by Sean Oliver
Christ, the coffee.
“Should I bring something to Beth?” Rose asked. George squinted. “McAllister.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. I’m foggy. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“What’s wrong? You in pain?”
“No, no pain. Yeah, maybe you should go over to Beth today.”
“Are you getting chest pains? What about your breathing?”
George stood and walked to the counter and grabbed a mug. He walked to the coffee maker as if hoping to intimidate it with the waiting cup.
“I’ll grab something at the bakery and see Beth. I cannot believe there’s no information about that poor girl yet,” she said.
He dealt with it almost all day at school. He wasn’t starting his morning with it.
“No pain,” he said. “Just can’t sleep.”
“I wish you’d listen to them and drink decaf.”
George’s eyelids were drooping. He pulled the coffee pot out of the maker and poured his cup. A stream of brewing coffee spilled down onto the burner and sizzled when it hit.
“I’m gonna throw this in my Thermos and take it on the road.” He was not in the mood to consider the plight of the McAllisters. He didn’t have answers for them, or for his own wife for that matter. He could barely keep his eyes open, and what no one knew—not the McAllisters, not even his wife of several decades—was that the reason he was not sleeping was because he was fighting this mysterious tingle that was the cause of all the questions they had. He also knew that in the smoky haze that invaded him lay the answers to so much.
Answers he knew a certain detective sought, answers that prompted O’Malley to leave the voice mail George listened to before leaving the bedroom.
FORTY-TWO
“WHAT DOES THIS guy want?”
Lorenzo stood at his desk. That temporary security guard walked by again, looked in the main office. He was overstaying his welcome. When would Miss Carmen be back from maternity leave?
“Who?” Mariana asked from the copy machine across the office. It was a little after seven in the morning and they were just about the only staff in the building.
Lorenzo liked this time with her, their early mornings. They could speak freely, not text each other from across the office. They didn’t have to look over their shoulders. If they wanted to rip on someone they could, and laugh as loud as they wanted while they did. If they were in the middle of their complicated relationship drama and needed to scream it out, they could do that, as well. Just not too loudly—the main entrance security desk was out the office door and just fifty yards down the hall.
“The guard,” Lorenzo said. “What’s his name?”
“Mister Moore?”
“Keeps looking in.”
She nodded. “He’ll be leaving.”
“He better. He shouldn’t even be here. What was Carmen thinking? A baby? Now? Really?”
“I don’t think that was planned.” Lorenzo went back to looking down at that calendar blotter in the center of his desk. Mariana was watching him.
“Que paso?”
He just shook his head and folded his arms, still looking down. After a few seconds she joined him and looked down at the blotter, too. It was the calendar for the current year, an overview, with each of the twelve months organized in three rows of four.
Mariana didn’t say anything when she got beside him. He figured she wouldn’t ask anything more. The calendar had been very much on Lorenzo’s mind the past few days. Mariana was more or less in sync with him lately. He knew she was standing beside him thinking the exact same thing, and staring at the exact same box.
“My mother isn’t going to move,” Lorenzo said, barely above a whisper. They were still.
“You’re overprotective.”
“I want her set up.” He turned to her. “You understand.”
Mariana drew in a deep breath and tore herself away from the calendar, and Lorenzo. Mariana was tough, and she would always walk from any discussion of the future or love. But of late, her avoidance of certain topics was laced with something else. She still ran, still played like she was cast of stone. But Lorenzo smelled something else in the charade.
Fear.
That bothered him. He was close to having her all to himself. Images were crystallizing in his mind—that weird feeling was making their union very clear, despite some behaviors that were very unlike him. Running a teacher’s car into oncoming traffic would qualify. The Smoke erased him before acting, and it erased a lot of the judgment tied to thoughts he was having and plans he was making.
Mariana went back to the copies and left the office altogether to sort them. Lorenzo watched her go.
He pulled a marker from the pencil cup on his desk, leaned down onto the calendar, and circled April 5th.
FORTY-THREE
MARY EDISON COULDN’T take her eyes off eighth-grader Nora Aguiles. The young lady was reading her essay to the class and was decorated so completely with a poise and control rare for thirteen year olds. Most of her students read their work as though it was the first time they were seeing it, even though they wrote it. Could probably make an argument against their having written it, based on their clumsiness with it.
Not Nora. Mary watched from a student’s seat as the girl stood alone at the front of the room. Her auburn hair was blown perfectly wavy, and she’d clearly prepared herself special for this day when she’d be the center of attention. Her clothing, though just a school uniform, somehow fit better than all the other kids’ clothes. Her diction was perfect. She was pausing in the most effective places, and looking up above her paper for some eye contact with the room.
Community service volunteering—that was her topic, chosen from a selection that Mary used every year. Nora proposed some great options that Mary hadn’t come across in her years on the job, like community organizing being tied to all social media apps, giving a handful of people the ability to echo their message through hundreds more people, compounding exponentially.
Mary so admired this powerhouse before her, on her way to great things. She admired the girl so much that she was intimidated by her. Mary became uneasy when speaking with Nora. She’d scoff at that thought, but then become tongue-tied and jittery whenever she engaged Nora in discussion.
