Authors: Aaron Starmer
“Henry?” his father said, recoiling.
“It’s okay,” Henry said.
“What happened to you? Your face looks different.”
“It’s been so long since I seen you,” Henry said. “Daddy, I’m so glad you’re back.”
“Where are we, boy?” his father asked. “Who done that to your face, Henry? Where’s Mom at?”
This wasn’t the time for explanations. When Henry’s crawl brought him to his father’s side, he collapsed on the man. He wrapped his arms around his chest and nuzzled his face into his armpit. He began to cry.
“I missed you so much, Daddy. So much.”
Henry’s father didn’t look up to see Martin standing in the doorway. He closed his eyes and bowed his head and petted his son on the back. “Whatever it is, it’s gonna be fine,”
he whispered. “Come on now, Hanky. Tell me what’s goin’ on.”
Martin backed away and let them have their moment alone. When he exited the machine, he discovered that Tiberia was gone, and Marjorie with her, but the rest of the kids were still there. Darla approached him first.
“What’s the matter?” Darla asked.
“What do you mean?” Martin said.
“You’re crying.”
“I am?” He brought his hand up to his cheek.
“What happened to Henry?”
Martin smiled. “Leave him alone for a while. He’ll be out eventually.”
T
hey came out at dawn. Henry led his father past the kids and away from town. His father eyed them suspiciously, and they were all poised to ask him questions, but Henry delivered a stern shake of his head. “Not yet,” he told Martin.
Henry’s father’s name was Keith. At least, that was what Darla seemed to think. She remembered Henry bragging that he was an expert in martial arts. “Keith Dodd,” he had told her. “More belts than a … a belt store.”
Other than his tent, Henry didn’t have a place to live, so he took his father to the river, and they sat on an old barge that was docked in a marina. Martin retrieved Henry’s scope from the basin, and Darla used it to watch them from the bough of a nearby tree. She reported her findings to the group.
“He brought his dad a beer. And a pear. Can’t hear a word, though.”
Late in the afternoon, Henry came back to town alone and was confronted with a stampede of queries.
“Where was he?”
“How did he get there?”
“Did he see my parents?”
Henry could offer only one response. “He don’t remember a thing about the last two and a half years.”
This was hard for the kids to accept, but for Keith, it was nearly impossible. He could see that his son had aged, but for him those two and a half years had gone by in a blip. And to find out that the entire world was gone, that the boys and girls of Xibalba were all that was left? It was almost too much for him to bear.
Martin tried to attribute it to the theory of relativity. If he understood it correctly, the theory stated that people could travel at or near the speed of light away from the Earth, and when those people returned, they might have been traveling for only a few hours or minutes, while years would have passed on solid ground.
It was difficult for everyone to grasp, and there were, of course, problems with the concept.
“But he don’t remember traveling into space,” Henry said.
“Neither does Marjorie,” Tiberia added. Tiberia had brought Marjorie back to the hospital and had sat with her and spoken with her and tried to understand her story. She had also shown her Kelvin’s diary. When she had closed and locked Marjorie in her room, the woman had been poring over the pages, whispering, “When could this have happened?”
Martin couldn’t explain the inconsistencies. Sure, some alien force might have stolen their memories, or they might have been lying to cover up some vast conspiracy, but there was no evidence to support any of that. Xibalba was now in
possession of two confused adults and plenty of confused kids and one big machine.
“How’d you do it? How’d you bring ’em back?” was the one question Martin could answer.
“The machine did it,” he told them. “I had something wrong the first time around. It doesn’t bring us to them. It brings them to us. We need something they’re connected to, though. Maybe a gift they’ve given us. Like the marble. Marjorie gave that to Kelvin. And the scope. Keith gave that to Henry.”
“Does it only work with parents?” Sigrid asked.
“I’m not sure,” Martin admitted.
“Because Christianna, my sister, she gave this to me.” Sigrid held her arm up and showed them an orange rubber wristband.
That night, Henry and Keith went back to the barge to be alone. Tiberia agreed to bring Marjorie food and sit with her and try to explain what was happening. Trent went to the school to track down Lane and tell her the news. No one had seen Lane in weeks.
