The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black

by Eden Unger Bowditch

  And that was just his father’s side. On his mother’s side, Wallace was the great-nephew of Lewis Latimer. Latimer was himself an inventor, among other things. He was most famous for being a master draftsman, and he was the person responsible for getting Alexander Graham Bell the patent for his telephone. If Lewis Latimer hadn’t been such a fine draftsman, and hadn’t worked so fast and hard to get the draft of the invention done, the patent would have gone to someone else who had also invented a telephone, and was applying for a patent that very same day. Wallace heard it had only been a matter of hours between the two inventors getting their patents into the office.

  “You’ve got some shoes to fill, son,” Wallace’s father would say. In fact, he said this a lot.

  Wallace didn’t have to try to fill someone else’s shoes, though, because he had some pretty impressive shoes of his own. From an early age, he showed great talent for organic chemistry and molecular physics. It was lucky for Wallace that both of his parents could help him hone his skills. Until Wallace was six, his mother would stay home three days a week and teach her son all about geometry and algebra. The other two days a week, Wallace’s dad stayed home and tutored him in chemistry and physics.

  “We don’t want to waste your mind in school,” his father would say.

  When Wallace was eight, he invented a device for measuring tiny particles. They contacted Uncle Lewis, who helped them draft a patent for the invention.

  “Your mother would have been so proud,” Wallace’s father had said. He said this a lot, too.

  Wallace’s mother had died when Wallace was six years old. He missed her every single day afterward. He would close his eyes and he could hear her, smell her, feel her—her smile, her touch, the way she laughed. He thought about her every night before he fell asleep. He imagined her caressing his cheek and telling him she loved him. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it just made him feel the empty space where his mother once stood. Wallace had always had a hard time falling asleep. At least, he had had a hard time since he was six years old.

  After Wallace’s mother died, Wallace’s father did not come out of his bedroom for three weeks. Then, one morning, he stepped out and began his new life without his wife. He changed his schedule so he could tutor Wallace in everything—everything important, that is. Benjamin Banneker IV believed that science and math were important. He would stay home every morning and teach Wallace until noon. They would usually have lunch together, and then do some stretches or races or some kind of exercise.

  “The body is the home of the brain,” Dr. Banneker would say as he performed these exercises with ease and grace. He had always been a tall, strapping man, broad-shouldered and well-chiseled. Wallace, who had always been a bit pudgy and awkward, hoped that he would grow to be like his father. So far, the exercises had not made him strong or strapping.

  After lessons and exercise, Wallace’s father would go off to his lab, leaving Wallace to his own devices. It was on his own time that Wallace had created his minute particle-measuring invention. It was because of this invention that he was invited to travel with his father from their home on Long Island, New York to Washington, D.C. to meet President McKinley.

  “You are surely the youngest boy in history to get a patent,” Wallace’s father had said.

  The trip to Washington, D.C. was the only time Wallace had ever gone on a trip with his dad. At least, it was their only trip before setting off for Dayton. When they got to Dayton, Wallace’s father had simply abandoned him on the side of the road. On the trip to Washington, D.C., Wallace had been left sitting on benches outside of closed doors. He had been hoping to have some fun on that trip. He didn’t have much fun at all. Wallace had wanted to go to museums and walk around the National Mall, but they were only able to stay in the capital city for one day after meeting the president. And Wallace’s father spent most of the time talking to scientists and politicians, but not to Wallace. Wallace spent most of his time waiting and thinking. It made him feel even lonelier. At least at home, he had his own room, his lab, and his greenhouse. Here, he just sat on a bench while his father busied himself doing other things.

  Mostly, it gave him time to sit alone and miss his mother. He knew his father believed in him, but not the same as the way his mother believed in him. Wallace’s father never held Wallace in his arms and told him how special he was.

