Wednesday, July 14, 2004

"Happy Fourth of July!" my cousin Lily said as we shared a hug. It'd been years since I'd last seen my relatives in Norfolk: my Mom's older brother Bruce, his wife Sophia, and their fifteen-year-old daughter Lily. Uncle Bruce wasn't actually there to greet me—he was on tour somewhere in the Atlantic—but the women in the family were here, and that was enough for me. "I know I'm a little late," Lily smiled.

"How was your flight, Claire?" Aunt Sophia asked.

"Okay," I replied, adjusting my green carry-on backpack to relieve the stress on my shoulders. "So are we going to head out, or what?"

"Sure." Aunt Sophia nodded and began leading Lily and I to the baggage claim, where my suitcase would be arriving shortly. Except for my green eyes (compared to their blue), the three of us were very alike, especially today, dressed in shades of blue (lighter for Lily than my aunt and I) with ponytails formed in our brunette hair. "I heard you graduated from elementary school last month. Excited about becoming a middle schooler?"

"Excited," I agreed reluctantly. "Nervous. It's seventh grade, Aunt Sophia, it's not like I'm going away to college."

"Yeah," Lily said. "But I think what my Mom means is, this is like you're entering the minor leagues. High school being the major. You're on your way, Claire." It was good to know they still remembered who I was—a baseball fan. But the conspicuous blue-and-white Dodgers T-shirt I was wearing may have been something of a hint if they had forgotten.

"She's twelve," Aunt Sophia reminded Lily. "It's puberty. Middle school for her means boys. That's what it meant for you, kid."

"Lily looks like Jennifer Love Hewitt," I said. "Of course it was going to mean boys for her."

"Hey, I have smaller boobs than she does," Lily was quick to point out.

"I wasn't insulting you."

"Yeah, I know, but if a boy starts comparing me to some hot celebrity, then it's obvious he's thinking about her and not me. Fortunately, I have better things to occupy my time than the opposite sex."

"Like the same sex?" I joked.

"This is the South, Claire, we don't even joke about stuff like that."

"Well, I'm from Texas, and I don't care."

"No, you're from California, you were just born in Texas."

"Girls, please," Aunt Sophia urged us, silently tempted to stop walking halfway down the crowded terminal if it meant an argument could be prevented. Suffice to say, the threat worked more effectively on younger kids who actually disagreed on something.

"So I spent five whole years being born in Texas?" I said, going along with Lily's claim despite knowing what she meant. Sometimes I create arguments where there are none; I like to think that's just the athlete in me looking for some chance to one-up the competition, but maybe my friends are right and I do just come off looking like a jerk.

"Born in Houston and spent the first five years of your life there," Lily grumbled. "Whatever. But you've spent most of your life in California, right? Most of your memories are in California, right? Then you're a California girl."

"Brian Wilson would be proud," Aunt Sophia said as we turned a corner and the baggage claim conveyor belts for this airline came into view. "All right, Claire, you've got a week here with us. Any idea of what you want to do? Anything special you want to see?"

"Anchorman," I smiled.

"The movie?"

"Oh my god, we have to see that!" Lily said, almost jumping in excitement. "Everyone I know says it's the funniest damn thing they've ever seen!"

"Okay," Aunt Sophia said, stopping us upon reaching the conveyor belt. "But can't you see that at home, Claire? I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, local attractions. The aquarium? The colonial towns? Don't you want to see those while you're here? You loved them last time."

"Yeah, I want to see them," I nodded, "but I also really want to see Anchorman."

"We'll see if we can fit that in."

"There's my bag, there's my bag!" I said with an unusual amount of excitement that I guess was just my way of burning off the stress of the flight. I removed the large blue suitcase off the conveyor belt, double-checked the plastic tag on the cloth handle ("Claire Zielinski," Aunt Sophia said aloud while I read it to myself, "that's you."), and finally pulled out the metal handle so I could roll the luggage around on its wheels.

"I know somewhere we could go," Lily said. "And we don't even have to leave the house."

As the door opened to lead us out of the terminal and out into the airport parking lot, Aunt Sophia did little to reduce my curiosity when she told her daughter, "There's nothing there, Lily. Claire, don't listen to her. Your cousin finally got an imagination, that's all this is."

