Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

Throwing it all away.

  For your family.

  My teeth were razors in my mouth. I didn’t stop to think about how we’d gotten here, how we’d gone from a passed note to attacking each other in the library. I just spat back. “I would give everything,” I snapped, “do anything, for any one of them. Unlike you.”

  Another shush, sharper now, from below. Footsteps on the loft stairs. A voice: “Excuse me.”

  Vanessa covered her face with her hands. “I didn’t mean that,” she moaned. “Zach, no. No, I didn’t mean that.”

  “My dad told me once, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them.” She took a step toward me, arms out. I backed away, looking her up and down. “I’m glad I know now.”

  “Zach.”

  “Excuse me,” came the voice again. The librarian, Mrs. Barrett, appeared on the stairs, breathing hard. “You’re being very loud. And the bell has rung. I suggest you move along to your classes.”

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Zach, wait,” Vanessa pleaded. “Zach, it wasn’t up to me. It was my mother, she—I didn’t—she—”

  “Miss Drake,” interrupted Mrs. Barrett. “The bell has rung. Let’s break this up. Now, please.”

  “You just don’t get it,” I said. “You have so much. I don’t care what happened. It’s hard? No problem. You’ll just quit. Do the work? That’s all I do. But not you. Right? Have you ever—”

  “Mr. Mays,” Mrs. Barrett stormed. “Move it along now, or I’ll ask you to join me in the principal’s office.”

  “Nah,” I said, backing down the stairs. “That’s cool. I quit.”

  Vanessa’s eyes flew open. “Zach—”

  I turned and took the steps two at a time, without looking back. Mrs. Barrett repeated Vanessa’s name twice more, and then I pushed through the library door, into the annex. At the end of the hall, I walked right past the administrative office, out the door, into the afternoon sunlight. Nobody stopped me. Nobody followed.

  I’d needed more space.

  Now I had all the space in the world.

  30

  Vanessa

  February became March.

  I couldn’t stop being mad at Mom.

  Cece wouldn’t speak to me.

  Zach hated me.

  I missed him.

  Things couldn’t get worse.

  * * *

  It was difficult to celebrate when the news arrived:

  Voyager has left the building, folks

  by Twylight Guy|March 4, 2013 • 4:11 p.m.

  Un. be. lievable. Unbelievable! Guys, it’s legit, it has happened: Voyager 1 has officially departed the solar system. According to the big scientists, ol’ V’ger passed through the heliosphere sometime around August, last year. Our spindly little friend has eclipsed our wildest dreams; it’s the farthest man-made object from our little blue home …

  It was good news, to be sure, but I hated that it made me think of my father. Had he seen the news? I’d wondered about him so many times over the years. Not only why he left us, but what had become of him. He’d simply never been in touch. I told Mom once I didn’t care to know what he did with himself, but she suggested I was wrong. “When you’re older, maybe you’ll be curious,” she’d said. “You might even want to find him.” Over my grumbling, she’d added gently, “And when you find those answers, I’ll be right here.”

  That day might come—but it hadn’t yet. I was content to invent stories about him, chief among them the notion that he had another family now. A new daughter, perhaps, one who didn’t yet know all his secrets. For my father, knowledge and power were inextricably linked to some false notion of love. When he no longer held the upper hand, that’s when he withdrew his affection, his kindness.

  Though she was a fiction, this new daughter broke my heart. One day, I wanted to tell her, you’ll know everything he knows. And you’ll find out what happens when he has nothing left to teach you.

  Voyager was gone, carrying with it a record of everything we were: our voices, our feelings, the pulse of our brain waves, the thrum of our hearts, beating into the dark. What had my father taken with him of me? Of my mother? Little more than memories, I suspected. Ephemeral things, memories. Easy enough to put out of one’s mind.

  Voyager was gone, and there was no bringing it back.

  Just like him.

