Professor Plumston sat on her massive leather chair and reviewed the list of clues Thomas had given her. She looked for quotes, context, or allusion, but found none. “I’m sorry, Thomas. I don’t see anything more than you do. It’s not an excerpt from anything I know of, and it seems to me like there is no particular code.”
“I thought so too, but it’s not really my area of expertise. I guess I was hoping I had missed something.” Thomas stood up to leave.
Professor Plumston stood as well. “Sorry I can’t help you, but good luck.”
Remember, death, honor, living, tell, the Truth shall set you free. Thomas mulled it over and over in his mind. Slowly he began to focus on the middle of the message. Tell the truth. That had to be significant. Tell what truth? Thomas could hardly imagine that Dillon had a secret so great that he would be thrust into inter-dimensional time travel. Danny might have secrets, but why would Dillon’s family be involved? There was the question of Dillon’s parentage, but lots of kids were adopted, so Thomas couldn’t see how that could be it either. There had to be some reason that the boys had been brought together. The guitar might be the mechanism that joined the boys, but it seemed like it was no longer really necessary to bring the boys into other dimensions.
Still, the guitar figured prominently in many of the experiences. Thomas’ brain ached from trying to figure it out, and then it dawned on him. Dillon doesn’t have a secret; Dillon is a secret. His DNA doesn’t match up with his parents'. Maggie seems to know, and she said Ryan knew, but not Dillon? And if he doesn’t know, why does it matter now? How does it affect Danny? What makes Dillon’s adoption so different, even dangerous? Why should it have cosmic consequences?
Thomas could feel his brain itch again. There was no doubt about it; he knew he was getting closer to figuring this out. He was definitely on the right track and he was definitely going to be up all night trying to put this puzzle together. The frustrating thing was that he didn’t think he had all the pieces.
November 4, 2011
It had been a long night, and when Thomas called Maggie the next morning, he had a list of questions. He didn’t want to intrude on her private life, but he needed to know more about Dillon’s DNA if they were ever going to figure this out. They agreed to meet an hour later, and Maggie asked Ryan to join them. It was going to be difficult and uncomfortable for sure, but it wasn’t just Maggie’s story to tell. It was only fair that Ryan should be there when Maggie explained about everything.
Thomas and Ryan arrived at Maggie’s place at the same time. Maggie breezed in, and Ryan could tell from her flushed cheeks and bright-red ears that she was nervous. He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Might as well get started,” Maggie said in a voice a little more high-pitched than usual.
Thomas had a list of questions, but Maggie looked like she needed to do this in her own way. Explaining a child’s adoption is a delicate thing at best, and Thomas didn’t want to make this harder than it had to be. He put away his questions and leaned forward to listen. A moment later Maggie began to speak.
“Wow, this is harder than I thought it would be,” Maggie began as she and Ryan sat on the sofa together. "What I’m about to tell you is extremely private and sensitive. Before I begin, I need your word that it will be kept completely confidential.” Thomas nodded.
“You are absolutely sure you need this information, right?” Ryan asked.
“I know it’s not easy, but yes, it is crucial. You see, I was going over the messages Dillon received and right in the middle it says Tell the truth. That got me thinking, Tell the truth about what? What secret and who needs to tell it? All along I have wondered what Dillon needs to tell us, and then it finally occurred to me, what if Dillon is not the one with the secret, what if he is the secret? That reminded me about the DNA discrepancy and that’s why I called you.”
“Well, as I guess you already know,” Ryan began, “we’re not Dillon’s biological parents. We are, however, his legal parents and guardians and more importantly, we’re the only family he’s ever known.” Ryan wished he didn’t feel as defensive as he sounded. Being Dillon’s dad was the most important thing in Ryan’s life, but he always felt like he had something to prove. “What if I told you that this is not our first experience with time travel?”
The room fell utterly silent and Thomas tried to get a grip on what Ryan was trying to tell him. At least a million questions flew into his mind, but he said nothing. He just sat back on the couch and retrieved his old notebook. No way he wanted to miss even a word of whatever this was. Maggie looked away and stood up. This was a tough conversation for lots of reasons.
“I’m not sure exactly where to start,” Ryan explained, “but I guess 1985 is as good a place as any. I was a freshman in college that October and I was rushing a fraternity. 'Hell Week,' as they liked to call it, was almost over and it had definitely been one hell of a ride. I came through a week of groveling and other miscellaneous embarrassments and there was just one test left to pass. Everyone knew it was crazy, but the last feat I had to endure was driving the old fraternity truck down Main Street at midnight. It should have been a no-brainer, but there was a catch. I guess there is always a catch. The old piece of junk had no brakes.”
“Wait a minute. You agreed to drive a vehicle with no brakes?” The question was out of Thomas’ mouth before he could stop it.
“I’m afraid so,” Ryan sighed. “I didn’t realize that 'bad brakes' really meant no brakes at all, but by the time I discovered that, it was too late. Anyway, there I was headed down the street and picking up speed. I pumped the brakes and then pounded them, but it was no use. I saw a field up ahead and a young woman waiting at the edge. I thought that if I could just make it to the field, I could ram that old heap into a haystack, or even the barn, anything at all just to make it stop. I almost made it too. If that light hadn’t changed at the last minute, none of this might have happened.”