Mary was pretty sure she loved her. Not in an improper sense, nothing romantic. Despite the uncomfortable nature of her fascination with the girl, she still felt herself so drawn to her. Mary wasn’t dumb—she knew articulating that to any other adult could mean serious charges and the like. As a middle-aged woman, she didn’t understand it herself. How would she expect anyone else to?
She lost herself in Nora’s perfect skin, a face so expressive and mysterious. She continued to read to the class and, in truth, Mary Edison wasn’t hearing much of it, certainly not digesting it.
She wasn’t seeing anything in Nora that was a reminder of herself, decades ago, at thirteen. It was the opposite, and that was the allure. Nora was electric, captivating. Mary was fascinated by how different things must be for Nora, and she was adrift in the excitement of considering such a young life.
As a young lady, Mary had been stricken with illness and never recovered. She certainly made a full recovery in the sense of body, defeating a bout of leukemia that was deemed inoperable. Mary lay in a hospital bed for weeks, which for a nine-year-old girl was an eternity. She got her share of visitors for the first week or so. Cousins came, friends from school came.
Then they didn’t. Doctors spoke to parents and they were all informed that Mary didn’t have a realistic chance. Her passing wasn’t necessarily imminent, but people began to protect themselves from the pain of sitting with a young girl sentenced to die. They didn’t want their children to be devastated watching a drastic deterioration of someone like them. That would lead to trauma and considerations that parents didn’t want to explore in their own lives.
Her mother’s cheeks became more sunken as the weeks went on. She wasn’t eating, she w
as smoking packs of cigarettes a day, and she’d resumed drinking. Mary smelled the liquor and smoke from across the hospital room.
Mary was a smart little girl. She knew she was dying. She put together snippets of conversation going on around her. She got indirect, though telltale answers to questions she asked. She witnessed the desperate logic of adults trying to make a child think it was okay to die.
“Mary, we all have different times,” gave way to, “Close your eyes and let yourself fall asleep and you will feel better.” There was talk of God, of heaven. For Mary, watching people watch her die was the real torture.
The medicine they were giving her, they called it morphine, began to tingle in her body all day long, which was weird because she wasn’t getting the morphine all day. After a few days of the tingle that crawled up her back and into her shoulders, she was sitting up talking. She was as hungry as a lost panther. She ate and ate as doctors and nurses visited regularly with smiles. They gave her so many blood tests she would cry every time they came in to find a vein. They explained they kept doing it because they just couldn’t believe the results. It was a good thing.
People began to come in to visit again. Her mother laughed and cried with joy sitting in the room, rather than crying all day out of sadness. Mary would live.
But the emotional death that she experienced after the leukemia would be some sort of fatal. Her mother, the only parent she’d ever known, soon gave her entire existence to the bottle. By the time Mary was ready to graduate college, her mother couldn’t even make it out of the house so see her. She was toothless and emaciated—a ghost.
Mary was unable to forge quality relationships of any kind. She’d watched the visitors wane in that hospital and knew that would happen again if ever she needed people. Her terminal leukemia’s promise took everything except her body. She never told anyone about the tingling feeling in her spine. It was like a magic spell that made her feel better. And magic was secret.
As Nora continued to read her assignment, Mary opened her yellow legal pad and scribbled in it. She took notes when each of her students stood to read, but she’d been enraptured by the prancing mare before her controlling the room. So she turned toward the pad and began to jot notes with no thought behind them. Her hand seemed to glide across the page on its own. That kind of thing had been happening a lot lately, that feeling starting in her spine and flowing upward. That smoky crawl across her body, up into her scalp, had become so much a part of her. Maybe it was just her.
Nora,
Your wonderful essay inspires me and shows how truly remarkable you are. You can effortlessly draw the class into your world, and I know you can effortlessly draw our world into your world, as well.
Mary was writing a note to Nora, though it read a touch more formal. It was a letter. Mary fell into the words as they appeared on the page before her, writing feverishly, a hint of a smile coming to her lips.
You will be afforded opportunities unlike those offered to other students. You must seize upon them and use them. Allow me to help you realize your power—
Mary could help her, nurture her. Mary could add the finishing touches to the already blossoming gifts the girl had.
Mentor? Teacher? There probably wasn’t an exact word for what she had in mind, and she didn’t bother to search for one. Her hand was inviting Nora into her life.
The teacher looked up, her mind back in the classroom. The room had fallen silent. Nora was finished. Had been for a while, it seemed. Everyone was watching Ms. Edison. She flipped the pages down on the legal pad and hoped she wasn’t as flush as she felt.
“Sorry,” she said, standing and heading back to her desk. “There was a lot there, Nora. Wanted to remember every bit.” She smiled pleasantly at Nora who flashed a wide, proud smile back. Mary slid the pad into her drawer, having heard nearly nothing the girl read, but knowing it was all so very perfect.