  * * *

  I followed my nose into the kitchen. It was late; I’d fallen asleep without meaning to. Aaron was bent over the countertop, chopping scallions; on the stove behind him, a deep pot of steel-cut oats bubbled. He’d set out his other ingredients: two brown eggs, a wedge of Gruyère, a sriracha bottle. I knew before I reached the doorway that I’d find him, and not Mom. Since her … betrayal, life around our house had changed. We hadn’t shared dinner in ages. Aaron kept long hours at the office, and Mom stayed mostly out of sight. Too ashamed, I hoped, to face us.

  My stomach rumbled, loudly enough to give me away.

  Aaron looked up and grinned. “I thought you were asleep already.”

  I shrugged, then indicated the food: “Can I get in on this?”

  His eyes flicked past me uncertainly, and I turned, following his gaze to find my mother, sitting uneasily at the dining table, in shadow.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “There’s enough for three,” Aaron said. “I’ll get another egg.”

  “No. That’s fine,” I said. “I’m good.”

  I turned to leave, but Mom stopped me with a word: “Vanessa.”

  I paused in the doorway, my back to her.

  “I will eat in another room,” she volunteered quietly. “We don’t have to talk.”

  I hesitated, then said—coldly, flatly—“Yeah. Could you?”

  Without a word, my mother pushed back from the table. I turned away as she passed by.

  “I’ll bring it to you,” Aaron called after her. Down the hall, the bedroom door closed softly. He sighed, then turned toward me.

  “Is this the part where you defend her?” I asked, folding my arms.

  “No,” he said. He bent into the refrigerator to find a third egg. When he popped up again, he admitted, “Hell, we’ve barely started talking again. But—you know, Vanessa, you’ll learn this more as you get older—”

  “Here we go.” I rolled my eyes.

  “—but people make mistakes.”

  Trite, Aaron. “That’s too soft a word.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “And yet it’s exactly the right word.”

  “Mistakes aren’t calculated,” I said. “What she did…”

  “Don’t confuse mistake with accident,” he said.

  “Semantics. Lawyerspeak.”

  “Husbandspeak.”

  “But not fatherspeak,” I said. Inwardly, I winced. I couldn’t believe I’d said it—but I didn’t take it back, either. Aaron turned away and cracked the eggs into a skillet. Without acknowledging my words, he pushed the wedge of cheese toward me.

  “Shred,” he said. “Please.”

  As I grated the cheese into a bowl, I skimmed the newspaper. He’d left the Chronicle on the counter. According to it, the world was in disarray. The president of Venezuela had cancer. The United Nations was doubling down on sanctions against North Korea. A map depicted seismic activity in the Sea of Japan.

  “Anything interesting?” he asked. He stirred the scallions into the oats, then filled three bowls. I passed the cheese to him and kept reading.

  “Seven earthquakes in Japan in the last seven days,” I summarized. “They say none are particularly significant when taken individually, but together, ‘scientists believe they may suggest an imminent, larger event.’”

  “Oh, I hope that isn’t true,” Aaron said. “They’ve been through enough. Did I ever tell you about the story I heard, after that big quake in 2011? Saddest thing I’d heard in a long time.”

  That Aaron wore his heart on his sleeve, I knew, was one reason Mom had fallen for him. I hoisted myself onto the c
ounter, watching as he drizzled sriracha over each bowl. “What was it?”

  “Story of an old man in this little town,” he said. “Otsuchi, I think it was called. Quiet old man. Not prone to emotional displays. But he’d lost his cousin to the tsunami.” He passed me a bowl of oats and a spoon. “Take it to your mom?”

  I glared at him.

  “Had to try,” he said. “You keep that one. I’ll be back.” Another bowl in hand, he disappeared down the hall. As I waited for him to return, I punctured my egg yolk, then stirred it into the oatmeal. When he came back, he said, “Where was I?”

  Through a mouthful, I mumbled, “Grumpy old man.”