The rest of them met in the machine.
The wristband was set in the basin and Sigrid gave it a kiss for good luck. Then Martin went through the sequence again. The cranks and dials and levers and the pendulum. The light came, followed by the laughs, and soon Sigrid was at the door to the machine’s heart, waiting for a signal to go through.
When she opened it, she found Christianna on the other side. As Christianna struggled to open her eyes, everyone pushed together in the doorway to get a closer look. Conjured out of thin air was this girl, like a younger version of Sigrid—blond and fit and angular.
“She’s your kid sister?” Ryan whispered.
“She is my older sister,” Sigrid whispered back. With her hand out, she stepped forward and said something in Norwegian. Christianna answered her in a soft but worried tone. Sigrid began to cry.
Right away, the kids were running wild through Xibalba, digging through the remains of their former homes, trying to find anything to put in the machine. A bit of cloth from a T-shirt that Riley was sure her grandmother had once touched. The twenty-dollar bill Gabe kept in his pocket as a guilty reminder that he had swiped it from his mother’s desk on the eve of the Day. Even some melted and balled-up wire that was the braces Vincent had removed from his teeth nearly three years before. His father had paid for them, so it seemed they might do the trick.
None of these things worked. The kids tested the machine over and over, all through the night, but Martin’s hunch appeared to be correct. The objects needed to be gifts, things one person had given to another, physical expressions of generosity, not objects passed on by necessity or reciprocity. When they were too exhausted to keep at it, the kids retreated to their beds with a common goal: Rest up. Try again in the morning.
Martin was the last to leave. The sun was teasing the horizon, and the grass was standing a little higher, encouraged by the dew. Mornings of frost were most likely behind them now. Martin’s body ached, but it was a good ache, a
finally
ache. Sleep would have to wait, though. Someone was standing at the door to the library. It was Henry’s father. It was Keith.
“Are you their leader?” Keith asked.
“I don’t know about that,” Martin said.
“You’re their leader a’right,” he said firmly. “Henry told me you boss folks around. Make big decisions.”
“I do what I think is right,” Martin answered.
“So do I.” Keith was not a tall man. He stood only an inch or two higher than Martin. Yet his voice, raspy and ragged, had height. It had a frightening power.
“Is everything okay?” Martin asked. “Do you want me to get you anything?”
“I’m takin’ him,” Keith said. “We’re leavin’.”
“Oh.”
“Henry tells me there ain’t no one else in the world. You kids are the last of the Mohicans. That sounds like a load of bull to me. Somethin’ that someone makes up to keep folks from goin’ out and findin’ the real truth.”
“I can see how you might think that,” Martin said.
“You can’t see nothin’ in me,” Keith snarled. “You built somethin’ powerful there. More powerful than you know. I’m taking my kid away from you. We’re gonna find his brother, his momma.”
Martin understood what he needed, but he also knew what such a quest would require. “Your wife,” he asked, “has she ever given you any gifts? Just out of the blue, ’cause she cared about you?”
“What kinda question is that?” Keith snapped. “My wife is a fine woman. And we’re gonna find her. We’re goin’ home.”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow. Henry, he’s a bit attached to you folks. We’re goin’ huntin’ this morning. Gonna bag us a few turkeys. He’d like us to have a goodbye dinner.”
T
hanksgiving had come and gone when the machine was still living at Impossible Island. No one really cared then. They would make up for it now, preparing the grandest of feasts to send Henry off. There were, of course, the turkeys. They also had some potatoes and squash left over from Chet’s greenhouse. Wendy baked bread, and there were mushrooms to gather for stuffing. Gnarly crab apples and canned pumpkin were good enough for pie.
They cooked it all on giant charcoal grills they lugged into Town Square. Everyone pitched in, and by the afternoon they had a line of tables set with china and crystal. They giddily filled their plates, picked their seats, and toasted new beginnings.
Forgiving Martin and Henry wasn’t an issue at this point. The world had opened up and all the kids could talk about was how they were going to bring their friends and families
back. As they gorged themselves, they made gift lists, annotated with addresses. The plan was they would fuel up Kid Godzilla, and Darla would drive to their old homes and bring back the magical loot. On her way, she would drop Henry and Keith wherever they wanted to go.
