The Only Ones

by Aaron Starmer

Now Martin’s thoughts drifted to the kids of Xibalba and how they’d always seemed so self-absorbed, so different from George. But were they really all that different? What if the entire world had been pulled out from under George’s feet? How would he have found comfort? How would he have survived? How would he have made the best of things?

  Martin remembered the kids holding the lanterns and welcoming him into their odd little community. Not even a year had passed since then, but those kids weren’t kids anymore. They were out there in the world, beyond the lights of Ararat and the campfires and high beams Martin could see dotting the banks upriver and the roads through the mountains. He couldn’t speak for everyone, but he was pretty sure that despite all their mistakes and all the forces of fate they were bound to find themselves up against, his former neighbors would always try to make the best of things.

  Martin gave George a simple nod of agreement.

  “I should make the best of things too,” George replied. “When I see my parents again, I’m gonna have ’em bring me to your father’s old address. See what I find.”

  “There’s nothing for me there,” Martin replied. “Just a place my father and I once lived. It burned a long time back. Besides, I don’t even remember it.”

  “But you wanted me to go. I haven’t forgotten that.”

  The autumn came in, furious and orange. Wind and rain whipped Ararat, but the machine ran nonstop. Keeping busy put a mask on Martin’s loneliness, but it was still loneliness. George left soon after his family was summoned, and Martin was without a best friend once more. Other people swept through his life with barely a hello. He would summon them, and he would usher them to the door, and he would never see them after that. Then he’d do it all over again. The only difference was the weather when his guards walked him home every night.

  It didn’t sit well with many adults that a boy could have so much power. People arrived confused and compliant, but men and women who had lingered in the vicinity of Ararat for months were beginning to band together and call for Martin’s removal.

  The Council for a Blessed Kingdom, as one collection of overly zealous citizens named themselves, invited Martin to a secret meeting nearly a month after his fourteenth birthday and the third anniversary of the Day. It was a torrent outside, one of the nastiest storms in memory. With his cabal of guards accompanying him, Martin arrived, cautious and drenched. He sat on a cold, hard wooden chair, below a stuffed moose head, in a hunting lodge a few miles up the river.

  A man named Crawford Dixon presided over the meeting, and he was a no-nonsense type, even though his features were soft and small and his voice wasn’t much more than a gravelly whisper.

  “We could have you … removed … if we wanted,” he told Martin, his patronizing gaze gliding over Martin’s guards.

  “I’m sure you could,” Martin admitted.

  “You are, however, a hard worker and a genius of some sort,” Crawford said. “So here is how we will proceed. The Council has chosen five people who will be your apprentices. You will teach them how to build the machine, and how to run the machine, and they will each teach five more. And things will go on like this until these machines are like post offices. Every town will have one.”

  “I assumed that this would have to happen,” Martin said.

  “So you comply?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Martin asked.

  Crawford answered the question by jotting down a quick note, looking up, and saying, “We start tomorrow.”

  On the way back to Ararat, Martin made a decision, if it could be called that. He knew that his days running the machine were numbered, so he would do as instructed. He would teach them how to build new machines, but he would make one small change to the blueprints. All the Birthday Dials would be permanently set to the Day. Because if anyone other than Martin had the ability to conjure people from times other than the Day, then there was too much potential for chaos. The future could become a place where the vindictive or the heartsick or the just plain curious could snatch people up with the push of a button, the flip of a switch, the simple turn of a dial. Martin wouldn’t let that happen.

  When he finally arrived home at the library, the rain was so heavy that he didn’t notice the Jolly Roger flying on the flagpole. He bid his guards good night, and he ducked inside, already plotting out the revised blueprints in his head.

  From his seat on the edge of the circulation desk, a smiling and soaked George greeted Martin with a wave.

  “My goodness,” Martin said in shock. “Are you okay?”

  “Never been this far north this time of year,” George replied as he wrung water from his sleeve.

  “It can be dicey,” Martin told him.

  George held an envelope in his hand. Somehow, he had kept it dry. “It used to be a farm,” he said with a smile. “It’s only a field now, down a dirt road, far away from anywhere. I think there was a house. There was concrete that my dad said was probably the foundation.”

  “You really went?” Martin asked.

