“Oh no,” Aunt Delilah took a step back from the counter.  “Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no –”  She spoke faster and faster as the panic she’d held at bay all morning hit her head-on.

            “Hold on,” Melisma protested.  “That doesn’t make any sense!  So, the only way to get my missing brother back is for my missing brother to come here and ask to get my missing brother back?  But he’s missing!”

            The clerk frowned uncomfortably at the surface of his desk.  “We don’t like to say ‘missing,’” he said.  “Perhaps ‘temporarily unavailable?’”

            “Melisma, where’s Cade?  What happened to Cade?”  Doria’s voice was a nervous squeak.

            “Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no –” bleated Aunt Delilah.  

            Lyddie watched as Aunt Delilah staggered to her chair, then began wailing herself.  “I wanna go hooooooome!”

            “Melisma, where did Cade go?” Doria repeated, more loudly.

            “He’s gone!” Melisma shouted.  “And the only way to get him back is to have him here to get himself back!”  She rounded on the clerk, who at that moment was chewing his lip and wishing he could be anywhere else.  “What does ‘unavailable’ mean?  I want my brother!”

            As she shouted, the door whispered open behind them.  Mr. Elmer slid mildly into the room.  “What seems to be the trouble here?”

            Aunt Delilah yelped and almost fainted.  Melisma whirled to fix him with an accusing look.  The clerk exhaled in relief.  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my manager.  Thank you for choosing Suleiman Kruld Financial Services.  Have a pleasant day.”  He darted into the back office and slammed the door.

            “Why, Ms Tucker!  Girls! It’s so good to see you!  Welcome to our offices.”  Elmer extended a friendly hand.

            Melisma snatched Cade’s red voucher from the counter and brandished it at him.  “What does this mean?” she demanded.  “What did you do with my brother?”

            “Of course.”  Elmer nodded.  “You’re here about Cadence.  Don’t worry.  We’ll get this all sorted out right away.”

            “How?!” Doria wailed.  “Melisma says Cade is missing!”

            “Missing?”  Elmer laughed.  “Not at all.  We’ve got the Cadence Sullivans in our showroom downstairs.  If you come with me, you can pick out the one you like the best.”

            Aunt Delilah moaned, half from relief, half from mental overload.  Doria and Lyddie shot Melisma confused looks.  She shrugged, angry and confused.  Together, the girls followed Elmer down the hall and into a waiting elevator.

***

The elevator opened onto a dim, cavernous space, punctuated at random intervals by small puddles of light.  Each one illuminated an isolated tableau, with its own furniture and scenery.  They looked like life-sized dioramas, or individual scenes from a play.

            The closest tableau was a bedroom about thirty feet ahead.  A squat lamp cast its warm glow over a battered desk and chair, a twin bed, and a section of powder blue wall.  A boy with tousled brown hair sat at the desk, working.  His sisters recognized him immediately.

“Cade!” Melisma shouted.  She rushed forward to throw her arms around him, then froze in her tracks when he glanced up at her and waved.

            “Hello, Melisma,” he said with a strange, polished smile.  “Hello, Aunt Delilah, and Doria, and Lyddie!  Sorry, I didn’t hear you get off the elevator.  I need to study hard if I’m going to get into a good university, but I can always make time to visit with my family!”

            Aunt Delilah swooned a little.  “What a gentleman!” she murmured, stepping closer.

            Melisma, Doria and Lyddie stood dumbstruck, as if he’d just greeted them in ancient Norse.  “Why is he talking like that?” Lyddie whispered, horrified.

            “I don’t know,” Melisma responded.  She scrutinized the boy in front of her.  He sounded like Cade.  He looked like Cade, too, in all but the most important ways.  The nose was right – a thick wedge that crowded out his other features. His mouth had the same heavy lower lip, but it looked strange when it wasn’t scowling.  His large, brown eyes were too earnest, and the sarcastic arch in his eyebrows was gone.  The boy smiled warmly, and Melisma’s stomach twisted into a cold knot.

            “That’s not my brother,” she said.

