Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 59 - Ten Rings

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“This one is working,” Olivia said excitedly, holding the phone’s receiver. “It’s ringing right now.”

“Who are you calling, exactly?” Tony asked, pinching one end of his bushy mustache.

“Her folks or her husband,” Frankie answered. “She’s been trying without luck at every phone she sees.”

“The phone lines must be clearing up,” James said.

“That’s ten rings,” Olivia told them. “They must be outside somewhere — out in the fields, maybe. I told them to stay near the phone. Why don’t they listen?”

“What say we make our way down to the generator room?” James suggested.

“I’m sorry,” Olivia said, the phone still pressed to her ear. Can I…I have another phone number…can I have just a minute? I can catch up?”

“There are other phones down the line,” James said. “Just down the tunnel a couple hundred yards or so. We should stay together.”

“I’ll just be a few minutes,” Olivia said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

“We can’t leave you here,” Tabitha interjected and looked at James. “It’s not safe.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“It’s more than that,” Tabitha said. “With all due respect, but we just met. We don’t know you. We’re not about to let someone have open access to ENH.”

“I can vouch for her,” Frankie said.

“You can vouch for her?” Tabitha repeated. “Who’s vouching for you? Becca?”

“Well, that’s a bit snippy,” Frankie countered. “I thought we were old friends by now, given all we went through together.”

“Your wife is nowhere to be found,” Tabitha said. “And this mysterious, pretty little girl shows up with you in her place.”

“I’m fifty-six years old,” Olivia said, taking in Tabitha’s tiny frame, her dress formal enough for a Sunday. “Apparently older than you are.”

“It’s just suspicious, wouldn’t you think?” Tabitha said. “And with all due respect, Frankie, you’re also an unknown factor. You showed up just as mysteriously on the same night your wife conveniently had this entire laboratory for herself — entirely for herself to do as she had wanted all along. For all I know, you’ve been in on this from the beginning. And then here you are now, conveniently awaiting our arrival.”

“First off, we were awaiting your arrival after we saw you on the TV,” Frankie argued. “And secondly, I had nothing to do with this. If anything, I’m the biggest victim here. My wife did all this. My wife. That wife of mine, who — and I don’t know how to state this any more clearly than I already have — botched things up as bad as they could be botched.”

Tabitha crossed her arms across her flattened chest, her prim and proper dress overly starched and hanging flat like something off of a storeroom baby doll. She was determined and resistant.

“And for someone with a three hundred IQ or whatever you may have,” Frankie said, “you seem to be awfully forgetful of the fact that it was my idea to rush here and stop Becca in the first place.”

“One twenty-five,” Tabitha said.

“What?” Frankie asked.

“My IQ is only one twenty-five.”

“The fact you know that,” Frankie said and bemusedly shook his head.

“Hello?” Olivia suddenly said from the edge of the room. Everyone turned to the sound of her voice. Tears welled into pools in her eyes as she hugged the phone against her ear. “Charlotte? Is that you?”

“Who’s Charlotte?” Tony asked.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing your voice again,” Olivia said and then broke into deep sobs as the realization sunk in that she was once more speaking with her mother-in-law, who had died months before, whose inheritance had provided the funds for David and Jeremy’s ill-fated kayak trip, which lead to Olivia standing outside, rain beating heavily like a rapid-fire drumbeat upon the sheer veneer canvas tent shielding the six-foot-deep hole as she buried her husband in the ground.

David.

Her husband.

The father of children whose faces were fading, horribly fading as each day ended, like a retinal burn, their memory so strong in her mind yet their faces quickly fading. How could she lose the image of the children she nursed? In what nightmarish landscape would she have to struggle to bring the curves of their cheeks to mind? The darkness of Mark’s brown eyes and Rosie’s perpetual grin, always smiling, so happy, so sweet?

Standing there in the shivering confines of the cold concrete tunnel, the phone pressed tightly to her ear, Olivia had a flicker of a memory from Christmas morning just the year before, of waking before dawn, of being surprised by the soft quiet just before sunlight peered through the slats in the window blinds, of the pleasant realization that her children had not yet stirred. It was to be their last Christmas before leaving for college. She lay in bed and remembered all the years the twins would excitedly burst into their master bedroom, except the one year when Olivia had found her daughter huddled on the floor of the family room with her sleeping gown draped around her legs, bent over with her face up close to the antique Nativity set that Olivia had impulsively purchased the Christmas after they were born.

Rosie always loved that Nativity set when she was younger. In the weeks of Advent leading to Christmas, while Mark routinely snooped for hints and hiding places for gifts, Rosie busied herself not with staring at the presents that Olivia and David had already set out, wrapped and tucked beneath the tree branches but with quietly lining up the strands of yellow hay that lined the base of the Nativity set. Rosie would stare, quiet and solemn, her face lit by the small bulb that glowed from within, hidden amongst the beams of the small manger scene.

That was the stillness, the sweetness, which now was so unobtainable, unreachable, and ungraspable to Olivia. Her quest to find her husband, to be reconnected only to be constantly waylaid and sidetracked, of finding herself not in his arms but now in some underground concrete bunker with the same scientists who’d first envisioned the potential of this scientific monstrosity. And if she couldn’t reconnect with her husband - hopefully, resurrected and breathing once more somewhere in this distorted mirror version of the world she once knew - how could she ever possibly expect to hold her children in her arms again?

But now she heard the voice of her deceased mother-in-law and could barely muster additional words from between her sobs.

“David,” she choked out. “Tell me he’s there?”

Tony, James, Frankie, and Tabitha watched Olivia silently cupping the receiver to her ear, grasping the phone so tightly her knuckles turned white.

“When?” she asked on the phone, then listened again.

“But I just called them,” Olivia said. “No one answered…Okay, I will…I’ll try again…Okay, Charlotte. You, too…Okay.”

She hung up the phone and mustered a smile at the other four who were watching her intently, eyes wide and fixed, trying their best to read the response of this broken wife and mother stuck in that sixteen-year-old body.

“I should have stayed put,” Olivia said, breaking into a sob again. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Where’s your husband now?” Frankie asked.

“Heading to my parents’ house,” she said. Her hand still rested lightly on the base of the phone, a feeble connection, hopeful, to what was happening outside the curved tunnel. “He left two days ago. He might already be there. Please. I have to stay here. I have to keep calling until I get through to my parents.”

She looked directly at Tabitha.

“Please,” Olivia pleaded.

Frankie moved to her and awkwardly placed an arm across her shoulders.

“He’s close, love,” he tried to assure her. “Just hang tight. We’ll get you to him.”

“Ow!” Olivia suddenly cried out. She pulled her hand from the phone and shook it vigorously. “The phone just shocked me!”

“What’s that?” Frankie asked as he pointed to a small black circle that suddenly appeared on the base of the telephone.

“Get back!” James yelled at them, lumbering forward with surprising speed for a man of his considerable girth. He grabbed Frankie and Olivia by their arms, jerking them away from the wall.

“The telephone,” Tony said, horrified, as they all stood agog at the sight of a quarter-sized circle of blackness pulsing at the center of the phone’s rotary dial. “It’s like what we saw over Lake Michigan. That’s how they all started!”

“We have to get to the generator room,” Tabitha ordered. “We have to get there now.”

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