SIX

“SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED about Ethan Winters?” Boz asked when the other Ghosts and I, along with several members of all three teams—Past, Present, and Future—were gathered in Conference Room A for our initial Scrooge meeting. “Havisham?”

Stephanie slid a folder over to me. I opened it and scanned through my report of the memory sift and the notes my staff had put together from their research into Ethan’s past so far.

I cleared my throat. “Well, Ethan’s had kind of a tough life, it turns out.” Next to me I heard frantic scribbling. I turned to see that Stephanie had taken out her notebook and was jotting all of this down. Like this meeting was a class she’d have a test on later.

“Indeed. A tragic past is quite normal for a Scrooge,” Boz said, way too cheerfully.

This, I would argue, is why Scrooges are so messed up. It wouldn’t be hard to avoid becoming a bad person if your life had always been full of ice cream and apple pie. But we’d been given rotten apples. It was monumentally unfair, in my opinion.

“His dad died when he was twelve,” I said. “After that he was left on his own a lot.”

“A history of isolation, yes. That’s typical.”

Scribble scribble scribble, went Stephanie.

“Have you identified a Marley?” Boz asked.

It was early in the game for that—the Marley was our starting point in April and May, but I’d been in Ethan’s memories only the one time. At this stage I was expected to do sifts once a week, unless getting the right details out of Ethan proved difficult—then I’d get approved for twice a week, although more than that was apparently not great for the Scrooge’s brain. But right now I was still trying to find my way around Ethan’s mind, sort the flashes I’d seen that meant something from the random, insignificant ones. No one expected me to have the answers yet. Still, I thought about the old man with the cold blue eyes I’d seen during those first moments in Ethan’s memory. He was old—which Marleys tended to be. Obviously rich, from the impeccable three-piece suit he’d been wearing, another Marley quality. And scowling.

“It’s too soon to tell,” I said, “but I do have a hunch.”

“Follow it,” Boz ordered like this was his idea. “It’s like I’ve always said: follow your instincts.” He turned to Dave. “Copperfield, tell us about the present.”

Dave scratched at his beard. “Ethan’s been easier than most Scrooges to get our eyes and ears on, since he’s in the city. He recently became legally independent even though he’s not eighteen yet—‘emancipated,’ they call it, and now he resides in a penthouse apartment on the corner of Sixty-Fourth and Third, which used to belong to his grandfather. His mother lives in the Bronx with her second husband. She calls Ethan once a week, but otherwise he has no family interaction. He lives alone. He attends the Browning School on Sixty-Second, where he’s a straight-A student and the captain of the tennis team, but I wouldn’t exactly call him popular. He has friends, but no close friends, as we’d expect in a Scrooge. And outside of school he spends most of his time at the New York Athletic Club.”

“So he’s a—what’s the word?—jock?” Boz said.

I pictured Ethan swimming, the way his arms had sliced through the cool water in his dream.

Dave shook his head. “I think he focuses on athletics only because he wants to perfect himself. It’s very important to him to have the best of everything. The best equipment, the best scores, the best body. He simply wants to be the best.”

An admirable quality, if you ask me, sniffed my Inner Yvonne.

“Any ideas on the Cratchit?” Boz asked. That was always Dave’s first assignment after he set up surveillance: find the Bob Cratchit, who was usually an employee of the Scrooge’s or someone he had a kind of authority over. It’d be interesting to see how this worked out in Ethan’s case, seeing as he was only seventeen and unlikely to be anybody’s boss.

Dave flipped through his notes. “I’ve got a good candidate. Daniel Denton is his name, but the students refer to him as ‘Dent.’ He’s a scholarship student—a hilarious, sweet kid, actually—only obviously lacking the wealth and advantages the other boys at the school enjoy. Ethan Winters seems to take personal offense that this kid is at Browning, so he’s always playing cruel jokes on him. Right now he has Dent believing that there’s a secret society at the school—the Eucleian Society. Dent wants to join, of course. So Ethan has Dent doing all of these initiation stunts. First it was sticking a raw egg in the back of the desk of an unpopular teacher. Then he made Dent come to school in a toga and recite a poem at the top of the school stairs just as class was getting out. That sort of thing.”

“But there is no Eucleian Society, right?” I asked.

“Not at Browning. So Ethan has Dent doing all of these humiliating things for nothing. Anyway,” Dave summed up, “he exerts a kind of power over this boy, which is consistent with a Cratchit. I’m not certain yet, but like Holly said, I’ve got a hunch about him.”

