One Last Goodbye

“Beatrice! Timmy!” the good Professor Emmett Peters called, “Family meeting in the den in five minutes!”

The Peters household was, needless to say, a unique one comprising of a father, son, and daughter who call the space within its many walls home. Since the passing of her mother some years ago Beatrice’s maturity has hastened her to be the reasonable one in the family. However, one must not underestimate the influence a father has on his daughter as Beatrice shares the same whimsical curiosity of her father, Emmett. The youngest is the precocious seven year old named Timmy who is sparse with his words but resents anyone who mistakes his quiet demeanor for shyness. After all, there’s no need to punish a boy who learned quicker than others that it is wise to be prudent with words in a world where there are so many useless ones thrown about.

“What is it, dad?” Beatrice asked as they gathered in the den. Timmy followed closely behind his sister who took his hand as he entered. “Is something wrong?”

“No, but I have a terrific announcement!”

“Did we get rid of that family of macaws in the attic?” Beatrice was referring to the Botanical Pulsar Antenna, one of many of her father’s inventions. Originally intended to make gardens grow more abundantly by emitting a frequency that simulated a spring-like climate at any time of the year. The result, however, was the migration of every bird within a five mile radius to their small street. Most of the birds found their way home a week later but those macaws called the Peters’ attic home.

Only one invention had ever resulted in complete success and has supported the Peters family all this time: the Waveform Pest Repellant. A variation on the Botanical Pulsar Antenna, the Waveform Pest Repellant used sound waves to deter insects and small vermin from entering a given distance from the emitter. It was a hit with summer parties aiming to keep mosquitoes away, amateur landscapers looking to spend less energy shooing away rodents and birds, and restaurants who could ill afford to display rat traps in a customers’ plain sight all without releasing any unwanted chemicals into the air.

“I think it’s well established that those macaws are part of the family now,” Emmett responded. “All that flapping and squawking, you’d think your grandmother was still around.” His daughter raised an eyebrow, not amused. Beatrice was very close to her grandmother who had passed away before Timmy was born. “Right… I would keep an eye out for an influx of small lizards though.”

“Why would you make something that attracts lizards?” Beatrice asked. Timmy’s eyes bounced back and forth between his sister and father’s amusing dialogue. It was one of Timmy’s favorite pastimes.

“I didn’t,” Emmett answered. “It was an accident. I just wanted to see what would happen if I reversed the polarity of the Waveform Pest Repellant and—well, lizards tend to go where the food is.”

“Oh, dad,” Beatrice shook her head disapprovingly as Timmy giggled quietly to himself. “I’m not sure warning us about lizards needed a family meeting, though.”

“Ah! Yes, well, that’s not why I called you to the den,” Emmett fussed over his worn lab coat, priming himself as if someone were about snap a picture. “I give you my latest invention!” He spread his arms out almost as widely as his smile was. The two children looked at him blankly, then at each other, and then aimlessly around the room, then finally back at their father.

“I don’t get it,” Beatrice commented. Emmett then looked at Timmy who then shrugged.

“Oh, right,” Emmett corrected himself. “I forgot to tell you that I managed to accomplish what Thomas Edison never could!”

“You were nice to Nikola Tesla? That’s great! Good for you, dad!”

“All right, none of that,” Emmett responded as he walked over the back wall of the den. He carefully removed a panel on the wall to reveal a chaotic network of wires and fuses and circuitry. “I’ve taken three separate inventions and combined them to create the pièce de résistance of my career: The Phantasm Extrapolator!

“I have long postulated that we all have, to some degree, some energy emitted in the form of brainwaves, psychic energy if you will. And I have also stated my hypothesis that said energy is not only unique to each individual but may leave residual imprints long after said individual is no longer with us. This phenomena results in what non-scientific folk might refer to as ghosts.”

Timmy and Beatrice held each other’s hand tightly partly because their dad may have found a way to capture ghosts and partly because they thought their father had gone mad. Admittedly, it’s likely more of the latter.

“Placed discreetly all around the house for the past few months were psychic sensors picking up on all psychic energies saturated in these walls. I take that data and put it into this processor, this bit with all the wires and things. And that gets translated through this holographic projector, which, as you know, projects holograms of whatever you program it to project. In this case, it’s whatever the psychic energy translates into.”

