The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Two?” I asked.

  “We’re having twins.”

  “Congratulations, Professor!” Marlin said.

  “I wasn’t expecting…quite so many—and quite so soon. Worries about their college tuition and all the other bills keep me up at night. I wanted everything for Piper and the new kids. And this appeared so easy, so clean. Just a simple phone call. I think I lost my head.”

  Nate had once said that everyone had a personal flaw. Dr. Little’s turned out to be that he was human just like the rest of us; he was guilty of the very thing he was afraid of discovering if he looked too closely at his heroes. It wasn’t greed but parental love that had made him risk his career. The twins that he and Mrs. Little were expecting had already reserved their place on the stage.

  Dr. Little wasn’t accepting defeat just yet. “Do you want to call anyone in your family, Julia? We could all share the winnings, perhaps.”

  I wouldn’t even have to call. Just slip the printout to Dad, over where he and the other students were getting back into the art bus, having finished their Cokes. I thought I heard the words beach, shrimp lunch, and swimming mentioned.

  I shoved the printout back at Dr. Little and said no sharply, more sharply than I’d intended. I was fighting the realization that I might have been tempted if Sabina were still alive. The money would have covered a trip to Italy, her college tuition, whatever else she might have needed.

  Abigail looked like she’d had the same thought, but all she said was, “You’re lucky you had someone to call in the first place, Professor. And Piper and her siblings are lucky that you care so much about their future. But even if it had worked, it would have been—”

  “Wrong.” I finished the sentence for her, watching the art bus pull out of the parking lot. “It never would have been the right decision.”

  The gardener had been glancing in our direction, as if she wanted to send us on our way. We gathered our things and headed toward the far end of the parking lot, where a couple of picnic tables, meant for tourists partaking in gift shop snacks, were clustered. Lunchtime had passed and only one table was occupied, by a sightseeing family. I noticed that someone had forgotten their things at a second table. It took me a moment to register what was on it. Whoever had retrieved Udo’s novel out of the trash bin had arranged the pages in a neat stack. I was more interested in what was on top of them, keeping the paper from blowing off in the light wind.

  A lab coat, neatly folded.

  Then a person stepped into the sunlight from behind a palm tree.

  30

  I held back, letting Abigail run up and hug her first.

  “We thought you were dead—don’t ever do that to us again! Ever!” Abigail pulled back to let Sabina breathe but was still holding on to her, as if afraid to let go. She swatted at Sabina’s dress ineffectively. “Oops, I got you a bit wet. Sorry.”

  “Why wet? Sunny day.”

  “It’s ocean water. Never mind, it’s a long story. We’ll tell you all about it later.”

  “But why you and Yoolia here?”

  “We came here to find you, of course.”

  “You want me back?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course we want you back. We need you back.”

  I had so many questions for her: Why had Udo pretended she was in his car? Why had she gone back in time in the first place? And was she happy to see us? But none of it mattered. I noticed Abigail had tears streaming down her face just as I wiped them from my own eyes. I rather thought that Dr. Little had something in his eyes, too. I saw him glance in the direction of the phone booth as if he wanted to give his plan one more try, but he said nothing. He shook hands with Sabina and said awkwardly, “Glad to have you back.”

  “Sabina, this is Marlin,” Abigail introduced them. “Marlin, I’d like you to meet a person who’s very important to us.”

  “Pleased to meet you, miss,” Marlin said.

  I cleared my throat and gave Sabina a great big hug of my own. “Let’s go home.”

  31

  I didn’t get a chance to talk to Nate alone until the following morning, Sunday home-time. There was too much going on—the happy reunion after we got back to the lab; the lengthy account we gave the others of our time in 1976; the fussing Abigail and I did over Sabina once we got her home…I tumbled into bed, exhausted and in need of a good eight hours. I’d given Nate a cheery wave as he drove off (he’d followed us back to the house in his Jeep to pick up Wanda) in the hopes that it would convey that everything between us was all right. While he had been very glad to see the four of us step out of STEWie’s basket, he’d been more reserved than usual. Not that he had ever been particularly demonstrative toward me while others were present, but I’d given him the cold shoulder earlier, and he had no idea why.

