“Images that bolster one’s core belief system, by their definition, are not impossible. It’s when you threaten those deep beliefs, shake people’s reality, that they’re forced to deny what they’ve seen and opt for rational explanations no matter how ugly or incredible.”
“The family was hit by an earthquake off the charts as far as their realty is concerned,” she said after a moment.
Nathan nodded. “Still keep the lights on day and night?”
“I can’t shake it. I found that I couldn’t work in a cubicle. My first job. I was getting a stiff neck from turning every few seconds to make sure it was still open. I had to quit. Small enclosed spaces, dark. Still there.”
“Elevators must be another kind of hell for you.”
“Walking up and down stairs is good for the heart,” she said as lightly as she could.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s order something to eat. Hamburgers, fries, undo all the good that stair climbing brought about.”
Later, driving her to her motel, he said, “Ashley, I have to go back. Come with me.”
She tensed so much she was almost paralytic, catatonic. “I can’t,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to go inside. We’ll take a rope, tie it to my wrist, and you hold the other end, yank me out if . . . It can be a guide rope, a way out if the lights go off. That’s all. I want to see it again, measure it. I can’t get a picture of it in my head, just a black space, that’s all that comes. I have to see it again.”
“Nathan, we agreed. We said we wouldn’t go there.”
“I have to. Kids played in that cave for more than a hundred years. What was different that one time? They went over it inch by inch and nothing happened. Why that one time? I have to see it again.”
He was staring straight ahead, his hands tight on the steering wheel as he spoke. “Maybe it happens periodically, even predictably, but no one had ever been there at the right time before. Was it something about us, the three of us, the configuration of our bodies or something? Joey sat down, remember? Was he in the middle, dead center? Is that what was different? I have to go. I’ll get a rope and a steel tape measure, measure the goddamn cave, make a map.”
“Nathan, please, don’t. Stay away. Even Skipper knew something was wrong with the cave. Remember? He wouldn’t go in.”
“I remember,” he said softly. “And we were going to find a fortune in gold. I remember.”
They reached her motel where light shone from around the drape she had not closed completely.
“I’ll pick you up around nine,” he said, exactly the same way he had named the games they would play, their roles in the games. Numbly she nodded.
The farm house appeared to be intact but neglected, with leaves and scraps of paper in drifts on the front and back porches,the yard unkempt and weedy, with overgrown hedges, seedling sumac and maple trees, a lot of Queen Ann’s lace in bloom. It made Ashley sadder than the funeral had done.
She and Nathan skirted the house and found that the path to Rabbit Creek had vanished amongst brambles and more weeds. Nathan went first, stamping down what he could, holding back a few low-hanging branches for Ashley.
The creek was unchanged, as was the cave entrance. Ashley felt a wave of nausea as they drew near the boulder. “No closer,” she said in a low voice, six feet or more from the entrance.
Nathan nodded. He had a length of nylon rope, a thin pale life line to lead him to safety if necessary. He tied a loop in one end, slipped it over his hand, and handed her the coiled rope. Without speaking, he waved to her and walked the rest of the way to the entrance while she played out the line. He passed out of sight around the boulder.
She turned her back on the cave, and gazed at the corn field across Rabbit Creek. Grampa once said that sometimes the creek flooded the other side where the ground was lower. She tried to see wind-whipped waves instead of corn. It was hard to imagine the friendly little creek flexing enough muscle to cover whole fields.
Suddenly the rope in her hand twitched, and she spun around, ready to start pulling. The tension on the line relaxed, then jerked again. She yanked it hard. Then she dropped it and felt her world spinning, her vision blurring. She flung out her hand to clutch a nearby tree trunk to keep from falling.
Joey had emerged from the cave. Close behind him Nathan was straightening up from a doubled over position.
Joey looked exactly the same he had looked that day, wearing the same stained, smudged t-shirt, blue shorts, sneakers. The same tow head, sunburned face, dried mud on his leg. The same wiry body, knobby knees, deceptively thin arms . . .
He stopped moving when he saw Ashley, and when Nathan touched his shoulder, he flinched away. He was so little, Ashley thought. He was so little.
“Joey,” she whispered. “It’s me, Ashley.”
