The Life Of Reilly
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Jack reached for a spoon to use with the sour cream and passed both to Lynn. “Probably. There aren’t a lot of secrets around here.”
She nodded. “Makes sense.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You think so?”
“Why not?” she asked. “Human attraction is largely random anyway. It’s a matter of pheromones—whether the other person smells like a viable reproductive partner. And we don’t even know it. At the most basic level, it’s about whether proteins in our brain are open or folded, a largely random function of precisely where the potentiality wave collapses into a point particle. So why not turn it over to the deal of a card?”
Jack looked at her, trying to find words. “Umm…”
She laughed. “Sorry. I go over the top sometimes.”
“It’s just that I’ve never heard love spoken of in such…cold terms.”
“Noooo,” she said. “It’s not cold at all. It’s quite beautiful, in fact. The universe deals to each of us in turn, random shuffling at the Planck scale, and yet we’re responsible for how we play every card we’re dealt. It’s a mathematical and ethical symphony beyond imagining.”
“Planck scale?” Jack asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. How’s the fish?”
“Fantastic! I don’t think I’ve ever had fish this fresh.”
“It came in on the boat this morning. One of the perks of living here.”
For a little while they were quiet, enjoying the food and the deepening tropical evening. As the last of the daylight faded, two citronella candles in clay pots provided the illumination. If there were any mosquitoes on the island, Lynne had yet to run into them, but the candles drew the attention of an equally successful pest: moths.
With her chin resting in her hand, she watched as Jack gently waved them away, saving them from death by fatal attraction. She couldn’t help but find it touching; surely he was the first person she’d ever met who actually cared what happened to a moth.
“These fellows,” he said as he waved them away, “are harmless, though not particularly pretty. It won’t be long though before the real butterflies start emerging. The colors are glorious.”
“That would make a great class project for my younger students.”
“Just don’t kill them to examine them.”
She sat up a little straighter. “Observation without interference?”
“Exactly,” he said. “You can catch them alive, look them over, then let them go.”
“You realize, of course, that observation without interference is not even theoretically possible,” she said. “Heisenberg? Schrödinger? Wave-particle duality? Double slit experiments? Any of this ring a bell?”
“Umm…you’ve gone into that other language again.”
“That was English,” Lynn said. “Well, Heisenberg and Schrödinger are German names, but still…it can’t come as a shock to you that we change the universe whenever we look at it.”
“When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you?” Jack asked.
“Well, that’s Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a philosopher, not a physicist.”
“Is there a difference anymore?”
Lynn smiled. “Touché. When we start to look at the most fundamental building blocks of the universe, we do tend to blur that line, don’t we?”
Jack shrugged. “I really couldn’t say. I don’t know all that much about it. But listening to you…well, I’m reminded of some of our more esoteric conversations back in seminary. How many angels really can dance on the head of a pin, and the like.”
Lynn felt the flush rise to her cheeks. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the shock of a dinner invitation on the heels of Delphine’s visitation. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
He held up a hand. “No, don’t be sorry. I have to say, I’m fascinated. Truly.”
Fascinated. That was a word that could mean a lot of things. Some of them purely intellectual. Most of them not. The latter could be…dangerous. Very dangerous.
She sighed.
“Something wrong?”
Lynn shook her head. “Just tell me to hush when I start babbling about things that sound too weird.”
“On Treasure Island?” he asked with a wink. “Trying to define weird here is like stepping into a tar pit.”
“But—”
“Lynn,” he interrupted, “just be yourself. Don’t try to impress me, because you already have. And don’t try to play to my expectations, because I don’t have any. If I’d wanted to be surrounded by staid, ordinary, never-risk-looking-weird people, I’d have stayed in Connecticut.”
He waved his hand over the candles again, sending a few more moths back to the safety of the shadows. She took the opportunity to study him, really study him. She’d spent most of the evening avoiding directly looking at Jack except in brief glimpses. The interface of observer and observed was never more apparent than in human interaction. All her life, she’d had a strong tendency to watch people, to examine every movement, every facial tic, every shift of the eye or the posture, looking for cues to their thoughts. It had consistently made people uncomfortable, to the point where she’d trained herself not to look at people directly. That had grown into a shyness that had plagued her through childhood and into the present day.
