“You might want to call Roy Ferguson,” I finally said. “And Cherokee.” The room was silent except for the faint buzz of the fluorescent lights. I stared at the table, and at my hands, which rested on it, the fingers spread slightly. “If there’s scent from…human remains…in one of the tunnels…” I had to pause; I took a breath, and then another. “The scent would spool downstream with the water. The dog should be able to detect it at the outfall near the library.” I focused on the right index finger on the table and willed it to move. The finger lifted slightly, yet still it seemed not quite my own. “Excuse me,” I whispered.
I left the room and turned down a dim inner hallway, heading for a rectangle of light—a glass door to the outside world. Just as I reached it, I heard a voice behind me. “Dr. B.?” I turned, and saw Miranda running toward me. She stopped a foot away. In the light pouring through the glass, her eyes shone with such kindness and compassion, I wondered what I could possibly have done to deserve them. Maybe nothing; maybe—like grace or mercy—they were unearned yet freely given, dropping as the gentle rain from heaven. I started to speak, but she held up a hand to stop me. “I need to say something to you,” she began, “and it’s really hard for me to say, because I know it will be hard for you to hear. I’m sorry about Isabella—that’s the truth, but that’s not what’s hard, because the fact is, you barely knew Isabella. But you did know Jess, and you did love Jess, and deep down, I think you’re still not over Jess’s murder. Not by a long shot. I think you’re lost in a maze of love and grief—more lost than you know—and you’re having a tough time finding your way out. It’s not just my fingertips or Eddie’s hands or some old scientist’s guts that are in tatters, Dr. B.; it’s your heart. And it’s not the storm sewers of Oak Ridge that are the labyrinth; it’s your life.” Miranda’s words shocked me—shocked me with the force of pure, blindsiding truth. “If you can work your way out of the maze, fine,” she went on. “Work as if your life depends on it, because it does. But if work isn’t the way out, then find another way instead. Talk to a therapist, take a sabbatical, get a dog, go on a pilgrimage. Whatever it takes to heal, do it. Do it for those of us who love you. Do it for Jess. Do it for yourself.”
With that she laid a hand on one of my cheeks, kissed me softly on the other, and then retraced the hallway and disappeared around a corner. I turned toward the light again, pushed open the door, and stepped into the cold February sunshine.
A slight breeze was sighing through the pines on the hill behind the police department. To my left, I saw a bright-yellow school bus stop at the entrance of the American Museum of Science and Energy. Dozens of youngsters, the age of my two grandsons, poured out of the bus and into the museum, with its displays and stories about the Secret City and the Manhattan Project. Below and to my right—just across the small stream emerging from a seven-foot circle of pipe—lay the blocky buildings of the Oak Ridge Civic Center and Public Library.
Straight ahead, through the trees and farther away, was a third destination, the one I chose. Approaching it from above, all I could see was a wooden, pagoda-like roof. Only as I descended the slope through the woods did the long, cylindrical shape of the Peace Bell come into view beneath the sheltering overhang.
The breeze kicked up slightly, and some of last fall’s dead leaves swirled around my feet. Most were brown, but some still bore traces of red and gold.
And fuchsia.
As I drew nearer the bell, a stream of fuchsia leaves flowed toward me from its base. But they were not leaves. Angular and sharply creased, they were paper cranes. Origami cranes. Hundreds of them; perhaps even a thousand.
I reached into my pocket, and my fingers closed around the hardness of silver and the softness of a silken cord.
I took the symbol of remembrance from my pocket and laid it at the base of the bell, amid a swirling flock of cranes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY PEOPLE, PAST AND PRESENT, CONTRIBUTED TO this story. Chief among them are the legions of scientists, engineers, soldiers, construction laborers, calutron operators, and other workers who brought the Manhattan Project to such swift, spectacular, and sobering fruition.