  “By your tenth birthday, you will create something that will save the world,” Wallace’s mother had told him when Wallace felt he could never live up to his legendary ancestors, and especially his father, who had been offered a place at Oxford when he was only fifteen. “You are your own man, Wallace. You are your own Banneker.” And Wallace promised not to disappoint her.

  Wallace thought about that as he sat alone in Washington. He kept his hand in his pocket and held his lucky coin so tightly in his hand, it left a mark in his palm. His mother had given him that coin. She told him that if he always keep it near, it would always bring him good fortune.

  “It’s very, very old, sweetums,” she said. “For generations, it has been in the hands of an inventor—an inventor from your own family.” He had looked at it for hours before placing it deep in his pocket. It was old, for sure, and it had a good weight to it. But it was unlike any coin he had ever seen. It felt good in his hand. The best part was that whenever he put his hand in that pocket, there it had been—for him, for his mother, and for all those who came before them. It was like carrying a little piece of her, a piece of her he could touch, in his pocket, always.

  It was Wallace’s mother who had named him Wallace, instead of naming him Benjamin Banneker V, which is what was expected.

  “We’ve had enough Benjamin Bannekers,” Wallace had heard his mother say in defense, time and again. “Let there now be a Wallace Banneker, the first.” She had never told Wallace he had any shoes to fill but his own.

  Though Wallace’s mother had been a very busy person, too, she’d never been too busy for Wallace. She had meetings and laboratory work and late nights at her desk, but she would come home every night and climb into Wallace’s bed and cuddle close, caress his cheek, and rub his head with the bottom of her chin. The thought of it made him feel warm inside.

  Sometimes, Wallace’s mother would scoop him up in her arms and sit with him in the rocking chair, telling him about her day and listening to him about his. Wallace tried to remember, and thought she might have sung to him, too, but he wasn’t sure. Thinking about it had been keeping him up nights, angry with himself for forgetting.

  Wallace’s mother would never leave the house in the morning without getting a kiss from Wallace, even if she was just going out to collect the morning paper. When she left for work at the laboratory, she made it clear how important those kisses were.

  “It’s hard for me to go an hour without a kiss from my number one boy,” she would say. “Can you imagine? Me going through an entire day without one? I just would not survive.”

  Wallace would give her the biggest kiss he could muster to get her through what was usually a very long day. She would close her eyes and soak it in.

  Wallace knew now that his kisses—even his biggest kiss—had not been big enough. Wallace had never heard of brain fever before. He knew all about it now.

  Miss Brett knew some of Wallace’s story. She never asked him to tell her things, but she was always there to listen. He had told her about his lucky coin.

  “I always kept it in my pocket,” Wallace had told Miss Brett. “But Father said he needed the luck and took it while we were on the train to Dayton. He never said why. He just took it.” And then Wallace’s father had just driven away, leaving the little boy standing there, alone, at the door of a hotel, with nothing but a paper that said “One Oak” and no explanation as to what that meant.

  Miss Brett could hear the pain in Wallace’s voice and see the confusion and hurt in his eyes when he told her about that day. She could imagine the little boy, standing there in a cloud of dust, the piece of paper
in his hand, watching his father leave. She could imagine that little boy feeling utterly alone as the carriage disappeared.

  As Wallace followed the doorman to Room 258, his hand had gone instinctively to his empty pocket.

  That night, alone in the hotel, Wallace didn’t go down to supper. Instead, he lay in bed, wondering what life had thrown at him. He had never been totally alone before, although there were times when he felt he was. He had taken off his glasses and closed his eyes. He imagined his mother tickling his head with her chin. It was hours of lying there, fighting tears, fighting fear, fighting to understand the reason he was alone in a strange city with no one to tell him why. He had tried rocking himself to sleep. He rolled himself into a ball and tried to imagine being held by someone. He tried, but failed.