Right now, however, she decided he was an attractive man. Person. Not a movie-star type, but handsome enough in a laid-back sort of way. His face seemed to want to smile, and laugh lines decorated the corners of his eyes and etched the edges of his mouth. The sun had bronzed him, nothing surprising here in the tropics, and left his brown hair streaked with blond. Almost a surfer look in a way, except his eyes held so much more depth.
That was when he realized she was staring at him. To her astonishment, he didn’t squirm. Instead, he smiled, revealing great teeth. “You look like you’ve never seen anyone push moths away from flames before.”
“I haven’t.”
He nodded. “I actually find it an interesting paradox. God gave most creatures a desire to live and the means of survival. Then we have the moth, who seems willing to immolate himself just to approach the light. One would think the heat would warn him off.”
“Not if he can’t feel it.”
He nodded. “Or…if the light is so beautiful the moth wants to approach at any cost.”
Instinctively, she looked into the candle flame. “It is beautiful.”
“And for the moth it is at once a desirable goal and a deadly trap.”
She glanced his way. “Are we talking metaphor here?”
“Why do people always think I’m speaking in parables?”
“Maybe because you’re a minister.”
He laughed at that. “Sorry, I was just marveling at one of nature’s oddities.”
“There certainly are a few of those. Although…”
She leaned on her elbows on the table. “Well, I shouldn’t I guess.”
“What?” he asked.
“The moths aren’t attracted to the flame.”
“Is that a fact?” His eyebrow lifted.
She nodded. “It’s actually the warm candle wax that’s the attraction. The infrared signature of warm candle wax coincides with that of the sex-attractant chemical emitted by female moths. Light-conducting spines on their antennae carry that signal to their brains, and they think there’s a…well…they think there’s a horny female moth there.”
“That would certainly explain the self-immolation,” Jack said. “Huh. So it’s not the flame at all.”
“I didn’t mean to spoil it for you.”
“Not at all! Why would you say that?”
She shrugged. “People are more comfortable with the familiar. The assumption is woven into the fabric of our language—‘Like a moth to flame.’ Then science comes along and shows something else entirely. People resent it when science turns their beliefs upside down.”
“Some people do,” he said. “I’m not one of them.”
Lynn nodded, wondering if his casual smile were covering something else. In her experience, discussing science with religious people tended to end very badly.
He paused for a moment, then continued, “Lynn, I’ve always felt that we miss so much if we don’t realize that the entire universe around us is full of wonders. Every breath of air, every beat of our hearts, is a kind of miracle. A beautiful, beautiful gift. Understanding why it happens, at a scientific level, doesn’t disprove the miracle. It helps us to appreciate the miracle even more.”
Right then and there, Lynn decided she liked Jack. And that, she reminded herself, could be a serious problem.
She jumped to her feet—not too quickly, she hoped—and said, “I’ve had a wonderful time, Jack. Thank you so much. But I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded.”
He rose immediately. “Then get to it, teach.” With a grin, he shook her hand. “See you around.”
She nodded and fled while trying to look as if she weren’t fleeing. This was going to be bad. Very bad. A neighbor who cared enough to save the tiniest creature from its own urges, and wasn’t offended when she shot holes in his worldview. Someone she could appreciate and also talk to. Yes, this was going to be very bad.
To her great relief, she found her living room empty of Delphine. She plopped into a chair and drew a deep breath, taking a moment to look into every dark corner of the room, making sure Delphine wasn’t hiding in the shadows before letting out a deep sigh.
She was alone.
Alone was good.
She could handle alone.
Right?
CHAPTER THREE
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE ANY papers to grade at all.”
Lynn rolled over in her bed with a groan and pulled the pillow over her head. The first roseate light of dawn was seeping between the Bahama shutters, far too early for rising. On Treasure Island, school started at ten in the morning because so many students went out early to fish with their parents.
“Go away,” she mumbled and tried to reach for the strands of a really lovely dream she had been having. “It’s too early.”
