The Bellbottom Incident (31 page)

“Odd that she used the modern pronunciation.”
Yoolia
was what she had called me back in Pompeii and since.

“Once she saw that she wasn’t back in ancient times, she probably decided that it would be better to keep a low profile and give a modern name. In any case, whatever made your parents choose Julia, it wasn’t because of Sabina.”
 

We hadn’t been gone that long—my parents, along with the rest of the book club, were still at the estate, unaware of what had happened to their leader. They were all perched on the curb of the parking lot by the art bus, paired off and sipping Cokes in the shade. The palm tree fronds above their heads danced in the soft breeze.

I couldn’t help but notice that something had changed between my parents. They were holding hands now. But that wasn’t all. Missy glanced at Soren, and in the glance I read not just contentment and happiness but
readiness
—readiness to move on to the next step in life. They had not discovered Life with a capital
L
, the way Udo had wanted to; they had rediscovered each other. Missy reached over and snubbed out her cigarette. Dad gave her a friendly wink.
 

A bit down from my parents, Gigi and Nathaniel were sharing a Coke.

There was no mystery here after all. Dad was my father—always had been.

An unexpected wave of something hit me. It was grief about Sabina, but not only that. My mother had come to terms with her pregnancy, and now Soren knew as well. I was about to take my place on the stage, which meant there couldn’t be a second copy of me here in the past. It was time to leave 1976.

Through a sort of shallow-breathing mental fog I said, “Abigail.” My voice sounded odd, distant, weak. A fresh tour group had emerged from the Edison Museum and were admiring the banyan. I tried to quell the rising sense of
not belonging
.

“What’s up, Julia?”

“We need to head back, I think.”

“I guess we’re dry enough. Let’s get out of sight. Hey, we could go into the telephone booth—you know, like Superman, only not to change into an alter ego but to pop back to the present.”
 

I knew she was trying to cheer me up. “How about the public restrooms instead? Besides, someone’s using the phone already—the phone…What on earth?”

“What’s
he
doing here?” Abigail said.

The person in the phone booth was Steven Little, who had penned a hasty note to us saying History was forcing him to go back. Yet here he was, still in 1976 in the flesh. Using the pay phone. We watched him fumble in his jean pockets and pull out the necessary coins. Receiver to one ear, he dropped the money into the machine and dialed. He greeted the person at the other end. I wished we had Marlin there to lip-read for us, but he was nowhere to be seen. Whatever adventure he had headed off to, I wished him the best of luck.

Dr. Little bent down to retrieve a couple of sheets of paper from his duffel bag, which was by his feet. He readied the first page and opened his mouth to read into the receiver. There was no need for Marlin to lip-read for us after all—even through my mental fog, it was clear to me that Dr. Little had been stopped by History from reading from the page, whatever was on it. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish several times, then shook his head and hung up irritably. He slipped in a new coin and redialed.
 

“Well, this is odd,” I said, my own words distant to my ears.

Abigail was equally puzzled. “I wonder if he managed to come back to do some kind of follow-up experiment for his research.”

“Why don’t we go ask him what he’s up to?”
 

We shuffled over to the phone booth, passing within half a step of my parents, who were too busy ogling each other to look up, and approached as cautiously as if we had spotted a ghost, even though he was obviously real enough.

The young professor didn’t see us, as he was too busy mumbling to himself while he dialed yet again. The words penetrated my brain like stones thrown into mud, one occasionally making a bigger splash than the others. “I’ll try the
numbers
one more time. If it
still
doesn’t work, I’ll tell them about Microsoft and
Apple
and IBM…Oh, and perhaps diversify with Starbucks, Beanie Babies, and such…”
 

Abigail nudged me in the side and pointed. Dr. Little was barefoot. He hadn’t jumped home, then once more back to 1976. He had never left.

When whoever was at the other end of the phone picked up, Dr. Little said, “Do you still have the pen and paper? I’m going to try to read you the numbers, starting with October 18…No, it doesn’t matter
who
this is—call me a well-wisher. Let’s see if I can read them out—and if I can, then I’ll tell you what they are…No, I
know
it’s odd…”
 

“Professor?” Abigail said.

