LATE FOR TEA (PART THREE OF THE WONDERLAND SERIES)
Robert Hill
Copyright 2014 by Robert Hill
Lupita Espinosa had been the first person in recorded history to be teleported from one spot on the planet to another using the Mirror Anomaly, making her the real life embodiment of Alice – the girl who stepped through the looking glass.
She smiled at the thought of it as she stood there just outside the Quonset hut. When she had fallen through her bathroom mirror in Corpus Christi, Texas and landed here – here in Antarctica – a month ago, and Bernie Skarpinski was standing there at the edge of the Mirror Anomaly platform, she remembered what he said to her at that moment.
“Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.”
Of course, in her dazed confusion at that time her only response had been, “But I’m not Alice.”
Yet, she was, it would seem. In the classic story Alice had stepped through a looking glass, taking her to a place known as Wonderland. And the same had happened for Lupita. Only she had not ended up in Wonderland, but rather in Antarctica, which was somewhat wondrous, she had to admit.
Lupita looked about from where she stood. There wasn’t much to look at in the dusky daytime winter hours five kilometers in from the Antarctic coast. Although it was ten in the morning, all she could see was darkened deep blue sky and hardened white fields of snow and ice leading to the receding edges of a jagged glacier field that slowly rose off into the distance. It seemed more like twilight instead of late morning.
And the cold … the biting cold married to the constant slashing wind that, were it not for the several layers of clothing and the parka she kept zipped up, would surely eat the tepid warmth of her heart and sap the life from her bones within minutes. Each time she stepped out of one of the Quonset huts at the research camp, she could not help but remark on the cold as it yanked one’s attention like the way Raul used to physically yank her in those days not so long ago.
She glanced over to her left at the larger Quonset hut where she had just come from which had been constructed by the research scientists over the Mirror Anomaly excavation site. Lupita thought of the conversation she had just had with Johann, and felt the tiny warmth from her skin blushing. Johann was in Germany, another “accidental” contactee like herself. Blonde and blue-eyed, Johann was a very handsome man with a prominent chin and a thick foreign accent, but unfortunately so far away.
“You’re very beautiful,” Johann had said. “Perhaps someday we will actually meet.”
“Yes, I – I would like that,” she had replied, but found herself turning away a bit from his projected image on the surface of the Mirror Anomaly, trying to hide the flush in her cheeks due to the compliment he had given her.
“Will you contact me again?” Johann asked. “I would like to continue, bitte.”
She had nodded, perhaps too enthusiastically, and then turned off the device, leaving only a silvery platform lying horizontal upon a raised dais in front of her, which then only showed her reflection in it where Johann’s face had just previously been.
What he had said to her was something Lupita was not used to hearing from men, although deep down inside she knew that even at age forty she still had a bit of the pretty Latina girl she had once been years ago. That she was beautiful. That she was perhaps even desirable. Well, Raul had not said such things to her in years. And if Johann had said such things in front of Raul, it would have led to a serious fist fight, possessive as he was.
As for Johann, he had no idea of her status, of Raul, and of what had really happened to her and how she had ended up Antarctica. Why, Lupita was not supposed to say anything about it; not to Johann, not to anyone. She wasn’t even supposed to be talking to Johann through the Mirror Anomaly. Directions from “high up” were that no further contact was to be made with anyone by anyone using the strange, possibly extra-terrestrial device that the research scientists had found buried beneath the snow and ice of a receding glacier. But then in the month that Lupita and Raul had spent here stranded, hardly anyone paid attention to her, except for Bernie. She was just like a wallflower at the dance. Since she had no scientific duties here, she went invisible except for when someone needed a simple domestic task completed, seeing as it lightened the load for the “smart people in the room”.
And as for Bernie Skarpinski, the geologist who first contacted her accidently when the Mirror Anomaly activated and made a connection with her through her bathroom mirror? Well, he was her one friend here. Sure, the other scientists were cordial, but they did not spend a great deal of time getting to know her. It wasn’t that they were not very sociable people, but rather they were simply too busy trying to wrap their brains around what it was they had discovered.
Bernie was different, though, and Lupita was not sure why, but she was glad, otherwise the only person she would have to talk with would be Raul – a tense and unpalatable alternative.
That moment just a month ago when Bernie … dear, sweet Bernie … had shown his cupid-like face in place of her reflection in her bathroom mirror had launched Lupita into a sequence of ugly and fantastic events. Because when Raul overheard Lupita talking to Bernie through the seemingly magical connection, Raul came staggering into the bathroom, suspecting Lupita was talking on her cell phone to some imaginary lover, and in his drunken confusion had pushed Lupita up against the mirror. Instead of breaking her bathroom mirror and being terribly cut up in the process, she was instead pulled through it as if she had fallen through the calm surface of a lake. And then, as if by magic, she had been transported through a dark passageway along with Raul, who had tried to grab her when she fell through the mirror, landing upon the Mirror Anomaly platform there in Antarctica where Bernie stood staring at her in a state of numbed shock.
Even Bernie was oftentimes busy, which had led to Lupita observing and then secretly – mostly out of boredom – making contact through the Mirror Anomaly with a few other contactees from around the world. It was Johann, though, where things moved from casual, if one could call two-way communication through mirrors “casual”, to something more like a “connection”. Even though his English was broken and her German was -- well, non-existent -- Lupita clicked quite well with the handsome man from a faraway land she’d never see.
“Will you contact me again?” Johann had asked.
What, was he kidding? As long as she didn’t get caught, and for as long as she was still stuck in Antarctica, of course she would contact him again. He was handsome, and he was smart with a good job as an accounting clerk at a bank. Given the opportunity, she would do a lot more than contact him.
Lupita sighed at the thought of it. Oh, if only…
She turned away from the frigid afternoon, and stepped inside the hut where everyone slept and ate. The instant she stepped inside, she found herself standing face-to-face with Raul within the center corridor of the hut. His appearance startled her, but she barely showed it. Raul was not much of a threat to her here. He didn’t dare to bully her with so many people present now in their lives. Also, since being stranded here with her, Raul had not had a drop to drink, making him a lot less volatile, although Lupita knew that he still had his leanings toward jealous insecurity and a desire to control everything about her. Yes, Raul had toned down quite a bit in the past month, most especially since those first moments when they landed in Antarctica and Lupita had taken a floodlight pole to the side of his head.
“Uh, Lupe,” he said, stepping closer to her. “I was coming for you.”
Lupita stepped back up against the door she had just entered. “For me? What for??
??
In the past month they had barely spoken to one another, and Raul had kept his distance for the most part, something she had welcomed. That distance had given Lupita time to think about her relationship with him, and room for her to gain confidence that she could deal with life without him constantly hanging over her like a buzzard waiting for a hit deer along the highway to finally die.
“I was just told they’re coming for us,” Raul said, and then he grinned as if he had won the lottery, showing that gap in his teeth where he had lost his left canine in a drunken bar fight five years ago. “A tractor is coming from Marble Point to take us back there, and then from there -- a ship back home.”
Lupita’s heart seemed to lurch up into her throat. She had always known that eventually someone would come for them. They could not stay there forever. And with the Antarctic winter receding, transportation out was an eventuality. Sure, she had been missing her son, Alejandro, now nearly a grown man, yet still just a boy in her eyes. But Lupita just wasn’t quite ready to go back. Not yet.
“Wha – when?” she asked, and she started to feel herself shrink, feel her very being collapse in upon itself.
“I don’t know,” Raul said. “A