The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  On the other side of Missy was Nate Sr. No, I didn’t want to think of him as such—he was Nathaniel, a college senior. Now that I knew who he was, I had drawn another connection—the woman in the sari had to be Nate’s mother. I should have recognized her from photos at Nate’s house. I knew she was called Gigi Kirkland but hadn’t made the connection between Gilberte Dubois and the married name. She was the Quebecois–Sri Lankan half of his roots, the other half—Nathaniel Sr—being the Dakota peoples and Scotland connection.

  Dad was not there.

  And finally, Sabina. She had dozed off, probably tired from the events of the previous few days. Her head was gently drooping forward as she sat next to Gigi with her knees drawn up and Dr. Mooney’s old lab coat pulled tightly around her body. Gigi laughed out loud at something Udo said and Sabina shifted in her sleep. Both Gigi and Missy hung on to Udo’s every word, leaning in to laugh at every point he condescended to make. They seemed starstruck. I saw Nathaniel yawn in an irritated fashion, clearly peeved that both women were giving their attention to Udo.

  All of which in turn made me wonder if I had walked into not a love quadrangle but a love pentagon. Udo’s blond hair came out of a bottle. Could he actually be my father? The thought was no less disturbing than attributing my parenthood to Nathaniel—all right, perhaps a little less disturbing, as the last thing I wanted was for Nate to be my half sibling. I had mostly dismissed the possibility of a shared parentage with Nate as soon as it had reared its ugly head. Nate’s parents had been high school sweethearts; they were married and had a child who was up in Duluth with Mary and Duncan Kirkland, and it was all neat and tidy—at least on paper. I wondered if Nate—my Nate—had any questions to which he wanted answers, or if he’d at least want a photo of his parents. Something told me that Gigi and Missy had been good friends once, before various complications arose. I wondered if Gigi knew that her friend was pregnant.

  This last year of college would be some kind of turning point for everybody. Come June, it would be time for Gigi and Nathaniel to pack up their college stuff, pick up little Nate, and start their family life in earnest. And for my parents, preparation for my upcoming arrival awaited them and then marriage.

  Being young was no easy thing, I thought, remembering my own—and clearly unwise in retrospect—marriage to Quinn. Did I feel a little wiser now? Not really. Perhaps a little less blindly optimistic that everything automatically worked out for the best, but that was about it.

  It struck me that, for all their interest in Udo’s book club, none of the four—Missy, Soren, Gigi, Nathaniel—had become a novelist. My parents had ended up running the town paper before moving to Florida. Gigi worked as a biologist at the Duluth aquarium. Nate Sr. was a land surveyor. I didn’t know for sure but figured that what had drawn them to the book club was not so much the desire to write the Great American Novel but the desire to discuss Life with a capital L. Was this midterm break, with its (let’s face it, silly) destination their one last carefree fling before facing real-world responsibilities? Watching as Nathaniel passed what I hoped was a Coke and not another beer to my mother, I crossed my fingers that it was a metaphorical fling and not an actual one.

  Nathaniel yawned again.

  It was clear that Udo’s fan club didn’t plan on sleeping any time soon. Since I was stuck a stone’s throw away from them, inspiration struck, and I decided to toss the shell in my hand at Sabina’s torso.

  I lobbed it at her back and missed. Gigi flinched in the moonlight, my projectile apparently having found her instead. Rubbing her shoulder, she turned to look. A seagull chose that moment to swoop by, and Gigi grimaced and checked her shoulder for bird droppings. Satisfied that there weren’t any, she relaxed and went back to listening to Udo, who was waxing on about his vision of a perfect community of writers. Ideas, housing, expenses, profits—all would be shared. It sounded very idealistic and very young, which made me feel middle-aged and practical in comparison. Still, the world needs both kinds of people: list-making realists like me and young dreamers like Udo. The thought occurred to me again: I wanted to save him. Perhaps once we successfully pulled out Sabina, we could turn our attention to trying to save the young writer, maybe even bring him back with us. I’d convince the others somehow that we had to try.