Ryan rubbed his head and sighed. “The light changed, but I couldn’t stop. I wailed on the horn, but it was already too late. Another truck came out of nowhere at the last minute. For a moment, I even thought the trailer end would clear the intersection before I got there and it almost happened that way. But at the moment the back of that truck was nearly out of the intersection, I plowed into it. I caught the back of the truck and the force of the impact flipped the whole thing right over. We landed in a pile of twisted metal in the field. It was a disaster.”
Thomas was horrified, but he didn’t see how this related to Dillon, Danny, or time travel.
“The next thing I knew I was hanging from the steering wheel and I smelled smoke. I must have passed out, and at the time I thought I was hallucinating, but the truth is, I saw the whole thing. Hanging there, peering through the smoke I saw something I would not understand until about fifteen years ago, when Dillon came into our lives.
"I actually saw Maggie walk out through the brush from the field. I watched her go into the back of the mangled truck and an old woman handed her a baby from the wreckage. At first I guessed some Good Samaritan had come to help us. Then I heard sirens in the distance and Maggie began to run. She ran straight into the field and disappeared back the way she came.
"I still don’t know exactly how long I was there before I felt these strong arms pull me from the car. There was a cowboy at least six feet tall standing over me muttering and swearing. I'd hit my head pretty hard and I guess I passed out again or something, but when I woke up, I was in the hospital and they told me I had been in a coma for about a month. I tried to tell them what I had seen, but no one believed me. They were convinced it was the head injury talking.
"Later I found out that the truck I hit was full of migrant farm workers from South America. Thank God, everyone got out alive, but they never found the baby or the guy who pulled me out. I guess everyone just ran for the hills. They wanted a description of the other driver, but I couldn’t tell them anything more than 'cowboy.' There was no way of knowing who
was in the truck because there was no record of those people. It was only the blankets and old clothes left behind that even made the cops suspicious. When they ran the plates, they discovered some kind of illegal trafficking going on.
"They ruled the crash an accident for one reason only: lack of evidence. The wreck was so burned up that there was no way for them to know it had no brakes. They might have suspected it was a stunt, but they couldn’t prove it. As for the truck, once again, they knew something wasn’t right, but they couldn’t prove it. Besides, that cowboy was long gone anyway.”
Thomas had stopped taking notes at least twenty minutes before, but he wasn’t worried. He would never forget what he just heard. His head was swimming when he muttered, “What happened fifteen years ago that helped you understand all this?”
Maggie smiled and took over. She had a strange look in her eyes. “Fifteen years ago I met an amazing woman. She was at the hospital and we got to talking. She claimed she could time travel, but I didn’t believe her, at least not at first.” Maggie fiddled with her sweater. “Anyway, she said that she knew how much I wanted to be a mother and that she could help me. She said she could show me where a child would be waiting for me. I didn’t understand at first but then she said something that I couldn’t ignore.”
“You will have a son,” the old woman began, “but only if you can claim him. Your child will not come to you by the eagle, not by your kind of medicine or hospital. Your son must come to you by the condor, by the world of spirit and time travel.”
“I have to admit I was curious, but still, I thought she was crazy. I thought it was all crazy right up until the moment I discovered it was true.”
Ryan shook his head. Maggie continued. “Anyway, the woman said she could show me how to do it, but that there wasn’t much time to debate. I went with her to Times Square of all places. I thought I was just imagining things but then even I couldn’t deny it. We held hands and then we began to move and I felt like I was falling. The next thing I knew I was standing in the field moments before Ryan’s accident.” Thomas tried not to look as amazed as he really was.
“The next thing I knew I heard wheels screeching and a crash. It was tragic. There was smoke and fire and then I heard a baby crying. I ran into the burning wreck and saw the old woman pulling Dillon from the back of the truck. I planned to go back into the truck to see if I could help, but there was a cowboy who ran in after me. I brought the baby out of harm's way and that’s when I could hear the woman shouting. She yelled at me to run back and to do it quickly before the portal closed. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think. I wanted to go back and help—I’m a nurse for heaven’s sake—but I didn’t. I ran and ran. I was running so hard that I fell into some kind of a pit. I clutched the baby and together we kept falling and falling.”
Ryan continued. “Maggie came back to Times Square with a baby bundled in her arms and she never saw the old woman again. Her first stop was Joe’s place where they invented a cover story, but eventually Maggie came clean and told me the truth. The weird thing was that I believed her. It just rang true.”
Thomas leaned back and closed his eyes trying to absorb all the implications of this new information. Maggie was a time traveller? Dillon was in the wrong place? Dillon was literally out of time? This had to be the secret, but why was Joe so intent on revealing it? Why did it matter so much now?
“Am I right in assuming that we are the only ones who know about this? What about Dillon’s biological family?” Thomas was looking for something, but he didn’t know what.
“I’m ashamed to say that there was no one left to look for him after the accident. There was no way to trace an extended family. I don’t even know what country they were from. I didn’t want anyone to know about how Dillon came to us. Even if we wanted to go public, who would have believed us anyway?” Maggie shrugged.
