The Lost Choice

by Andy Andrews

  “What was your point?” Dylan asked.

  “The changes shown by computer age progressions are not normally distinct after only a year. My argument was that while that might be true for a teenager, when a child is eight or ten, the changes in appearance after only a year can sometimes be drastic. Add that to whatever someone might do to further alter their looks . . .” He shrugged.

  “Anyway, I did the workup with our computer people. We built a composite of fifteen pictures for each child. Different clothes, haircuts, hair colors, hats, the works.”

  “Mark,” Dorry said, astounded. “You did this the day I left? What was that, three days ago? How did all this happen so fast?”

  “Michael was at your parents. You were gone. This is the first I’ve been home. I stayed at the station and, during off time, got some guys to help. We sent e-mails all day and all night, with the composites, to eight hundred newspapers and over a hundred television stations. We were still sending them out when Chicago got the call. The kids were spotted being taken out of an apartment building and forced into a car. The woman who recognized them followed in her car and used her cell to phone it in. She stayed on them, relaying locations, right up until the Chicago guys took ’em down.”

  Abby said,“Wow. By your hand, the people shall be free. Had you thought of that?”

  Mark nodded. “I’ve thought of a lot of things lately. Especially ‘by your hand.’” He turned to Dorry.“Just so you know, I might be suspended.”

  “Why?” she asked incredulously.“For what?!”

  “The captain told me no. Budget cuts, manpower shortages, changes in case jurisdiction, blah, blah, blah. I did it anyway. I just kept thinking about those kids out there somewhere . . . their parents dying a slow death . . . ‘by my hand,’ you know? I couldn’t shake the thought that I had gotten these ideas from somewhere . . . God maybe . . .” Mark paused to see if they would laugh. They didn’t.“And I couldn’t get away from by my hand! Like, ‘okay, you have the idea, but unless you do something . . .’” He sighed.“So I did.”

  Gently touching Mark’s arm, Dorry asked,“You feel as though you did the right thing, don’t you?”

  He looked her in the eye.“Yes.”

  “So do I.” Dylan and Abby were nodding too. “I would’ve wanted someone to do something if it had been Michael.”Dorry shook her head as if to erase the thought. “Mark, we don’t know. It might have been ‘by your hand, the people shall live.’You may have saved their lives.”

  He stared at them for a moment, then said,“I thought of that before I did it. That’s part of why I did it. I’m telling you guys, I don’t mean to be melodramatic or anything, but these relics have changed me. This whole experience . . .” He closed his eyes, searching for the right words. Then, clarifying his thought, he said, “I don’t mean that the objects themselves have changed me, but their message has changed my thinking . . . profoundly.”

  “How do you mean?”Abby asked.

  “I’m starting to believe that I have spent my entire life playing defense, reacting to whatever happens instead of making things happen. Look at the people on our ‘relic list.’” Mark gestured with both hands.“George Washington Carver made things happen. John Adams and Jonas Salk made things happen. Yeah, they all had ideas or a cause or whatever, but we remember them—the world changed— because of the action they took! Joan of Arc, William Wallace,Oskar Schindler—these people played offense!”

  Dylan reached down by his chair for a manila folder. Opening it, he removed several pages and scattered them on the table, spreading them out with his hand.“Well,” he said,“here are some more.”

  They were the same type of computer-generated pictures they had all seen before. Each exhibited the image of a statue, a painting, or a photograph, and in each, one of the relics was visible as well. On the top of each page, someone—Perasi, Mark assumed—had written a name in thick, black marker. They stared at the reproductions as if afraid to touch them, as though a line, somehow, had now been crossed.

  “How many?” Mark asked, indicating the pages with a motion of his head.

  “Eight,” Dylan answered.“And they’re still coming in.”

  Dorry picked up a picture of Queen Elizabeth I and moved some of the others around.“The good queen,” she murmured. Then, to herself as much as anyone, she said, “Her reign is still called the Elizabethan period. Art . . . discovery . . . everything flourished in England while she was on the throne.”