She took a step toward him, another, and he shrank away before she could touch him. She drew back her hand and looked from him to Nathan. He was pale and strangely pinched, much older suddenly.
“I was starting to measure, and saw something from the corner of my eye. It was Joey, sitting on the floor, just like he was before.” Nathan’s voice was unfamiliar, hoarse, and he was staring at Joey as if hypnotized by the slight boy.
Joey turned from him to Ashley, back to Nathan. His lips were trembling, he looked ready to cry. “Where’s Nathan?” he asked. “Where’s Ashley? Who are you?”
Nathan leaned against the boulder. “Joey, where were you? Did you see anything? Do you remember anything?”
Joey shook his head, edging away from Nathan, keeping his distance from Ashley. “I didn’t go anywhere. I just sat down. Nathan said he had something to eat. Then you were there.”
Suddenly he turned and bolted for the path to the house. Nathan ran after him and caught him, but not before he had gone a step or two into the brambles. Nathan lifted him and held him above the vines, crashing through brambles up the path, and set him down in the yard. He kept hold of Joey’s arm as Ashley made her way after them, trying to avoid what she could of the punishing thorns. They were all scratched by then, and Joey was bleeding on his legs and arms. He began to cry.
“We’ll go somewhere to clean those scratches, get some bandaids,” Nathan said.
“Nathan, look, the back door is open,” Ashley said, pointing to the house. “We can go inside and clean him up.” That meant that her parents and Nathan’s were already there, in the house. And they were due for a shock, she thought grimly. She reached for Joey’s hand and, with her holding one hand and Nathan the other, they walked the rest of the way to Grampa’s house.
When they entered, Maribeth called from the living room, “Ashley, is that you? I’m glad you changed your mind.” She walked from the hall into the kitchen, stopped, staring, and then screamed.
The others ran to the kitchen. Aunt Ella swayed, the color drained from her face, and Uncle Walt caught her and eased her into a chair. His face was livid, a tic jerked in his jaw, as he yelled at Nathan, “What abomination is this? Where did you get that child? What are you trying to do to us?”
Ashley, still holding Joey’s hand, walked toward the bathroom, and both sets of parents moved aside hurriedly to let them pass. The voices rose behind them as she went into the bathroom with Joey and closed the door.
She lifted him to the counter and looked inside a drawer for a washcloth and towel, then another drawer where there was soap. “We’ll clean up those scratches and see how many bandaids you’ll need. You could end up looking like a mummy, you know.”
His smile was fleeting, but at least he wasn’t crying any more, she thought gratefully, conscious of his wariness, the intensity of his gaze as he watched her soap the washcloth.
“Ashheap?” he said.
She swung around to glare at him, baring her teeth, making a monster face. “You’re in for it,” she said. “Hanging out to dry time. You know what I said I’d do if you called me that again.”
His grin was longer lasting this time. “You won’t catch me. You’re bleeding, too,” he said, pointing to her arm. He winced and drew back when she began to wash his face.
“It was just like Sleeping Beauty’s wall of thorns to keep everyone out,” she said. “I guess a boy can be like a Sleeping Beauty, get magicked away for a long time.”
“Why didn’t you come get me?”
“Couldn’t find you,” she said. “I guess you were magicked into Magic Mountain, out of sight or something.” Gently she washed his arms and patted them dry. So far the scratches were minor, superficial. The voices from the other room rose and fell, rose even more. She ignored them and began to wash his legs.
“So while you slept, Nathan and I grew up all the way, and then we found you again. How about that?”
“I didn’t go to sleep,” he said, then yanked away from the washcloth. “That burns.”
“Looks like mummy time coming up real soon now. Promise you won’t go around scaring anyone.”
He grinned.
She finished with his legs and began to search the cabinets for bandaids. There didn’t seem to be any. “Of course, if you’re all bandaged up, you probably can’t swim in the motel pool,” she said.
“What motel pool?”
“Where I’m staying. A great big pool out back, but I guess there are rules about bandages and mummies and stuff.”
He was obviously torn between being a mummy and going swimming. He looked at his legs, then his arms, and shook his head. “Nothing’s bleeding.”
A couple of the scratches were bleeding a little, but nothing a bandaid or two wouldn’t take care of, and she had bandaids in her cosmetic bag in the motel.
