For some, this is but a fair-weather home, and the rest of the time they live elsewhere in bigger cities like Richmond or Williamsburg that don’t have the breathtaking views and daily dramas of coastal living in a part of the world that includes NASA, the navy, the air force. Around here it’s nothing to see attack and surveillance aircraft, Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (armed drones), aircraft carriers and nuclear subs cruising by.
I can’t imagine living anywhere I’d love more. But it all depends on what floats your boat, and a lot of people don’t notice much. At least they’re polite and friendly when we pass each other on what my dad christened Penny Lane after he and Mom got married.
That’s the name of our side of the driveway, painted neatly on a sign that my headlights flick past as I turn in, small rocks pinging against the truck’s undercarriage.
The other side of the driveway has no sign anymore. But when it did, it was called Them Lane, a name Mom came up with, and I remember in the old days her sitting on the front porch, rocking Carme and me back and forth in the slider, shaking her head, making that clucking sound with her tongue like she does when there’s “a heap of meanness” in the news, as she puts it.
There isn’t much she hates more than bigotry and the petty ugliness that goes with it, and like a lot of people, we’ve put up with our share. The feuding neighbors didn’t have to live here anymore for others to join into their nasty games. Egging our cars, hurling rolls of toilet paper into Mom’s lighted trees, driving over the shrubbery, thinking it great fun to sabotage Dad’s garden with weed killer, poisoning the ducks and geese Carme and I had named and fed, sinking the bass boat, leaving a snake in the bird feeder.
To mention a few of their unamusing shenanigans, and we couldn’t prove a thing. Not that we doubted the identity of the offenders, and as I like to say, you don’t have to live on Them Lane or anywhere special to be a bigoted a-hole. The only requirements for membership are an overwhelming need to judge others for how they look, walk, talk, and whether or where they go to church. And what they own and who they love or don’t.
The cruel dues paid ensure a privileged position in a primitive pecking order, and the higher the rank, the lower one sinks into a hell of his or her own making. That’s what Mom says. Stupid and wasteful. What a destructive way to live when we come from the same stardust, every last one of us. She wrote it up in her most popular NASA lesson plan, number 112, from many years ago, the title “Live Among the Stars.” Her bestselling one to date for her science, technology, education and math, STEM, outreach, with more than 100,000 downloads last year alone.
Which must be some kind of record, and as I round a bend in the driveway that follows the curve of the river, Mom’s presence begins to glow sapphire blue. Eerily, like an interstellar nebula. Like Cherenkov radiation from an underwater nuclear reactor. Her blue light pollution lifts the foggy gloom as I get closer to home, listening to her over speakerphone.
“. . . After a shutdown? I don’t know, hon, I can’t seem to get back on track like I used to,” complaining about the furlough. “Who can when you never know if your funding’s about to be cut? Again. Or when you’ll be locked out of your building and computer. Again.”
Truth is, Mom’s not felt on track since an ultrasound showed a mass on her spleen. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, there was no question who would take care of her. She’s always called me her familiar.
“At least you can work from home,” I hear myself saying to her as I bump slowly along, driving closer to the blue glow.
Thinking of my sister’s silly joke. Don’t move toward the blue light, or you’ll wake up dead on Pluto!
“Well, as you of all people know, we’re not supposed to do any work at all . . .” Mom’s dubious voice, forever a schoolteacher at heart.
And no matter how resourceful, she believes in doing what’s right, including following instructions and rules. Or you go to the principal. Within reason, that is. Maybe. And it all depends.
“Overall, you’re saying her behavior has seemed more extreme . . . ,” thinking of what Dick said about Carme.
“I know, I know,” I reassure Mom, “but all those kids out there are waiting on pins and needles for your lesson plans . . . You’re like the ice cream truck coming, jingle, jingle. You make people want to help themselves.”
“Ha-ha-ha. If only that were true.”