  After tossing a second shell at Sabina, which also missed, I went back to where Abigail and Dr. Little were patiently waiting, seated by one of the pier’s cement pillars.

  “Why?” I demanded. “Why are we getting time-stuck everywhere we go? You said it would be easier to move around in 1976 than in Pompeii, Dr. Little.”

  “I wouldn’t say we’re getting time-stuck everywhere.” Dr. Little had turned his flashlight back on and was trying to get all the sand off his feet. Realizing it was fruitless, he gave up and looked up at me. “Still, you may have a point. I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “About what?”

  “Why we might not be able to pull Sabina out of 1976.”

  I lowered myself onto the sand next to him. “Why do you say that? It’s not as if she belongs here.”

  “She doesn’t belong in the twenty-first century either.”

  “Sure she does,” Abigail said. She started ticking off the reasons on her fingers. “She has friends and family there—me and Julia, Chief Kirkland, Dr. Presnik and Dr. Mooney, Jacob and Kamal. She has a bed, schoolmates, a breakfast cereal she likes best, and an addiction to the Weather Channel. Of course she belongs in the twenty-first century. She’s an immigrant to it, that’s all. A time refugee.”

  “Exactly. The present is unwritten, so she has freedom of movement and no constraints by History,” I said. “The life she’d lead here would be like Marlin’s—the life of a loner.”

  “I understand all that, and of course we’ll do our best to try to get her out of 1976. It’s just that History may have other ideas. Just keep that in mind, that’s all. Remember that tomorrow is no ordinary day for the book club, none of them. One of their own will be gone by the end of the day. They are locked into a course of events…and Sabina might be locked into it as well.”

  “You’re saying there’s no point in trying to pull Sabina out until after Udo’s accident?” I said.

  “Something like that,” Dr. Little said.

  I saw Abigail bite her lip, as if she wanted to say more but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  We sat a bit in silence, then settled in for the night, though I didn’t think I would get much sleep.

  “I only have one blanket and mat,” Dr. Little said, as if Abigail or I were going to snatch it away from him, just as Marlin had taken his shoes.

  “We have our own in the backpacks,” I said. “And some water and snack food, too.”

  While Dr. Little tried to select a spot well away from the rising tide for his sleeping mat, Abigail and I readied our own mats and blankets. I decided it was as good time as any to run my idea past them. “Since we have to wait to pull Sabina out anyway, I’ll just toss this out there for consideration—why don’t we try to save Udo?”

  They both stopped what they were doing to stare at me. I saw Abigail shake her head in the dark.

  “Have you heard nothing I’ve said? It won’t work,” Dr. Little said.

  I tried to formulate my argument in a way that made sense, working it out as I spoke. “We were able to do it with Sabina, back in Pompeii. What if we stopped the Ford Mustang from going over? A blown tire might have been the cause of the accident, according to the article. We could check the road for nails or other—”

  “Won’t work,” Dr. Little repeated. Having moved aside a couple of rocks and sharp-looking shell fragments, he unfolded his sleeping mat with a snap. “What would you have us do? Sweep the road? Warn Udo to drive more carefully? To wear a seat belt? Ask if he’s had swimming lessons?”

  I still did not want to admit defeat. “How about if, instead of trying to stop the car from going off Sanibel Causeway, we hid nearby and pulled him out of the water and int
o present-time?”

  “You mean one of us should swim out to rescue him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Again, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a busy bridge. If rescue had been possible, someone would have done it. Even if we waited in a boat or near the water’s edge, bystanders would notice us diving in to pull him out. And then what? They would watch us all vanish into thin air? This is a whole different game than your experience in Pompeii—and I still have my reservations whether you did the right thing there, if you want to know the truth. But like I said, this is different. Sabina, to be blunt about it, would have died in the eruption along with most of the people she knew and who knew her. Hers would have been a cleaner death—not in its manner, obviously, but as it relates to the threads of History. Udo’s death tomorrow won’t be an isolated event that can be changed without consequences to History. There will be a police investigation, news articles, a funeral, people who will mourn Udo and miss him. For God’s sake, Kirkland wrote down in the margin that the boy’s body was found.”

