The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Nonsense,” I said as firmly as I could.

  “Julia—”

  “We’re just having a bit of bad luck. Marlin will get to her. Look, he’s almost reached her.”

  But just then Nathaniel’s voice rang out, in his first line of dialogue: “I’m the Oldest Ancestor!” He hadn’t been thrilled about tagging along with the book club, but he gave his all to the character and had said the line in the same voice of authority his son would later use when he wanted to get everyone’s attention. It certainly made Marlin take note: he stopped in his tracks. I wanted to will him to keep moving.

  It was warm, and beads of sweat had broken out on Nathaniel’s forehead. “I do not speak often, as these bones are a thousand years old, my flesh gone a millennium ago.”

  “The Oldest Ancestor’s joints and bones creaked as his bony body slowly shuffled to its feet,” Soren read out.

  Nathaniel got to his feet as instructed. “The judgment is mine to give,” he intoned.

  “Before he could do so, a fuller, flesh-heavy form approached. The twin skeletons heralded the Living One’s arrival.”

  “Look, it’s a Living One,” Missy announced from Nathaniel’s right.

  “Yes, the Living One,” Gigi said from Nathaniel’s left. “Vulnerable, transient, soft.”

  “Living One, show yourself to me, the Oldest Ancestor.”

  “The Living One stepped out of the shadows and into the light. He was here to plead humanity’s case…”

  Marlin suddenly remembered his task and took a step forward, but it was too late. Udo had waved Sabina up. She was to be the Living One. She did not receive any pages as she softly stepped into the middle of the readers’ circle, so it was apparently a nonspeaking role.

  “The Living One, open your ears and prepare to receive the wisdom of your elders.”

  Sabina seemed to understand what was going on—Pompeii had featured a lovely theater, two in fact (I had walked up their stone steps). She opened her arms with her palms turned up toward Florida’s sky, pale blue with its blazing hot sun.

  I wondered who would have played the Living One if Sabina hadn’t jumped into the past, if none of us had been here. Perhaps Udo himself.

  “Oh Living One, here is what we say to you…”

  Marlin returned to where Abigail and I were waiting, on the garden bench. He shook his head at us. “I take it back. This is the oddest thing I’ve seen in my seventy-three years.”

  Defeated for the time being, we sat waiting as the club acted out Udo’s pages. For thirty long minutes, the Skeleton Ancestors conducted a lively discussion, which we could hear from where we were sitting, out of sight behind a flowered shrub. Sabina had been allowed to leave the circle before the Ancestors started their argument. The Ancestors, who had the upper hand, were bickering about whether to banish the living out of their town, Eden. Udo listened carefully, as if making mental notes about what needed to be changed. His turtleneck, out of place in the warm sunshine, seemed to be itchy, and he occasionally pulled at its neck.

  “What time is it?” Abigail asked.

  She had asked the same question maybe two minutes ago. “It’s five past noon,” I said. “Do you want to take my watch?”

  “I want Sabina to look this way and see us.”

  I wanted that as well. I craned my head to see around the shrub—Sabina had been called forth as the Living One again, to learn what the Skeleton Ancestors had decided. She shuffled into the center of the circle once more.

  “The accident won’t happen until one fifteen,” I said, “so we still have plenty of time. Besides, that was probably just an estimate made by the police. It could have happened a bit later.”

  Marlin was on the other side of Abigail. “What accident, ladies?” He had one tanned arm draped over the back of the bench. Abigail and I were perched on the very edge of the wooden seat, ready to spring up as soon as History allowed it. “Who’s going to be in an accident at one fifteen?”

  Abigail opened her mouth to answer. I figured I’d better speak up before she said too much, but in an ironic turn of events found myself saying exactly what I had wanted to stop her from saying. “We’re from the future. Udo—the tall one in the black turtleneck—is going to drive off Sanibel Causeway. There’s nothing we can do to stop it from happening, but we need to make sure Sabina doesn’t get into the car with him.”