  In the morning, he realized he had actually fallen asleep at some point in the night. For a moment, he forgot where he was and why he was lying, fully dressed, on a strange bed in a strange room. But quickly, the lack of understanding flooded back, and he lay there for a long while, staring at the tall arched ceiling. There were carvings of little angels and something that, at first, Wallace thought was a moose. He reached for his glasses. The moose turned out to be a unicorn.

  Wallace had told Miss Brett about much of this on that first night. He had also told her how his mother used to rock him to sleep every night, no matter what else was going on. After his mother had died, Wallace had found sleeping the hardest thing to do. He would climb into bed with his father, but it was not the same. And Wallace could never imagine asking his father to rock him. That kind of weakness would never have been tolerated.

  Miss Brett thought about the little boy alone in the hotel. She thought about the little boy, scared and lonely, lying awake in his bed, afraid to tell his father he couldn’t sleep. The poor little boy, Miss Brett thought to herself as she rocked him to sleep. Poor, sweet little boy. At least she could give him this.

  THE GREEN BOOK SHARES A SECRET

  OR

  LUCY’S FLOWERS

  “The thing I still don’t understand is what those devils were doing in your mother’s nightdress drawer,” said Faye. Miss Brett was in the kitchen making supper and all the children were in Faye and Lucy’s room, discussing the same thing they always discussed—until Faye brought up something new.

  Three weeks had passed since deciding to pursue their flying machine as both a fabulous invention and the means to rescue their parents. Every day, they worked and worked, and they came close to finishing several times, but there was always something not quite right.

  And there were a few moments when things were very wrong indeed. As they tested the speed of Jasper’s propeller, they accidentally launched a cornhusk they were using to balance it, creating a rocket that shot through the orchard into a grazing pasture—they could hear the angry retorts of a sheep in the distance. They then sent a propeller over the trees and startled a passing birdwatcher, who most likely thought it was some kind of never-before-seen bird. Wallace had to be revived after his nose got a bit too close to the diethyl ether he was using to power up the engine. (Luckily, Miss Brett had been making supper at the time.)

  Through the weeks, they fell victims to some of the same pitfalls that had prevented would-be flyers from getting off the ground for centuries. The thing just wouldn’t fly.

  But in some ways, they were getting closer. With Noah’s engine adjustments, Faye’s change in wing angle, Jasper’s propeller enlargements, and Lucy’s tail designs, they were getting closer every day.

  All the while, Wallace felt heavy guilt because he was mostly working toward perfecting his polymer. He avoided Faye’s glare, but he felt it. And his guilt was not only about his contributions to the aeroplane. It was double guilt.

  He knew he had helped—some. His suggestions had made the engine powerful and efficient, even though the original idea to use diethyl ether was Jasper’s. But more than anything, Wallace knew he had a promise to keep, and he was not sure he’d be able to do it. He could not help feel the importance of what he was doing on his own, and balance that against the importance of what his classmates were doing.

  And Wallace knew he was not in the only one who felt his absence.

  “Where’s Wallace?” Faye asked when they were trying to move the cockseat, which was attached to the engine, from the wooden gardening table to a more stable workspace. They could have used the extra hands and, because he was near an open window, Wallace had heard her ask. But he couldn’t put down his burette at that moment.

  “He’s never around when we need him, is he?” Faye had groaned in frustration.

  Wallace had flinched from the comment, dropping the beaker and wasting the fluid inside. He could have gone to help them then, he thought, because he had failed to finish this stage of his experiment. It had only made him feel worse when Faye walked by and saw him there, burette still poised in the air. She looked at him, daggers in her eyes, then shook her head and walked away.

  The children kept their notes and drawings in Lucy’s desk, all proof of their singular focus. Though they felt they might very well be headed for a successful mission, they spoke very little about how they would escape from the farm, and what they would do once they did. Where would they go? How would they find their parents?

  “We are surrounded,” said Noah. “Whether by love or greed or nefarious men wearing bear suits, we are certainly surrounded.”

  “I can’t help but think there’s more to this than simply keeping us from harm,” Jasper said. “We’ve been invaded, not just surrounded. Those men were in my mother’s room, in her things.”