  He was right, of course. I had pictured us bringing Udo back home safe and sound, helping him re-enlist in the creative writing department in present-time to finish his degree and his novel, one day reading the novel so I could find out how the skeleton hoarders had fared. It would have been good for Sabina to have someone like her, someone who was misplaced in time, too. A friend.

  It seemed it was not to be.

  It was the deepest, darkest part of the night, the moon having sunk under the horizon. The fire had gone out and the students were asleep, curled up in blankets on the sand. They remained tightly intertwined, with Sabina now sandwiched between Missy and Gigi, as if the two women wanted a buffer between them. Several times during the night we had taken turns sneaking over to the book club in our bare feet, but none of us managed to get close enough to arouse Sabina. Now it was my turn again.

  I found Udo awake. He was some distance from the others, reclining on one elbow with his legs stretched out, taking an occasional drag on the stub of a cigarette as he watched the breaking of the waves. I wanted to tell him to get some sleep, that he needed it in order to be alert the next day. And I wanted to tell him the opposite as well, that he shouldn’t sleep at all, because he had so little time left.

  He glanced up as a nocturnal bird I had accidentally disturbed made a screech of complaint. I saw him stub out what was left of his cigarette and get to his feet. He headed straight for me. Not knowing how to react, I instinctively took a step back, as if he was going to accuse me of something. What, I didn’t know. Of failing him? Of not having done enough? Although I knew I couldn’t do anything to act on my knowledge about his future, the guilt I felt was very real.

  Since secrecy and stealth were obviously out, I turned on Dr. Little’s flashlight as he approached.

  “Can I bum another cigarette? I’m out.”

  I couldn’t even help him there. “Sorry, I don’t have any.”

  “Pity. Do you often wander the beach at night?”

  “No, uh—only when I can’t sleep.”

  He was in his standard all-black outfit, sporting it like a uniform. He didn’t seem to recognize me from the book club meeting, but the context was completely different, of course.

  “I can’t sleep either. My mind is full of thoughts. I’m working on a novel, you see. Do you have any interest in writing books?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Ah. Reading them?”

  “I’d say so, yes.” I wanted to ask him to wake up Sabina right then and there and send her to us, but the words would not come out no matter how hard I tried. Railing internally against History and its rules, I said instead, “I’d like to hear about the book you’re writing.”

  It was an echo of something I wished I’d had the presence of mind to say to Kurt Vonnegut.

  “Would you? In that case, ever hear—let’s walk a bit—ever hear of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum?”

  “From Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, right?”

  “Very good. Have you ever stumbled across one yourself? Such a place, I mean. I’m searching for it.”

  At least I could check whether we were right in our guess about the Edison Estate. I thought the best approach was to answer truthfully and thought about it before replying. “I can’t say that I’ve considered where such a place might be—unless perhaps it’s wherever you happen to be. Maybe it’s up to each of us to make that a place where people understand each other.”

  “That’s good. Yes, I like that. Make the place where you are the one where people understand each other…”

  “What about yours?”

  “I have one in mind.”

  The “Where?” would not come out of my mouth.

  “My parents live over on Sanibel Island, you know,” he added apropos of nothing. I had thought it a bit strange that Udo had taken his book club to Estero Island and not where his parents lived. “We don’t get along. I’m a bit of a disappointment to them, you see.” He gave a wry laugh at the words.

  “I think most people are a bit of a disappointment to their parents. Or at least it seems that way when you’re just starting out in life and have yet to accomplish much beyond getting passable grades in school, if that.” I stopped, aghast. I had, without thinking, said what I usually do to students who were feeling overwhelmed by coursework and life decisions. I finished with an outright lie. “If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that things usually sort themselves out sooner or later.”