“You lied to get away from the nice preacher.”
Lynn groaned again, rolled over and closed her eyes. “You’re not here. I refuse to observe you and thus the quantum wave does not collapse and thus you are not here.”
“Don’t be silly, Lynn,” Delphine said, now a warm presence beneath the covers. “You know it doesn’t work that way. You’re not the only observer here. And if the pheromone scent under here is any indication, you weren’t the only observer last night either.”
Lynn threw back the covers in horror. “Aunt Delphine!”
Delphine, now sitting primly on the side of the bed, garbed in some diaphanous thing that Lynn remembered from years past, simply smiled. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Lynn scowled. “Stay out of my bed, Aunt Delphine!”
“Oh please,” Delphine said, patting Lynn’s foot. “I would never dream of doing something so tawdry. I may be a ghost, but I’m not like that.”
“Pffft. Don’t eavesdrop on my dreams either.”
Delphine put a hand over her eyes. “I didn’t see a thing, dear. But it doesn’t take a bloodhound to tell that you had some nice ones.”
“Arrgh!”
Lynn leapt out of the bed and headed straight for the shower. When she emerged, Delphine was buffing her nails at Lynn’s vanity table.
“Feel better?” Delphine asked.
“I feel less like a broadcast antenna at least.”
“That’s good, dear,” Delphine said. “And I’m sorry. That was a bit…forward of me. You must understand that in my state of existence, privacy is simply not a relevant concept anymore.”
Lynn found it impossible to imagine in detail, even while she could understand the theory of superposition and interconnectedness that underlay Delphine’s new experience. Still, the idea of not having a truly private thought was unnerving, to say the least.
“You look younger,” Lynn said, giving in. Hallucination or not, she found an odd comfort in Delphine’s presence.
“I can look any age I want to now. In fact, I don’t even have to look human. However, I’ve chosen a younger version from your memories…from back when you thought I was the coolest aunt ever.”
“How old was I then?” Lynn asked, trying to towel the moisture from her hair and fighting a losing battle against the ever-present humidity. “Three? Four? It must’ve been before the age of reason.”
Delphine laughed. “I always loved you, Lynn.”
In spite of her irritation, Lynn felt a pang. “I know, Aunt Delphine. I loved you, too.”
“Past tense?” Delphine asked, shaking her head.
Lynn hung her towel over a rod and considered the question. It was customary to speak of the dead in the past tense and yet…“No. I guess not.”
“Would you like to know what happens when we die?” Delphine asked, looking away as Lynn shrugged on her bra and panties. “You should wait until your skin dries, dear. It will be much easier to get dressed then.”
“That would mean waiting until January,” Lynn said, now reaching for a pair of capri pants and a flower-print blouse. “I never really feel dry here. And yes, I would love to know what happens when we die.”
Delphine smiled. “Nice outfit. Not what I’d have worn to teach in my day, but it’s practical here. I can’t tell you all of it—that would spoil the surprise—but let’s just say I have unfinished business.”
Lynn shook her head as she picked up a brush. “I refuse to be your unfinished business.”
Delphine shrugged. “Sorry, kiddo. Not your decision.”
“Oh, God!”
“Precisely.”
Lynn headed for the kitchen and her prized espresso maker. How many shots? Two? Four? Twelve? How many would it take to wrap her brain around Delphine’s intrusion into her life? And why didn’t they have a Starbucks on this island yet?
Four shots, she decided. An Americano over ice with just enough cream to take the bitter edge off. She needed to be buzzing high on caffeine to deal with this.
“I do miss Starbucks,” Delphine sighed behind her.
“What? They don’t have them in heaven?”
“Don’t blaspheme, dear.” Then, “Hmmm. Ahh! That’s much better!”
In spite of herself, Lynn whirled around to look. Her aunt was now seated at the dinette with an iced latte in her hand.
“It’s so hot in the tropics,” Delphine remarked.
This was too much. “Where did you get that from?”
“I thought about it and there it was.” Delphine smiled beatifically, then sucked delicately from the straw. “Oh, that’s the best I’ve ever had.”