“Actually, it is,” and I’m not making it up. “The kids can’t get enough. Not to mention the teachers relying on you. Look,” I lower my voice as if we’re conspiring, “as long as you don’t use a NASA computer, who’s going to know what you do in your own home at your own kitchen table while nobody’s paying you to work?” I feel my ire rising again and try to put a lid on it.
“Listen to you,” Mom’s surprised voice. “Since when are you such the rule breaker?”
“Only when they’re stupid and harmful.”
“Goodness, aren’t you full of it tonight? What on earth’s gotten into you?”
“Maybe everything,” as I enter what looks like Orbit City meets Christmas World.
“Lights, lights everywhere, and not a one can think,” to quote my sister’s nerdy rhyme that she used to singsong all the time, poking good-natured fun at our mother, who isn’t a mindless hoarder with an obsession. But close when it comes to her strands of miniblues that start with the twin stone columns I’m passing through, built of native granite by my great-grandfather. His pièce de résistance the copper plate etched with Chase Place, patinated green and pitted from unfriendly BB guns.
My run-flats roll slowly over loose stones, nearing our rambling white frame house, gracious and inviting in a nimbus that glows like Saint Elmo’s fire over silvery metal roofs, huge live oaks and magnolias. Mom’s minilights flicker excitedly, wrapped with engineering precision around trees, and illuminating an astonishing topiary she sculpts and trims with hedge clippers, transforming boxwoods, arborvitae and other perennials into cosmic wonders.
I drive through Jetson-style buildings on columns, rockets and flying saucers, crew capsules, planet-scapes inhabited by whimsical extraterrestrials in hues of blue, twinkling and shimmering a brilliant welcome. The rampant dragon breathes cobalt fire as I pass by, and the inflatable Santa astronaut is having a turbulent time but is ho-ho-happy. And I could swear there weren’t this many lights when I left for work in the pitch dark this morning.
Mom must have been industrious after she got home, the trees and boxwoods around the barn winking like galaxies of blue-eyed aliens. Never a good place to park around here. Nothing near the door, and I pull off the driveway onto the balding grassy area near the dock where I always leave my truck. Noticing Fran’s house on the other side of the garden, the windows glowing, a TV flickering through the draperies in the den.
Easton is up way past his bedtime in case the government shuts down and Fran heads back to Langley, dropping him at Mom’s on the way. Sometimes carrying him in conked out, and he wakes in the morning across the way as if teleported. Not ideal or beyond criticism, I suspect.
But when you grow up with furloughs and rockets, you don’t keep the same schedule as most folks you know. At least, we never have.
27
MY BOOTS squish wetly as I hurry through the biting cold, and a powerful weather system is headed here for sure.
My sensing it isn’t easily explained, maybe similar to animals knowing an earthquake, tsunami, volcanic eruption, stampede or other disaster is on the way. The silly family lore is that nerdy me came out of the box equipped with my own seismograph, temperature and pressure sensors, static ports, pitot tube, and ability to understand what clouds have to say.
All of which are letting me know what’s coming, and no matter how inconvenienced or distracted I might be, storms are magical to me. For a momen
t I fantasize that everything will stop as it did eons ago when squalls raged in and we’d batten down the hatches, everyone together. Watching thunderheads go to war over the river, taking umbrage darkly, hurling lightning bolts and booming like cannons.
Leading to the usual Chase contemplations about energy and mass, that everything is about the laws of physics and chemistry, including the big bang, and the way biological creatures act. Most of all people. Learning my mom’s homespun wisdom of letting momentous events play themselves out, like when lightning split the old tree with the tire swing by the dock.
Once we got past the loss of our woody childhood playmate, the joke was that the live oak became a dead one. Eventually we took it down, using the lumber to help build the loft that Carme and I would occupy on the barn’s second floor. Fortunately, not every natural drama is hazardous, and I love going to sleep to the loud hammering of a hard rain on the corrugated tin roof. Or best of all, waking up to a foot of snow piled on tree branches, pine boughs, the bird feeders, big flakes drifting down like in a paperweight.