  I tried to remind myself that space and time were one, that terms such as the past and now and the future were human constructs, and that time only appeared to move in one direction because of our limited perspective. If I pushed for an additional STEWie roster spot, I could jump back into the mid-fifties and watch Udo’s birth, or to eighteen years later to watch him graduate from high school, or to earlier in 1976 to listen in on further book club meetings in the rec room of St. Olaf’s Hall. I could converse with younger versions of Udo on the very subjects we were discussing now—Vonnegut, interfering parents, college, books. Like Schrödinger’s cat (a term I had picked up from physics presentations and lunchtime discussions, but which I was never quite sure I was using correctly), tomorrow Udo would be both alive and dead, if you looked at it from the cosmic point of view.

  The thought didn’t help one bit. Udo would die tomorrow.

  We had strolled down to the water, which looked different now. Mysterious in its blackness, harboring who knew how many secrets and unwanted surprises.

  Udo brought up his novel again. “I’m stuck on this one point, you see. My townspeople, they keep the skeletons of their dead relatives in their houses, around the dining room tables and on the TV couches. But I am undecided as to what happens once there are more dead than living, when the bony people outnumber the fleshy ones.”

  “You mean, would they get along or go to war with each other?”

  “Something like that. The living need the dead, but do the dead need the living also?”

  Again I answered truthfully. “I think they do. To be remembered by them, if nothing else.”

  “My skeletons, you know, they can talk…”

  Tomorrow is no ordinary day for the book club.

  Abigail was shaking my shoulder. “Julia, wake up, it’s morning.”

  I groggily opened my eyes. It had been an uncomfortable night, and not only because I lacked a proper bed. After my conversation with Udo, I had stayed up to finish Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan on Dr. B’s e-reader, Udo’s fate weighing heavily on me, only dozing off when dawn started to break.

  I sat up and stretched. Abigail was gathering her things, and Dr. Little was munching on a granola bar as he carefully repacked his duffel. All around, the islanders and their tourist guests were slowly stirring awake and beginning their day, with a handful of early beachgoers setting up umbrellas in prime spots. It was a weekday, so the beach would probably stay sp
arsely populated most of the day, until after work hours.

  A sudden worry shot through me and I whipped around.

  The book club was gone.

  23

  I stumbled to my feet in a panic. Udo and the others had left. I would never see him again. All that remained was a black, ashy spot where the bonfire had been and a smattering of trash.

  “It’s all right, Julia,” Abigail said. “They’re over there.”

  And indeed they were—in the lot of the nearest motel, congregated in the empty parking space between their two vehicles.

  I breathed a small sigh of relief and set about rolling up my mat. I tried to gauge how I felt about things now that the sun was warming everything up, spreading its cheerful rays on people and buildings alike. Out of nowhere, something Nate had once said popped into my mind. It was a discussion we’d had amidst Pompeii ruins, in the dark, as World War Two bombs fell all around us. He had jokingly suggested that once we passed, perhaps we embarked on a new adventure as alien life-forms. It was as good as explanation of the afterlife as any. It wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about, as there wasn’t anything practical to be done about it one way or another.

  I hoped wherever Udo was headed, he would find the answers he was seeking. What was meant to be was meant to be. I felt something akin to acceptance settle over me.

  I bent down to pick up the two rocks Nate had sent. Not surprisingly, they had dug into my side as I tried to sleep, so I had taken them out of my coat. Dr. Little saw me slip the rocks back into the coat pocket. “I’m usually a stickler for these things, but I don’t think you need to bother. Plenty of rocks and stones all around the beach.”

  I mumbled a couple of words about not wanting to leave time-displaced trash behind. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth—that the stones, solid and grounding, felt like a connection to home. A connection to Nate. It was kind of silly, but there it was.