            Elmer nodded behind her.  “I know.  But it could be!  At least, it’s one option.”

            Cade scooted his chair to make room for Aunt Delilah.  “Do you know anything about polynomials?” he asked her.  “You could quiz me on them, and I could simplify the equations.”

            Melisma rounded on Elmer.  “What do you mean, ‘one option?  I know Cade, and that’s not him!”

            At that moment, a second Cade called out from a patch of sunlit grass to their right.  He held a garden hose in one hand and a bouquet of water balloons in the other.  “Hey guys, come over here and help!  We’re going to throw the biggest summer block party this place has ever seen!”

            Lyddie’s love of water balloons won out over her discomfort.  “Whatcha gonna do with those, Cade?”  she called.

            “Something awesome.”  He winked and flashed a giant grin that set Melisma’s teeth on edge.

            “That’s not my brother either,” Melisma told Elmer.  “Where did you get these Cade lookalikes?”

            The agent repositioned his glasses.  “Well, they’re actuarial models.  The same thing we talked about yesterday.  Do you see any Cades you like?”

            “No.”

            Elmer sighed.  “All right.  I’ll show you the other options.”

            Melisma scowled.  “When you talked about actuarial models, I thought you meant like charts and statistics.  But those are real people!  Are they clones or something?”

            “They’re not people,” Elmer replied.  “At least not yet.  They’re just possibilities of people that could be.  On their own, they can’t exist outside this building.  See, Suleiman Kruld Financial Services handles our modeling differently than other insurance companies.  That’s why we can offer coverage on things like personalities.  Come on, I’ll show you.  Actually, I’d like to ask you girls for help with something, too.”

            Elmer led the girls across the dim showroom floor.  They weaved between scenes of Cades hiking, Cades painting, Cades building bookshelves and Cades grooming horses.  There was a Cade for every occasion.  Lyddie and Doria gasped and giggled as they walked.  They’d always known Cade as surly and stand-offish, and it was weird to see him act so differently.  Melisma shivered in disgust.  She missed Cade, and this series of almost-Cades just made it worse.

            Elmer led them to a door at the far end of the showroom.  “Melisma, do you remember, when we spoke yesterday, how I told you our actuarial team members were like gardeners?  How they plant trees whose branches hold all the possible outcomes?”

            Melisma nodded.

            “Well, this is one of those trees.”

            He opened the door to reveal a much smaller room.  A pool of shallow water covered most of the floor.  In the center grew a single, massive tree.  Its arched roots sucked moisture directly from the water around them.  A riot of thin, leafy branches kissed the ceiling, then cascaded down to eye level.  There wasn’t space for much else in the room, but the water lapped against four elevated platforms, one in each corner.  On those platforms, four stone lanterns sent light flickering and dancing across the surface of the pool.  It was pretty.

            Melisma took a step into the doorway.  A rich, earthy smell hit her nostrils.  Elmer pulled her back.  “Don’t go in,” he said.  “It may not be safe for you, and we’ve got enough to deal with already.”

            Doria stepped forward to peek through the door behind them.  “Hey, Mister,” she said, “how does that tree grow without any sunlight?”

            Elmer smiled at her.  “It doesn’t need it,” he said.  “This isn’t an ordinary tree.  It’s an actuarial tree.  Watch this.”

He stepped through the doorway, into the room.  Brackish water flowed down the sides of his loafers, soaking his socks, but Elmer didn’t seem to mind.  He extended his hand to a branch and twisted off a fist-sized, purplish fruit.  He inspected it carefully, then placed it in the water in front of him.

            The fruit began to tremble and shake as Elmer stepped quickly out of the room.  It gave a tremendous shudder, then burst with a loud pop, releasing ropes of milky white smoke into the air.

            “It’s poison!” Lyddie leapt backward and plugged her nose.  “Abandon ship!  Women and Lyddies first!”

            “It’s perfectly safe,” Elmer said.  He wafted a handful of smoke in the girls’ direction.  “Do you smell that?”

