Resonance

by A. J. Scudiere

  “They are, but I’m supervising.” The voice sounded so much like her Dad’s that her head snapped up.

  “Aaron!” She felt the smile spread across her face as she launched herself into his arms. Only two years older, Aaron had been her god since the day she was born. In her early teens, she had suffered through the indignities of having to share him with her friends. And later with having to share him with the town. Knoxville was like every other southern town. There were three religions: ‘Baptist,’ ‘Football,’ and ‘Other,’ in order of their likelihood of gaining you a spot in heaven. And Aaron had led the town to a state championship.

  “Hey, Becky.” His hair was blonde and short but his eyes were green moss just like hers. “Long time, no see.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just drove up for the weekend. And come to find out you’ve got yourself some weird little frogs.” He looked over her shoulder, his eyes snapping wide. “Hey! Melanie! I told you two hands!”

  That made Becky jerk her head around. Only to see Melanie roll her eyes and hold the frog out at arm’s length wrapped in the short fingers of her right hand. She shook the frog slightly for emphasis as she spoke. “This is how you’re supposed to hold them - with only one hand. Back fingers hold their legs down. Top finger and thumb hold their arms out, and they can’t get away!” She rotated the frog to upside-down and back upright. It waved its hands but didn’t accomplish much else. “Tell him, Becky.”

  Forced to display a small smile to Aaron, she conceded. “She’s right.” But then she turned back to her sister and with two hands slipped the frog from Melanie’s grip into her own identical hold. “But you aren’t supposed to flip them around like that.”

  “Whatever, they’re so creepy anyway. I was just getting a lexan.” With that the reprimand was dismissed and the little girl wandered off to get the plastic container. In a moment she held it up for Becky to slide the frog down in, head first, then snapped the container back closed.

  Becky started when her mother spoke suddenly from directly behind them, and turned to find the woman using the same emphasizing hand gestures her younger daughter had just moments before, only with a spatula not a frog. “We’re really looking into sending her to that gifted school out in Cedar Bluff. They just opened that new Magnet Program out there.”

  “NO!” It was earshattering and they all turned to stare at Melanie who had gone red in the face in the space of a breath. “I won’t go! I don’t want to ride the short bus!”

  Becky shook her head, far more used to their little sister’s antics than Aaron ever would be. He had moved away to college the first chance he had gotten, his status of ‘Golden Boy’ eating at him in a way even Becky had never understood. He had been out of the house before Melanie came along and had never really gotten to see her full-fledged personality.

  Letting herself sink down into one of the dining room chairs, Becky toed off her thick sneakers and let the feeling of relief soak into her feet. She leaned back and almost closed her eyes before she realized that Brandon was standing right beside her, clear tupper in hand, the frog inside pointed toward the window. Becky raised her eyebrows; too worn out to voice her question, she let it show on her face.

  “Melanie got too mad to tell you what we discovered. Watch.” Brandon walked over to the refrigerator. Becky tilted her head to see, but expected nothing other than the appearance of a moldy ham sandwich. He placed the lexan flush against the fridge and waited.

  Slowly, the frog turned to face the old white unit. When he pulled the container away, the little fellow re-oriented to his original direction. He put it back and the frog turned again to face the fridge. Waving his hands like some demented magician, Brandon declared it “Cool, huh?” Then gave his theory. “I think he’s hungry see. . . Melanie says that’s not it, but she’ll see. Can I give him pizza?”

  “No!” But her brows were pulled together and she was out of her chair in her bare feet, traipsing over to where he stood, her fatigue dismissed in the wake of her growing curiosity.

  Trying it herself, Becky kneeled in front of the fridge and moved the container slowly towards and away from the white door. Her frown deepened as the frog made the same subtle adjustments every time.

  “For god’s sakes Becky, I need to get the margarine.” Her mother tapped her foot impatiently behind her, not at all moved by the new level of oddity displayed by her catch.

  Obligingly, she stood up and went in search of other objects the frog might turn to. She started toward the TV, which Brandon pertly informed her wouldn’t work. He grinned like a praised puppy when it didn’t. “It’s just the fridge.”

  But Becky didn’t believe that. There had to be something else. But she just wasn’t sure what. She traipsed through the house, testing every large object she could think of. Aaron dogged her heels, for once following her to see what she would come up with next.

  They were all three piled behind the front door watching the frog shuffle uncomfortably, waiting to see if it would change direction or settle into its familiar line. None of them heard the door click and all three fell into a startled heap when Mr. Sorenson opened the door onto them.

  Melanie came bouncing over the pile of bodies struggling to right themselves, “Daddy, Daddy, you’re home!”

  “Yes, I am.” He grabbed up his youngest and stepped gingerly over his other children, trying to gracefully right themselves. “Were you all so anxious to see me?”

  Aaron shrugged, and Becky was amazed to watch the transformation from grown man to child that was so rapid across his features. “We were just checking out Becky’s weird frogs.”

  Her father’s eyes caught her gaze. “Is it something new?”

  “Yes! Daddy, Yes!” Melanie bounced in his arms. “They turn toward the fridge!”