  I avoided Abigail’s eyes.

  Marlin, one arm still draped over the back of the bench, spoke as if he were stating that the weather in Florida tended to be pleasant—that is to say, easily and conversationally. “Then we’ll make sure that she doesn’t get into the car with him.”

  “I’m going to ready the coordinates for us to jump to Sanibel Causeway in case that becomes our only option,” Abigail said, as if looking for something to do. Marlin raised an eyebrow in response to the laptop Abigail pulled out of her backpack. He said, “Well, okay.” Apparently a beach existence accustomed you to seeing strange things.

  “Julia, do you have that map of the area?”

  “Here,” I said, drawing it out of my bag.

  “If you’re doing your crazy jump thing again, that’s a good spot, just past the first segment of the bridge,” Marlin said, pointing to a spot on the map. “There’s a beach.”

  “…The Oldest One was ready to pronounce judgment.”

  “The Ancestors shall have voting rights, too, same as the living…”

  So Udo had decided on an optimistic ending after all. The skeletons had chosen to put a “fleshy person” in charge, at least provisionally. There would be an elected government. A new era of bone and flesh cooperation would begin.

  The readers took a bow and gave a round of applause, both for themselves and for Udo’s work. Laughter and digs at particularly good or bad performances followed. They didn’t high-five each other or tap fists in a congratulatory manner as students did in the present; the men gave Udo hearty thumps on the shoulder as the pages made their way back to him in a messy stack.

  Next came a moment of awkwardness. They had done what they had come to do—read and perform underneath The Tree—and now everyone seemed uncertain about what to do next.

  Udo himself appeared lost in thought, as if digesting the performance of his work.

  “I have to make a phone call,” we heard him say. We watched as he headed for the public phone at the near end of the parking lot.

  The rest of the book club, after a few minutes’ conversation, settled on doing the out-of-towner thing—they split up to look around the estate. Sabina stayed with Gigi and a couple of other students, Nathaniel trailing behind them.

  We would have followed, but our bottoms were History-glued to the bench. Instead we watched Udo put coins into the phone box. He greeted someone at the other end in a gruff fashion, judging from his body language. I strained to hear what he was saying—after all, these had to be some of the last words he had left—but the booth was too far from our bench.

  “Do you want to know what he’s saying?” Marlin offered.

  “You can hear?”

  “I can lip-read. Lost my hearing for a couple of years. Turned out to be earwax.”

  “Yes, please do it,” Abigail said.

  “All right, let’s see…He just said that he’s not skipping classes, it’s midterm break—Writing is an art, Father, and art is not a foolish pursuit. Just because you have a law degree doesn’t mean I must as well…”

  It was the classic scene, one that played out between many fathers and sons. Udo’s father did not approve of his son’s choice of a career. I guessed that Udo was being told that writing did not pay well enough, that a man needed a steady job to support his family, and so on. The usual way these things went was for the parent to threaten to cut the child out of the will—and for all I knew he might have, since Udo’s face was turning very red. He glanced around for his book club, as if to draw strength from them, but the others, unaware of the importance of this particular moment in U
do’s life, were paying more attention to the exotic plants than their leader.

  Udo seemed to come to some sort of a decision. He straightened his shoulders. Receiver pressed to one ear, he stretched the phone cord so far that I thought it might snap and dumped the pages of his novel into the nearby trash can. In they went, all of it—the handwritten parts, the typewritten ones, the photocopies.

  The CSI was supposed to be where everyone finally understood each other, but this was not the case today—not for Udo and his father.

  He was still visibly angry. I half expected him to slam the phone back into its cradle, but instead Marlin revealed his next words to us. “Tell Mom I’ll stop by for lunch, yes.”

  Udo had hung up the phone after delivering that parting line. The others, Sabina in tow, were by Edison’s lab, reading an informational sign out front. Instead of walking over to join them, Udo turned on his heel and headed straight to where the three of us were glued to the bench.