“It’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“That you get to think one into existence, but I have to make mine.” Petulance, Lynn thought. Now she was being petulant with a ghost.
“Well, Lynn, you live in a cause-and-effect world. You have to effect the cause to cause the effect. So start brewing so we can chat before you leave for school.”
She didn’t want to spend her usual quiet coffee time with a dead aunt. This was her time in the mornings, time to sit on her back porch and sip her coffee, taking in the fragrance of bougainvillea and dew before they evaporated and left behind only the tang of salt air. However, she had no choice in the matter, so reluctantly she walked out to the porch and sat with Delphine. Besides, she didn’t really want Delphine to go.
“That’s so much better,” Delphine said approvingly.
“So are you going to tell me the mysteries of the universe?”
“Don’t be silly. You have to find them out for yourself.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Delphine said. “I just have to finish something.”
“Oh, lovely.” Lynn put her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, and stared at her favorite aunt. “You know you could cost me my job.”
Delphine appeared appalled. “I wouldn’t do that!”
“You will if I keep talking to empty air.”
Delphine pursed her lips. “I hadn’t considered that. I was only thinking of my mission.”
“I’d appreciate it if you would keep that in mind.”
“Of course I will.”
“Thank you.” Bargaining with the dead. Lynn closed her eyes, surrendering briefly to a sense of surrealism that Dali and Kafka might have conspired to create.
She lifted her coffee and sipped, considering how bizarre it felt to look across at a dead person. Common sense said this could not be happening, but then again what was reality? When she considered her former colleagues at Princeton investigating the effect of consciousness on the underlying quantum field of the universe, reality became a tenuous thing.
But there was nothing at all tenuous about Delphine’s appearance. She looked solid enough to touch. A thought occurred to her. “You’re not cold.”
Delphine arched a brow. “Why would I be cold?”
“Ghosts are supposed to create cold spots. You draw energy from the matter around me in order to materialize. I should experience that energy drop as coldness.”
Delphine laughed. “That old tale. Well, I suppose some do. But I’m not exactly a ghost.”
“Then what are you?”
“A non-physical manifestation of my consciousness.”
“A ghost.”
“Not the same thing at all, Lynn. Not at all. A ghost is merely an imprint left on the quantum field. Like a footprint left in the dirt. The footprint is there, but the person who left that footprint has passed on.”
“Really.”
“Don’t sound so dubious. Remember, I’ve graduated ahead of you.”
Lynn had the worst urge to roll her eyes. “Graduated what ahead of me? Death? Yes, I’ll give you that much. But physics? Oh Auntie, let me assure you that physicists are working on things you only imagined when you were still teaching.”
“You think I don’t know that? My point is—I have the answers now. You don’t.” Delphine sipped her latte then frowned. “Which reminds me. Why in the world did you leave Princeton and your research to come to this place and teach youngsters, of all things?”
“Do you really want an answer?”
“Yes.”
“Because I got sick of the underhanded competition,” Lynn said. “Not with my peers, but with my students. I’m sure you heard about it. Students were stealing books and papers from the library to prevent other students from reading them. Buying their term papers on the Internet. Fudging their experimental results. I felt as if I were teaching a generation of cheats. Not that I should have been surprised, given how some of my colleagues behaved.”
“Your work was stolen.”
“Yes.” Lynn scowled. “And I hope Donald Farthing enjoys his new-found fame.”
“He was that professor you were dating, right?”
“Unfortunately.”
“And he’s the one who stole your work?”
“Two years of research on 11-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes, trying to prove my theory of quantum space-time. I had to develop a new mathematic to solve it, Auntie, just as Newton had to develop calculus to fashion the equations of classical mechanics. Then one morning I wake up and find he’s published my research on the Internet, under his name. He’d copied my files to his computer and even backdated them. And since he was a tenured professor and I was just a Ph.D candidate…”
Delphine nodded and took another sip of her drink. She sucked loudly at the straw just as she sometimes had in life. “I never really cared for Donald,” she said finally. “I’m so sorry he proved me right.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“Well,” Delphine said, suddenly brisk, “this is a nice spot for a change of pace. Almost like a vacation. Is that why you chose this place?”