“Oh, I love hunches,” Boz said. “How about you, Blackpool?” He turned toward the other side of the table, where the GCF was brooding. “What does the future have in store for our Mr. Winters? Any hunches there?”

“I have seen the Scrooge’s death,” intoned Blackpool. That was grim, but it wasn’t surprising. Every Scrooge we encountered had less than a year to live. It didn’t matter how they old they were—they were all fated to die sometime in the next twelve months. I’d asked Boz about that once, and he’d said it was one of the criteria Blackpool used to choose a Scrooge—his “imminent demise,” he called it. “They have to run out of all the other chances that life has given them to change on their own,” Boz had explained. “So our chance will be their last chance.”

“When will it happen? How?” asked Boz.

“Struck by an automobile,” Blackpool answered, “on Christmas morning.”

Wait, what?

“On Christmas Day, this year?” Stephanie sounded as shocked as I felt. “You mean that if we don’t succeed, if Ethan Winters doesn’t see the error of his ways and change his present course, he won’t even make it through one day?”

“Six fifty-six a.m.,” Blackpool said with an air of grim satisfaction. “On Broadway.”

There was a moment of silence. I shivered. I knew exactly what dying after you got hit by a car felt like, after all. Not fun.

“But that’s what we’re here to do, right?” Of course Dave, with his endless optimism, was the first to recover from this morbid news. “We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re going to change the Scrooge’s fate.”

“Well said, Copperfield,” Boz agreed. “That is exactly what we’re here to do. We are going to save this Scrooge. Or at least we’ll give it our very best try.”

Right. I suddenly noticed that everyone in the room was smiling. It was a strange expression that’d been going around the office lately, this knowing smile that made me feel vaguely like I was missing something. Not to mention that everyone was staring right at me. I guessed Blackpool had made the announcement, and Dave and Boz had expressed their enthusiasm for the project, and now it was my turn.

“Yeah,” I said awkwardly. “That’s right. We’re going to do this thing. We are totally going to save this Scrooge.”

The Jacob Marley was usually pretty easy to identify. He was always a type of role model, but never in a positive way—he encouraged the young Ebenezer Scrooge to put blind ambition above everything else; he nurtured the Scrooge’s flaws, year after year, until they became equals and people had a hard time even telling them apart. Then eventually the Marley died and left the Scrooge to carry on for both of them.

I knew what had happened to my own Marley—Yvonne Worthington Chase. She was doomed to forever wander the earth, invisible, watching all the people come and go in all the wrong clothing choices, but never being able to do anything about it. Probably still wearing her Diane von Furstenberg and smelling like a corpse and dragging around her chains of pearls. It wasn’t the kind of ending I would have wished for her.

Yvonne wasn’t a nice person—I knew that. But all these years later, even after I understood her part in my own screwed-up fate, I was still grateful for what she did for me. Because before Yvonne, everyone used to say I looked like my mother. They always meant it as a compliment, being that my mom was drop-dead gorgeous. She and my dad met at one of those crazy exclusive parties in the Valley. By then both of them were already famous in their own right, but my dad didn’t watch a lot of TV, so he didn’t recognize her as the Ariana Jackson, and my mom had heard of Gideon Chase but never met him in person. He wore board shorts and flip-flops, or so the story went. She wore a white sundress and a magnolia in her hair. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her” was how my dad always told it, and I knew exactly what he meant. There was something mesmerizing about her, something that made you want to keep staring at her face. Her beauty was completely effortless, too. Even without makeup, she could light up a room.

I did look like her. Sort of. My eyes were the same shade of golden brown, my nose was long and straight with the small bump at the end, my bottom lip was much fuller than the top one, and my chin came to a point that was nearly too sharp, just like hers. But Mom’s hair was a shiny chestnut color and fell in perfect waves down her back. My hair was dull as muddy water, half curly, half limp. My teeth were crooked, and my ears—the only thing that I could clearly tell I inherited from my dad—stuck out horribly from my head. I was all angles, where Mom was gentle curves. She kind of floated when she walked. I slouched. Mom was luminous, amazing, charismatic. I was frizzy. Awkward. Shy. I was like a bad photocopy of her, which made it even worse, because people couldn’t help but compare us.

