Awakenings (24 page)

Seth stuck his arm back through the doorway and felt the cold sting of upstate New York. Once his mind accepted what had just occurred, he took off his jacket and claimed a padded lounge chair in the corner of the patio. “Finally, something good happens to me,” he said.

“May I use the bathroom?” Cat asked.

“It’s right in there, sweetie.” He handed her a crutch that lay in the corner. “My daughter sprained her ankle last year. You look like you could use it.”

“Thank you.”

“Ben, is that you?” came a voice from another room.

“Be with you in a minute, honey. That’s the missus,” he said with a smile. Ben poured them lemonade and made each one a plate of freshly made
pasteles
from a tray on the stove. “Just finished a batch before you came knocking,” he said. “Excuse me for a minute. Make yourselves at home.” He went into the bedroom.

Cal kept checking his watch and looking back at the trailer door.

“Take a breather, man,” Seth said. “Your brain’s still being edited. Relax.”

Cal considered him with a sour face.

It was in the forefront of Seth’s thoughts that the cop blamed him for the current situation. If everything they claimed were true, Seth would only have been thirteen at the time. How could a teenager be relevant to a covert mission? Seth turned from the cop’s scowl and studied the beach. A half-naked Puerto Rican girl, tanned and gorgeous, romped with her dog. Seth instinctively wanted to get his camera and pursue the opportunity. He watched—a neutered voyeur.

“We’ve got to go back,” Cal said.

“Let’s thaw out first,” Seth whined.

“Now.”

“Jeezus! I’m with the only guy in Puerto Rico who wants to work.”

“Can it. Let’s go.”

“You go.”

“You, too. You were there thirteen years ago. Might be important.” Cal hovered over Seth. He wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Seth considered whacking the cop in the balls and running down the beach. He decided not to push his luck. “Well … so long as I’m important. What’s the plan?”

“We talk to the tree.”

“Of course. It’s so obvious. Do you speak Tree?”

“Lelani will figure it out.”

“Pretty convenient having your own living, breathing computerlike girl Friday. She’s like your Mr. Spock.”

“You’re only as good as the people who help you. Aandor, NYPD … doesn’t matter where.” Cal’s tone indicated Seth was the weak link on this team.

“What about Cat?” he sniped.

Cal’s expression changed, like a stick prodding a wound; Seth had struck a nerve. Cat was a liability to the mission. In Cal’s anal-retentive hierarchy, even Seth had more of a stake in this mission than Catherine.

“Quit stalling,” Cal said.

Ben came back from the bedroom and with him was a slip of a woman with a slight hump, in mismatched sweat clothes and slippers.

“Hey guys, I want you to meet my wife, Helen Flannery Reyes. Helen was Miss Queens, New York, 1966, you know. She gave those upstate girls a good run for their money in the Miss New York pageant, didn’t you, hon?”

Helen shuffled over to the men slowly and took Cal’s hands in hers. They were mottled and leathery, and she smelled of menthol. Seth was glad she chose to greet Cal.

“Don’t you pay Ben any mind,” she told them in a slightly slurred speech. Both men realized she was recovering from some sort of ailment, like a stroke. “He still sees me as that girl of seventeen, but you and I know there are a lot more miles on this ol’ bucket than he cares to admit.” She winked at them and smiled, mostly with the half of her mouth that was still mobile.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Mrs. Reyes,” Cal said. “But if you could excuse us for a minute…”

“Are you leaving already?” Ben asked.

“Can you talk to Rosencrantz, Ben?”

“No.”

“Please, it’s very important.”

“I didn’t mean
no, I wouldn’t,
I mean I can’t. I inherited this gig from the former caretaker. Taught me everything I needed to do to maintain Rosencrantz’s comfort and health. I don’t even think the tree knows I exist.”

“Is this portal back to New York permanent?”

“It’s a fixed transfer,” Ben said. “It’ll still be there after you exit.”

“Could I impose on you to let Catherine rest here a while? Her ankle…”

“I’ve got some Aleve and a cold pack we can throw on that baby,” said Helen. “I think my daughter’s old air cast is somewhere in here, too. Hey, when you come back, Ben will build a bonfire on the beach.”

“Great idea,” Ben said. “We can trade war stories. I was in the Big One back in ’forty-four.”