  A honk outside the house woke me up, and it took me a moment to register where I was, back in my own bed in 2012 and not tucked into some out-of-the-way alcove in 1976. Sunlight streamed in; I had forgotten to close the curtains. I grabbed the clock—it was nine. I had slept in for the first time in, well, years. I threw on a sweatshirt over my pajamas and padded outside in my slippers to see that Nate had pulled his Jeep into the driveway. His grandmother was in the passenger seat, and Celer was in the back. A rush of warmth flooded my chest. He must have realized how important it would be for Sabina to see her dog today. To be here now, he must have left for his grandmother’s house as the sun rose.

  Sabina, who was dressed in a crisp white T-shirt and light green shorts, had already rushed outside to greet Celer. It wasn’t the modern clothes that made me heave a sigh of relief but the expression on her face as she squatted down next to Celer and rubbed him all over. She was back for good. I knew it in my bones.

  It turned out that, while Quinn’s blackmail may have been the catalyst that had sent her into STEWie’s basket, she had been motivated just as much by a desire to find out what had happened to her father, Secundus, and her grandmother, Faustilla—if they had survived the eruption or not. We could offer no more than a promise to try to find out, but I had sensed acceptance on her part. I guessed that her unexpected foray into 1976 had helped her see the difficulty of any such undertaking. Her focus now was on the future, not the past.

  Celer waddled up the house steps and inside, as if exhausted from all this coming and going. Sabina grinned at Nate, then followed with a polite greeting to Mary Kirkland, whom she hadn’t met before. She and Mary shook hands. Sabina thanked the older woman for taking care of her dog, and I had to wipe something from my eye.

  I wasn’t the only one. Nate coughed and said with a catch to his voice, “Well, now everyone’s met everyone. Shall we go inside?”

  “Most certainly,” I said. “Judging from the delicious smell, I believe Abigail is making pancakes.”

  Celer shuffled over to his favorite spot behind the TV, and the rest of us joined Abigail in the kitchen. Nate rolled up his sleeves and offered to crisp the bacon. His offer to help was accepted, but Sabina’s was waved off. We pointed her to the seat of honor at the kitchen table and directed Mary to a chair as well. As I got the coffee going, I heard Mary ask Sabina how she’d liked the seventies. They launched into a discussion of disco pants. I suspected the two would get along very well, which gave me a good feeling. The more people in your life who care about you, the better. I wanted Sabina’s support network to be vast.

  I set up the coffeemaker and readied several mugs. When Abigail walked away from the counter to bring the stack of pancakes to the kitchen table, I said quietly to Nate, “Good news. We’re not half siblings.”

  He was methodically lining up bacon slices on a napkin to drain them. “We’re not—what did you say?”

  “It’s a bit of a long story. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  Speaking of later, I had decided to do what I should have done long ago: make an appointment to talk to an expert in the genetics department. The expert could tell me more about hidden traits, and perhaps I could ev
en volunteer for a genetics study to trace the dark-haired ancestor from whom I’d inherited my looks. There was always the chance that a TTE run to the relevant time period would open up, whatever century it was, and I could tag along.

  There was only one problem. Dean Braga had left a message on my voice mail. She needed to talk to me as soon as possible.

  There was no deep meaning to the location of Udo’s CSI in the end, not the way I’d thought there would be. According to Sabina, who had been inspired to join the book club’s journey more by the Latin word infundibulum (she’d hoped it might lead to home somehow) than by the prospect of catching a boat ride, Udo had wanted to show the others that much of life was just chance and coincidence. The chain went something like this: Udo wanted to be a writer; Kurt Vonnegut was the person he looked up to most in that quest; Kurt had written PR releases for General Electric; GE had been founded by Edison; Edison had owned a winter estate in Fort Myers; Fort Myers was where Udo had been born. I didn’t know if the phrase six degrees of separation existed in 1976, but that’s what Udo had done. He’d linked Kurt to his own birthplace. The actual location didn’t matter much—Udo could have picked any spot and probably connected himself and Vonnegut to it—but he’d chosen the banyan as a symbol.

