Tenerife
Meanwhile, the middle-aged version of me was living with my family on Earth.
“Recognize this?”
Theo handed me a map of an island that looked a little bit like a floating duck, but it wasn’t easy to see it well in the torchlight of the back deck, so I leaned forward a bit and pulled it under the light.
“Should I?”
“It’s that shape that Little Althea asked us to look for. I found it. And you’re not going to believe how.”
He had everyone’s attention then. Maura and Kali stepped to either side of him and Oliver looked up from his book.
“That’s not the shape,” I said.
“What do you mean? Of course, it’s the shape.”
“Yeah, mom,” said Maura, “that’s it. Wait a minute. I know where we saved Little Althea’s drawing.”
Since a fractured version of myself began her (or my?) separate existence, with experiences and thoughts in an unnerving state of being completely unknown to me, we’d grown into the habit of calling her Little Althea. We also set up this patio observatory to study the skies and lay the foundation for Theo’s career in astrophysics. He’d shown himself to have quite an aptitude in the field, which didn’t surprise any of us, and was in the process of finding a university for his doctoral work.
“Here,” Maura said, putting Little Althea’s drawing into my hands.
It was facing the wrong way. How was that possible?
“This isn’t right,” I said. “I was there when she drew it. I remember. This is not what she drew. It’s backwards.”
“No, no, Mother, it’s not backwards,” said Theo, “and I can prove it because I’ve found where it was meant to lead us. There I was, elbows deep in brochures and applications, and on one of the brochures there’s this map. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“It’s Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.”
“Ah,” said Oliver, “the Spanish islands off the coast of Morocco.”
“That’s right, Dad, and thanks to you, I’ve got a shot at working on my doctorate program there. Thanks for teaching me Spanish since birth.”
“What’s the university there?”
“Es Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. It’s right where that dot is, Mom. Right there. Can you believe that was one of the places I was planning to apply?”
“That’s great, Theo!” said Kali. “We’ll find your homeworld yet, Mom!”
There was a lot of talk about what Theo needed to do next to apply and how amazing it was that he’d found the image and figured out what it meant, as if an unseen hand was guiding us in our quest. There was excited chatter about what it must be like on a beautiful island like Tenerife and that they couldn’t wait to visit him and trying to think of people they knew who might have gone there and on and on until finally someone decided it was time to go to bed.
“Goodnight, Mom,” Theo said, kissing my forehead, “while I’m away, you guys hold the fort here and keep looking for anything new in the sky, any shadows that could be a planet passing through.”
“We will. See you in the morning,” said Oliver.
Once they’d headed off, the sound of their continued excited chatter echoing from within the house, it was just Oliver and me out on the patio in the warm dark of midwestern summer.
“You’ve been very quiet, Althea.”
“Do you ever feel like you’re not real? Like the world you’re in, like everything, isn’t real?”
“Would you like me to go look for a top so we can spin it and see if it keeps going?”
I laughed. Oliver always knew how to make me laugh.
“No, but you go get Leonardo DiCaprio, if you’d like,” I teased. “Do you know what I mean, though? Seriously. Do you ever feel like things are twisted around? Like somehow you’re being manipulated and messed with?”
“I guess so. I guess maybe we all do sometimes.”
“That drawing is not the same one that Little Althea drew.”
“Memory is a faulty thing. It deceives us all the time.”
“No, Oliver. I know that memory can get distorted. But I watched her draw it. And more than that. I determined to commit it to my memory because I knew it was important and something could happen to that sheet of paper. I intentionally placed it into my memory banks. That’s a very different thing, Oliver. You don’t forget that sort of thing. The casual things that happen, those things you can forget or twist around. But something that you intentionally store into your memory. I don’t think so. And I have a very specific memory of watching her draw it.”
“Reality is a fragile thing. That’s all I really know.”
“There are so many things that just don’t make sense. There are so many vacancies in my story, in where I came from. I feel like someone made me up, that I’m someone’s creation.”
“There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who would agree with you, Althea.”
“Yeah. I just don’t want my mind messed with.”
“You know, maybe you saw the paper from the reverse side. Maybe Little Althea handed it to you upside down and you were looking at the image through the paper.”
“Nice try. But I wasn’t. I know I wasn’t.”
“I’m just thinking of a possibility. I know it’s unsettling, but in whatever case, I’m so glad Theo’s headed there. It will be a terrific place for him.”
“I’m sorry about all of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting you involved in this weird and messy search.”
“Why are you sorry? I love a good adventure. It beats lecturing and writing books for the rest of my life. There’s nothing better than a mystery to solve.”
“I really appreciate how logical and level headed you are about all of this, Oliver. It really helps keep me grounded, especially when it feels like I’m losing my mind.”
Oliver stood up. “I’m glad to be here. And now, I’m going to bed. Laura and I are getting up early to take a little hike along the lake before she heads back to Chicago.”
“You mean Maura.”
“No, Laura, our daughter Laura.”
Next: Pintor’s News
This is the eighteenth part in a series of stories. Following are the previous installments starting with the first:
1. The Library
2. Listen, Move, Hide, Repeat
3. A Necessary State of Alarm
4. Anches
5. A Question in Colored Glass
6. How a Lifetime Friendship Began
7. In the World I Created
8. To Make Things Right Again
9. Escape from the Library
10. Pintor’s World
11. Vincente
12. What I Didn’t See Coming
13. First Person Binary
14. Closing the Loop
15. Finding Kali
16. Escape from Smort
17. Lux Earth Wars