“We’re imposing too much as it is, Ben.”

“What imposing?” Helen cut in. “We rarely get visitors anymore. The kids are so busy with their careers…”

“I’ve got eight bedrooms attached to this place,” Ben said. “You guys look like you can use a rest.”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “At least do it for Cat.”

Cal grabbed Seth by the cuff and pulled him toward the transfer. He smiled at the Reyeses and thanked them for their help while pushing Seth out the door. Seth barely managed to grab his coat before the cold breath of upstate New York kissed him again.

3

Outside the trailer, Lelani had painted two white concentric circles around the base of the tree. They were perfect circles, stark white on a green mass that reminded one of the boundaries of fair play at ball games. Viewed from the sky, Rosencrantz marked the green center of a bull’s-eye. The four-foot-wide ring of grass between the two circles was painted with evenly spaced runes around the tree. Her brass compact was placed on Ben’s propane grill, also within the circles, and she surrounded it with leaves, bark, soil, sap-coated twigs, and a plastic container of water. The lights of the device flickered brightly, casting a web of multicolored lasers on the smooth glassy surface of its inner lid. The compact hissed a steady stream of white noise. Lelani played with the controls, like tuning a radio station.

“Progress?” Cal asked.

“I’m about to contact Rosencrantz.”

“So, the tree’s going to talk?” Seth asked.

“In a manner. Sentient flora communicate through scent,” Lelani explained. “Pheromones, sap, water, chlorophyll, nitrates—these are the components of their language. But they operate on a much slower plane than we do. To communicate in real time, I have to generate a time warp around Rosencrantz.”

“If you speed time around him, won’t the tree age rapidly?” Seth asked.

Lelani regarded Seth with pleasant surprise, as though such an observation was thought beyond his comprehension. Seth half expected her to award him a gold star.

“Yes,” she said, in an encouraging tone. “Fortunately, trees have very long life spans. I’ve heard they rather enjoy the experience. It gives them a rush. Still, we should try and conclude our business as fast as possible. This device will utilize the elements I’ve placed around it to pose our questions and translate the tree’s responses. Time within the inner ring will move rapidly. The buffer between the two circles is the event horizon. That’s where we’ll stand. Outside the outer ring is normal time. Don’t move outside the buffer while the spell is in progress.”

“Can I just wait in the trailer?” Seth whined.

Lelani touched a jewel on the compact. The sky beyond the tree danced like the aurora borealis. Strings of energy stirred around them, a proto-hurricane of photonic vibration. The tree shifted rapidly, like still shots taken on a windy day and flapped in succession.

“My God,” Cal said, over the din of increasing white noise. “The power.”

“Yes,” Lelani agreed. “We could not attempt this away from the lay line.”

“Hey, tree … are you there?” Seth asked.

The device squawked a raspy, rapturous,
“Yes.”

Seth was dumbfounded. Reality deteriorated every moment he spent with these people. He wanted his life back—the drugs, the raunch, the cheap sex, even the nagging roommate. Imperfect as it was, it was his; he could make sense of it, and it was safe.

“Tell these people I have nothing to do with them so I can go home,” he said.

“Proust seed watered,”
came the reply.
“Remember you. Great feast of the waning joy, cycle of Zcqxbvxq.”
A pit formed in Seth’s belly.

“Do you remember me?” Cal asked.

“Great feast … waning joy. The wide trunk gives strength to its arms in the deluge.”

“What does that mean?” Cal asked.

“‘Joy’ is also the word for ‘sun’ in flora speak,” Lelani translated. “‘Feast’ is its word for ‘rain.’ Waning joy is autumn—large transdimensional crossings would have aggravated weather patterns. You probably arrived in a torrential rainstorm. ‘Seed’ is the flora word for both promise and potential. Perhaps it’s referring to a debt to Proust. ‘Wide trunk,’ I believe, literally translates into ‘something big on which smaller things depend on for prosperity.’ My guess is it means leader. That would be you.”

A shudder ran through Seth, the ghost of an old memory. He stepped back to the edge of the outer line. A sparrow chick caught in the event horizon with them hopped over the inner circle toward the tree. It aged like the subject of a time-lapse film.

“Remember.”

“He knows why we’re here,” Lelani continued. “He’s followed my progress since I arrived. Rosencrantz’s consciousness can reach around the world through a green network, so long as there’s a plant or a flower to tap into.”