"No, Mom," Lily protested. "You're wrong. You are very, very wrong. And how would you know? You haven't even bothered to check it out yourself!"

"What is it?" I asked, looking back and forth between them.

"It's our cellar," Lily replied. "Last week, I discovered this trapdoor or something in the floor." The three of us began climbing the stairs to the next level of the parking lot. "The craziest things happen when you open the door. It's like some kind of portal."

"Wait, so where does it go?"

"That's what's so messed up about it. It changes every time I go down into it. I got lost the first few times, but then I figured that the way back is usually through the first door you see. You open that and pass through, and you come back through the trapdoor and back in our cellar."

"Uh…wow."

"She doesn't know what she's talking about, Claire," Aunt Sophia told me as we steadily approached Uncle Bruce's truck, which they were using instead of Sophia's sedan while he was away. "It's nonsense."

"Again," Lily said, "how would you know, Mom? I keep telling you to come take a look, but no, apparently there are more important things than fantastic scientific breakthroughs."

"You're a historian, not a scientist," Aunt Sophia said. "An amateur one for now, but still…people go to you if they want to know about Benjamin Franklin or the Civil War…"

"American Civil War!"

"Exactly, that. Not wormholes or quantum physics or whatever it is that's got you hooked lately."

"Mom, I'm not trying to be a scientist now," Lily said. "I still want to be a historian. This is just me becoming an explorer, like Columbus or Lewis and Clark. Actually, this Lewis needs a Clark, and I think you fit the bill, Claire. I mean, come on, your names have the same three letters at the beginning!"

"Yeah, that's something to put on your résumé," Aunt Sophia said sarcastically, mostly to herself.

The car beeped as my aunt unlocked it, and the three of us took our respective seats: driver (mother), passenger (daughter), and back (visitor), but not before throwing my suitcase into the flatbed and ensuring its protection by closing the hood over it. Aunt Sophia turned the key in the ignition and prepared to drive us home.

"Well, Meriwether," I replied to my cousin's thought, "why not? Let's check it out together. We can start as soon as we get home."

"Yes!" Lily exclaimed, squirming gleefully in her seat.

Aunt Sophia sighed and turned on the radio—"Dirt Off Your Shoulder" by Jay-Z began playing, and after a sharp "No," from my aunt, the station quickly changed along with the song, to "Toxic" by Britney Spears. "Claire, you'd have to be crazy to follow Lily into this. There's nothing in the cellar, especially not a magic trapdoor."

"Are you hiding something?" I asked Aunt Sophia with genuine curiosity.

"Why would I hide a fantastic scientific breakthrough?" Aunt Sophia said, backing up the vehicle.

"Why would you ignore it, I think, is the better question, Mom," Lily said.

"Lily, what you're doing is playing with your discovery. That's not good."

"Oh, really? Then tell me, Mom, what should I be doing with it?"

"Leaving it alone."

Lily laughed as Aunt Sophia drove the car out of the parking lot. "The great explorers didn't become so great by being sissies. They took action; they went where nobody had gone before; they took risks!"

"And that's exactly the problem with that kind of career," Aunt Sophia said, rolling her eyes at the idea of Lily entering such a field and dragging me along with her, however willingly. "The risks. Remember what happened to Magellan? You should, you're the one who first told me about it!"

"What happened to Magellan?" I asked while Aunt Sophia directed the car into the streets of Norfolk.

"Oh, he just pissed off some Filipinos and got hit by a poison arrow before being speared to death by the islanders," Lily nodded as I stared at her bug-eyed. "Never made it back to Spain. But that's not going to happen to us, because we're not sixteenth-century Spaniards and we're not going to the Philippines. We're going to the cellar!"

"It's not a good idea to play with things you don't understand," Aunt Sophia warned us.

"Mom, I understand how it works. You heard me describe it to Claire. We're fine! Come on, you can even join in, get a look at this trapdoor for yourself!"

"If you can convince me there's something worth seeing, maybe I'll take a look. But I strongly suggest you stay away from that door, Lily. Claire. Because it's probably only a matter of time before someone gets hurt—if there's even something there."

As I would soon find out, there was something there. It was a fantastic scientific breakthrough, and something truly worth seeing. But Aunt Sophia would before too long be proven just as right about the trapdoor as Lily, and by then, the two of us would be wishing we had listened to her warnings.