Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  Gentian looked at Dominic. “Many hands make light work,” he said.

  Gentian went back into her room and crawled under the table again. She was pleased with herself for not having stuck out her tongue at Juniper.

  The weather continued cloudy. The control system oozed through the attic until there was only a narrow corridor to walk along. The museum room also overflowed, but not to such an extent. Gentian found this odd, but she did not have much time to think about it. She was getting worried about finishing before school started, and it occurred to her that she could call on the Giant Ants to spend the last day of their vacation all working together.

  “I need to call Becky,” she told Dominic.

  “Need must, when the devil drives.”

  Gentian thought of the Laurie Anderson song about the devil’s being a rusty truck with only twenty mile, and giggled, and went to her room and called Becky. It must be about time that Becky came over to spend the night, anyway. Gentian would not be able to spend hours and hours with her, talking the sun down the sky, as her father liked to say, because of the work she had to get done, but Becky could read. Gentian dialed the number, and got Becky’s mother.

  “Who? Gentian? Well, this is a surprise. Just a minute, I’ll see if she can be disturbed.”

  Becky did not take many telephone calls when she was writing poetry, but her mother had been told that she would always take Gentian’s.

  Becky’s voice erupted from the telephone. “Gentian! What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I just wanted to ask you how time worked.”

  “Gentian Betony Meriweather, how can you disappear for months and let Steph down and then call me with a culinary question?”

  “It’s not a culinary question and I haven’t disappeared anywhere.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you always know right where you are. Well, we don’t. I’ve left you a hundred and fifty phone messages.”

  “Rosie or Juniper must have forgotten.”

  “I left them with your parents.”

  “I never got them.”

  “I came over and we couldn’t find you.”

  “I’ve been right here. I haven’t gone anywhere all week.”

  “Gentian, you sound awfully strange. Did they take you to that therapist after all and put you on drugs?”

  “What therapist?”

  “The one your mother said maybe they’d better take you to after I told her you’d dropped out of the play.”

  “What play?”

  “Oh, God, I knew those drugs were a bad idea. They’ve crunched up your memory. I mean Twelfth Night.”

  “I’m not taking any drugs and my memory is fine. Who told you I’d dropped out of the play?”

  “Dominic. And how could you, how could you send messages by that viper?”

  “I didn’t. I’m not dropping out. You haven’t found another Antonio yet, have you?”

  There was a long pause. Gentian was glad she had brought a tricky bit of wiring with her. She tucked the telephone under her chin and went to work on it.

  “I guess you didn’t know,” said Becky, slowly. “What day do you think it is?”

  “Friday?”

  “Well, it is at that. What month, then?”

  “January,” said Gentian, more firmly.

  “Gentian. It’s the first day of April. The play’s over. Steph is by turns furious and devastated, depending on, as far as I can tell, the phase of the moon.”

  “That’s not funny. Just because I got confused once last fall—”

  “Ask anybody who is not working on that infernal device of yours. Turn on the radio. Turn on the television. Look outside, for God’s sake, at your precious stars.”

  “Oh. Well. Yes. I could do that. Unless they play jokes on April Fools’ Day too. You wrote a poem about that.”

  “Well, sort of,” said Becky, but she sounded considerably mollified, or perhaps relieved. “Look, promise me. Promise me you’ll do some stargazing tonight. And I think you should tell your mother you want to go to that therapist.”

  “My mother hates therapists. She hates psychobabble.”

  “Promise me you’ll do some stargazing.”

  “All right. I just have to get this bit wired.”

  “What’s a good stargazing time in April?”

  Gentian concentrated. She put her bit of plywood with its wires and lines of solder down on the bed. “Um. Well, you know, it depends on what you want to look at, but if you want, say, the Coma Berenices, ten in the evening is about right. If you want a last look at Orion before it gets too far west, more like eight.”

  “All right, look, which do you like better?”

  “Well, the Coma Berenices is just bursting with deep-sky objects.”

