Winter Oranges by Marie Sexton Page A

anyway, I’m sure your mother doesn’t see it that way.”
    “It doesn’t matter. She’s an agent now. She has other clients. Other projects.” Jason shrugged. “It’s not like there’s bad blood between us. We just don’t have much to say.” He chewed his thumbnail, eyeing the online genealogy site. He could start with his grandparents, but he knew it was silly to create more work for himself when all he had to do was make a simple phone call.
    He swallowed his pride and dialed.
    Neither of his parents recalled having any connection to Tennessee. They were able to give him the names of their grandparents, and a couple of their great-grandparents, but nothing more than that.
    It felt like a good start, but Jason quickly found that doing genealogy online was far more difficult than the commercials would have him believe. Ben grew bored with the process after only a few minutes and went back to watching reruns of Seinfeld on TV, leaving Jason to fight his way through the lineage lists himself. It might have been easier if he’d had one specific line to trace back, but there was no way of knowing which of his eight great-grandparents shared Ben’s blood, and with each new generation, the number of names he had to trace doubled. His list soon included more than fifty ancestors. The problem was, he couldn’t find the maiden names of most of the women, and many of the men had frustratingly common names. Without knowing their birthdates, or where they’d been born or died, he had no way of knowing which Mary Smith or John Walker was actually connected to his family.
    Jason stopped, chewing a cuticle in frustration. He wasn’t following the trunk of the tree to its roots as he’d envisioned. He was running up and down its branches like a mad squirrel, trying to find the one slender twig that took him where he longed to go. Even after feeding his credit card number into the genealogy sites, he got nowhere near Tennessee or anybody with the last name of Ward.
    Maybe he was going about it wrong. Tracing his own lineage meant following the branches of an ever-widening tree. But he knew his final destination: Ben.
    “What was your sister’s full name?”
    “Sarah Elizabeth Ward.”
    “And do you know her birthday?”
    “ September 9, 1837 .”
    But even with that information, Jason came up empty. Most of the records from the nineteenth century weren’t available online. He tried searching for Ben and Sarah’s father, and for Theodore Jameson, the man Sarah was supposed to marry, but couldn’t find him either.
    “The only way to figure it out,” he told Ben at last, “would be to drive to all of these cities and dig through the archives in their libraries or courthouses or . . . or wherever the hell old records like this are kept. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
    Ben watched him for a moment, chewing his lip as he debated. “Why does it matter?” he asked at last.
    Jason didn’t have a good answer. He’d had some half-brained idea that finding their shared ancestry would lead to an explanation of Ben’s predicament, but when he sat back and looked at it logically, he realized it was ridiculous. How would knowing a name change anything? Even if he knew which parent shared Ben’s blood, it got him no nearer to understanding Ben’s situation. It certainly didn’t offer any kind of solution. After all, if any of his cousins or aunts or uncles had any kind of mystical powers, he was sure he would have heard of it. His mother would undoubtedly have found a way to make a dime off it by now.
    Still . . .
    “Aren’t you curious?” Jason asked.
    Ben graced him with one of his sweetest smiles. “Not really. You can see me, and you can hear me. That’s good enough for me.”
    “But what if this is the answer?”
    “The answer to what?”
    “To getting you out of the globe?”
    Ben scowled and turned away. The more time they spent together, the more Jason found himself wondering about the globe that