Failing Upward

Chapter 38: Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

I hesitated, finding my voice. At last I said, "No, I'm the same John who left you, but I've changed." My uncle continued to stare into my eyes like he could see my soul, a mist swirling beneath.

He felt the pull of the roses. The old grandfather clock struck the half hour. "Are you displaced?" he asked.

"This is where I began, if that's what you mean. You could say we were displaced until now." I didn't know how much to say. What to say.

"Are you sure this is where you belong?" he asked.

Sherlock closed his eyes and nodded. "Yes," I said. "We're sure."

"It worked then," Glenda sat down on the couch, clenching her hands in her lap. "Sherlock was right."

"I was?! Brilliant! About what?" Sherlock asked. He seemed to snap out of a dream, or possibly his mind palace.

"That you could return to where you began," she said.

My legs shook as we stepped up to the old piano. Sherlock pulled out the bench, and it groaned as we sat down. I rested my back against the keys, comforting for us both to be close, thighs touching.

"I'd like to know a bit about how it was different," my uncle asked, sitting on the arm of the couch.

There was so much to tell, but so much I didn't want to tell. Sherlock sensed my hesitation.
"It will take days to relate to you all we have experienced," Sherlock said slowly. "It's far more important that we know the danger Moriarty and the Community pose. There had to be an explanation as to why John dug up Moriarty. Our counterparts had a plan. I would assume it involved the Community."

I was getting woozier with Mica's effect and let my body rest against Sherlock's.

"We don't want to upset either of you. We know you've been through so much. I can hardly imagine, but you must know that in your absence much has happened to us, all of us," Glenda said, then told us the story: My angst-driven behavior at the lake after we'd buried Moriarty, the family's confusion at my behavior, and how I'd rejected Sherlock. The annoyed voice, and the way she stared at my hand on Sherlock's knee, I realized she wished I rejected him still.

She stopped as the clock struck six times. We waited for her to begin again and take up the story. It was a riddle to her, she told us, why we had acted oddly. Yet our uncle accepted it all. Finally he shared what he knew. She said she wasn't surprised I was not the same and Sherlock wasn't either, after all, she knew it had to be something like that. Normally she didn't bother herself with concepts like these. Time travel, parallel universes were my uncle's and my parents' preoccupation. Her preoccupation was the garden, this house, keeping the family together, but I knew better. She had as much a hand in it all as anyone else in this room. Maybe more so. At last she spoke of her confusion over how I'd gone back to Lake Michigan, dug up Moriarty, leaving "that man" free on the beach. Why had I done such a thing? I had said we had a good reason. The solution to it all.

"You told us that it was the only way to finish this," she said at last. "We thought it was finished when we dumped the last shovelful on top of him." She blinked. "It's hard for me to distinguish that you're different."

I admit that the scent of roses made my mind muddled too. Having Sherlock so near made me want him. I had to fight to ignore the heat of his leg against mine and how warm his knee was beneath my hand.

No one spoke and the old grandfather clock ticked seconds, then minutes. I cleared my throat, then I told them the condensed version of our story. With my mind muddled by Mica, my tongue was loosened although I felt like I left pieces of myself behind as I'd told the story. I spoke of how I was buried. How lost I was— the longing I felt. It seemed the air in the room made the longing all the stronger. I told them how Sherlock came to be immortal. How I felt remorse and delight in this. How I'd lost Sherlock for a time, and how losing Sherlock was like losing a piece of myself. I hoped as I told this, Glenda would come to understand how much Sherlock was a part of my soul.

At last I told them how this was not finished— that we intended to finish it. But I did not tell them how I intended to do that because it was still a mystery to me. It seemed our counterparts may have had a clue.

I stopped. Took a breath. Waited. Then said that the other John might have done the right thing digging up Moriarty. Uncle Greg stood up.

"I'm beginning to think Sean is right. You are bent on self-destruction," Glenda said.

"No," I said. "If we were, we wouldn't be here now."

"We don't have answers. Yet . But we will. Your help would be appreciated," Sherlock said.

"Part of me thinks I shouldn't interfere," my uncle answered.

"We don't understand your purpose. If we did, then we would help," Glenda said.