  “All right. Look at it, then, at ten o’clock. I’ll call to remind you, all right?”

  “Are you doing a paper or something?”

  “Something,” said Becky. “Definitely something.”

  “Are you writing an astronomical poem?”

  “Not just at the moment.”

  “What are you writing, then? You haven’t shown me anything in forever.”

  “I haven’t seen you in forever. What in the world is going on over there?”

  “Well, we’re helping Dominic build his time machine. You know, I wonder if it’s working already somehow and he didn’t tell us, or he doesn’t know.”

  “That’s an explanation,” said Becky, slowly. “Is it the best one?”

  “I guess it might multiply entities unnecessarily.”

  “Well, or not. You know what entities I think are unnecessary?”

  “What?” said Gentian, fascinated. It sounded like a Becky poem in the making.

  “That you’d change so much you’d let Steph down, and me, and all of us.”

  “You shouldn’t have believed Dominic.”

  “You believe him.”

  “I don’t believe him about people.”

  “Good point,” said Becky, still slowly. “Look, you promise me you’ll look at the Coma Berenices.”

  “I did already.”

  “Turn the heat down now, so the temperature will be equalized by ten.”

  “You don’t have to tell me how to do this,” said Gentian, irritated.

  “Good. Do it, then. I’ll call you at ten.” She hung up, rather loudly.

  Gentian hung up too, and went to turn off the radiator. It was stone cold. That would explain why she hadn’t seen Maria Mitchell much. Murr would be in the bathroom where it was warm. Gentian started across the hall to find her, and was almost bowled over by Juniper, who came charging up the stairs and ran for the door to the attic.

  “Watch where you’re going!” said Gentian.

  “Where’s Dominic?”

  “In the attic, I guess.”

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “He told Sarah I didn’t want to see her any more.”

  “Why’d she believe him?”

  “Why shouldn’t she? I haven’t called her for months.” Juniper wrenched open the door to the attic, banged it against the wall so hard bits of plaster fell down, and bounded into the blaring light. She immediately fell over Gentian’s latest addition to the control system and landed with a resounding crash. “Jesus Christ!” said Juniper. “God-damned mother-fucking son of a bitch!”

  Dominic came out of the museum room. He had cobwebs in his hair. “Bear your body more seemly,” he said to her.

  “Fuck you!”

  “High thoughts must have high language.”

  “My thoughts,” said Juniper, struggling to her feet and walking up to within an inch of him, “are not high. They can’t be. They’re of you. How dare you lie to Sarah about me?” She bristled all over, like a furious cat; her red hair, even tied back for dusty work, sprang around her head brighter than all the copper wires in the time machine. Her green T-shirt and blue jeans hurt Gentian’s eyes like spring.
Dominic, eye to eye with her, was like a faded black-and-white photograph.

  “You let me in,” he said, “and barred the door with a silver pin.”

  “I’ll be happy to let you out again,” said Juniper.

  “You lied to Becky about me, too,” said Gentian.

  “What is a lie,” said Dominic, “but truth in masquerade.”

  “You are coming with me,” said Juniper, “to tell Sarah you lied.”

  “That way madness lies.”

  Juniper took several steps back, and Gentian saw the flush of anger leave her face. Gentian came forward. “And then,” she said, “you can tell Becky you lied to her. And Steph—you can tell Steph you lied about me and the play.”

  “There’s no remedy save this,” said Dominic. And he darted his hand about in the air, over the attic and the time machine.

  Juniper made a derisory sound through her nose. “I assume you lied about that, too, you—you walking Bartlett’s. I can’t make you do anything,” she said, shoving past Gentian, “but there are people in this house who can. I’m telling Mom and Dad,” she said to Gentian, and went out. Her furious footsteps diminished; the door at the bottom of the attic stairs slammed.

  Gentian did not know what she felt. Before she could think, Dominic said, “She will forget.”