  History itself, it occurred to me, is like a large, never-ending game of six degrees of separation—or better, six degrees of connection. A lattice links everybody and everything. Time and geography. The past and the present, and the future as well.

  Sabina had called the pages in her possession “Udo’s book.” She pronounced the name with a long u and a softer d: Ooo-doh. Hating to see anything go to waste, she’d recovered them from the bin after Udo’s departure. He had told Sabina it was time to part ways and that she should wait in the art bus. Not understanding why we were on her trail, he hadn’t wanted Abigail and me to find the girl he knew as Julia, so he’d stuck her hat onto the passenger-side seat of the Ford Mustang to mislead us.

  After some time spent waiting in the art bus, Sabina had peeked out and seen Dr. Little get off the city bus. Something about his manner had made her uncomfortable, and she’d hidden in the garden until spotting Abigail and me once we jumped back from the causeway.

  Udo had been headed to a final showdown with his family, I guessed, perhaps to make a grand announcement that he was leaving school for good. He never got the chance. The pages Sabina had saved, and we had brought back with us, were all that was left. In a way it was a childish gesture—throwing the story pages away because he hadn’t found any support from his family. But it was what had saved his book for posterity.

  “How did you get along with the others?” I asked Sabina as the mellow Sunday rolled on. “Did you recognize any of the book club students?”

  “Missy…your mother, yes? And Soren…father?”

  I explained about Gigi and Nathaniel being Nate’s parents, but she already seemed to have figured that out, too.

  “You gave your name as Julia?”

  “Udo ask,” she explained. Apparently the others had stuck to calling her Lab Coat Girl.

  “But why my name?”

  “Rule of time travel—blend in. Julia a nice name and you nice to me.”

  Seeing my parents there had kept me in her mind.

  Speaking of my parents, they returned my call around lunchtime—the ship had pulled into port—and I had a chance to ask if they remembered meeting Lab Coat Girl. The answer was they did, vaguely—Lab Coat Girl had spent much of the drive down to Fort Myers staring out the window, my Mom said—but it was the memory of Udo that had stayed with them all these years. I filled them in on the facts as they both listened in on the speakerphone. After Mom’s exclamation of surprise, followed by “I thought Sabina looked familiar,” there was a moment of silence on their end when I mentioned that we had rescued Udo’s manuscript.

  “Get it published in his name, Jules,” Dad finally said. Mom heartily agreed.

  “I will,” I promised. “Just as soon as things get back to normal here.”

  I didn’t ask about their college friends Gigi and Nathaniel in case there were still some hard feelings there even after all this time. My parents were driving up soon and it was best to bring up the issue face-to-face. It was time I introduced them to Nate, anyway.

  Dean Braga pointed me to the chair across from her desk. Dr. Little had passed me in the hall on his way out, his cheeks bright red. My guess was that he’d told the dean everything, though I wasn’t sure if that included the truth about how Sabina had come to be with us. I took the chair. Before I could say anything, Dean Braga spoke. “Dr. Little told me about the lottery numbers and his breach of conduct.”

  “Is he staying on?”

  I hoped the answer was yes. Dr. Little and I didn’t get along very well, but he was talented, and he cared deeply for his family.

  Dean Braga sighed. “He did offer to quit, but I didn’t accept. He said he lost his head and that it won’t happen again. I believe him. I’ll think about what the consequences of his actions should be. Now, about what prompted this madcap run to 1976…”

  “I’m not even sure where to begin.”

