“I’ll speak to you soon, Dr. Munsterberg,” Duke said. But the man didn’t even hear him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Tess

Tess’s grandpa Ben always said that if you want to know the future, read about the past.

Mohican historian Hendrick Aupaumut once wrote:

A great people traveled from the north and west. For many, many years they moved across the land, leaving settlements in rich river valleys as others moved on. Reaching the eastern edge of the country, some of these people settled on the river later renamed the Delaware. Others moved north and settled in the valley of a river. . . . They named this river Mahicannituck and called themselves the muh-he-con-neok, the people of the waters that are never still.

He was writing, of course, about the migration of his own people. One wonders what the Mohicans, the Munsee, and the Lenape thought when they saw the first European ships sailing up the Hudson or blundering over the sharp rocks toward Manhattan. What did they make of the unwashed white people who stank of sweat and beer piling onto the shore? Did they realize that the Puritans, so persecuted in their own countries, believed that this rich, forested land was theirs for the taking, and that they did not have to ask or share?

And what did the natives make of Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1614, as he maneuvered his ship through Hell’s Gate, up the East River and into the Long Island Sound, to become the first white man to view Astoria? Were they more curious than scared? Perhaps it was the storytellers among them, the wives and mothers, the ones who would tear the world apart for the sake of their children, who got a bad feeling in their guts, who were haunted by uneasy dreams. Perhaps they were visited by their ancestors, and warned of a coming storm. But then maybe even the storytellers couldn’t anticipate how many colonists would arrive, and how quickly. Who among them could know they would soon be forced to migrate west, or stay and wrestle for slivers of the land they had inhabited for thirteen thousand years? How could they have guessed that the treacherous rocks and reefs in Hell’s Gate would be dynamited, or that thousands upon thousands more strangers would pile onto the shores of Queens to join them: Italians, Greeks, Colombians, Chinese, Guyanese, as well as Indians, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Romanians, Filipinos, and Koreans?

Most of whom were asleep at four in the morning.

All except Tess Biedermann.

She must have drifted off for a little while, at least, and had a nightmare she didn’t want to remember, because Theo was slumped next to her bed, snoring, his hand around her wrist. Gently, she unclasped his fingers and pulled her arm away. She slid down to the end of the bed and slipped into her sneakers and a sweatshirt. Then, she crept downstairs as quietly as she could.