Sheridan, Illinois 2192 A.D.
“Mom, when will you and Dad be home?” I asked my mother as she packed a bag one morning when I was eight years old.
“We’ll both be home tomorrow. I’m catching a late tube and meeting Dad for dinner with friends in Ohio; then we have a meeting in Philadelphia.”
She took some things out of a funny little homemade box she called an “incubator” and packed them into a shoulder bag.
“I wanted to show him that I finished the puzzle he gave me for my birthday.”
Mom stared at me while I held up a large spherical puzzle, then sighed.
“They called it ‘The Impossible Puzzle’ and you finished it in three days? It has over nine thousand pieces. Even the ‘Nearly Impossible Puzzle’ we got you last year took longer than that.”
“Mom, I was only seven then.”
“Nothing seems to be impossible for you. I guess once you’ve done the ‘Nearly Impossible,’ the ‘Impossible’ doesn’t look so hard anymore. You know, most adults give up on those puzzles long before finishing.”
“Tell me about it. Dad took part of the ‘Nearly Impossible Puzzle’ apart and I had to fix it.”
“Maybe you should glue it.”
“That’s okay. Dad promised he wouldn’t mess with it again.”
“If you’ve finished the puzzle, what am I going to leave to keep you busy while Mrs. Pierce looks after you tonight?”
“You don’t have to leave anything. I like just talking with Mrs. Pierce. She has lots of great stories from when she was young.”
I looked Mom in the eyes as I said it. I always thought she had the most beautiful blue eyes in the world. Then I frowned as I looked over the rest of her face.
“I take it you still don’t like my new haircut?” she asked.
“Not really. I liked it much better when it was long. I only ever remember it being long. That’s okay. I don’t like Dad’s new cut either. How long do you think it’ll take for it to grow back?”
“I’ll leave that for you to puzzle out.”
Mom removed a few more things from the incubator.
“What is all that stuff anyway?” I asked.
“Just some things I’ve cultured. Incubators can be used for a lot of things that need to be kept warm to grow. There’s some yogurt in there that’ll be ready in a few hours if you want to try it, but mostly scientists use incubators to grow things they want to study, like tissue samples. We could even hatch chicken eggs in there if we wanted.”
“Cool! Can we?”
“Not today.”
She removed two containers filled with a dark fluid from the refrigerator and added them to her shoulder bag.
“I need to pack a few more things and head for the tube station. Promise me you’ll be good until we’re back?”
“Define ‘good’,” I said.
This was my usual response and it elicited the usual smile from Mom. Normally this was the point where the exchange ended, but instead Mom got a serious look and held me gently by the shoulders.
“Just be who you know you should be. No matter what anyone else says.”
“What’s wrong, Mom? Why are you crying?”
She wiped a tear from the corner of each eye.
“It’s okay. Sometimes moms just want their little boys to stay little boys and we get sad when we remember you have to grow up.”
Six hours later Mrs. Pierce was awakened by a call to the house and I listened to her footsteps as she slowly climbed the stairs and placed her hand on the doorknob to my room. She stood there for a long time and I could hear a gentle rattle that indicated her hands were shaking. When she peeked in, her face looked disappointed to find that I was still awake and reading.
“Cephas. There was just a call to the house. There was an accident in the tube car your parents were on.”