  “Are you kidding? Junie never forgets a grudge.”

  “She will forget to tell your parents. She won’t forget that she hates me, but—” he shrugged, one of the few gestures Gentian had ever seen him make, “—we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

  Gentian tried for a moment to make this remark apply to Dominic and Juniper, but then she realized that his voice had changed. With that remark, he had begun quoting again, rather than speaking as himself. She said, still at a loss, “Junie’s not religious.”

  “I don’t mean by religion what you mean.”

  Gentian looked at him.

  Dominic, whom she had never seen sweaty, or out of breath, or affronted more than once or twice, seemed to be making some enormous effort. “The myths she partakes of helped her to love, and then to know, and thus to hate,” he said. He sat down abruptly on a small leather trunk that had strayed out of the museum room. Gentian’s eye found and automatically read Rosemary’s label: “Victorian traveling trunk, ca. 1867; U. S.”

  “Your verbs haven’t got any object,” she said after a moment.

  “My object is always myself.”

  “Well, that explains a lot.”

  Gentian had no idea what to do. Marching out in a fury was not the way she operated; even knowing what he had done, even remembering, more clearly, it seemed, than she had known it while it was happening, his earlier behavior with Alma, she was as curious as she was outraged. And her conscience prickled a little too; Becky’s mention of a therapist had been nagging at her. Gentian was perfectly well aware that she didn’t need a therapist; but maybe Dominic did. Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are relieved. Oh, great, now she was quoting too. And what a quotation: that was the way those conspirators in Julius Caesar had thought, and look where it had gotten them.

  “Even if Juniper does forget,” she said, “I don’t think my mother will forget that she’s thinking of sending me to a therapist.” She hardly knew if she was comforting herself and threatening him, or the other way around.

  “No,” said Dominic, “but it will be as a new thought to her, each day.”

  “What? What the hell are you doing?”

  “The time machine isn’t finished, but certain outliers can be accomplished. Come and see.” He stood up, and moving slowly and with great care, as a cousin of Gentian’s who had arthritis used to move on a bad day, he went into the control room. Gentian followed. She expected Juniper and her father to come frothing upstairs at any second, but she might as well see what she could before then.

  Dominic never seemed to have as much trouble navigating the crowded room as Gentian did; he was standing beside a collection of four monitors while she was still negotiating the first few feet of the room, with its thick ropes of colored wires tied up with duct tape and occasionally anchored to floor or wall or table. He did not do anything until she was standing beside him; then he waved his hand, and all the monitors lit up. Gentian was familiar with motion-sensing lights, but she had not installed one here, and in any case she had never heard of a motion-sensing monitor.

  “See, then,” said Dominic.

  In the upper left-hand monitor, Juniper was sitting at the computer in her bedroom, typing furiously. She had on the same green T-shirt and blue jeans as she had been wearing when she was in the attic a few minutes ago, and the same green scrunchie, one Rosemary had given her for her birthday, to keep her hair out of her eyes. She must be sending E-mail to Sarah. Either that, or informing the entire teen chat echo of The Light Prince’s perfidy. She seemed to have just come from the attic, and yet she was not talking to her parents. They must not be at home.

  “When did you put a camera in Junie’s room?” demanded Gentian. It was monstrous. And good grief, how long had it been there? Did he know she read Juniper’s diary? She swallowed her intended remarks; she was not in a good position to make speeches about the odiousness of spying. But she’s my sister, she thought, that makes it different. And I didn’t put in a camera; I never watched her most private moments.

  “No camera but time,” said Dominic.

  Gentian looked away from Juniper, violently. In the upper right-hand monitor, the entire family, including Gentian, was sitting at dinner. Oh, that’s interesting, thought Gentian, does my hair always mat and stick up that way in the back? No wonder Maria Mitchell grew hers long and braided it. And I don’t slouch like that, really, do I? It doesn’t feel that way from inside. Everyone else looked as usual, so she must too. They were having an argument. Gentian craned forward, and Dominic touched the side of the monitor. Talk burst over the quiet hum of the control room. It did not sound just as usual; Gentian was not talking but watching, and the person who slouched, who was wearing Gentian’s Planetary Society T-shirt and Gentian’s blue jeans patched with red corduroy, was saying what she would say, but not in her voice, not precisely.