  Abby and Dylan had already seen them, of course, but Mark just sat, exhausted, staring at the pages.“I’m not even surprised, anymore, by who these people are,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited—thrilled even—but not surprised. It’s as if these great people—maybe all the world’s great people—have a secret that I almost understand. Almost, but not quite.”

  “I feel the same way,” Dorry said.“As if some great revelation is hovering just beyond my reach.”

  Abby placed her backpack on the table.“I want to show you something. Would you get me a hand towel, please?” she asked. To one side, she set a UPS Overnight mailer, and to the other, a plain white envelope. And in the center of the table, as Dorry spread the towel, Abby carefully arranged the three artifacts. The Adams relic was positioned in the middle, Michael’s object, Live, was to its left, and Mae Mae’s food stone on the right.

  They were strangely quiet. It was the first time Mark and Dorry had seen all three of the objects together. Indeed, it was the first time they had seen the Adams relic—Free—at all. It was slightly different from the other two, Dorry noticed, as if flayed open, somehow, on one side.

  Abby began. “First of all, let me tell you that after the objects were regressed, it was obvious that they fit together perfectly. So there’s the answer to one question,” she said to Mark.“Yes, they belong together.”

  She continued.“I have, on paper, 3-D computer models of the regressed pieces. I also have a computer-generated picture of the object as it once was.” She held up a page from the envelope, keeping its image turned toward her. “But I want you guys to discover it like I did. Mark, get behind Dorry so you can both view this at the same angle.”

  As Mark got up and moved to stand behind his wife, Abby slid the towel holding the objects toward them until they lined up vertically. The food stone was at the top, Michael’s object at the bottom, with Adams’ relic still in the middle.

  “Okay,” Mark said.“They are stacked—top to bottom— Fed, Free, and Live. ”

  “Right. That’s what Dylan first noticed when I showed this to him. But to be honest, I’m not sure there is any importance in the order of the words. So stop thinking like an investigator. Think like an artist. View the object as a whole.”

  The Chandlers concentrated intently. Finally, Dorry said,“Talk to me,Ab.”

  “Okay. The edges need to fit. Remember the objects were misshapen by catastrophic pressure. Undo that damage in your mind’s eye.”

  Abby and Dylan exchanged a glance as their friends focused, eyes narrowed and steady, determined to see through the objects in front of them and into the past. Mark stood with his arms folded, occasionally bringing a hand to his chin. Dorry rested her fingertips on the edge of the table. Her head was cocked slightly to the right when, carefully, never shifting her gaze from the relics, she sat up a little straighter.“Abby,” she said,“can I move them?”

  “Yes.”

  Deliberately, Dorry reached for the relic that had belonged to John Adams. It was the one in the middle. Pausing only for a second, she moved it to the top, its flayed, slightly open side, pointing up. Dorry picked up the food stone next. With its one edge closed by pressure, she placed it at the bottom where its other side, the rounded edge, faced down. And last, Dorry saw, with both of its edges closed, the object her son had discovered, fit neatly into the middle position.

  Holding her breath, Abby asked quietly, “What do you see, Dorry?”

  Dorry reached out and brushed her palm ac
ross the objects, tenderly touching all three at the same time. She looked at her husband and said, “It’s a cup.”

  For a moment, time itself seemed to stand still. No one said anything or moved. Suddenly unsure he could remain standing, Mark went back to his chair and sat down heavily.“ It’s a cup,” Dorry said again.“Do you see it?” she asked Mark, who nodded numbly.

  Abby placed the computer-generated picture on the table. With its edges regressed, the closures undone, and the pieces placed together, it was indeed the perfect image of a cup. The computer had even defined the object’s original color, and the vivid, coppery-gold glint of its reflection smoldered from the page.