The phone receiver dropped out of Dr. Little’s hand and clanged against the glass and steel of the booth on its cord. He swore under his breath and retrieved it. “Hello? Hello?”

He turned to face us and said accusatorily, as if we had ruined an experiment, “They hung up.”

“Dr. Little,” I managed to ask, “do you want to tell us what’s going on?”

He didn’t. He grabbed his duffel and wordlessly took off across the parking lot, the pages still in hand.
 

“Dr. Little, wait,” I yelled, or thought I did. It might have just been a whisper.
 

Abigail seemed torn between running after the professor and helping me, as I was starting to feel a bit unsteady and probably looked it, too. She offered me her elbow for support and together we stumbled in our wet sneakers in the direction Dr. Little had gone.
 

The book club students, startled, had glanced up at the commotion, as did a gardener who had been digging around a potted plant when Dr. Little dashed by her. The professor was about to disappear into the foliage when a scrawny body in cutoff shorts and shirt stepped into his path. The two men fell to the ground in a tangled mess of limbs.

We hurried over. Abigail made sure I was steady on my feet, then turned her attention to Marlin. She helped him up and dusted gardening mulch off his shoulder.
 

“I’m too old for this,” Marlin said. “Much too old.”

The gardener shook her head at all of us in disapproval, then went back to work.

Dr. Little was still down on the ground on his back, his notes strewn all around him, his duffel bag knocked off his shoulder and to one side.
 

“Why did you stop me? What’s it to you?” he said to Marlin.

“Looked like the ladies wanted to talk to you.”

I slid a foot over to where Dr. Little’s page, the one he had wanted to read over the phone, was threatening to blow off in the wind. I picked it up, steadying myself on a wooden post so as not to lose my balance.
 

“We thought you went back home, Professor,” Abigail said, and offered Dr. Little a hand to pull him to his feet. He did look pathetic as he lay on the ground, his bare feet scratched up and dusty. He accepted Abigail’s hand. “I was hoping to get this done in private so that no one would know. Obviously it made no sense for me to run. I don’t know why I did,” he admitted. Then, noticing our faces, “Is it bad news about Sabina?”

I sighed. “I’m afraid so.”

“Sorry. That’s awful.” He said it like he meant it.

“Oh, no,” Marlin said. A large tear rolled down one age-sculpted cheek.

With a sigh, Dr. Little dusted off his jeans and picked up his duffel bag and dusted that off as well, then glanced around, as if searching for some way to explain his continued presence in 1976. But I knew the truth and so did Abigail—he had some kind of agenda of his own; he’d had one all along. Dr. Little finally said, “I just needed to make a phone call. That’s all.”
 

“We figured as much, Dr. Little,” I said. “But
why
?”

“Not in front of Marlin.”

Abigail moved over to Marlin’s side. “Marlin has been very helpful. We owe him the truth.”

“Fine, then. That really is all I was going to do—make my call. To my parents. I waited at the beach inside one of the motels until you and Abigail left. After I was finished, I planned on rejoining you. I was going to tell you I’d been to the lab and back and my feeling of light-headedness was just an anomaly. But I was unable to use the public phones at the beach—I tried several—so I caught a bus over here, figuring maybe History didn’t like that we were all scattered. You weren’t here, so I figured you were elsewhere, on Udo and Sabina’s trail.” He digressed again. “It’s…it’s hard for those of us who are expected to use a time-travel machine only for lofty goals such as documenting History and exploring the physics of spacetime. I am as human as the next man. I tried not to succumb to temptation—for the birth cutoff research study, I made sure to stay on campus, far away from my family in California…I think now that approach was wrong, that we might need to observe our parents to gauge the cutoff moment. It’s likely a personal event, one governed by emotions and not an equation.”

That look on my mother’s face when I watched her finally accept the pregnancy…and now the very air felt thinner, and I knew my time in 1976 was nearing an end. Dr. Little was right—there wasn’t a hard and fast rule about when a newcomer’s presence on the stage was noticed. It was different for each of us.
 