Joey jumped down from the counter as if to demonstrate his fitness for swimming. He watched her wash and dry her own scratches, and afterward they walked together toward the clamorous voices in the living room, where an abrupt hush greeted then. Joey slipped his hand into Ashley’s and she gave him a reassuring squeeze. Maribeth and Aunt Ella were both pale, Ella shaking hard, and Uncle Walt’s face was fiery red. Ashley’s father, who looked more like a dock worker than an academic economist, was slightly removed from the others, watchful and wary. Every eye was fixed on Joey, but no one made a motion toward him or spoke to him.
“Let’s go,” Nathan said. “Joey, how does McDonald’s sound? One or two burgers?”
Several hours later Ashley and Nathan were sitting on a terrace overlooking the swimming pool where Joey was playing with a few other kids. Ashley and Nathan both had a tall cold vodka with bitter lemon. She felt they both deserved and needed it.
“What was all the yelling about?” Ashley asked. It was the first chance they’d had to talk. They had gone to McDonalds, then to a big box store to buy some clothes, including a swimsuit, for Joey. Nathan and Joey were registered in the same motel Ashley was in.
“First,” Nathan said, grinning slightly, “they accused me of hiring a child actor. Then trying to pass my own son off as Joey. Dad said they could have me arrested for something or other, or was I trying to kill my mother with one foul trick after another. Then it got ugly.” He laughed and took a sip of his drink.
Joey was on the high drive. He didn’t dive off, he cannon balled, landed with a tremendous splash, and bobbed up like a cork.
“Anyway,” Nathan went on, “I reminded them that a simple DNA test would settle the question of parents. Then it was a matter of publicity, a new media circus even worse than the first one. Careers destroyed, and so on.”
His father was a high executive in a firm that supplied electronic equipment to the government, and of course Ashley’s father was a distinguished university professor. Nathan was enjoying himself, Ashley realized, as he said, “They would both be ruined by a new round of tabloid-type publicity. The farm would be overrun by the curious, photographers, television crews, flying saucer nuts . . . They’d dog our footsteps day and night and Joey would be at risk. Except,” he added dryly, “he didn’t call him by name, just ‘the boy.’ My mother could go into another breakdown with the stress. You get the drift.”
She nodded. They wanted Joey to go back to wherever he had been for seventeen years. “So what’s the solution?”
“We’ll have a conference tomorrow, after we’ve all had a little time to think about it. My conference, Ashley, my terms. Or I go public. And Mother, at age sixty, will have to explain to her garden club friends how it happens that suddenly she’s a new mother to a seven-year old feisty boy.”
He laughed. “I want the farm house and three or four acres around it. They’ll probably get Grampa declared incompetent and sell the rest of the farm. Dad will have to arrange for the right papers for Joey, school, medical records, birth certificate, whatever is needed. He has connections, he can manage that. And I’ll become Joey’s father. No publicity. They’ll come around to accepting a grandson. That’s not going to be a problem as long as they can avoid the publicity.”
Joey was on the high dive again. They watched him jump off.
“You want to live on the farm?” she asked then.
“Not exactly. I intend to set up a research facility. I’ll get in touch with my old physics instructor and, believe me, he’ll jump at the chance to join me.” His grin was very much like Joey’s then, with the same kind of shining eyes. “Will you help?”
“How?”
“Be a second parent, or aunt or something. But aside from that, we’re going to need a good computer person, a research assistant, something of that sort. Someone who really knows the truth. You.”
She remembered how Joey had slipped his hand into hers as they approached the stunned and disbelieving family. She suspected that Nathan was going to be very busy for years to come, and Joey would need a hand again and again. Not the hand of a paid care taker, her hand. Besides, she really was a good computer geek. She nodded. “I’ll help. Joey’s going to need an aunt. And a lot of tutoring to catch up with seventeen lost years before school starts again. What about the research?”
“I’ll put a heavy duty gate on the cave entrance, and we’ll come up with the right tools, the right methods to investigate, really investigate a hole in the universe, the doorway to a different universe, a place where a second or less is equal to seventeen of our years.” He laughed again, and nodded toward Joey, who was poised to jump off the high dive again. He looked too small to be up there alone. “The living proof of multiple universes,” Nathan said.