I always knew the instant my eyes blinked open in the early dawn, could feel the damp chill, the silence as complete as when I’m surrounded by acoustic foam in the anechoic chamber. As insulated from outside interference as when in the HIRF lab. I’d sit up in bed, pushing the curtain aside, feeling the window’s ice-cold glass, the porch light illuminating black tree trunks and dark-green tightly furled leaves against pure white.
Darting around in a limbic hunt for coats, mittens, boots, wherever Carme and I stashed them last because Hampton is surrounded by water that warms the air just enough to be a spoiler. On the wrong side of the snow line, often we’re slammed with only the miserable stuff. Sleet and rain, ice and downed power lines, the grocery stores sold out of milk and bread, total pandemonium during life and work as usual.
But a showstopping snow (didn’t take much) was a rare gift that meant no school, and nonessential government employees like Mom and Dad not going in. It meant hot chocolate and staying up to watch TV, and building fires and igloos, snowball fights and sledding. And Carme and I lying on our backs in deep powder, making angel wings, and trudging new paths, leaving our footprints for all to see, if only temporarily.
Everything fresh and clean until it wasn’t anymore, and my face is numb. I can’t feel my feet as I haul my gear through the volatile night. Blasts of frigid air grab at my chemical suit, my gear and hair, and I’m struck once again by the spell nature casts, all creatures great and small hunkered down, huddling to keep warm, the air heavy and stone still. Just the sounds of the wind kicking in angrily, rocking trees and shaking shrubbery like frantic pompoms, sending dead leaves fleeing and swirling.
Walking fast, head bowed, nearing the family timber-framed barn. Need to get inside and out of these wet things fast before they flash freeze on me, the windchill somewhere in the neighborhood of −23 Celsius (−10 Fahrenheit), if I had to guess. Headed to my private habitat, for all practical purposes a monster garage that in an earlier era was appointed with stalls and haylofts for donkeys and cows.
Kept warm and well fed by all accounts, and in more recent memory my sister and I fostered a number of rescues. A potbellied pig, a gaggle of ornamental chickens, rabbits and my pet fainting goat, who easily collapsed in a panic. I named him Boo after my favorite character in To Kill a Mockingbird, prompting Carme and others to blurt out the poor goat’s name loudly and when least expected, causing him to topple.
No furry or feathery friends at Chase Place now, not since the family bulldog, Ruger, went on to glory last spring, and gosh darn it’s cold. Scary cold, like you’d die in no time if stranded outside, and I’m shivering badly, my keys jingling as I stiffly find the right one with my frozen fingers. Hurrying past the shut bay door, big enough to drive a tractor or small airplane through, and mind you I said small.
Dad may be an inventive genius, but he’s not always practical, can be more than a little forgetful, what we kindly refer to as being the absentminded professor, except he couldn’t possibly teach the brilliant madness brewing inside that brain of his. But I’m here to tell you it’s the little crap that will get you, which is why I always work out problems on paper first. Although there’s no need to bother when it’s a question of a 10.6-meter wingspan (35 feet) fitting through a 9.1-meter-wide (30 feet) bay door.
A minus B, simple subtraction tells you the result won’t be optimal. Did no good to tell him either, and moving the fuselage of the ’54 Piper Super Cub inside the barn was fine. Towing it out after he’d put the wings back on was another story when it was time for a test flight on the grass strip that used to run along the river a couple decades ago.
That plane eventually got traded up for the ’65 Beechcraft Baron he keeps in a hangar at the Newport News airport, the plane Carme and I learned to fly. We were too young for lessons when it was the misfit of a Piper, although I have fragmented memories of being in Mom’s lap, looking out the side window, our plane powered by what sounded like a huge lawn mower. Feeling the cool wind rushing in. Looking down at our house and barn getting smaller.