  Abby pointed to the bottom of the cup in the picture. It existed on the page as a rounded curve.“See what’s missing?” She picked up the food stone and turned it over. “Remember? We said it was as if something was attached here at one time? It was the base.”

  “So there is one more piece,” Dorry said as a fact.“We are missing the cup’s base.”

  “Without a doubt,”Abby replied. She looked at the picture and turned the food stone over in her hand a few times before replacing it in its position on the table. “It— the base, wherever it is—would be round . . . and flat.” She thought for a minute. “There is not a stem. Cups of that period were either flat-bottomed or melted directly onto a precast base.” Having already noted the round bottom of the cup, Abby reached over and tapped the small, dime-sized spot on the food stone. “This cup had a base.”

  “So we aren’t missing a stem,” Dylan said.“Meaning,we aren’t lacking two more pieces.”

  “One piece,”Abby stated definitively.

  “What about the writing?” Mark asked. “Would there be script on the base?”

  “Probably,”Abby responded.“Another message perhaps, maybe something that explains the script on the body of the cup. It might even have the mark, or seal, of the maker.” Mark gestured with his head to the side of the table indicating the pictures, now neatly stacked, of the men and women whose actions had changed the world in which he lived.“I wonder . . . are they so different from us? What did they know that we don’t know?”

  No one else spoke.

  Slowly, Mark reached out both hands. With infinite care, he surrounded the objects with his palms and picked up all three at once. Holding them toward his wife and friends, he asked,“After all this time . . .why has this come together now? Where is the last piece? What happens if we find it? Do we understand more about our purpose? Or everything? Is there a message in that last piece that will change me somehow? Or will it change the world?”

  Mark whispered,“What am I missing here?”

  SEVENTEEN

  NEW YORK CITY—JUNE 11, 1915

  THE BOYS PLAYED ON THE FLOOR AT HER FEET AS Margaret Vanderbilt held an envelope in her hands and stared out the open parlor window of the mansion. It was a beautiful afternoon, clear and warm. She watched as a stable boy curried the Appaloosa—a gift from Alfred on their last wedding anniversary. Margaret loved the animal, but absently wondered if she would ever ride again. The passion for horses she had shared with her husband, she feared, had surely died with him.

  For a week after his death, Margaret never left her hotel room, but friends had finally persuaded her to move back into their home on Fifty-seventh Street. There, the staff kept reporters at bay as the young widow grieved. She was in agony, unable to eat or think or accomplish anything beyond the barest care for the two boys, Alfred Jr. and George, who were too young to understand what had happened.

  Alfred’s body had never been recovered. For a time, Margaret held out hope that he had been rescued by a passing fishing boat and perhaps taken to a remote village on the Irish coast, unconscious and unable to get word to her, but as the days passed, she resigned herself to the obvious truth—her husband was gone forever.

  Newspapers were full of stories from survivors about the horrible last moments of the tragedy. Margaret forced herself to read every one and as the eyewitness accounts of Alfred’s gallant actions that day began to come to light, she cut those articles out to save for the boys. It was a small consolation now, but as little Alfred and George grew up, she felt, it would be important for them to know that their heritage was one of character and courage. Their father had died a hero.

  Margaret shifted in the chair and smoothed the front of her dark blue dress with her hands. Crossing her legs, she wiped a tear from her cheek with a handkerchief and read the letter again. It had arrived by special courier from the post office earlier that morning, and she had almost fainted when she saw the handwriting. It was addressed to “The Young Masters Vanderbilt” in care of her. Posted from Liverpool on May 22, it was one of several hundred letters recovered from a floating mailbag and forwarded by Cunard only two weeks after the disaster. Margaret’s brief hope for good news was dashed as she opened the envelope and saw that it had been written by her husband on May 6, the day before the sinking.

  Inside the envelope, wrapped around a much longer letter to Alfred Jr. and George, was a personal note to her. Written in his familiar flowing script, it read:

  Darling,

  I send you my love across the miles. It is early evening and I am on deck, alone with my thoughts of you and our precious little ones.