“Wouldn’t that be the ghosts?” Beatrice asked.

“Exactly,” her father answered, “But I took it a step further and coupled the device with my quantum manipulator. That didn’t work as well as originally intended but does just enough for what I need this machine to do which is to make the hologram a solid thing we can touch and feel.”

“Wait,” Beatrice was curious of the implications. “You want to touch the ghosts?” Timmy’s eyes widen as did Beatrice’s when they realized what this meant.

“It will be like they never died,” Emmett answered. “You can sit with them here, in the den, and carry out a conversation with them, embrace them, and possibly even smell them as if they were still with us. There are a few catches though.”

“Like what?” Beatrice asked.

“For one, the range on the holographic projector is limited so you have to stay in the den for this to work. The door has to be closed, lighting kept to a minimum. That’s why I moved the furniture a bit. Secondly, you can only conjure up people who have lived in this house for a substantial amount of time. We can’t bring back President Lincoln or Socrates or anyone like that. Their psychic signature has to be within this house, picked up by my sensors. In order to bring back someone, you just have to think of them. Those same sensors that detected the spirits’ psychic energy pick up on yours and conjure up the person closest to your heart at the moment you walk into the den.”

“Well, why isn’t anything happening?”

“I haven’t turned it on yet,” Emmett answered, “We can only go in one at a time otherwise we might overload the system and blow up the house.”

“We haven’t had that happen in a long time,” Beatrice added. There was little sarcasm as explosions followed Emmett regularly, though luckily, none of them resulted in anyone being seriously injured. “So, only in the den, one of us at a time, and all we have to do is think of someone and they appear?”

“Yes!”

“How do you know it works?”

“I don’t. Not yet,” Emmett responded to his daughter, “I was going to test it myself, and assuming everything works out just fine you two can use it too.” Timmy looked up at Beatrice who was simultaneously concerned, confused, and excited.

The good professor reached into the circuits into the wall and fiddled around until there was a sharp CLICK sound. The walls hummed as Emmett gestured for his children to exit the den. He closed the door behind them. The humming echoed throughout the entire house, shaking the windows and frightening the two children. Their father didn’t make a sound but they could see a soft, rose colored light emanating from the space beneath the door leading to the den.

The quiet was deafening. Timmy shook, frightened, debating with himself if a trip to the den to have a chat with someone formerly living was worth the trouble. Beatrice wrapped an arm around her little brother though she was nervous herself. She knew she wanted to try out this Phantasm Extrapolator but she wasn’t sure who she missed more, her mother or her grandmother. An hour passed before Emmett emerged from the other side. His children ran to meet him.

Beatrice and Timmy looked at their father who had a serene look on his face. His smile was much smaller than usual but the look in his eyes told them he was happier than he had been in quite some time. Their father looked well rested and one might argue that he probably just took a nap and dreamed up what he was about to tell them.

“Well,” Emmett said, just nodding at his children, “It works… it actually works!” He embraced them tightly though they weren’t exactly sure if it really had worked. Timmy noticed it first. There was a faint smell of lavender on his father’s lab coat. It was the smell of their mother’s perfume! Timmy couldn’t stop smelling it, taking in deep breaths hoping to imprint the memory of that smell into his lungs forever. Beatrice clung to the lab coat and did the same. She took a step back and noticed the single tear welling in her father’s eye. He tried his best to hide it from her but when Emmett saw that she had figured out he was crying he whispered in his daughter’s ear, “Mommy says hello.”

Beatrice stepped back again and Emmett lifted Timmy up off the ground. He nodded to his daughter to let her know that it was okay to use the Phantasm Extrapolator now. She hesitated and looked at her father as if to say, I don’t know who to conjure up.

“Just walk in and close the door sweetie. The censors will know who you’re feeling strongest about that very instant,” Emmett answered as he held little Timmy close, the young boy’s head leaning on his shoulder. Beatrice entered the den and shut the door. The walls hummed and shook and the pink glow emitted under the door again.

Timmy wasn’t sure who he’d talk to. He felt a bit guilty as if he was not missing someone enough as he should be. The censors will sense who you miss the most whether you know you miss them or not, his father assured him. But perhaps, Timmy wondered, he was too young to feel the sting of death. It was a fortunate position on his part, to be certain, but Timmy still wondered why he still felt so sad all the time. While his family loved him, he still felt like the loneliest little boy on the planet.