But Mom’s beauty didn’t last. She lost her hair and was left with a few little fuzzy strands that clung damply to her nearly bare skull. Her skin became sallow. Her face puffed out from all the drugs they pumped into her. Her lips chapped. Her eyelashes and eyebrows fell out. Her body withered away so much she started to look like a gruesome stick figure—her head abnormally large, bobbling on top of an intersection of straight, indefinable lines. She was ugly by the end. It was the thing that made her the angriest, I think—the cancer stealing her beauty. It wasn’t enough that she had to suffer so much and die so young. She had to die ugly, too.

That’s how we ended up with Yvonne. She was just Yvonne Worthington then, well established as a fashion stylist but not überfamous yet. She was in the middle of her first season of her fashion reality show. She’d worked with my mom a few times before the cancer, done her up for the Emmys one year. But when Yvonne heard she was sick, she pressured my mom to be on her show. So one day she showed up at our house with her camera crew, bringing with her a series of glamorous wigs, clothes that would disguise how frail my mother had become, products like organic bath soaks and soothing lotions and makeup that would hide the circles under Ariana Jackson’s bloodshot eyes. I remember that day like it was yesterday.

“This is so kind of you,” my mother kept saying, but she didn’t really want the attention. She’d only said yes to the whole thing because it was impossible to say no to Yvonne.

“I just thought you might want to feel human again,” Yvonne said sweetly.

“That really is amazing of you,” said my dad. He smiled at her. He genuinely meant it. “Thank you so much.”

After she’d talked to my parents for a while, got some good footage, made my mother look less like Gollum, Yvonne took me aside. “And let’s see you, my little darling,” she said, pulling me out to arm’s length to give me a once-over. “Well. You look just like your mother.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Though I really think we should do something about that hair.”

I stared up at her. Having this reality-show-personality in my house felt a bit unreal, like there was a lioness stalking around the living room. I could see that Yvonne had carefully constructed every part of herself—her long platinum hair, her perfect makeup, her form-fitting black clothes. Even then I understood that her appearance was like her armor, her shield against the world. She looked tough and smart and capable of anything.

I thought, She’s not going to get sick. She’s not going to die.

And I wanted to be just like her.

That’s how it began. My dad married Yvonne about a year after Mom died. Yvonne was like a different person around my dad—she laughed at his jokes and hung on his every word and was always kind of petting him. He didn’t figure out what she was really like until it was too late to back out. Then he started disappearing into his work. And I started dyeing my hair blond and straightening it, so when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see my dead mother anymore. I saw Yvonne’s strength. I saw a fighter, a survivor, a realist. I saw a version of myself that I could live with. And that’s what got me through. So, in her own horrible way, Yvonne saved me.

Anyway. That was my Marley. I had a hunch that Ethan’s was his grandfather. The old man with the cold blue eyes. I’d seen only a flash of him during my first memory sift with Ethan, and he had the right look, as I mentioned, but most of all it was the feeling I’d gotten when that image had flitted through Ethan’s mind—a kind of hard reverence that I recognized, a mix of dislike and admiration. So during the next sift, I went hunting for Ethan Jonathan Winters I. Ethan Senior.

He wasn’t super difficult to locate. He hadn’t been around much when Ethan was little—I got the impression, sorting through the past here and there, that he and Ethan’s father hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye about most things. But after Ethan’s father died, the grandfather started popping up all over the place like a cantankerous old penny.

I picked one of the keener memories and honed in on it: Ethan knocking on the door to his grandfather’s study. If I had to place us in time, I’d say this was after his dad had died (there was just that particular tang of grief in Ethan’s awareness that I was so familiar with myself—the terrible ache), but not long after. Ethan and his mother and sister were staying at what was then Ethan Senior’s penthouse until his mother could get her feet under her. At least that was what the old man kept telling everyone. Kid Ethan thought this was strange for him to say, because his mother had never been off her feet, that he knew. But the apartment had plenty of room, and Ethan felt safe there. Like the bad things that happened in the world couldn’t happen in that place. Grandfather had so much money that nothing could touch him.

Ethan knocked on the study door. A sharp voice told him to come in.

His grandfather was on the phone. “I don’t care whose fault it is,” he was saying. “Fix it.” He waved Ethan inside. “You’ve got until Monday, or you’ll be looking for another job. Good-bye.” He slammed the phone down and glared at little Ethan. “What do you want?”

Heart beating fast, Ethan handed him a report card. His grandfather scanned it quickly.

“It’s acceptable,” he said.