  That’s when Faye asked the question. “I just don’t understand it,” she continued. “What was that book, when it was a book? Why do they want it? Why is it important?”

  Jasper jolted up from the girls’ bed where he had been lazily reclining. Was he a fool? An idiot? A dimwit? Had he never questioned what the men were doing or why that green book was important?

  “Lucy, where is that book?” he asked.

  “It’s pressing my flowers,” she said without concern.

  “Where is it pressing your flowers?” Jasper asked.

  “Why?” asked Lucy.

  “We want to see it,” said Wallace. He, too, was at full attention.

  “Why?” asked Lucy, concern rising. The book was hers now, she felt. It was her flower-pressing book.

  “Because it might have something to do with all of this,” Faye said, trying to keep her anger in check. Did they have the answer in their possession? Did they actually have a clue that they’d ignored? Had Jasper been so stupid as not to have looked at the thing?

  “We looked at it,” Jasper said to Faye’s silent accusation. “It was just an old green leather book with no pages.” But he felt something nagging at him. Had he really looked at it?

  “We did not all look at it, Jasper,” Faye said. “You told us about it. I want to see it for myself.”

  “It’s my flower book!” Lucy said.

  “Get it, Lucy,” demanded Faye, crossly. “Get it now.”

  “Don’t shout at her,” Jasper said, rising to his feet as he turned to Lucy. “But it would be good if we could see it, Luce.”

  “But I want it back,” she said.

  Faye rolled her eyes. “It isn’t yours, Lucy.”

  “Yes, you can have it back,” Jasper said, throwing an angry look at Faye. It was none of her business, and the book certainly wasn’t hers to command.

  “Well, if that’s a promise, then I’ll let you see it.” Lucy reached under the bed and pulled out her weekend satchel. She opened it and took out the green book. It was tied with a ribbon, as it had been when Jasper had seen it under her bed at the house. She held it close to her chest.

  “Give it over,” growled Faye, which only made Lucy cling to it all the tighter.

  “Lucy, I promise,” said Jasper. “No matter what, you will be in charge of it.”

  Faye shook her head, “You ca
n’t—”

  “I promise, Lucy. I am your brother and I’ve never lied to you or broken a promise.”

  Lucy looked at Faye and, almost imperceptibly, stuck out just the very tiniest bit of her tongue in Faye’s general direction. But Faye, focused on the green book, did not see this. Lucy handed the book to Jasper.

  “It doesn’t have any pages,” said Lucy, now swinging her legs off the bed, “except the one and that’s the one everyone has always been using to press flowers.”

  “What do you mean, Lucy?” asked Wallace, who, like the others, leaned over the book Jasper was trying to open.

  “Careful!” shouted Lucy. “All of our flowers are going to fall.”

  But Jasper found it hard to open. The covers were stuck together.

  “What did you put in here?” asked Jasper.

  “Just flowers, like everyone else. Except I did put that clover I found by the beehives. It was a bit sticky.”

  “Who is everyone, Lucy?” asked Noah. “Do you have a bunch of imaginary friends?”

  “No,” Lucy said, “everyone who had the book before. There were loads of pressed flowers and broken petals and bits and pieces of flowers from long ago.”

  “I can’t get it open.” Jasper had been trying to gently pry open the leather covers, but that only made a few old and brittle petals fall out of the book.

  Faye picked up a few. “Well, these are flower petals, and they are old.” She rubbed a few petals between her fingers. “But these other ones are pages, linen pages, from a book. This was once a book of some kind.”

  “Don’t break them,” whined Lucy. “They might have been in there for a hundred years.”

  “She’s right,” said Wallace, sniffing the petals and bits of linen pages Faye had dropped onto the bed.

  “Oh, give the thing to me, will you?” said Faye, grabbing the book out of Jasper’s hands and pulling the leather covers apart.