  The dean leaned back in her leather chair. “Sabina is Abigail’s charge, right? And the two are renting the mother-in-law suite in your house? I’m afraid I don’t know very much of the backstory beyond that. Was Sabina acting out for attention, as teens do, having somehow figured out how to get into the TTE lab? Or is there something here that I’m missing?”

  I was suddenly at a loss for words. How to explain why we had plucked a thirteen-year-old out of the Pompeii ghost zone and brought her into the twenty-first century, why we had violated time-travel protocol? I took a deep breath and the story came tumbling out. It wasn’t so difficult to explain after all. “We met her on that run to ancient Pompeii, the one that was orchestrated by Lewis Sunder. Her father was Secundus, a fish sauce merchant with a small shop in town. He entrusted his daughter to our protection when the eruption started…We couldn’t just leave her there.” I slumped into the chair. “Sorry, we should have told you before.”

  The apology felt inadequate.

  Apparently she agreed. In a rare moment of unprofessional snippiness, she said, “You think?” She tapped a pencil, then said more mildly, “I apologize for my outburst. I suppose I can understand why you kept it secret. Making the details widely known would have cast a shadow on the TTE program and the school, not to mention the girl’s life here in the twenty-first century.”

  “I—we just wanted her to have a little more time to get accustomed to her new environment. In retrospect, it may not have been the best plan. It was why she used STEWie. She was trying to go back to Pompeii because she thought she was a burden on us, and to find out what happened to her family.”

  “I see. You understand that this is one secret that cannot stay that way?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, what’s done is done. I’m not heartless—of course I’m glad you were able to rescue her from Pompeii. But we can’t allow anything like this to happen again. I’ll have to give some thought to how to handle the PR angle, which will require some finesse on our part. There’ll be those who will argue that it’s not our job, our right, to play God. They’ll be right of course, but they can hardly make us send her back.”

  We both knew that there were many who thought using STEWie was messing with the natural order of things and that the past was best left unexplored. But growing pains were to be expected with any new technology, especially one as groundbreaking as time travel. Things would sort themselves out. I sat up and opened my notepad to start a list of what needed to be done, but she held up a hand.

  “As I said, we can’t allow anything like this to happen again. You bringing her back from the Pompeii run and hiding it, this weekend’s events—it all reinforces what I’ve been considering for some time now. The STEWie program must be shut down. I’m going to make the recommendation to Chancellor Evans.”

 
; The pen almost fell out of my hand. Dean Braga wasn’t fond of time traveling herself, but I knew that that didn’t enter into her thought process. “Shut it down? Surely that’s an overreaction.”

  “Julia, think about it. If there is one thing that has become abundantly clear, it’s that human nature and time travel do not get along very well. We’re not ready. Since STEWie’s first successful run, we’ve seen a sequence of inappropriate behavior from one researcher to the next—Dr. Mooney, Dr. Sunder, Dr. Holm, and now Dr. Little…and that’s only the actions we know about. What other secrets has the time-travel lab been privy to? I realize that some of the researchers had good intentions—”

  “And some didn’t, that’s true.”

  “But this cannot go on.”

  “Still, to shut down the lab…”

  “I share your disappointment, but for now it is the only course of action we can take. We’ll have to let the other schools know.” She meant MIT, the University of Beijing, and the two other schools that were building their own STEWies. “We can’t make them halt their lab construction, but I think public pressure might increase after Sabina’s story hits the news.” She pointed at the blank page in my notepad. “Let’s start by notifying everyone on the STEWie roster that I’m putting all runs on hold. Then we can release an official statement and see about scheduling a media Q&A and a meet and greet with Sabina.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, you know there will be considerable opposition to shutting the program down from within the school. Unfinished research. Students unable to wrap up their PhDs. Unused funding. Upended work schedules.”

  I’d dealt with angry tenured professors before. That’s what tenure guaranteed them—the right to speak their mind without the worry of being fired—and boy, did they use it on occasion.