  What she said, while helping herself to salad—and spilling lettuce on the tablecloth quite obliviously—was,

  “Have I got an Electra complex, or is Dad the only sensible person in this house?”

  “Taking your career choice seriously isn’t sensible?” said her mother.

  “Well, all right,” said Gentian, running her fork through the salad. She looked awfully clumsy; no, not that exactly: inattentive. Her mother silently handed her a bowl of chopped tomato, green pepper, and red onion, and cocked one eyebrow to show she still wanted her original question answered.

  “I figured I’d do astronomy after ten,” said Gentian, “which is mostly a good time, and maybe miss school in the morning sometimes.” Gentian, watching, was pleased. She liked sounding matter-of-fact, and uninvolved, and this tone was just as she had hoped.

  “Mostly, I assume,” said her mother dryly.

  “The Giant Ants’ll let me look at their notes.” Oops, there was a bit of pleading in that sentence.

  “Well, as long as you don’t start bringing home those oily communications from your counselor. I don’t know how so fundamentally sensible a school can countenance so much psychobabble.”

  The sound faded out; the picture continued. “Now,” said Dominic, still with an obvious effort, “How fares your mother after that talk?”

  “Um, reassured but wary?”

  “Precisely. A state she thinks good for the mother of such as you. So, then, when she hears report of your failures, this is run through her, and she feels she has made an investigation and will be continuing to pay attention.”

  “Get away from her!” cried Gentian. “Stay out of her head!”

  “I am here,” said Dominic, simply.

  And what did he mean by fa
ilures? Gentian looked at the third screen, the lower left one. It was divided into nine windows; and even in her fury, perplexity, and annoyance, she almost laughed, to see that they really were windows, the windows of the house. Then she saw what they meant, and stopped smiling. The view outside every one of them showed a cloudy sky, bare trees encrusted with snow, snowy bits of lawn and street and roof. This was why she thought it was January, when it was April. Gentian turned on him. “You presumptuous, intolerable bastard.”

  Dominic looked, if anything, pleased. He inclined his head at the monitors, so Gentian looked at the fourth and last one. Rosemary and Amber were sitting in Rosemary’s room, eating strawberry ice cream with chocolate sauce on it and giggling. Rosemary’s voice faded in, “So he’s a jerk. He tried to make me miss winter camping and he’s trying to make Genny miss her school play, but my father says he’ll take care of it.” I guess he does say that, thought Gentian, over and over and over. She was glad there was no monitor to show him doing it.

  Gentian almost said, “Becky’s not here, or Steph, or Sarah,” but she didn’t want to give him ideas he hadn’t already had. She remembered then that he had been obliged to lie to Becky and Steph and Sarah; he had not been able to trap them in time and send them scrambling like hamsters over and over the same space, held in the two palms of his hands. For whatever reason, they had not let him in. No, nor put soft cushions under his head, either. She felt glad that Rosemary was out of it, and then looked again at the monitor and felt cold. Not quite out of it.

  It would be better to go through with finishing the time machine, and use it to clear things up. If Dominic had what he wanted, whatever that was, whatever he needed the time machine for, then he would go away. At least, she hoped he would.

  “What do you want the time machine for, anyway?” she said to him.

  “For the same reason you do,” he said. “There is something to be done over.”

  Gentian saw no particular reason to believe one thing he said more than another, but he was at least speaking in his own person, and it did make sense. “All right,” she said, briskly. “What do we need to do next?”

  “We must construct another helmet,” said Dominic, blandly. Gentian raised her eyebrows at him. So he was capable of learning from experience.