  Anxious though I may be to share everything this instant, my own thoughts and emotions are jumbled to such a state that I must beg your patience. Suffice to say that a great revelation has now come into our lives. An object—an antiquity, if you will—has opened corners in my mind and heart that I scarcely knew existed.

  The boys are young and will not understand, but somehow I feel it important that you read the enclosed letter to them now. Save it, of course, and I shall explain all upon my return.

  My prayer, as always, is for your safety while we are apart and that you might feel my arms around you as though I’d never left.

  Your adoring husband,

  Alfred

  Margaret sobbed as she held the note to her breast. She had been certain that there were no more tears to cry, but every day brought a new memory, a smell, or some tangible reminder of the man she had loved more than her own life. She was not sure she wanted to live without him. Were it not for the boys . . . she mused . . . and then, quickly banished the evil thought from her mind.

  Shaking her head, Margaret drew a deep breath and wiped her eyes. Alfred had departed this earth having left behind more questions than answers. An antiquity? A great revelation in our lives? And how might an object open corners in one’s mind and heart, she wondered.

  Margaret had already read the letter meant for the boys several times to herself, and while beautiful and eloquent, it only added to her confusion. In it, however, Alfred had referred to “words” that had changed his life. Did these “words” have something to do with the object about which he had written? He had not said, but she noted with awe that she was strangely comforted by their presence in the letter.

  The “words” were written in the form of a memorandum, and while Margaret knew they had been meant for the boys, she determined to copy them down for herself. She would read them over and over again, as Albert had instructed his children to do. Might there be, she thought, a corner in my own mind and heart that can be opened?

  She gazed up at the parlor’s chandelier, spreading gracefully from the fourteen-foot ceiling. Closing her eyes, Margaret prayed for strength and hope, wisdom and courage. Then, to her husband, she promised to bring up their children as he would have wished. She told him that she would not be bitter about his physical absence in their lives. Rather, she would be grateful for the years they had lived and loved and laughed with each other. And she told him good-bye.

  When Margaret opened her eyes, she found Alfred Jr. and George standing quietly beside her. George had placed his tiny hand on her knee. Smiling for the first time in a month, she scooped George onto her lap and kissed his face. With her left arm, she drew little Alfred close and kissed him too. Then,
Margaret unfolded the letter to the boys and read it aloud.

  My dear, sweet Ones,

  My first thought upon rising this morning was of you, and my heart is full to the bursting. You may be surprised to hear that my last thought of the evening before was also of you. My voyage on this great ship has been slow and uneventful, and I miss your laughter and antics tremendously. The time alone, however, has given me occasion for reflection not often enjoyed under normal circumstances.

  Never given to undue emotion, I have lately been overwhelmed with a feeling of love and responsibility for your future that drives me to tears. I feel somehow compelled to write down and send a specific message I have received for you. It was my intention to read the words to you in person, but time, I fear, is of the essence.

  You are very young and will not understand these thoughts at this moment. No matter. They will be read to you for now. When you are older, you will read them yourself again and again. Then, again and again. Only when their meaning is imprinted in your heart will you realize their power and your purpose.

  These ancient words, translated from an object in my possession, have most recently changed my life. Let them now direct yours. One day, when I am gone, the world will most likely babble on about the money you will have inherited. But more than anything, I want you to understand that the message of the following words are the most valuable legacy with which one could ever be provided. Here now is your true inheritance—the gift from a father to his son.

  I made you different from the others.

  On the planet Earth, there has never been one like you . . . and there never will be again.

  Your spirit, your thoughts and feelings, your ability to reason—all exist in no one else.

  Your eyes are a masterpiece, incomparable, and windows to a soul that is also uniquely yours.

  A single strand of your hair has been created especially for you. Of the multitudes who have come before you and the multitudes who may follow, not one of them duplicates the formula with which I made you.