FORTY-FOUR
DEANNA MARCHED DOWN the hallway, averting her eyes from everyone. She reached her classroom and closed her door with a thud. She didn’t break stride to her desk where she dropped into her seat and pulled the laptop out of her bag. She’d just delivered her class down to phys ed for the period. It gave her the first significant amount of undisturbed time to poke around the thing that possessed her mind all morning.
April 5th. She could barely focus on anything else, and being in that building was pumping her full of distraction. She’d avoided Jared for most of the morning. He’d dropped some comments about her still being angry from the department store bathroom summit, but she’d waved it off and said she just needed time to think. She wanted to grab him by his collar and ask what the hell was up with his birthdate. But she was all too aware he shared it with the rest of the freaks. She just didn’t know where he fit in. Or where George fit in. Or into what, exactly, they fit.
There was so damn much she didn’t know, and her head was spinning. But she was invigorated. She kept her mind on Trisha. She kept moving forward.
How had no one at the board of education seen this? If this wasn’t a glitch and all of the birthdays were input accurately, was it not impossible to come across this? The years were pretty varied and unless someone had specifically exported that data and sorted it by birthdate, perhaps it might have gone unnoticed. All the teachers in the building came there under varied circumstances, across many years, she assumed. It was gradual and was probably impossible to notice over time.
When her laptop was ready, Deanna opened Google and searched April 5. She got what she expected—around 129,000,000 hits. She scrolled through the army of blue and black text, through pages and pages on the search engine. Her eyes caught fragments and factoids from indexed sites—Gregory Peck born…National Caramel Day…a mass suicide…Epcot wait times…lottery results—and everything else under the sun.
The date itself bore no significance to Deanna beyond the couple of birthdays she’d already known. But what of the others’ birthdays? Did the entire building walk around on that day and wish each other a happy birthday? Weren’t there individual birthday celebrations at school throughout the year—8:00 a.m. teachers’ room gatherings around a cake, bagels, and cannoli? Did they celebrate everyone on the same day? Wouldn’t others see that as odd?
And what others, exactly?
Deanna kept scrolling through results by the dozens: Mayflower sails from Plymouth…historical baseball scores…Lent…Easter…tornado in Tupelo… It was all becoming a mush. Her eyes were going sightless from all the innocuous snippets and phrases flying up in front of her. Her mind had already been in a whirlwind and the sheer voluminous amount of information offering a tale of April 5th’s significance to the planet was making her fingertips flutter.
Where was her friend right now? Was she in pain, scared? Did she need help? Did she need Deanna?
As this information presented itself, Deanna felt the journey toward a resolution had gotten longer. Jared was just upstairs in his classroom, teaching his Internet of Things class. All of this would be easier with him helping her. He had been integral thus far. That thumb drive with the “Glitchy.exe” file had been a key.
But there was Jared’s name, bearing the same, curious stamp as each name she clicked into on that board of education site. She kept scrolling, alone in her classroom—the only staff member with a different birthday. Well, the only one not missing.
More text swam across her screen, with nothing grabbing her. There was nothing about schools, nothing about New Jersey, nothing about Carson. There was nothing that was even interesting enough to warrant a click. It was all equally normal. She knew this search was as useful as her looking under the hood of her car if it suddenly died on the highway. She would probably walk to the front and do it, but unless there was a big, flashing red light under there, she’d gain nothing from looking.
…Yankees vs. Orioles…income tax seminar…French troops occupy Bois de Caillette…
Then there was yet another search result about a mass suicide.
It flew by her eyes, but she brought it back down onto her screen. Those kinds of things just stood out in the throng of announcements of the unremarkable. After seeing it for the fourth or fifth time, she stopped scrolling. April 5, 1961. This particular hit on Google marked the date “a tragedy.” One entry below that also referenced that day in 1961, making reference to sixty people found dead in Honduras. She clicked on it. No real connection, just an attention-getter.
A Times article from 1961 opened on the screen, reporting United States authorities having finally found dozens of citizens reported missing nearly two years prior. What was first thought upon discovery to be a POW camp from the bloody uprising of 1959 in the troubled country, actually proved to be a voluntary mass suicide. One man, Markus Tarkay, the head of a spiritual colony called the Circle of Tomorrow, and fifty-nine of his followers willingly ended their lives in a deep thicket of forest, according to the article.
According to writings of Tarkay, found in his cabin, all of them believed their work together would again resume at a specific time in the future.
FORTY-FIVE
Honduras—March 1961
TOMMY COULD SEE the ocean from atop the banana tree. For the past few weeks it had been his sanctuary. He found himself more and more impatient with tasks and with others. He was just one of a few young men there, and thus felt he was being taken advantage of. His strength always seemed needed somewhere, for some hauling or hoisting.
It was only midday and already Tommy had rebuilt most of the wall on cabin two, and it was getting damn hot. The air was so thick and he was tiring quickly. Up on the tree, his head poking above the thick foliage, he could catch whatever breeze there was. He closed his eyes and inhaled. Birds announced their presence with assorted squawks and cries throughout the dense forest. Cicadas buzzed and competed with the chunks of conversation that could be heard below.