Keith hardly said a word during the meal. He passed the food and passed judgment with disapproving sneers and squints. The only time he spoke was when he chided Darla for trying to open up some champagne.
“You’re a little girl,” he said, grabbing the bottle from her.
“A little girl who’s driving you home,” she said, angling over to grab it back.
Keith tucked it safely under his arm. “Not so sure about that, sweetie.”
“You ever driven a monster truck before, mister?” she asked.
“I’ve driven pickups.”
“Totally different, old man,” she said. “Pickup ain’t gonna do squat on those crowded roads. And driving the Kid requires skill. You know how to take a hill without flipping? How about the difference between rolling over a minivan and an SUV? ’Cause there’s a difference, you know?”
“So where’d you learn how to drive it?” Keith asked.
“My dad.”
“Wait a sec,” Henry said. “You told us you taught yourself how to drive it.”
“That was a lil’ fib, Henry,” Darla said. “Made for a better story.”
“I’ll let you drive, ’cause my son says you can handle it,” Keith said. “But if I get to feelin’ you’re nancy-footin’ the pedals, then I’m takin’ the wheel.”
At the other end of the table sat Christianna. Sigrid did her best to introduce her sister to all the kids, but Christianna would hardly raise her head to look at anyone, let alone to say hello. The entire scene must have been terrifying for the girl, and Martin couldn’t help studying her, searching her face for an explanation for why she was who she was.
What worried him most was that she hadn’t aged at all. She had gone from being Sigrid’s older sister to being her younger one. Christianna told Sigrid that she had no memory of traveling into space or anywhere else. So again, if the theory of relativity wasn’t the answer, then what was? Martin could imagine all sorts of scenarios, but all were drawn from science fiction and fantasy books. Suspended animation. Cryogenics. Fountains of youth.
The answer couldn’t be as complicated as all that. On the island, Martin had taken apart the machine multiple times. He had examined every gear and bolt, every pedal, every piston. He understood the basic mechanics. What he had never questioned, however, was the procedure. The procedure was gospel. He and his father had practiced it so many times that it had never occurred to him to ask, “Why do we turn the crank? Why do we drop the pendulum?” And most of all, “Why do we set the Birthday Dials?” They hadn’t been moved since that morning Trent had pointed them out and Martin had set them to the Day.
Martin looked into the sky to see the first star of the evening revealing its face. The stars were the calendar of ancient man. The stars were their map. He did calculations in his head.
“No moon tonight,” Trent told him.
“What’s that?” Martin was so wrapped up in thought that he had forgotten where he was. Tiberia had been sitting next
to him, but she had left to bring food to Marjorie, and in the meantime, Trent had snagged her seat.
“You pay attention to the moon and stars, so you probably already know,” Trent said as he handed him a bowl of stuffing.
“Thank you,” Martin said. “Don’t you want some first?”
“I don’t eat stuffing,” Trent explained. “Too gooey.”
“Know what you mean,” Martin said as he took another spoonful. “But I like that about it. I like that there’s always new foods for me to try.”
Trent nodded at this, then slipped in a confession. “Don’t be mad at me, but you probably already figured out that I didn’t have any luck with Lane.”
“I’m not mad,” Martin said, “but I’m sorry to hear it.” Martin had really wanted Lane to see the machine in action, if only to prove to her that all their sacrifices were finally paying off.
“I went to the school,” Trent explained. “She’s still there. She’s locked herself behind a door. Room seventeen. I talked to her, and I told her that we could bring her parents back. She said she didn’t care.”
“We can’t force her to do anything, I suppose,” Martin said.
“
I
care,” Trent said bluntly. “And when I was talking to her, I realized that I have something. For the machine, I mean.”
“You do?”
“My kazoo. It’s a silly thing, but it was metal and it wasn’t completely destroyed in the fire. I forgot, but Mom gave it to me when I was just a kid. Can we try it after dinner?” Trent asked.
“Darla wants to continue the party over at the movie
theater. Besides, it’s getting dark and it’s probably best to wait for morning.”