His mother passed away when he was young and never got a good chance to know her. He never had the chance to know his grandmother either so maybe the psychic sensors wouldn’t pick up on anything. Maybe, Timmy speculated, he would sit in that den all alone bathed in the warm rose-colored light and still be alone. He wanted someone to talk to, someone other than his sister and his father to play with. He hated himself for hating Beatrice whenever she went out with her friends’. Not that he hated spending time helping his father tinker with some quirky contraption but a boy needed to be around other boys. There was only the memory of Taylor who was the closest to an actual friend Timmy had but wasn’t sure if Taylor had actually counted him as one.

The door to the den squeaked open and Beatrice’s face was red, her eyes welled up with tears, and a smile spread across her face. Emmett put Timmy down and the two walked towards her to give her a hug. She smelled of the same moth ball stench that her grandmother had smelled of, Emmett told Timmy. It lasted only a few minutes but the smells were so real that they could have lasted a lifetime. Beatrice didn’t say a word, just kept smiling as she bent over to hug her baby brother who had a blank look on his face. Emmett and Beatrice stepped back to let young Timmy walk into the den. He looked back and saw their eager faces. All he could do was furrow his eyebrows as if to say, I don’t think it’ll work for me. Emmett just smiled assuredly and gestured for his son to get in the room.

Timmy walked inside and closed the door behind him. It was dimly lit, as was expected but he found his way to the center of the room and sat on the floor. The entire room hummed but strangely the hum was quieter on the inside of the den than it was outside. The pink light emanated from the circuits that were built into the wall growing brighter and brighter. At first, it felt as if the room was still empty, that the Phantasm Extrapolator hadn’t worked. That was until Timmy distinctly heard breathing behind him.

Understandably, it frightened him at first. He knew he was alone when he entered the room but there’s nothing more powerful than the imagination of a seven year old boy. Timmy took a deep breath and gulped down his dread and anxiety, turning slowly to see who exactly was breathing behind him. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and his pupils became pinpoints at the center of them. Timmy fell to his knees, his mouth curling into a large smile.

“Taylor?” Timmy asked. Taylor slowly walked towards him and leaned his face towards Timmy’s and licked the tears streaming down the boys face. Timmy wrapped his arms around the dog thinking he would never have a chance to say goodbye to him. “I miss you so much!” Timmy exclaimed, smiling as he saw Taylor’s tail wag uncontrollably.

Emmett and Beatrice were curious as to who the extrapolator had chosen to conjure up for the baby of the family. They conversed of their experiences, Emmett explaining how their mother looked just as she did when they had married. Beatrice described feeling warm and secure in her grandmother’s arms as if she was still around. But then a ruckus from the den interrupted their talk. It sounded as if Timmy were running around in laps. Beatrice ran to open the door but her father stopped her warning that it may destroy the extrapolator and hurt Timmy. The running turned into laughing, uncontrollable laughter that they had not heard from Timmy in quite some time. The door opened and an exhausted but elated Timmy emerged from the other side.

“Are you okay, son?” Emmett asked. The boy nodded. Beatrice noticed the dog hairs on Timmy’s clothes and showed her father. Beatrice was about to make a comment but Emmett motioned her to stop. Timmy deserved to feel this happy. Just then the circuitry of the extrapolator sparked and shot a small fireball into the air. Emmett instinctively pulled his children away from the burning section of wall in the den. An inventor as active as he was always had a fire extinguisher at the ready. He charged into the small room and put out the fire.

Most components of the Phantasm Extrapolator had been lost to that small explosion, burnt beyond recognition. However, Timmy’s experience with it proved that one need not be dead in order to be brought back home. What Beatrice wanted to point out was that Taylor, the family dog, didn’t die but ran away. He may have died; there was really no way to know. All that Timmy knew was that his best friend was gone and would never come back. To a child like Timmy, there was nothing more tragic than losing a friend forever. It’s always a difficult time when one had to say goodbye. There would always be words that you thought you could have said. But thanks to Emmett’s Phantasm Extrapolator he, Beatrice, and Timmy were given the rare opportunity to make just one last goodbye to the one’s they loved so dearly.