  “All right, what’s going on? Why are you following us? I recognize you. You were on the beach last night.”

  Abigail and I looked at each other. We had to try.

  “Your car,” I said. “The Mustang. Don’t—”

  But that was all I could get out. And Abigail got no further than opening her mouth.

  “Well? What about my Mustang?” Udo demanded.

  Abigail gave a sigh of acceptance. “I wish we could tell you, I do. But we’re really here for her.” She pointed over the shrub, in Sabina’s direction.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Julia? Why?”

  For a second I thought he was addressing me, had somehow learned my name, then realized that Sabina had for some reason given my name as hers.

  “To bring her home,” Abigail said.

  “She’s not a student—she looks mature for her age, but she’s actually only thirteen,” I explained.

  “So you say. But if you really know Julia, why have you been lurking in shadows?”

  I knew how bizarre our behavior must appear to him. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “So you claim.”

  “If you could tell her we’re here and—”

  “Sounds to me like she doesn’t want to see you. Look, something made her run away from home. She hasn’t explained what, but that’s her right. I’m certainly not going to force her to go back.”

  “If you could just tell her we’re here,” I tried again.

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “I know it must seem like you’re doing her a favor, but—”

  “But she’s not safe with you,” Abigail finished for me.

  “What? Nonsense. Of course she is. Who are you people, anyway?”

  With that, he walked off to rejoin the others.

  It was maddening and ridiculous. There Sabina was, under the straw hat, close enough for one of us to call out her name to get her attention if only History would let us. We were, to all intents and purposes, invisible to everyone but Udo. I hated the feeling of powerlessness. At least we had finally been able to detach ourselves from the bench.

  The students had streamed across McGregor Boulevard, the three of us trailing behind them. Sabina was in front, as if Udo had placed her there so he could keep an eye on her. She made a left at a fountain in the direction of Seminole Lodge, and Missy and Udo followed, with Soren a few steps back. Nathaniel, Gigi, and the others continued past the fountain in the direction of the wooden pier and the river.

  Abigail said with a note of hope in her voice as we too made a left at the fountain, “Can Udo even make it to the Sanibel Causeway by one fifteen? It’s a quarter till. Maybe it’s some other Udo Leland who dies on the bridge.”

  “He can only make it if he drives like crazy,” I said. It was a good twenty-, twenty-five-minute drive. “But how many Udo Lelands can there be? It’s not a very common name. Plus the newspaper article said that he’s a St. Sunniva student.”

  I watched as Soren, who was a few paces ahead of us, blew his nose and put his handkerchief away. He picked up his pace to catch up to Missy as the four of them climbed onto the veranda of the main house. Seemingly annoyed by Soren’s trailing after her, Missy pulled him aside by the elbow. The pair remained on the porch while Sabina and Udo went inside. “What is it now?” we overheard Missy say to Soren.

  “Why don’t you stay here, Julia,” Abigail said, “in case Sabina and Udo come out another exit. Marlin and I will go inside.”

  She knew how badly I wanted more information about my parents—even now.

  They headed into the house and I stayed where I was—just around the corner from where my parents were about to have some kind of showdown on the veranda. Despite the circumstances, my curiosity got the better of me. I had to know what the argument was about.

  “Look, I just want to explain,” I heard Soren say. “When I said what I said, I wasn’t talking about you—I was talking about me. That it would be a farfetched dream for me. Being a novelist, I mean. Do you see what I mean?”

  Missy had been keeping her gaze on the river, steadily and unflinchingly. After he had said his piece, she turned to face him. “Don’t you want to be a novelist?”

  Soren blew into his handkerchief again. “Not really, no. I can’t imagine sitting at a typewriter all day alone, not talking to a soul. Besides, it seems like a lot of work.”

  “I thought you liked being alone.”

  “When did I say that? But if you want to be a novelist, that’s great,” Soren added quickly. “I think you’d be fab at it.”