The last time Ethan had given his report card to his dad, he’d received a high five and a rough hug and a “what a brain you’re becoming,” before his father had whipped out his wallet and given him ten dollars—one for every A he’d earned. Then they’d gone to get ice cream.

His grandfather frowned. “I suppose you expect some sort of congratulations, but you’ll get no such thing from me. If you want a trophy, go join Little League.”

Ethan straightened. “I don’t care about a trophy, sir. Mom’s out of town until Tuesday, so I need you to sign it. To prove that you’ve seen it.”

“Oh.” The old man hastily scrawled his signature at the bottom of the paper. He pushed it back toward Ethan. “There you are.” Then he picked up his phone and dialed. “Mary,” he barked when the person on the other end picked up. “Call HR and have them start processing Hopkins’s termination. Have them deliver his pink slip on Tuesday.”

He hung up again.

Ethan didn’t say anything, but his grandfather explained anyway. “I don’t give second chances,” he said. “Second chances make you weak. He’ll be better off if I fire him. This way he’ll learn.”

His grandfather had apparently said a lot of that kind of thing to Ethan over the years. This was the first time, though, that Ethan paid attention. He’d been listening closely ever since, and now he could flip through these tidbits of advice like songs on a playlist.

Never give anything away unless you know it will benefit you somehow in the long run.

Never settle for a woman who isn’t beautiful. But take care that she’s not stupid, either. Beautiful, stupid women have been the undoing of many a great man.

Don’t let anybody get to you, and if they get to you, don’t let them see it. Never let them see you weak.

It was just like the way I heard my Inner Yvonne. Pure gold Marley-type stuff.

I looked for another memory of the old man and pinged on a particular Christmas morning sometime after the report card moment. The Winters family was still living in the penthouse, gathered in the living room opening presents that were piled neatly on the coffee table—no tree in the old man’s place, no other decorations, no Christmas spirit evident anywhere. Ethan was in a better mood than the Christmas with the family in the coffee commercial—he’d just received that new gaming system he’d wanted, so he was kind of happy. And he wanted to make his mom feel better, because he knew she was hurting, too.

“Thanks, Mom. This is awesome,” he said, and tried to give her a smile.

There had been kindness in him, I thought. Once.

“Rots your brain,” Ethan Senior muttered from his overstuffed leather chair in the corner. He was practically scowling the entire time the present opening was happening. “That’s why this generation is made up of morons—because their parents just plug them in and let the television do the raising.”

I felt Ethan’s smile fade. His mother tried to act like she hadn’t heard the insult. His sister, though, who seemed about seventeen, looked at her grandfather and smirked. “Whereas you just left the raising to the hired help, isn’t that right, Grandpa?”

Jack kind of rocked. Ethan thought so, too. There was a fearlessness to her. She’d never cared what other people thought of her. If she wanted to dye her hair neon pink, she did it. If she wanted to wear combat boots with a plaid miniskirt, she wore them. She’d told Ethan that her nickname at school was Honey Badger. He had no idea what that meant.

“Don’t be impertinent,” snapped Ethan Senior.

“I can’t seem to help myself,” she shot back with a falsely sweet smile. “It must be my terrible upbringing.”

Ethan’s mother raised her hand. “Let’s try to get through this peaceably, please.” She bent to pick up another present from the table, a long silver-wrapped box. She read the tag and then handed it to Jack.

“Who’s this from?” Jack asked, frowning.

“From me. And it’s more than you deserve,” answered the old man.

Jack unwrapped the package, revealing a velvet box. She opened it. Inside was a diamond bracelet, which was totally familiar—I’d seen that bracelet the first time I’d been in Ethan’s mind. It was important, I felt. A key image that he carried with him. A turning point.

“Well?” the old man demanded after a minute. “What do you think?”

“What is it, exactly?” Jack asked, staring down at the glittering string of jewels.

“It’s a tennis bracelet. Isn’t that what the young girls like to wear? It cost a pretty penny, I’ll tell you that.”

“And what am I supposed to do with it?” Jack clearly wasn’t as impressed as she was supposed to be. “I’m not really into tennis.”

“Wear it. Show your friends. That way they’ll know you’re a Winters.”

She shut the box. “No, thank you, Grandfather.” Her tone was surprisingly polite.

The old man’s face was slowly turning a beet red color, but his expression was calm, collected. “You don’t want it?”

“It’s not my taste,” she pointed out.

