JULIETTE FLUNG OPEN the door to the bathroom and pointed dramatically to the bathtub. It was filled to the rim with water and soap bubbles, even though the bubble layer had diminished quite a bit since Nilly had done his cannonball into it.
“This,” said Juliette, her voice quivering, “is a time-traveling bathtub. You can go anywhere you want in terms of time or space in this bathtub. All you have to do is fill it with water, get the soap to make bubbles, and then submerse yourself. You concentrate on where and when—the date and the time—you want to go. After seven seconds, you can come up again and, voilà, you’re there! You can go anywhere you want, but you can’t go to the same place more than once. In other words, you get only one chance to change the past at that specific location.”
“Cool!” Nilly exclaimed. “When did Proctor invent this doohickey?”
“While he was living here in Paris, just before he met me. Which is to say: Victor—”
“Victor?”
“Doctor Proctor,” Lisa said. “Doctor Victor Proctor, that is.”
“Victor Proctor?” Nilly spluttered in disbelief.
“Well he has to have a first name, doesn’t he? Just like everyone else,” Lisa said.
“Sure,” Nilly said. “Doctor, for example. That’s a great first name.”
“Anyway,” Juliette said patiently. “Victor was the one who invented the actual time-traveling bathtub and his assistant invented the time soap.”
“Remarkable,” Lisa whispered.
“Ha!” Nilly said, folding his arms across his chest. “Now do you believe me? I was lying there on the bottom of the bathtub thinking about the Moulin Rouge in around 1909, wasn’t I? And voilà—”
“You were there,” Lisa said. “Wow, I’m sorry I doubted you, Nilly. You always do tell the truth.”
Nilly closed his eyes halfway and gave Lisa a gracious look. “I’m not the kind of person to hold a grudge, my dear Lisa. If you tie my shoelaces for the next week, we’ll call it even.”
“Well, well, get into the tub, kids,” Juliette said. “Cliché is on his way.”
“Are you sure it will work now that there’s more than one of us in the tub?” Lisa asked skeptically, climbing cautiously into the water after Nilly.
“Yes,” Juliette said. “Victor and his assistant tested it thoroughly.”
“How weird,” Lisa said. “If he’s had this amazing invention for all these years, why hasn’t the rest of the world ever found out about it?”
“Exactly!” Nilly said. “He could have been rich and famous.”
“Because the time-traveling bathtub only works with the time soap,” Juliette said. “And his assistant was the only person who knew how to make that. They had a falling out, and without the time soap Victor didn’t have a patentable invention. All Victor had left of the time soap was that little jar he brought back to Norway with him when he was expelled from France.”
“The jar that was in his basement on Cannon Avenue,” Lisa said.
Juliette nodded and held up the mason jar containing the strawberry-red powder. “He brought a little of the time soap from this jar with him when he came back to Paris two months ago, and that’s what he used three weeks ago when he stood exactly where you are standing now, said good-bye to me, and traveled back to July 3, 1969, to the village of Innebrède in the Provence mountains to change history.”
“To change history?” Nilly and Lisa gasped in unison.
“Nothing less,” said Juliette. “The plan was to travel back to Innebrède and be standing there waiting at the gas station when we pulled in on the motorcycle. He’d hold up a big sign written in Norwegian so that only we could read it, warning us not to stop so we would keep driving all the way to Italy and get gas there. Even if gas costs six cents more per gallon in Italy.”
“Of course!” Lisa said. “Because that would keep all the stuff that happened from happening.”
“Exactly,” Juliette said. “The hippos would never have noticed us, Victor and I would have gotten married in Rome, Cliché would have given up trying to become a barometer, and Victor and his assistant would have made up again and patented the time-traveling bathtub and the time soap together and become world famous and so rich that Victor could pay off the mortgage on my folks’ castle.”
“But if everything had gone the way it was supposed to with his time traveling, Proctor would have been back by now, wouldn’t he?” Lisa asked. “So what could have happened?”
