Epilogue
On May Day, as had been the tradition for most of thirty-three years, Greensbury Elementary School opened its doors to the crowds of students, families, and members of the community who’d come to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, Nausica? Torres-Lakeman, Doctor of Fine Arts, directing.
Nausica? had reserved Miles a seat at the front with the teachers, but he chose to sit with Kate and Wesley.
They had arrived late, failing to anticipate the rush for seats, and were lucky to find space high in the bleachers, looking down upon the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of people who had gathered there. [*]
It had been some time since they had been to the theater.
Back in California, Wesley had been in his third-grade play, about a kid programmer turned spy, written by one of the sixth-grade girls at a summer camp called Innovators in the Arts.
Co-written, we should say, with a Tony-winning playwright who was paid a fee he had never seen in his life, and would never see again.
It was a slick production, in a new school theater built by a donation from a venture-capital firm run by the playwright’s father, with the original costumes underwritten by the mother of the spy, the third employee at a company of such wealth, and such a history of litigation, that this author dare not mention its name in these pages, even positively.
It would be tempting to draw a contrast with the small-town feel of Greensbury Elementary, but such a comparison would be facile, for the Greensbury production was in a category of its own.
From the moment the curtain lifted on Athens, and the ten Pucks appeared, dressed in matching purple, in a fairy dance that was Nausica?’s invention entirely, and the ten Pucks parted to reveal a stately Theseus and Hippolyta, and they made way for the two Hermias pining for the two Lysanders, the audience passed from bepuzzlement, to bemusement, to acceptance, and then to awe.
Did it matter that some of the children were reading lines projected on screens cleverly hidden from the audience by real spruces donated by Southern Vermont Gas and Electric?
(They were in the right-of-way, and would have been cut down anyway.) Or that the enunciation of both Helenas, one of the Lysanders, and King Theseus left something to be desired?
(Reader, three of four had braces.) Expectations were exactly what they should have been for a third-grade production.
And so it was that, as the play progressed, and the players entered two by two, and three by three, and four by four, and the audience began slowly to piece together what was happening, something settled upon the hall that we might call, in fact, enchantment.
The raised phones slowly drifted down. The squirming little siblings settled, with hypnotic precision, into their parents’ laps.
Hands of couples who just minutes before had been arguing about whose fault it was that they were running late, or why the laundry wasn’t changed, or a hundred other earthly troubles, now sought each other in the glimmer of the unfolding wonder.
By the time (the two) Peter Quince(s) and his (two times six) players yielded the stage to the gang of fairies, and a soft green light replaced the cabaret red, there was not a soul who didn’t think that this was how the play had always been envisioned, each line recited with the quality of a chorus, each movement given the quality of dance.
Among the ten Pucks who danced upon the stage that night, Olive Krzelewski-Petrosian, her name misspelled twice in the program, in two different ways, moved with a particular grace.
And though much of this had to do with the rigor she had applied to her rehearsals, the truth was that she had an inside scoop on magic, though of a very different kind from what she had expected to find, six weeks prior, when she set out to draw the inside of a cave with the aid of her Crayola 64.
It would be easy to attribute her discovery of this cave, a week before her disappearance, to a child’s credulity and a father’s stories, but Olive, contrary to what her parents thought, actually had a pretty good understanding of the limits of imagination.
She knew when her dad was full of it, and only a silly person would believe the existence of a subterranean city lit by a subterranean sun.
No: like most cave discoveries, this one involved not just a child but a dog.
Olive found the cave because Giuseppe found the cave, and Giuseppe found the cave because of the rats.
It should not come as a surprise that the property of Norbert Rumphius should have its own connection to the underworld.
Super-Rat-Lines are usually found in cave country; if we do not see their seething armies streaming past us in their billions, still they are below us, in the merciful, accommodating earth.
Indeed, as the dog’s behavior should long ago have indicated, the territory was laced with gaps and openings, many of which he’d snout-probed, and more than a few, partially excavated.