A surge of pressure poured into Seth’s mind, as though all his sinus cavities were filled with fluid past their capacity. He grabbed his head and fell to the ground. The onslaught rushed in too quickly, too forcefully. His head was already on the brink of bursting when it was forced to take on more. He turned to Cal for help, but the cop was on the ground, too. Lelani was holding her own but looked like she’d succumb any second.

“Make it stop! Make it stop!” Seth shouted.

“What is it?” Cal screamed.

A ripple of air emanated outward from the tree accompanied by a deep bass vibration, which reverberated to the marrow.

The world changed. The wind-lashed forest was wrapped in a torrential downpour. Lightning stamped fleeting silhouettes of the surrounding tree line. A shimmer in the air preceded a vertical tear in open space, birthing a gaggle of weary travelers. There was a translucent quality to the beings. These were phantoms of another time. Men and women dressed in cloaks. A bearded man with the body of a horse. A crying infant cradled in one traveler’s arm. And there, for the second time in a long age, Seth’s parents Parham and Lita. He forced back his emotions, reminding himself it was all a lie. They were not his true parents. Yet the urge to throw his arms around them was overwhelming.

The phantoms took shelter under Rosencrantz. Seth recognized his own eyes in a boy on the cusp of manhood; frightened, confused. In his hand the boy held a rolled parchment. He broke the wax seal.

And then, it was Seth himself under that tree looking down on the scroll instead of his doppelganger.
As long as the spells remained uncast, they’d be vulnerable,
said a voice in his head. His voice.
Foreigners in a foreign land.
His orders were to delay for nothing. He unrolled the scroll, fighting the wind for its possession, and even as he did this, grown-up Seth struggled with inevitable history. Even without a conscious recollection of these events, he knew what was about to transpire, as though it were some late-night movie he’d once watched years ago. He couldn’t stop. It was the past; it was done. He acted out the spellbound part in an enchanted script. The wind and rain took their toll on the parchment. The paper was saturated, the ink began to run. He would have to be quick or lose all the directives. He read the first line thirteen times, once for each member of the party. Then he recited their names, and then read the activation word, almost dissipated, at the bottom of the scroll.

A searing hot line of pain cleaved through his head. All the blood in his brain boiled like magma. Cal—both of them, old and young—screamed, too. Seth was again within the event horizon on his knees, holding his head. The cloaked travelers were once again third-party players in the drama. The phantoms staggered, dazed and confused, from their arborescent shelter in various directions, some standing, others crawling on their knees. They broke off into separate groups, some trailed off alone, with no regard for each other. The storm subsided. The phantoms faded from the world. Seth vomited.

“Oh God. What was that?” he said, gagging and spitting.

“Thirteen years ago,” Lelani said. “Your repressed memories, or maybe Rosencrantz’s own recollection of the events.”

“Proust seed watered. The keeper, a cloud in the drought. The keeper’s saplings will know fortune,”
said the tree.
“Water my seed.”
And then it discontinued the time warp.

Seth passed out.

CHAPTER 15

DO THE RIGHT THING

1

Rita did not say a word until they were a block from the house.

Then, in a monotone she said, “This is a real mess, Danny.”

Daniel could not tell if it was an accusation or a statement of fact. Rita’s energy was such that she could spare none for inflection. Daniel tread carefully. It didn’t take much to send his mother running for her little yellow pills.

“Them Grundys were messing with Ade,” Daniel said.

“A lot of good helping him did.”

“He’s just scared.”

Daniel was surprised to find himself defending a person who’d betrayed him. A part of him wanted to go back to the previous night and help the Grundys pummel the jerk. Deep down, though, Daniel understood his friend better than most. Mrs. Lutz, who kept an immaculate home, had a passion for baking that made Sara Lee look like a slacker. The house was always warm from the oven and smelled of cookies. Mr. Lutz was jovial, a tinkerer by nature and toy model builder with the patience of Job. Their house was in order and affection flowed copiously. Life behind those walls was as soft as Adrian’s gut. Daniel took every opportunity to stay over. Unconditional affection, however, was not doled out in the real world, even when it was warranted. The world outside chez Lutz was a harsher place. Adrian squandered his energies trying to mold life into a facsimile of his home.