  Becky decided to be grateful her sister was no longer sulking in her room, withholding what might be valuable information, and she held the frog next to the oven. It stayed in its normal direction. Becky swore under her breath, dropping her behavior marks another few notches. But at the top of the oven, the little guy turned. He turned toward the washer and dryer, too.

  “I know what it is!” She yelled out as she turned and smacked square into Aaron’s chest.

  “Where’s Landerly’s signature?” Anne shook her pretty little blonde head as she poured over the forms in front of her.

  Jordan smiled and pointed. He was afraid his expression screamed ‘It’s a forgery’. He had vetoed Jillian standing beside him at this point, so she didn’t have to be here for this display of fraud. Also because she was a really terrible liar.

  Anne giggled. “The way you’re grinning at me, and the number of times this thing’s been through a fax . . . you could have forged this.”

  “I didn’t forge it.” The irritation that the difficult-to-read signature was his work was genuine. He hadn’t forged it. Jillian had.

  But Anne just giggled again and entered the data. “It’ll be about half an hour.”

  He raised his eyebrows, not giving voice to all the questions he desperately wanted to ask, but couldn’t because they’d give him away like a neon sign. Was she going to call to corroborate with Landerly? She had already made a comment about forgeries. Was she going to run it by the higher ups?

  “Yeah, I can’t whip up a plane ticket out of thin air.” She giggled again, and as much as it reassured Jordan that she was dumb enough that he just might pull this off, it also was beginning to annoy the hell out of him.

  “Thanks, babe.” He turned and walked away, not getting to see her response. Babe? He winced inwardly and went back to his desk. He already knew what would happen if they were found out. Landerly had told them that first day that the CDC would just send them into the Ebola lab without suits. His breathing picked up.

  Just as he entered his cubby hole of an office and leaned wearily back against the inside wall, his leg vibrated, scaring the shit out of him. But it was just his cell phone, and as he h
eld up the display panel he realized that it was Jillian. “Hi.”

  Her panic radiated through the phone even before she spoke, poor thing. “Jordan, are you okay? They didn’t find out did they?”

  “No. Our flights will be ready in about half an hour.”

  “Where are you going?” The voice was masculine, and coming from behind him. In that first split second Jordan schooled himself to a calm response.

  “You startled me.” Turning, he saw it was Mark from the lab. “We’re going to Florida.”

  Mark nodded in understanding, although just what he understood was beyond Jordan’s capabilities. “Spiderbite-girl having a relapse?”

  “Nope, something new. . .” He stopped himself before launching into an explanation; it would just be more to get tangled in later. Offering a smile, he turned his attention back to the conversation with Jillian, and ended it as quickly as possible in hopes of avoiding other such scares.

  Mark simply wished him good luck, and turned to go. Or so he thought. Again the voice startled him. “Is Dr. Brookwood going with you?”

  “Hm?” It came out before he put the pieces together. Jillian. “Yes, she is.” As he went back to his sorting, it occurred to him to add up Mark’s actions over the last few weeks: it equaled a crush on Jillian. But Jillian would never put up with that shuffling walk. No authority.

  The desk phone yelled at him, an angry electronic buzz that was supposed to resemble a bell ringing. He answered it gruffly just to stop the noise. Realizing only as he got the phone to his ear, that there was every possibility that it was Landerly, calling to check up on them. Perhaps having noticed the, oh say, thirty fax pages he had received from them before they went about forging his signature.

  “Dr. Abellard.” The wispy quality and lilt of the voice dispelled any of those fears in less than the time it had taken them to form. “This is Anne, at reception. Travel has confirmed your flights. You leave in three hours.”

  “Thank you, Anne.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, glad that the one thing keeping him here was finished. He wanted to get away and hide from the people he was cheating. Maybe he could be on the plane before anyone figured out what was going on. “I’ll be by within the next ten minutes.”

  No, they wouldn’t get caught. Landerly wasn’t going to be back for another week and they would be back before then; no one would be the wiser. And even Jillian thought she could justify the trip after the fact. Landerly listened to her.

  He grabbed his briefcase, and hefted it to the desk, stuffing in the extra files. It brimmed already with all the paperwork he could find on Eddie and Lake James’ medical history. He gave only the barest of smiles to Anne as he breezed by the front desk. Her voice trailed him down the hall like so much cheap perfume, “Have a good trip Dr. Abellard!” Jeez, could she yell it next time? Hope that forgery pans out for you!

  But he stuck his badge on the reader at the front door without unclipping it and waited the short eternity for the computer to decide that he deserved to leave and then actually slide the glass doors open. It was all he could do not to squeeze through sideways the instant a crack appeared.

  The afternoon sun hit him full force, blinding him almost as thoroughly as it would after a matinee movie. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision, knowing full well that his sight adjusting was a matter of time and not moisture. He was basically tear free by the time he popped open the door of his overly blue Cavalier. He should get a better car. But that would happen a lot easier once his student loans were paid off. And that was a minimum of a few years away. He shoved the car into drive and left the building that was threatening to reveal his secrets to his bosses.