  “Of course I did.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  George pushed the envelope at him. “There was a tree. A maple. It wasn’t too big. On the ground next to it, there was a plaque. You know, like for a statue or something. I did a rubbing, using a broken pencil.”

  He pushed the envelope at Martin again. Martin took it and picked lightly at the corner until he had made a small hole. Running his pinkie finger along the seam, he opened it. Inside, there was a message written in chalky, chunky gray.

  TO MY DEAR HUSBAND, GLEN.

  WE ARE HAVING A BOY!

  MAY HE AND THIS TREE

  GROW HEALTHY AND HAPPY TOGETHER.

  ALL MY LOVE,

  HOPE

  Taped to the bottom of the page was a small maple leaf, no bigger than a boy’s hand.

  The alarm clock Martin’s father had given him on his eighth birthday had told him he was born sometime shortly before 12:21 a.m. The exact moment of his birth wasn’t as important as the moment his father received the call about it. He turned the Birthday Dials. He set them accordingly.

  He went through the rest of the procedure. When the sounds and the light and the laughs were finished, Martin opened the door to the machine’s heart.

  Behind the door, the maple leaf sat in the basin. A woman lifted herself to her feet. Her eyelids wouldn’t open immediately, so Martin decided to wait. He wouldn’t speak until he saw her eyes.

  The woman wasn’t much older than Martin. Eight years. Maybe ten. Her auburn hair was thick, but tangled. She pulled it away from her eyes with damp hands. Her face was similar to his, but it wasn’t like looking in a mirror for Martin. It was like opening a book he’d never read but somehow knew the story to by heart.

  “Is this the bathroom?” she said, squinting.

  “No. But you’re safe,” Martin told her.

  “Are you an orderly?” she asked.

  “My name is Martin,” he said. “Your name is Hope, right?”

  She smiled as she ran her hands down the long, papery gown she wore. “It is. And my son’s name is Martin as well. But I haven’t met him yet. They had to put me under when he was born. He’s in the nursery now.”

  “You’ll meet him,” Martin assured her. There was a shimmer to her, and even in the darkness, he could see what his father had meant when he’d equated her with a bubble. She was gorgeous, but she seemed destined to disappear in a blink.

  “I have to get back to my room,” she said. “The doctor will be expecting me. And I don’t want to worry my husband. He’ll be on his way. Martin came a month early. He was a surprise.”

  “Stay,” Martin pleaded. “I have some things I need to tell you.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband is out of town on business. They’re calling and waking him and he’ll be on his way. I didn’t tell the nurses I was going to the bathroom. Nobody knows where I am.”

  Back on the island, there was the smaller versi
on of the machine, the one Martin had built with his father. Martin assumed it still sat in that empty room in that gray-shingled cabin, where they had lived and worked and waited. That version of the machine had a glass door, which opened into its heart. In the heart, there was a small basin at the back of a tall hollow chamber.

  Looking at Hope now, Martin imagined an alternate past. He imagined an alternate eleventh birthday, where his father’s skiff was arriving safely on the island. He imagined his father stepping out from the boat, with that tree branch resting over his shoulder and the alarm clock tucked under his arm. He imagined the two of them climbing the ladder and going to the cabin and pulling the machine out into the yard. He imagined placing that branch in the basin and running through the procedure and laughing with his father and looking through the glass door into the machine’s heart and seeing Hope standing in there, looking back at them. She had the type of eyes that memories held on to, the type you yearn to see again.

  But that moment never happened, because it was never meant to happen. This was the moment life was giving Martin, and he didn’t care whether he had any choice in the matter. He was taking it.

  “Don’t worry,” Martin told her. “Your husband figured out a way to find you. And together, we can figure out a way to find him.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  JAMIE WYETH. I don’t know him, but his painting planted a seed.

  ELISABETH WEED AND STEPHANIE SUN. They cast a light on a strange little sapling.

  REBECCA SHORT AND MICHELLE POPLOFF. With patience and brilliance, they pruned and watered and trusted.

  JENNIFER BLACK. Her clear eyes and magical pencil set things straight.

  LISA ERICSON AND VIKKI SHEATSLEY. Give them an object and they’ll summon art.

  CATE STARMER. She encouraged. She believed. She loved. None of this could have happened without her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Aaron Starmer is the author of DWEEB. He lives with his wife in Hoboken, New Jersey.