“Elementary,” Nilly said. “Doctor Proctor ran out of time soap and couldn’t get back. That’s why he sent us that message on that postcard. Although how he managed to send that …”
“I was the one who sent it,” Juliette said, pouring a little of the soap powder into the tub.
“You?” Nilly said.
“Well, actually, I forwarded it. I snuck into the hotel room every day to see if Victor was back yet. I sat in the bathtub and waited, but nothing happened. Until one day suddenly a postcard floated up to the surface. It was addressed to Lisa, whom I’d heard so much about.”
“And Nilly,” Nilly said.
“And Nilly,” Juliette agreed.
“So that’s how the postcard got wet! Some of the writing was washed off and there were traces of soap on the stamp,” Lisa said.
“Hm, if you ask me,” Nilly said, “that’s how the postcard got wet. Some of the writing was washed off and there were traces of soap on the stamp.”
Juliette poured a little more soap powder into the water. “Stir it up and make some bubbles. Quick, the hippos will be here any minute.”
Nilly churned his arms like an eggbeater in the water.
“Why couldn’t Proctor just get in touch with that assistant and get more time soap?” he asked.
Juliette sighed. “Victor’s assistant was a very peculiar person. Right after Victor and I started seeing each other, they had a falling out. I’m not sure why, but after Victor disappeared, his assistant tried to steal the whole time-traveling bathtub invention. Luckily Victor hadn’t left any sketches behind. He kept everything in his head, and Victor himself was the only one who knew how to configure the bathtub so it would work. And—”
Juliette suddenly stopped talking because they all heard a definite creaking sound from the hallway outside.
“Wha-what’s that sound?” Nilly asked.
Juliette held out her hand. It held the two blue nose clips. “Quick, put these on and dive.”
“Don’t need to,” Lisa said, demonstrating how she could pinch her nose shut with her thumb and index finger.
Juliette opened one of the blue nose clips and released it so that it clipped over Lisa’s nostrils with a little pop!
“Ouch!” Lisa protested.
Juliette gave Nilly the other nose clip. “Keep them on and a lot will become clear to you.”
There was a loud knock on the door.
“Under the water, now!” Juliette whispered, screwing the lid of the soap jar back on and passing it to Lisa.
“But you have to come too,” Lisa urged.
“No, I have to stay here.”
“What?” Lisa whispered. “Cliché is just going to lock you up again! And we’ll never find Doctor Proctor without your help!”
There was another knock on the door, louder this time.
Juliette bent down and kissed first Lisa and then Nilly on the forehead. “Victor said you were two smart kids. And I can already see that he’s right. Hurry up. Find him and come back.”
They heard an angry shout from the hallway and rapid footsteps, and the next second the door bulged into the room as if someone had just flung themselves against it. The door quit bulging, and they heard the creaking of the floorboards again, as if someone were taking another running start.
Lisa and Nilly took deep breaths and dove under the soap bubbles.
Then they were in a watery twilight where there was total silence.
Nilly could feel Lisa’s hand holding on to his own as he concentrated. Naturally what he wanted to do most of all was travel back to the Moulin Rouge to that girl who had thought he was so cute, but you couldn’t travel back to the same time and place more than once. So instead he had to think about … about … where were they supposed to be going again? That’s right, the Provence mountains. July … 3, 1969! More specifically Inn … Inn … what was that place that Juliette had said again? Darn it, it started with Inn! Inn … Inn …
Soon he couldn’t hold his breath anymore.
Inn … Inn …
Must have air!
Inn … DARN IT!
Nilly stood up in the tub, gasping for air.
He was standing in a bathtub in the middle of a meadow full of colorful flowers. The sun was shining, bees were buzzing, and birds were chirping all around him, and there were extremely tall mountains in every direction. At the other end of the meadow he saw a bunch of people sitting along the edge of a road in folding chairs waving French flags as they said cheers and clinked their wineglasses together and cheered on bicyclists as they passed. It was a wonderfully beautiful summer’s day out in the countryside. There were really only two things that concerned Nilly. One was that Lisa wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The second was that a bull with horns the size of a Congolese tse-tse elephant’s tusks was heading toward him at full speed.