  A crack had appeared in Missy’s stern countenance. “You really think so? That I’d be good at it?”

  “I’d be honored to read anything you wrote.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Though those words were often said sarcastically in present-time, I could tell she meant it. “Want to hear the truth?”

  “Always.”

  “I don’t want to be a novelist either. I don’t think I could keep up the necessary aloof attitude. I like talking to people and finding out about their actual lives. I’d rather write about that.”

  “Yes, I feel the same way. But if that’s the case, why did you join the book club?”

  “Because you seemed to think it wasn’t a good idea. Why did you join?”

  “Because you did.”

  “Oh.” Missy appeared flustered by his answer and she quickly changed the subject. “I mailed off a letter before we left—Thornberg News ran an ad for a job opening, and I applied. Reporter.”

  “I sent in an application, too!”

  There was a moment of awkwardness as they realized what that meant—that they were in competition with each other.

  “I’ll withdraw my application,” Soren offered chivalrously.

  “Nonsense. That wouldn’t be fair or right.”

  “Oh. Then may the best, er, person win.”

  “May the best person win. I think we better not mention this to Udo. He’ll say working for a small-town paper is too bourgeois or something.”

  “He will, won’t he? Mum’s the word.”

  As they went inside to rejoin the others, I thought I heard Missy say, “By the way, I have a bit of good news.”

  I didn’t get to hear the rest.

  So their argument hadn’t been about me, or even Missy’s interest in Udo and her flirtation with Nathaniel. It had been about non-earth-shattering stuff, though when you’re in your early twenties, most things seem vitally important.

  I waited where I was until Abigail and Marlin rejoined me. Udo, Sabina, and my parents exited the lodge after them, talking about what would happen if someone accidentally fell into the river, according to Marlin, who was lip-reading again. How quickly would an alligator show up?

  “If you see one, you should make noise and try to poke it in the eye,” Marlin quoted Soren, and then stopped. I saw that Udo was checking his watch. He said something to the others.

  “What did he just say, Marlin? Did you see?”

  Having
a lip-reader as a helper was useful, and I made a mental note to suggest that our time-traveling researchers be trained in the art. Handheld electronic listening devices could be cumbersome to carry and were hardly discreet.

  But Marlin shook his head. “No, he’s facing the wrong way.”

  All at once, things were happening. Udo, Sabina, and my parents were striding in the direction of the parking lot. We followed more slowly than we would have preferred, History’s hand keeping our pace down. We found that our path was temporarily blocked by McGregor Boulevard traffic. I tried to dart across the road, but Marlin caught my arm and stopped me. “You’ll do her no good dead.”

  I pushed his hand aside—“I won’t be killed, don’t worry”—and Abigail and I darted across.

  We were too late. Udo’s Ford Mustang was pulling out of the parking lot. I scanned the heads by the art bus, which was still parked. My parents. Nate’s parents. The other four students, whose names I didn’t know.

  Sabina’s dark-haired head was not among them.

  Marlin’s mouth dropped open as Abigail and I took off after the Mustang on foot, dodging several cars to much honking. We would catch it, I was sure we would—a red light at the nearest intersection halted its progress briefly. I glimpsed Udo’s blond hair above the seat headrest and Sabina’s straw hat in the passenger seat. We were almost there…

  We didn’t make it in time. There was a break in the traffic, and the car sped off.

  27

  I struggled not to sink into the cold seawater weighing down my clothes, battled to blink the sea out of my eyes so I could get my bearings. Abigail was next to me, treading water and holding the Slingshot high above her head. We were within swimming distance of shore, near the narrow sandy beach abutting the middle, sea-level segment of the causeway, just past the elevated portion where the accident would happen shortly. Abigail had sent us here as quickly as possible. We had elected to leave Marlin behind, since he’d told us he didn’t know how to swim, and it turned out the precaution had been warranted—we’d aimed for the causeway shoulder but had missed.