            Melisma leaned in and sniffed.  “No, it just smells like dirt.”

            “Wait, there’s something else,” Doria said.  She thrust her face forward and breathed intently through her nose.  “It smells really familiar.”

            “Dirt is familiar,” Melisma said.  “Maybe it’s mold?”

            “No, it’s not that,” Doria said.  “It’s… it’s….”

            Lyddie’s curiosity overpowered her caution.  She stepped forward and took a quick whiff.  “It’s Melisma.”

            “Oh yeah!” Doria nodded at her sister.  “You do smell like that!”

            Melisma started to argue, but Elmer stopped her short.  He pointed back into the room.  Doria and Lyddie gasped.

            Something had sprouted and grown from the fruit in the water.  Its vague outline was just visible through the smoke.  It had stretched to be almost four feet tall in the few seconds they’d been talking.  No normal tree could grow that fast.

            Elmer beamed excitedly.

            The smoke began to dissipate, and the shape stepped forward.  Lyddie squealed and jumped behind Melisma’s legs for protection.

            From the haze emerged a scrawny girl in a blue cotton dress.  She was barely taller than Lyddie.  Melisma’s stomach lurched as she took in the girl’s bronze skin, her brownie-batter eyes, and the dark mop of hair that fell over her shoulders and down her back.  She clutched a tiny purple and pink bow in her hand.  The girl stared at Melisma with the same shocked glare that Melisma could feel burning on her own face.

            “Whoah, Melisma, is that –”  Doria stared at the girl, dumbstruck.

            The girl let out a frightened shriek and whirled on Doria.  Before anyone could react, she raised her weapon and sent an arrow sailing straight at Doria’s head.  The rubber suction cup tip bounced off her forehead and the arrow clattered harmlessly to the floor.  The girl darted into the small room and dove behind the tree’s trunk.

Melisma’s knees trembled.  Her head felt tingly.  “Hey, come back!” she shouted.  “Was that…”

            “Was that you, Melisma?”  Lyddie finished the question, stepping forward with an awestruck expression on her face.  “Is that what you looked like as a kid?”

            Melisma nodded.

            Elmer closed the door.  “That was Melisma when I first met her, frightened and brave at the same time.”

            “But where did she – where did I –” Melisma stammered.

            “She dissipated, or she will soon.  That fruit wasn’t ripe yet.  If I’d grabbed one of the bigger ones, she’d be thirteen years old and she’d stick around for days.”

            Elmer led the girls back toward the showroom.  “You see, that’s just one of our actuarial trees.  That’s our Melisma Tree.  We planted it just after we started your policy, rooting it in the information we collected about you during that first visit.  We moved the tree to that room a few days ago.  The Melisma Tree shows us all the Melismas that could have been.  Some are quiet and skittish like, you were.  Some are brave and confident, like you grew to be.  There are as many types of Melismas as there are Cadences, but they all come from that tree.”

            “Is there a Doria Tree too?” Doria asked hopefully.

            “Absolutely,” Elmer said.

            “And a Mixolydia Tree?”  Lyddie squeaked.

            “Well, there would have to be, wouldn’t there?”

            “Where is it?”  Lyddie demanded.  “I wanna see my tree!”

            Elmer sighed.  “The trees are planted deep inside our Actuarial Modeling Unit.  We maintain an orchard down there, with hundreds of them lined in neat rows.  We call it ‘the Man-Grove.’”

            “Mangroves grow in swamps,” Doria interjected automatically.

             “Well, so they do,” Elmer said.  “I’m impressed that you know that.  You’re a very clever girl, Doria!”

            Even in the darkness, Melisma could sense her sister beaming proudly.

            “Typical mangroves do grow in swamps,” Elmer continued.  “And we grow our trees in wet, swampy conditions as well, but they’re very, very different.”

            “I wanna see my tree!” Lyddie repeated.

            Elmer nodded.  “And I would love to show you.  But, as I said, I need your help fixing something first.  Now, how about we go collect your aunt, then take a quick coffee break?”

***