A handful led deeper; one or two, he’d slipped inside.
It was just a matter of time before he would arrive at Cave A-76, on the border of the Highly Likely Quadrangle.
It was the snow that brought Olive to him, Giuseppe’s footprints leading directly to the entrance and then inside it.
Later, people would say that she was lucky that neither bear nor Bigfoot was awaiting her.
Once there had been bears and foxes, and once Mohican and Abenaki hunters had taken shelter there.
But no longer. The rats, to her good fortune, preferred a narrow fissure arching southward from the opening, sparing her the sight of some hundred thousand creatures, huddled inches from Giuseppe’s maddened snorts.
So close and yet so far! thought the dog, while the girl broke the darkness with the little key-chain light she carried always in her pocket, a gift from her parents, and so now a talisman, for between them she sensed that something was not right.
A dim light, but a light strong enough for her to see that the cave extended deeper, enough so she could believe that maybe part of the story that her father told her might be possible.
Might be, maybe. And so, a week later, bragging about it to Harper, exaggerating, against her best intentions, its depth and magnitude, she decided to do what any child in a novel about a cave would do, and dared her friend to follow her inside.
This time, Harper, she of the fierce clan of bear-cub killers, chickened out.
So Olive went alone. It was just five minutes up the trail from her house, and five to follow the ledge to the entrance to the cave.
Olive hadn’t intended to go very far inside—she was alone, and a little scared—but once she was there, and her reputation was on the line, she decided just to shine the light and see what she would find.
Cave paintings? Treasure? She had her sketchbook with her, primed for documentation.
And, once inside, she weighed her fear against her curiosity and, finding the ledger still in slight favor of the latter, walked a little farther.
And then a little farther, to what seemed to be a silver cataract, a vision made no less extraordinary to this child, so highly attuned to color, by the discovery that, no, it was a normal cataract, illuminated by the light reflecting off the polished marble.
It was also slimy. Just as she reached into her bag, searching for the colors that could capture the essence of the falling water, Olive slipped and fell. Not a big fall. But she dropped the flashlight, and when she got up and began to move about the darkness, she slipped again.
—
To the disappointment of several members of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, not to mention the volunteers from the Search and Rescue Squad, the individual who discovered Olive was the same individual who had led Olive to the cave, and thus the hero of this entire story, Giuseppe.
In fact, that night, he’d gone back and forth four times between the humans and the cave—FOUR TIMES, PEOPLE—and barked at his addled owners incessantly, even stayed inside with Olive for an hour, giving her hope that someone would eventually find her.
But, much to his frustration, no one understood what he was saying, saying repeatedly, saying insistently, angrily.
Not the two smug German shepherds brought by the Search and Rescue Squad, and certainly not the humans.
It was only on his fourth foray to the house that Bentley, watching the dog pass in the headlights of the ambulance, noticed he was smeared with clay, and thought to follow him—not actually Bentley himself, confined to the flatlands, but the others, under Bentley’s instruction.
Ten minutes later, they were at the mouth of the cave.
When they called, Olive immediately answered, and, one by one, the trackers went inside.
There she was, wet and cold, and very much alive; Miles and Kate were on their knees, in the stream, hugging her, kissing her; Wesley was hugging Giuseppe; a pedantic member of the Search and Rescue Squad was scolding everyone for not following cave-rescue protocol, which called for immediate isolation and medical evaluation for zoonotic illnesses—they could get histoplasmosis, leptospirosis, tick-borne relapsing fever, even rabies—while the Wylkesians turned their attention to the corridor that vanished at the back of the cave.
—
“Well,” said Hugh.
“Well, well,” said Earl.
“Look at that,” said Kayleigh Swan, who had ignored medical warnings against third-trimester spelunking.
“Oh boy,” said Clem.
“Wow, just wow,” said Farm Candy, holding hands with Serena Rubin, the cave being just the first of many revelations of that evening.
“Should we go back and get some ropes?” said someone. “Helmets?”