposed to fill out some sort of report?” piped up Stephanie.

Right, the report. If Project Scrooge was really my own personal version of hell, my hell was made up of never-ending paperwork.

I nodded and made my way back to my office. I told Stephanie to go home, I’d see her at the meeting in another few days. I didn’t want her pacing around while I wrote this dumb report, checking my grammar or highlighting all the important passages or something equally Stephanie-like. So then I was alone, finally, and I could think.

I spent ten minutes staring at my computer screen.

Ethan’s dad had died. It was so obvious that it was this single event that had put Ethan on the path to Scrooginess. And this I could totally understand.

My mom died when I was thirteen. It was like her death split an uncrossable line down the middle of my life, a before and an after.

Before, we lived in Beverly Hills in a house painted all warm, bright colors and filled with antiques and special flea-market finds that my mom had painstakingly collected and refinished, so every piece of furniture we owned was personal, she said. After, we lived in a pristine, sprawling place in Malibu, and the furniture and walls were mostly gray and white. Clean. Modern. Yvonne’s.

Before, Ro and I spent hours together, playing games by the pool and making the most elaborate paper dolls you’ve ever seen and dressing up in all my mom’s outrageously cool Hollywood clothes. After, we started hanging out at the beach, just watching the waves. And then hanging out less. And then not hanging out at all.

Before, my dad cracked jokes. After, he threw himself into work. He wanted to talk to me, sometimes, get involved in my life when it suited him to try, but he was never home. We didn’t talk about Mom.

Before, I was what you might call happy. After, it was like happy people became the enemy. Happy people were weak. They were clueless. They did stupid things like die on you.

Before, I thought Christmas was a day my mother had created entirely for my benefit. After, Christmas felt like a black hole that would suck me into it for weeks. It made me think of my mom when I didn’t want to think of her. Which understandably made me cranky, but you’re not allowed to be cranky on Christmas. You’re supposed to be all merry and bright.

After, I convinced myself that Christmas was just another day, an excuse to spend too much money on gifts people don’t really appreciate and go to lame parties where people wore Christmas sweaters—an affront to good fashion everywhere—and drank too much eggnog—possibly the grossest beverage ever to have been invented. After, when people said, “Merry Christmas,” I thought, Whatevs. Which was, I suppose, my version of Bah, humbug.

I shook my head, trying to clear out my crowded thoughts. I had to finish my work. I dashed off a quick report about the details of the sift and headed home, still thinking about Ethan’s dad and my mom the entire time. Like when Ethan was looking at that TV family all snug in their pain-free, insufferably content lives, hating them so much, how I felt like I instantly got him. I knew him.

That night I had a dream about my mom and Charlie Brown.

It was the last Christmas before she got sick. We spent that one in Hawaii, because my dad had to film there at the beginning of the year. We used to go with my dad on location all the time. Before, I mean. Anyway, in my dream/memory my mom somehow got this little tree to put up in our hotel room. A Charlie Brown tree, she called it, because there was this Charlie Brown Christmas special where Charlie is sent to get a tree and comes back with this stunted, tipped-over shrub, but when they decorate it, it magically becomes beautiful. So this Hawaii tree of ours was kind of pathetic, but it still deserved someone to care about it, Mom said. We didn’t have ornaments, so Dad made popcorn, and he and I sat on the bed threading it piece by piece onto a long strand of dental floss. Mom cut some napkins into odd little snowflakes. And we found some grocery store candy canes to hang on the branches.

“You see, you don’t need much to make Christmas,” Mom said after we were done decorating. The tree wasn’t pretty, but it was nice. It was ours. She planted a kiss on the top of my head. “All you need is love.”

In the dream, I wanted to say, “You’re wrong. We need you,” because somehow I knew it was only a dream, and I knew that she was dead—she’d been dead such a long time, it felt like forever—and I wanted to tell her that her dying had really screwed up everything for me. I was a freaking Scrooge now. I was dead, too, and where was she? If we were both dead, why couldn’t I find her? Why wasn’t she here? I wanted to ask her, but that’s when I opened my eyes.

I was back in New York City. Cars honking on the street below. I smelled peppermint.

I closed my eyes again. “Bah, humbug,” I said out loud to the empty room. “Whatevs. So what?”