  He dug his cell phone out of his pants pocket and depressed his #2 speed dial while he was waiting to merge onto the freeway. “Hi, Jillian. . . I’m out. Our flight is at seven-fifteen. . . . we get into Sarasota-Bradenton Airport at midnightish, . . . yeah, I’ll come by your place. . . . All right, Bye.” Traffic was getting heavier and he was glad to hang up.

  But a conversation would have been preferable to the thoughts running through his head. Landerly would call from Hawaii. Or he would see his pager had gone off and all the numbers were the same. And when he did finally call in Jordan and Jilly would be gone. Bad move.

  He pulled out the cell and held it at arm’s length in front of him, carefully feeling his way around the number pad. “Hi, Anne, can I ask you a favor? Can you forward all the calls to my office to my cell phone?”

  “What about the calls for Dr. Brookwood?” He could hear her eyelashes beating a steady rhythm just from her voice.

  “She’ll be with me, so they can all come to my cell.”

  And he gave her the number and hung up feeling much better, until he realized that he’d given Anne his personal number. He just prayed that he hadn’t given her any ideas.

  His apartment seemed to be about ten miles further away than he remembered it. Crime sure did find a way of turning you upside down. And once he was there he wasn’t really sure what to pack. So he threw in all the same things he had packed for his earlier trip to Florida and headed out to Jillian’s.

  He parked on the curb and buzzed her apartment, leaving his bag in the back seat. She didn’t even answer the ring. Instantly the door began to buzz, and he followed the sound inside. Jordan jogged up the stairs hoping to burn off some extra energy. It didn’t work, and coming face to face with Jillian, her hall door flung wide, didn’t help him calm down either.

  She was taking deep breaths and talking. Almost to him, . . . maybe not. “Landerly told us that when we found an answer we would know it. And that he would back us when that time came. He wasn’t available. No one else would help, we knew that. We can ask each of them in turn if they would have signed off on it. They’ll say ‘no’.”

  So he took her by her upper arms and guided her back into the small apartment, “Jillian, calm down. We’re going to be fine. We aren’t going to get fired, for all the reasons you just listed.” He breathed in. “Take a deep breath.” And he waited until she did, “Now, we have to leave. Are you ready?”

  She just nodded and started to reach for her bag, then fumbled with the lock to her front door.

  “Jillian, if you don’t calm down, they’re going to detain us at the airport for being suspicious.”

  “Huh?” Her whole body stilled. “I was a cheerleader and a girl scout. I couldn’t possibly be a terrorist.”

  He laughed. “Actually that would make you the ideal terrorist. So pull it together.”

  She laughed with him, the first easy, relaxed sound he had heard from her since they had hatched this horrible plan over lunch. And she managed to keep herself steady and calm, even when security did an open check on her bags. For the briefest of moments Jordan wondered if they would pull out anything good, like a vibrator or a chain of foil condom packets. But no, there was a novel and a bunch of photocopied files that he was pretty certain represented cases that she had searched and pulled together.

  They made it to the terminal just as loading was beginning and joined all the other fliers funneling themselves down to the gate like so many cows to the slaughter. Once they were at their row, he made Jillian give up the window seat, arguing that she had slept through every single flight the last time. He didn’t add that he had never gotten to fly until he was an adult paying his own way. The window still held a kind of magic for him that had worn off most middle-class kids by the age where they could read the take-off time on cartoon watches. And sure enough, even as he watched the houses and freeways below getting smaller and smaller, he felt the soft weight of her head settling on his shoulder, and the swish of her hair, unbound, falling across her face.

  Becky’s eyes adjusted to where Aaron swung the highbeam, lighting the whole area in front of them to ghastly shades of bright and black. All the shadows of midnight remained, just thoroughly delineated by the overpowering light. It became even creepier when they entered the woods at the back side of the field.
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  She started talking just to quell the feeling that she was walking where she didn’t belong and where she was unwanted. “So how has-”

  So did Aaron. “How do these frogs do-”

  They laughed together, then she let him finish asking about her catch. “These are rana. A genus that really includes all your garden variety frogs, no bullfrogs though. They’re indicator species - really sensitive to the environment. They’ll mutate, like my little guys, really quick, if anything is off. You know, radiation, pollution, that kind of thing. Or magnetics.”

  “So, what is this then? We’re visiting a polluted frog spot in the middle of the night, that might be loaded with radiation from the power plant?”

  “I thought of Oak Ridge, too. They actually do grow some creepy frogs out that way sometimes. But they’re on the other side of the town from us, and they tend to hop down towards Chattanooga.”

  “How comforting.” He muttered.

  She maneuvered around behind him, disliking how her own shadow gave her such a case of the creeps. “I checked them all out at school with a Geiger-counter and got nothing. Like almost zilch. I mean you would register on these meters, they’re that sensitive.”

  “All right.” He raised the light, letting her decide which path to take, and even though it didn’t look anything like it did during the day, she instinctively knew which way to go.

  “So, anyway, other than the fact that they have spare legs, and are all from this one spot, I’ve got nothing.” She took another long pull on the coke she carried with her. “That is, until tonight I had nothing.”