“As a lawyer,” Ryan added, “it was easy enough to get Dillon private adoption papers, so that’s what I did.”
“Look, Thomas,” Maggie added, “I can’t pretend I expected to have a child this way, but Dillon is our son. He doesn’t even know he was adopted because we would have no agency records for him to see. If I had left him there, he could have died. That’s why we didn’t tell you all this before. Dillon’s sanity was already under pressure; this was just not anything we wanted him to have to deal with now.”
“There is just one more thing.” Ryan stood up.
“There’s more?” Thomas was reeling.
“Michael McIntyre knows everything and never lets us forget it. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. He says that’s why he keeps me close. I believe he is a time traveler too, but I’m sworn to secrecy. If I tell about his time travel, he’ll expose the fact that Dillon isn’t ours.”
This was definitely a secret worth telling, but to do so now would just hurt and confuse Dillon. Thomas wanted to go home and think.
Danny couldn’t stop thinking about that picture in the box at his parents’ place. He was going to go there again, but then changed his mind. He didn’t need to see it again to remember what it meant, and he knew he couldn’t hide away from Dillon forever.
“You ever hear that saying, You can sleep when you’re dead?” Danny asked Dillon as he appeared in his room. “Well, let me tell you something, it ain’t true. There is no sleeping at all.”
Dillon was glad to see his friend again. Dillon was trying to change the strings on the guitar, and he was making quite a mess. When Danny saw what he was doing, he thought about letting Dillon struggle along. That was how he learned to do it: trial and error after error after error. The only problem with that plan was that Danny hated to see his favorite guitar suffer through what it looked like could be a long learning curve.
“Stop it. I’m begging you. Please stop strangling our guitar!” Danny took the guitar in his hands and then abruptly dropped it on the bed. “If I can do this! Why can’t I make my dad hear me?”
Dillon was confused. “What are you talking about?”
Danny wanted to tell Dillon everything right then and there, but he said, “I’ve been trying to talk to my dad, to get him a message, and the only thing I can do there is flicker his lights. But there may just be another way.”
Dillon asked before he thought it through: “You want me to try and get him a message?”
Danny was tempted, but he knew better. “I’m curious, Dillon. How would something like that go? Hi, I’m a kid you don’t know from New York and I have your dead son’s guitar and he has a message for you. I can tell you right now, he would never believe any of this.”
Dillon was relieved because he didn’t really want to do it. “Did you ever wonder why you and I can communicate? There must be some reason. We never even met when you were alive. Uncle Joe seems to have a lot to say, but even he can’t just talk to me; he has to show me in those awful dreams or whatever they are.”
“I may not know what those little adventures are about, but I think we both know that they are not dreams.” Danny picked up the guitar again. “Okay, pay attention. I don’t ever want you to torture our guitar like this again.” He began to untangle the knotted strings. “First off, you never, and I mean never, take off all the strings at once. You might have warped the neck by taking all the tension off it at the same time. From now on, one string at a time. Got it?”
Dillon nodded and watched as Danny put the new strings on the old guitar. When he was finished a few minutes later, he even tuned it. Then he handed the instrument back to Dillon and said, “Play on.” When Dillon took the guitar again, Danny disappeared.
A moment later and Danny was back in Tennessee. He used to stay away for years, but now that he knew what was going on, he just had to go there. The box was back in its usual place on the shelf in the closet. Danny tried to relax, to accept the picture as good news, to think of it as a blessing, and not to see it as an indictment of his dad. At first, it didn’t work at all. All he felt was angry and then frustrated. Then Da
nny thought about Dillon playing his guitar up there in New York City. He thought about how nervous Dillon looked waiting for Marie to show up at the theatre, and he smiled. In a way, the snapshot wasn’t bad news at all. It explained why Dillon and Danny were in this mess together.
November 8, 2011
Thomas had a headache. It was the same headache he had had yesterday and the day before. He was convinced the pain was caused by the physical stretching his brain must be doing. Dealing with this kind of thing was redefining the term mind blowing for him.
He paced in the lab and rubbed his eyes. If someone had told him two months ago that he would be involved in all this, he never would have believed it—time travel, string theory, alternate dimensions? But that wasn’t the part that made his head hurt; that was the part that made his heart race with excitement. The part that had him completely upside down was how common these things were.
Thomas prided himself on the fact that he never made assumptions, and yet, in this case, he apparently made them all the time. He assumed that time travel was unusual, but it was happening all around him. Dillon, Maggie, Danny, and, if he took into account the stories from the hospital about people seeing and feeling the presence of loved ones in the moments before death, we are all literally surrounded by string theory in action. People are crossing dimensions all around us, but it is like a conspiracy of silence. We often have dreams about those we've lost, and sometimes the dreams are so vivid that when we wake up, it feels like it was a real visit. What if it was? String theory is believed to be the crossroads between quantum physics and gravity, but what if there were another intersection running right through? What if string theory proved the existence of quantum physics, gravity, and the afterlife?
PLAY ON Page 13