  “That’s right. Nobody ever saw him laugh or cry. Well, after the tsunami, he went out to his garden, or what was left of it, and right in the middle of it, he built a telephone booth.” He blew on a spoonful. After a bite, he continued. “He put a telephone inside, but he didn’t connect it to anything. Just a telephone.”

  “Why?”

  “When he felt sad about his lost family, he would go into the booth and pick up the phone.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t understand.”

  “Something happened when he did. He talked to his cousin.”

  “God. That’s so tragic.”

  “All the things he could never say aloud, he said into the phone.” Another bite. “It was cathartic, I imagine. Well, word got around. People told stories about the old man with the telephone that could talk to the dead. They called it the wind telephone.

  “One day, the old man looked outside, and there was a stranger in his garden. Another old man, just staring at the telephone booth. He was there for a very long time, just standing there. Finally, he went inside, and he picked up the phone—and he just began sobbing. Before long, strangers from all over the country came to the phone booth.”

  Aaron poured a glass of water for each of us, and we ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “What was it like here?” I asked him. “In 2011.”

  “People were terrified,” he said. “The tsunami was supposed to hit us hard. And we all remembered how bad that storm had been, just a few years earlier. News said we should find high ground, so we did. Then … nothing happened.”

  I thought about the debris I’d seen on the beach in Big Sur. Even the swells from a storm like that one, so minor compared to a tsunami, had been immensely powerful.

  Aaron blew on another spoonful. “Imagine,” he said. “Finding oil in a place like this. The sea’s just lurking out there, waiting to teach us a lesson.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But we’re pretty high up.” I thought about Zach and his family, practically sitting ducks down there at sea level. “We’re … lucky.”

  Aaron shook his head sadly. “In Japan, they lost everything. Can you imagine? Being so adrift, so desperate for one last moment with the people you’ve lost, that you confess your sins on a disconnected telephone in an old man’s garden? Makes you think, you know?”

  My cheeks flushed hot, and I looked away.

  He kissed my forehead lightly. “Night, kiddo.”

  * * *

  Here’s the thing about Voyager: Eventually, it’ll run out of power. It’ll stop transmitting and sail through the dark, just a lonely artifact flung into the night by its makers. We won’t be able to reach it, the gulf between us as wide as death. None of us who lived now—or any of our generations to come, likely—would ever know if Voyager found life somewhere in the vast dark. We would never hear from it again.

  With a heavy sigh, I peered through OSPERT’s viewfinder. Though the sky was clouded over, I wasn’t looking for celestial bodies. I was searching for life. Just one.

  I brought the firelight of the oil platforms into view. In the dark they appeared just as Zach had drawn them: loathsome, insectile. Steel monstrosities, gutting the planet. Our town depended on them—but that didn’t make them benevolent.

  I watched someone walk a dog on the beach, flashlight bobbing, then scanned the town until I found the market. The lights were out, the lot empty. I moved to the impound lot, but I didn’t see Zach. Even if he were on the boat, I wouldn’t have known. The blankets he’d hung over the wheelhouse windows would have hidden him away.

  With a sigh, I gave up looking for him and just whiled away time observing our little town’s drowsy activities: someone pumping gas beneath the lights of the Chevron sign, someone mopping the floors in the all-night McDonald’s. The diner was alive, truckers and retirees stopping in for their evening—Wait. Was that—? I sharpened OSPERT’s focus. On the sidewalk outside Dot’s, Zach was removing a checkered apron. He folded it, pinned it between his knees, tugged on his hoodie. He worked at Dot’s now?

  I hadn’t seen him since the day he’d walked out of the library. In health ed each day, I waited, hoping it was all just an outburst, that he would come through the door and take his place at the back of the class.

  But he’d really quit.

  He tore open a white envelope and removed a slip of paper. A paycheck? It brought a big smile to his face, and he folded it and stuffed it into his pocket. My heart ached, watching him stroll contentedly across the lot.

  You can’t just save him, Cece had said.

  She was right, I knew. Cece was always right.

