Page 57 of Echoes

“I shouldn’t have even bought the damn house with the pool,” she muttered to herself. “I wanted it for those kids I don’t have yet. Stupid.”

Violet pulled open the door and went back inside.

Hours later, after the men had left, she took her puppy outside through the front door but decided to swing by the back to see if they’d yet dug up the item that would cost her thousands of dollars. Theyhad, apparently, because there was a very dirty metal case about the size of that bread basket everyone just kept comparing things to despite people not really having bread baskets anymore, sitting by her back door.

“What the hell is that?” she asked herself.

Two Days Later

Asking the crew to work over the weekend to finish the work faster had been a mistake. She knew that now. First, her new puppy barked at every little movement outside, and the workers moved a lot. Second, they made a lot of noise. There was a jackhammer on Saturday that had been on and off for a few hours. Today, they were out there running new concrete. Hopefully, though, in a few days, she’d have a backyard with a fenced-in pool so that she could let ‘Little Guy’ run around in there because the poor dog sure did have a ton of energy to run off.

The object that had caused her all these problems in the first place was currently sitting on the floor of her laundry room. She hadn’t bothered to try to open it once she figured out that it was a case of some kind, choosing to believe that someone might have buried a pet in the backyard initially until she thought about how deep that box had been. Odds were, no one would’ve dug that deep to bury the family pet. And the men who were still trying to repair the damn pool had told her that the previous owner, a woman named Rosie, hadn’t asked them to bury a dead pet beneath it. If it wasn’t a pet, she had no idea what else itcouldbe. The only other idea she could come up with was a time capsule, but again, she had no idea why someone would bury a time capsule, something that wasmeantto be dug up at some point in the future, so deep in the ground.

Violet had even done a little research on the house and what had been on this property before it. The house itself had been built in the eighties, and the land had been mostly forest before the subdivision had been built, so it wasn’t a previously government-owned building or any place that might have needed to bury something in a silver metal case.

Tired of all the construction noise, she decided to take her puppy for a walk to try to get some quiet and give him a chance to walk off at least some of that energy. She stopped by the playground in the neighborhood that served the kids who lived there, and ‘Little Guy’ was a big hit with a few of the kids there, who, thankfully, helped wear him out a little. Then, she walked back home, thinking about what could possibly be inside that case.

“Airplane debris?” she said, thinking that years ago, a planecould’ve dropped some cargo or something, and maybe it ended up being buried over when the house was built.

It was a long shot, but when she walked in through the laundry room, she saw the case again and decided that if itwerea dead pet, she didn’t want it in her house anyway. Her dog didn’t seem interested in that box at all, though, which was another reason in the not-a-pet column, so she put on a pair of rubber kitchen gloves and wrapped a bandana around her nose and mouth because it was the best she could do. She carried the case out to her garage, and with the door closed, she set it on the workbench table that lined the wall and had been put in by one of the previous owners.

Violet looked at all sides of the case and saw minimal damage, so it likely wasn’t that plane debris, after all. The case had a latch but no lock, so she opened it and took a step back, expecting a hissing sound, maybe, or something to jump out at her. When nothing happened, she reached for the lid, lifted it, and stepped back quickly again, waiting for something that never happened.

“What the hell?” she said to herself and took a step forward this time to get a closer look.

Inside was a piece of metal with some shine on it in certain spots as well as some dull spots, and while she knew nothing about welding, it looked as if it had been welded into one piece, and there was a cord hanging out of it. Violet had no idea what this thing was. She looked around the case, but the strange object was the only thing inside it unless there was something underneath it. At first, she resisted touching it, but thinking there might be an explanation for what it was or something under it, she reached for it, hoping her gloves would protect her and wishing she’d bought the gardening gloves she saw in the store the other day because they were thicker. When she lifted it up, Violet was surprised at how heavy it was. She looked under the object and, seeing nothing, placed it back down in the case.

“Whatareyou?” she said out loud again.

Deciding to pick it back up because nothing bad had happened the first time, she turned it around in her hands a few times to see if there was a brand name or a model number. There didn’t appear to be anything written on it, which was frustrating because she would’ve at least been able to google this thing if there was something there. The only thing she could see, besides the cable thing that was just kind of sticking out of it, was a button. And one button only, too, which was odd. Most devices had at least two, she surmised. Sometimes,on and off were two separate buttons. Other times, it was on and off as one button and an additional button to serve whatever its purpose was. But this thing had only one, which meant that it was both for both on and off.

“What do you do?” she asked.

The object had an odd shape to it, and she couldn’t see anywhere that it would open up. It seemed to have no spot for batteries or to charge it, either. Nothing would pop out to sweep her floor or play music for her. It looked old, too, so she probably shouldn’t be treating it as a modern device. She had no ideahowold, but if she had to guess, it was at least as old as this house, maybe older. Violet set the device back into its case, heard the noisy men outside her garage door, and decided that she might as well press the button to get her questions answered. If it was really that old, and it wasn’t plugged into anything, nothing would happen anyway, and she could just toss this thing out in the bin on trash day.

She took a deep breath, for some reason, and pressed the button. She didn’t remember closing her eyes, but she found herself opening them all the same. Her head was on a swivel because she was no longer in her garage.

“What the fuck?” she said.

Violet was in a hospital room. She was standing near a wall and looked up to see a very strange-looking TV or maybe a projection screen on the wall that was showing a news program. The room looked strange to her, too, and she’d be able to tell – she’d spent a lot of time in a hospital room when her grandmother and then mother had both gotten sick. Her grandmother had been a diabetic and spent the last month of her life in a hospital, and her mother had been in and out of one after being diagnosed with cancer. After her second time in remission, her mom had passed away in a hospital room, and Violet was pretty sure that she knew what most of the machines that had been attached to the woman did and could probably use them herself; she’d learned so much during her time there.

These machines looked smaller, and there were fewer of them than she’d expect to see in a hospital room where someone was lying in a singular bed. The weirdest part to her, though, was the fact that none of them were making any noise at all. Violet swallowed hard, wondering how she’d gotten there when she’d just been in her own garage. With her hands still covered in gloves, she reached for and found the bandana still in place, and realizing that she probably lookedlike someone who was there for a nefarious purpose, she pulled the bandana down and yanked off the gloves.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just looking for the… restroom.”

The woman in the bed said nothing, but then again, she hadn’t moved yet, and her eyes were closed. There was another woman sitting in a chair, holding the other woman’s hand in both of her own, and she was crying.

“Mom?”

Violet turned to see a woman around her own age standing just inside the door of the room. She must have just walked in because she hadn’t been there before. She, too, had tears in her eyes.

“Hi, honey,” the woman in the chair said.

“Mom, the nurse said they need to take her away now.”

“I just need a little more time,” the woman replied and pressed a kiss to the other woman’s hand. “Just a little more.”

“I’ll ask,” the younger woman said as she wiped a tear from her face before she walked over to the other side of the bed and placed a kiss on the woman’s forehead. “I love you, Mama.”

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