I looked down at the page Dr. Little had been trying to read to his parents. It was a printout from the lab, and I had seen it once before, in his duffel bag. At the time I’d assumed the numbers were Slingshot coordinates. “So…these aren’t spacetime coordinates?” I asked.

4-9-33-36-39-47

8-21-32-35-36-38

20-30-32-43-44-47

5-7-12-21-32-45

4-5-18-41-47-48

11-16-21-26-27-47

2-10-19-23-26-30

15-18-22-24-28-49
 

…

Abigail glanced at the page. “They aren’t, no.”

Dr. Little turned his palms upward, as if it was a relief to tell the truth. “They’re lottery numbers.
Winning
numbers for the California Super Lotto, starting with the first week the game began—October 18, 1986. See? Four, nine, thirty-three, thirty-six, thirty-nine, and forty-seven. I was going to read them over the phone to my parents so they could buy a ticket. There was only a negligible chance of it working, but it was still a nonzero chance. I felt it was worth a try.”

Money. So that was it. Nate had been right about there being more to the professor’s reaction than mere annoyance at the interruption to his research. I should have seen it.

“But it didn’t work, did it?” Abigail said.

“Can I have that paper?” Marlin asked.

“Certainly not. No, it didn’t work. My mother answered, but I was unable to read anything out. I was calling a second time to try again. If I was unable to use the lottery numbers, I was planning to tell my parents to buy stock in Apple…” He trailed off with a glance at Marlin, who said, “I like apples. Is it an orchard? A juice maker?”

Dr. Little went on: “The ethics are murky perhaps, but after all, if it
did
work, that would by definition mean that no one would be affected or harmed by it in any meaningful way.” He said it as if grasping for a way to justify his actions. “It could even be called an experiment in History and the limits of its changeability.”

Abigail asked the question. “You wanted your parents to be rich, Professor?”
 

“I didn’t grow up poor—solidly middle class, really. But a junior professor’s salary and my wife’s website design freelancing do not go very far when you have a young one and another two on the way.”

“Two?” I asked.

“We’re having twins.”

“Congratulations, Professor!” Marlin said.

“I wasn’t expecting…quite so many—and quite so soon. Worries about their college tuition and all the other bills keep me up at night. I wanted everything for Piper and the new kids. And this appeared so easy, so clean. Just a simple phone call. I think I lost my head.”

 
Nate had once said that everyone had a personal flaw. Dr. Little’s turned out to be that he was human just like the rest of us; he was guilty of the very thing he was afraid of discovering if he looked too closely at his heroes. It wasn’t greed but parental love that had made him risk his career. The twins that he and Mrs. Little were expecting had already reserved their place on the stage.

Dr. Little wasn’t accepting defeat just yet. “Do you want to call anyone in your family, Julia? We could all share the winnings, perhaps.”

I wouldn’t even have to call. Just slip the printout to Dad, over where he and the other students were getting back into the art bus, having finished their Cokes. I thought I heard the words
beach
,
shrimp lunch
, and
swimming
mentioned.

I shoved the printout back at Dr. Little and said no sharply, more sharply than I’d intended. I was fighting the realization that I
might have been tempted if Sabina were still alive. The money would have covered a trip to Italy, her college tuition, whatever else she might have needed.

Abigail looked like she’d had the same thought, but all she said was, “You’re lucky you had someone to call in the first place, Professor. And Piper and her siblings are lucky that you care so much about their future. But even if it had worked, it would have been—”

“Wrong.” I finished the sentence for her, watching the art bus pull out of the parking lot. “It never would have been the right decision.”

The gardener had been glancing in our direction, as if she wanted to send us on our way. We gathered our things and headed toward the far end of the parking lot, where a couple of picnic tables, meant for tourists partaking in gift shop snacks, were clustered. Lunchtime had passed and only one table was occupied, by a sightseeing family. I noticed that someone had forgotten their things at a second table. It took me a moment to register what was on it. Whoever had retrieved Udo’s novel out of the trash bin had arranged the pages in a neat stack. I was more interested in what was on top of them, keeping the paper from blowing off in the light wind.