The big room that had formerly contained the ODEC, the control panel, and everything else had been rearranged, tidied up, and cut in half by a wall of glass. The control panel was on the other side of it. Through it I could see Tristan, Erszebet, Rebecca, and Oda applauding and giving me the thumbs-up.
The Maxes had also installed a shower stall in the corner of the ODEC chamber, and plumbed it with a system that would inject a sterilant into the hot water. I went in there and warmed up with a long shower, scrubbing myself all over with some manner of liquid soap that was supposed to kill all bacteria and viruses. I emerged from that to find more pills awaiting me on a stainless steel tray, and swallowed those. Meanwhile the ODEC and the chamber surrounding it had been sprayed down with more disinfectant and irradiated with germ-killing purple light.
I stepped out into a small dressing room where my clothes were awaiting me, and put them on. Then out through another door into the control room, where I was received as a conquering hero.
“So you have survived,” said Erszebet proudly. “I knew you would. You are not like General Schneider.”
Rebecca looked at me with wide eyes, shaking her head. “I . . . I don’t even know what to ask you.”
“That’s good,” I said, “because I don’t even know what to say. Let’s go check the site and see if it’s there. I can describe the rest later.”
But: “Stokes!” came an exuberant voice from the hallway, and of course when I exited I was briefly embraced by Tristan—who’d been on the phone to his higher-ups in DC, giving them the good news. It was almost exactly like being grabbed by the cooper, but without the erection or the general sense of ickiness. I realized how tense I had truly been. There was nothing more I needed in that moment than to feel that comforting clutch.
I did not say such a thing, of course; I just nodded, clapped his shoulder, and waited for him to release me. “Tell us,” he said. “Tell us all of it.”
“On our way to the boulder,” I said.
His face lit up. “You did it! You buried it!”
I tried not to preen. “Sure. But I want to go there while I still have a very clear sense of exactly where I buried it.”
“She did it!” he shouted to the world at large. “Good work ethic, Stokes. The professor’s car is behind the building.”
I could not believe how immediately overwhelmed I was, by the air pollution and ambient city noises, by the seams in my blue jeans, by the squishiness of the car seat. I felt strangely bereft of something. As we drove through Central Square and up Mass Ave, I gave the four of them—Oda was driving—the clearest depiction I could of my day. Erszebet was gleeful to hear that she lived in a better time period than the poor miserable Puritan witches. “It heartens me to hear somebody else suffered even more than I did for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she informed us.
We were learning to ignore her when she got like this.
Finally we arrived at the Odas’ house and the professor pulled into his driveway. An eager cluster of five, we all went through the gate into the garden and straight through to the back of the property.
There was the boulder, looking more worn and slightly shorter than it had four hundred years ago, but not by much, and mostly because it was now surrounded by landscaped gardens. It was almost impossible to imagine where the stream had been, but it was this near side of the rock I wanted anyhow. I recognized a particular bulge in the stone and oriented myself around it, lay on the ground, and reached toward the stone, then tapped the earth below my shoulder.
“It is right under here,” I said. “In a sealed wooden bucket.”
They already had the tools for digging handy. We all dug. Even Erszebet took a mostly symbolic turn at it.
An hour later, there was a hole five feet deep and twice that wide, obliterating Rebecca’s vegetable garden. The back of the property resembled an archaeological excavation. And indeed it was: we found a rusty toy truck that looked to be from the 1950s and some bones that looked to have been buried by a dog. Below that, the rust-skeletal remains of a nineteenth-century lantern. Below that—as my heart beat more quickly—the broken-up oyster and clam shells I’d held in my hands four hundred years ago, a few hours earlier . . .
And that was all.
There was no bucket.
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
JUNE 16
Temperature today about 75F, bright and sunny, no breeze. Barometer steady.
All vegetables: deceased. Flowers: largely trampled. South-side peonies (blooming), flame azalea (blooming), and most rose bushes still in good form. South-facing herb bed generally doing well.
The garden has been completely destroyed in the interest of digging up the book Melisande says she buried four hundred years ago. No sign of it. I have never seen her so distraught or confused. We stood about a large hole that had been my vegetable bed. Tristan offering condolence that “at least the soil is getting aerated.” Mel circling the hole, shaking her head, climbing into it, searching on her hands and knees, trying to dig even deeper with her fingers.
Erszebet, retro-chic handbag clutched to her side as usual, watching all of us with superior amusement. “Obviously not here,” she said. “We have to try again on another Strand. This is quite normal.”
Mel looked up from the hole, gave Tristan a questioning look. Tristan and Frank also swapped glances. “What do you mean by ‘another Strand’?” asked Frank.
She shrugged. “I mean another Strand. Of time,” she clarified, seeing their confusion. “You have your fancy technical language to explain it. I have only what it really is. There are many possibilities and you cannot completely control which Strand you are on when you are summoning. It is not up to you. Magic does not make you omnipotent. So Melisande went back on just one Strand, and that one Strand did not change things to your liking. Maybe she will go back on another Strand, and then another, and when enough Strands have been shifted a little by this, then maybe it will help here and now.”
“That makes my brain hurt,” Mel said, sounding tired. “Do you mean I have to go back and redo everything I just did? Relive the entire day?”
“Of course,” said Erszebet. “Several times, most likely.”
Melisande groaned and threw herself onto the earth at the bottom of the hole, a dry-dock Ophelia. “I’d almost rather go back to working for Blevins.”
Erszebet (scolding): “You have a simplistic notion of how complicated things work. It is like when the euro came into being.” (Uncomprehending looks from all of us.) “If somebody had made up a new coin and called it the euro and walked in someplace to use it, it is not suddenly money. But because many people all agreed to make up a new coin, and then use these new coins over and over, now the euro is used and the old coins are not.”
Tristan (irritated): “Bad metaphor. That was an economic policy move on the part of governmental bodies, it wasn’t—”