“I didn’t know him,” Becky interjected, “I saw his face. I didn’t recognize him.”
Becky watched her father take a deep gulp of air and hold it before continuing his account.
“Somebody from the apartment called the police because… because… it was three days before anybody knew you were missing and…” Her dad scrambled to find the right words, “There were complaints from your neighbors. They thought maybe the sewers had backed up. When the apartment manager opened up your door, that’s when they found you and called the police.
“That was ten years ago, sweetheart and not one day has gone by that we haven’t talked about you. We were… we are so proud of you.”
“We missed you so much baby. And now you have been brought back,” said Mrs. Lacey reaching out to touch her resurrected daughter’s cheek. “It’s a miracle,” she added in a tight whisper. “A miracle.”
Rebecca did not share her parents’ belief that her resurrection was the result of anything supernatural. They were good people; describing them as salt of the earth would have sounded like a cliché if it was not for the fact that it applied to her parents one-hundred percent. Her father was a lineman for the local power company; her mom drove one of the school buses ferrying children from the north—end of the valley to the high school in the south. They led a below-average lifestyle on a below-average income.
Raising a child could be a hardship for all but a lucky few, but it was doubly so in this small, rural, dirt—poor town. But early on, Rebecca’s parents learned that their daughter was nothing less than exceptional.
She aced every aptitude test from the first grade on up, and it wasn’t long before the young Rebecca Lacey’s parents were informed that their daughter was not just exceptional, she was special, bright beyond her years. So special, in fact, that the school had recommended Becky be placed on the academic fast track. It was the their recommendation that she move from the tiny public school to one that would challenge and help develop her intellectually; a private school with personal educators. They recommended a school where her full potential could develop and where the very best teachers would coach her, allowing her nascent intelligence to flourish and grow. She would receive the best education money could buy, the councilor had said with a smile.
Her father had quietly informed the councilor that they could not afford to do that but the woman had looked at him sympathetically over the rims of her glasses and told them they should not worry about the funding, there were scholarships available for individuals in their financial situation and she would be happy to give them the forms to fill out. With their daughter’s test score averages they would have no problem, she was sure. Money would not be a consideration in their daughter’s future education.
Rebecca had not wanted to leave her school and her friends. The other children liked her and, unlike most geniuses of a similar age, she had the social graces to match her intelligence. She had spent many years being brilliant at not showing her peers that she was brilliant. However, even at the age of ten she heard the call of something bigger than herself or the tiny valley that she was growing up in.
Mathematics.
Numbers, figures, formula. She could see them in the flight of the hawks that sometimes circled above her home, in the random fall of gravel that made up the drive to their front door, or the billowing clouds that hung over the mountains surrounding the town.
While other kids watched MTV and read the umpteenth Harry Potter, she was watching Nova on her local PBS channel and reading Sagan and Hawking, devouring anything by Gian-Carlo Rota and Julian Barbour.
She appreciated mathematics as others loved poetry: she could hear the meter in a constant, feel the rhyme in an integer, and sense the prose hidden in quantum foam. It combined to create a stunning sense of wonder in her, a wonder that never diminished.
With the sense of wonder came an awareness of something intangible, of something beyond the mathematics, something outside intelligibility that, just as a molecule consisted of electrons, protons and neutrons, made mathematics something greater; imparting a rhythm and a meaning to the figures and equations that she could not quite understand.
To Rebecca, it was a sense of God.
No formula could express what she was experiencing. Like a woman who lived in a two dimensional world trying to grasp a third new dimension of reality, she did not possess the senses needed to interpret the undercurrent she felt rippling through each and every equation. Its ineffableness at once frustrated, terrified and excited her.
And now, in this reconstituted world, here it was again, the same sense that something was at work behind the scenes of her life, an undercurrent pulling at her mind again, catching it in its tow and sweeping it out into a sea of uncertainty and mystery.
No. She did not believe that this was a miracle at all.
Twenty
If you didn’t know the path was there, you could easily drive right past it. It was just a narrow dirt track leading through the forest to the cabin on the lake shore. Simone had asked Jim several times to get the path paved. He had steadfastly refused; he liked the fact the place was off the beaten track—quite literally. Instead, he had agreed to spread gravel the last hundred yards or so to the house so they wouldn’t track mud inside after one of the frequent storms the area often experienced.
It took Jim twenty minutes of driving back and forth along the same strip of road before he spotted the track, obscured by a year or more’s growth of Juniper and Sage. As Jim turned off the main road and onto the rough dirt track leading up to the cabin, he finally felt that he was leaving the events of the past year behind him. It was a boundary between the strange new world, and him. A living fence of birch and oak separating him from harsh reality.
Jim pulled the truck to a stop outside the cabin. It was a quaint colonial-style affair, built completely with local trees sometime in the early twentieth-century. Surrounded by thick woods on all sides save for the lake, Jim and Simone had bought the place within a year of getting married—escaping to its tranquility every chance they could. It sat on the shore of Shadow Lake, a 700-hundred acre natural body of water. As he exited the truck he could hear water lapping at the supports of the old wooden dock outback, and see their paddleboat bobbing languidly on the waters ebb and flow, just as it always had.
Of course, Simone was not with him this time. Jim had come to terms with the fact that both his former wife and Lark were, in all probability, dead. Killed in the first few chaotic days following the Slip—as the event had eventually become known. She and Lark were undoubtedly one of the estimated seven-million American’s who had lost their lives in the U.S. on that fateful day. Hundreds of millions more worldwide had been killed across the globe, and millions more perished in the weeks following the event, mostly in undeveloped countries as their fragile governments and infrastructures collapsed around them.
Jim half-expected the cabin to be occupied; claimed by one of the many displaced families that the Slip had created in its wake. But as he walked up the weatherworn steps onto the front porch, he found the door still locked. And peering through the grubby window, he could see the place was empty, and just as he remembered it.