“Yes, it is. Just let me get on with it, will you?” But a vacation was not the reason she had chosen this island. A vacation had been the last thing on her mind. She’d needed to escape, yes—especially from the academic world that was looking at her like a bug under the microscope—but Treasure Island had been an accidental discovery on the Internet.
She’d been browsing around, looking for various teaching jobs, when this one had popped up. She might have passed it by, except that her mathematical mind had immediately calculated the thousands of miles this job would put between her and Donald.
The lure had been irresistible.
“But of course!” Delphine arched a brow as if surprised. “I’m not here to hinder you.”
“No?” Lynn felt entirely dubious, with good reason. Delphine’s help had often caused more problems than it had cured. “But, um, I really should handle my own life on my own.”
Delphine smiled benevolently. “You only think it’s your own life.”
Lynn didn’t know how to react to that. She wanted to throw something, but that wasn’t her nature. She could have told her aunt to stop playing the sphinx, but she’d never told Delphine to do anything except butt out. Which she had just tried to do.
“Look, dear,” Delphine said kindly, “you know you’re part of the Unity. Nothing affects only you. Others are involved. But, I promise to stay in the background as long as my work here if unfinished.”
At that, she dissipated. Lynn felt anything but reassured. Delphine in the background could be as every bit as disastrous as Delphine front and center.
Groaning, she sat on the back porch, drank coffee and watched the remainder of the sunrise. Before long, despite everything, peace began to fill her again. That was why she had come to this island, and the sun’s early rays seemed to bathe her with it.
Forget Delphine, she told herself. The worst she could be was a nuisance. The best….
Well, the best that could be said was that Delphine had just confirmed a lot of current theories in physics. She smiled at that and raised her coffee in a toast to the sun. The world was an amazing place.
It even included an alligator staring at her from beneath a shrub.
She blinked and peered more intently. God, it was an alligator. It must be Buster, she realized. He was the only crocodilian on the island and more a celebrity than any of the human inhabitants, even World Series of Poker champion Bill Anstin. Buster was not quite wild, not quite a pet, not dangerous but neither to be trifled with when he set his mind to something.
Rather like Aunt Delphine.
“Tell me you’re not in league with her,” Lynn said.
Alligator physiology made it impossible to shrug, but somehow Buster conveyed a shrug regardless.
“Aren’t you supposed to be with Hannah?” Lynn asked. Buster was smitten with Hannah Lamont, a pilot who lived with Buck Shanahan up at the airport. Island legend said that Buster had played a prominent role in getting Hannah and Buck together and thus ensuring that Hannah stayed on Treasure Island.
“Mmmhhhhmmm.” It was a wordless groan and yet Lynn had no doubt what Buster meant.
“She’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“So you’re lonely and hanging around with me?”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“Delphine’s going to make trouble for me, isn’t she?”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
Lynn sighed. “You have to understand, Buster. She was the stereotypical spinster schoolmarm. When she was a girl, guys didn’t like girls who were too smart. And she was way, way too smart. She never found anyone who could put up with that, and for as long as I can remember, she’s been bound and determined that I should not end up alone.”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“What she can’t understand,” Lynn said, “is that I would rather be alone for the right reasons than be with someone for the wrong reasons.”
“Mmmmmm?”
“I don’t want to be with someone just for the sake of being with someone. I’d rather be alone than be with the wrong person again.”
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
“You think I’m crazy, right?”
“Uhmmmuhmmmm.”
“No?”
“Uhmmmuhmmmm.”
“Will you do me a favor, Buster?” Lynn asked, looking into his saurian eyes.
“Mmmmmm?”
“When Delphine makes things nuts—and we both know she will—will you remind me I’m not crazy?”
Buster blinked and seemed to be assembling the parts of the thought before he replied.
“Mmmmmhmmmmm.”
So okay, Lynn thought. At least she had an ally. An ally-gator. She laughed at the thought as she rose to get ready to leave for school. Maybe Buster was wrong. Maybe she was crazy.
But she could still laugh at herself. She laughed even harder when she realized her aunt had done it again: she had her niece talking to alligators.