“As if you had any taste. Fine.” He held out his hand for it. “Give it back to me.”

She did. He immediately held the box out to Ethan. “This bracelet is worth twenty-five thousand dollars,” he said coldly. “If your sister’s too stupid to accept it, I want you to have it. Keep it. Sell it, when you’re old enough. It will be part of your inheritance.”

“Don’t call her stupid.” Ethan’s mother had a protective arm around Jack now. “We’re here because you wanted us to be here. If you treat us this way, we won’t come back.”

“In what way have I treated you? I’ve paid for the children’s school, shoes, clothing. I’ve kept you out of the poorhouse after my son died,” scoffed the old man.

“I didn’t ask you to do any of those things,” said Ethan’s mother. “Get your coats, kids. We’re going.”

That was clearly the moment when Ethan’s mom officially got her feet back under her.

Jack went out to the hall to fetch her jacket, but Ethan hesitated. His grandfather was still holding out the box. Still looking at him with eyes that were like chips of ice.

“Ethan, come on,” his mother urged from the doorway.

“Take it,” the elder Ethan Winters urged.

“Ethan, now.”

“Don’t let them make you soft,” Ethan Senior said softly. “It ruined your father, and it will ruin you, too. And never pass up an opportunity to gain an asset.”

“I’m coming, Mom,” Ethan said. He didn’t really know what the word asset meant, but he understood twenty-five thousand dollars well enough. He glanced over his shoulder, and his mother wasn’t looking at him—she was messing with Jack’s scarf—so he reached out and took the velvet box from his grandfather, who smiled. Ethan opened the box quickly, and then he slipped the diamond bracelet into his pocket.

“Good boy,” he heard his grandfather whisper as he walked out with his mother.

Oh yeah, I thought. This guy has Marley written all over him.

I spent a few minutes perusing the moments surrounding his death—his stroke, the series of hospital visits, his funeral. Then I watched from fifteen-year-old Ethan’s eyes as he took the urn of his grandfather’s ashes into the study and set it on his grandfather’s desk. He stood there for a minute looking around at all of the items that had belonged to Ethan Jonathan Winters I—books and papers, mostly, an antique clock ticking on the wall. And he actually missed the tough old bird.

“He was a bad man.” Jack came into the study. She was a senior in high school now, and she’d dyed her hair blue to match her eyes. “Don’t you remember how he used to talk down to Dad?”

“What are you talking about?” Ethan asked sullenly.

“Dad quit the company,” Jack said. “He left to go back to school for something besides business. That never sat well with Grandfather. They fought about it all the time before Dad died.”

“Grandfather was a great man,” Ethan said, his throat tight. “Dad was a screwup.”

Jack’s eyes filled with hurt and surprise. “You look just like Dad, you know?” Her expression hardened. “But now I think maybe you’re more like dear old Grandfather, after all.”

After she’d gone, Ethan thought about the diamond bracelet. He’d kept it hidden in an envelope at the back of his desk for two years, and he hadn’t told a soul about it, ever. He looked again around his grandfather’s office. He’d been told, just that morning, that the old man had left everything to him. His fortune. The business, as soon as he was old enough to run it. This very building. It’s all going to be mine, Ethan thought.

“Hey, Holly, he’s starting to move into a lighter sleep stage,” came Grant’s voice in my ear. “You should head back soon. Or give him a second dose of the lavender, if you need to keep working.”

It was late, and I had what I’d come for. Slowly I untangled myself from Ethan’s mind until we were fully separate again, him lying on his side in his near pitch-black bedroom, muttering in his sleep, me standing over him. I detached the transducer carefully and made my way back to the closet door, which was glowing around the edges. I opened it, stepped through, and was instantly back at Project Scrooge. The lights went on. Grant and Marty, both looking bleary-eyed, gave me a thumbs-up and started to gather their cards. They had apparently been playing poker all night while I was slaving away. Slackers. Stephanie bounded over to me with a vanilla latte. I sipped at it blissfully as she and I walked back to my office, our footsteps echoing in the empty hallway. The building was quiet this time of night. Deserted. I liked it so much better that way.

“So, did you get the Marley?” Stephanie asked as I plopped down at my desk. I put my arms over my head and stretched, rolled my neck from side to side. I was so exhausted it was suddenly hard to keep my eyes open. Sometimes the mind melding took a lot out of me. Especially those times when the Scrooge really reminded me of, well, me.

“I got the Marley,” I said with a tired smile.