  But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

  At the edge of the parking lot, he paused. There were no streetlamps where he stood, and in the dark, he tipped his head upward. Curious, I moved to the window and looked up. The clouds had parted above Orilly, ever so slightly, and a watery moon shone through, just for the briefest moment. And in that moment, I felt … calm. We weren’t speaking, and our paths had firmly diverged, but the same sky connected us.

  When I peered through the scope again, Zach had walked out of view. I resisted the urge to turn OSPERT and follow him home. Instead, I closed the drapes and sank onto my bed. Had our paths really diverged? In ten years, in twenty, would Zach still be working at diners and grocery stores? Would I be any different? Voyager, that little bucket of bolts, had conquered the sun’s gravity, had left our entire solar system in its rearview mirror.

  Surely I could do the same with Orilly.

  Couldn’t I?

  31

  Zach

  “You’re late,” Derek said when I came in.

  He sat at the kitchen table, his back to the door. I dropped my backpack and apron onto the couch, then joined him. He studied me over a glass of milk.

  “You’re late a lot of nights.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I noticed that, you see.” He wiped milk away from the mustache he’d grown practically overnight. “You’re tired, too. More than usual. I noticed that, too.”

  “Same as you,” I said.

  “I noticed Leah’s here more, longer. Here when you’re not. She’s tired, too, you know.”

  That was true as well. Some nights she practically slept upright in Mama’s room, in the chair beside the window. I felt bad about it, but what was I supposed to do?

  I took the paycheck from my pocket and pushed it across the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “Money,” I said. “Same as it always is.”

  He took the envelope but didn’t open it. “It never bothers you, Z? All this money you earn, just handing it all over?”

  “What else would I do with it?” As he opened the envelope, I took his dishes to the sink and started scrubbing them.

  Behind me, he said, “Z, what is this?”

  I looked at his reflection in the kitchen window. “What’s what?”

  “You get a raise?”

  My spine stiffened.

  “No,” he said, flipping the check to the earnings statement. The stub I’d forgotten to remove. “No, these hours here. They’re not paying you more, Z, you’re working more.” He started to assemble the facts out loud. “Working more. Coming home late. Tired all the damn time, making everyone else damn tired.” The chair scraped the floor as he stood
up in a rush. “Z, don’t tell me you quit. I better not hear that.”

  “Okay,” I said. Lightly, trying to lift the moment. “I won’t.”

  If it hadn’t been so late, if Mama and the girls weren’t asleep, I think he might have thrown something at me. Instead, he gripped the back of the chair so hard I saw the molded plastic flex. Then, with a grunt of frustration, he wheeled and stormed through the front door. The screen clattered shut. I could hear him outside, pacing on the gravel.

  Quietly, I put away the dishes, then sat down at the table. The house filled the silence well enough on its own: air rattling in the pipes, the faint groan of the settling foundation. My brother didn’t return for several minutes, and when he did, he didn’t sit down. He stood at the edge of the kitchen, the front door open behind him. I could hear the surf in the distance, like faint radio static.

  “God damn it,” he swore. He ran his hands through his hair, and then he did sink into the chair again. “God damn it, Zach.”

  Derek looked exhausted, but it was more than that. The expression he wore was one of defeat. I’d seen both of those looks on my parents’ faces. In our house, exhaustion and defeat often went hand in hand.

  “It’s better this way,” I ventured. “You know it is.”

  He’d buried his face in his hands, elbows splayed wide on the table. He said something, but I couldn’t understand it.

  “I don’t know what you said.”

  His hands parted, and he peered at me with wet, red eyes. “I said I won’t let you.”

  “It’s done, D. I already—”

  He shook his head. “I can’t believe you would…” He trailed off, then tried again. “After what happened to me…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This, Z.” Derek spread his arms wide, indicating our home, everything in it. “This.”

  Dad had dropped out of school in the tenth grade. Took a job, started helping his family. When he died, Derek had quit college and come home. He didn’t complain, didn’t protest; nobody asked him to make the right decision. It had cost him things. Cost him a life.