As we soared over the river, I could see the runways at Langley Air Force Base. And NASA’s A-frame gantry, looming on the horizon like a colossal swing set, as if built by giants. I remember wondering why anyone would be earthbound if the choice was that or traveling through the air, the ether, and heading to the side door I always use, I wonder why the porch light is out.
Because it was working fine this morning when I left for Langley in the pitch dark. Looking around, I listen to the wind howl and moan around the eaves, blowing through trees in an agitated stage whisper. The hair prickles on the back of my neck as I feel a presence again, that same strange sensation of being watched, aware of it like the insidious pull of a magnet or electrical vibration.
The lock clicks softly as I turn the key not twice but once to the left. It’s also not right that the dead bolt wasn’t set, and I walk in, the security alarm beeping instantly. That’s good, at least. Shutting the heavy oak door behind me, I’m enveloped by warm darkness, deep and dense like velvet, mindful of the familiar odors of old wood, paints, solvents and possibly something else.
A whiff of a fragrance so fragile it might be imagined, and there it is again. And just as quickly gone. As if I’ll turn around and find Carme close enough to touch. Smelling faintly of White Musk. Seated at a worktable, looking like a hologram of me. Armed with pencils and a binder full of graph paper. Working out problems and predictions in the language of everything, math.
I enter the code on the alarm system’s keypad, and the beeping stops, silence abruptly returning as the air vaguely stirs near my head. I feel it again as faint as a breath, and it’s not the heat pumps kicking in. It’s not fans blowing or a draft, and if it’s what I think it is, then that’s not normal, either. Especially when Dad isn’t home.
Someone’s been in here and maybe still is.
00:00:00:00:0
QUIETLY, with no sudden moves, I lower my gear bags to the floor. My right hand releases the gun from its tactical thumb-drive holster, index finger straight out above the trigger, weapon drawn and ready.
Listening, motionless like a hulking iceberg in my frostbitten ballistic and chemical gear. Trying to stop shivering inside, to slow down my breathing. Whatever stirred overhead like a hummingbird seems to have vanished in thin air. I know it’s not a barn owl, flying squirrel or other nocturnal critter flitting about. Nothing alive by the usual definition, and I’m on red alert.
Too many things aren’t right, and I streak down the list. Extra strands of lights around the barn as if welcoming me home. The porch light out. The dead bolt unlatched. The motion-sensitive lantern-sconces not coming on when I walked into the entryway just now. More disturbing is what stirred overhead in the dark, stealthy quiet, creating but a whiff of rotor wash. I throw o
n the dead bolt and reset the alarm.
“Anybody home?” And what a dumb thing to shout out loud, one might suppose.
Except not by my calculation. Mom’s an acre away inside the house, and I know that because I was just on the phone with her. Fran’s home with Easton. Dad’s possibly at Langley and could be on his way to Wallops Island. In any case, he wouldn’t sneak around in here with the lights out, spying and not answering.
So, unless an unknown intruder managed to unlock the door, bypass the alarm system, and wears my sister’s signature White Musk scent? I’m not coming up with candidates for who might be in the barn besides me. Unless it’s her. Otherwise I’d be a lot more aggressive than I am right now. In kill mode, if necessary.
“Carme? Are you in here?”
I’m not afraid of her. Even if I should be, and I don’t want to shoot my sister. That can’t happen, and we also don’t need to be shooting each other. Thoughts like this scream through my head as I feel along the wall near the door for the light switch. Flipping it up and down, up and down.
Click-click-click-click.
Not working, and I need to dial it back, take deep breaths, take it easy. If I’ve learned nothing else, it’s to get in sync and pay attention. Not to freak out. Doing what I was trained. Laser focus. Nothing personal because birth and death aren’t. Only everything else.
I’m aware of my thawing hands burning and full of pins. Of my trigger finger and the residual numbness in the scar. Not as bad as it was, but I don’t have the same sense of touch, and if she wanted me dead, I would be.
Quantum Page 23
