by Jason Gurley
Bo went into the water then and lifted Zach up from below; Adele got her hands around him and pulled. I gasped at the sight of Zach’s injuries as he rose out of the water: his hands and stomach were bloated, and one arm swung limp at his side. His right leg was folded in places that bones are not meant to fold. His jeans were shredded, revealing swollen and gashed skin beneath.
He was talking again, perhaps dimly aware that things were happening. It sounded as if he was reciting his home address, though I could barely understand him.
With a final heft, Bo shoved Zach upward, and Adele yanked him into the boat. Zach uttered a terrible, primal cry of pain as he tumbled inside. Adele yanked the cord on the outboard, and Bo swam toward my rowboat. “Get ready!” Adele shouted toward the shore. “We’re coming!”
I turned toward Derek, but he wasn’t there. His lantern glowed deep below the water, and a column of bubbles swept to the surface.
Bo grabbed the side of my boat and saw the alarm on my face. “What?”
“Derek’s down there, he’s still down there—”
PART FOUR
After
43
Vanessa
I arrive at the hospital a little too early. The familiar door to his room is closed, a curtain drawn over its little glass window. I wait in a little alcove with chairs and a television. Leah is there with the girls. Robin and Rachael run to me, and as they squeeze me from two directions, I give Leah a smile.
“Waiting?” she asks. “We were just in a few minutes ago. He’s doing okay. Some pain today, more than usual.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Poor guy.”
Robin asks Leah if they can watch television, and both girls sit down and fiddle with the remote until they find cartoons.
“You doing all right?” Leah asks.
“I think so.”
“This town,” she says. “It takes so much.”
“Yes,” I agree. For the first time, I really understand.
* * *
When I check his room again, the door stands open, and I peek inside. I can see him on the hospital bed, mummified in casts, tethered with clear tubes. His room is quiet, and I wonder, not for the first time, how he manages to keep his sanity.
“Hi,” I say.
Derek can’t move his head. “Vanessa?”
“Who else?”
“Weren’t you just here?” He exhales. “No. Leah was just here.”
“And the girls,” I say. “They’re in the waiting room. Don’t worry.” I cross the room and stand beside his bed, and pat his hand. “I heard today was difficult.”
Derek rolls his eyes. “They tell you not to worry, don’t sweat, the pain goes away. They don’t tell you first it’ll double or quadruple before it does.”
“I brought you some books,” I say, holding up a bag.
He offers a sideways grin. “Maybe when they let me move my arms again I’ll read ’em.”
“I thought I could read a bit. Or Leah, maybe.”
“Yeah?” He considers this. “Maybe. Nothing funny. I can’t laugh.”
“You see the pictures?” I ask him. “Of the town?”
“Leah and I watched some of the news together,” he says. “It’s hard for me to see. I keep thinking back, how many things had to go wrong, how many things had to line up just right, for me to even find Zach.” His voice is shaky. “After the wave, everything was chaos. They airlifted us off the rigs, you know. To Monterey. You know it took two days for me to get back to Orilly? The truck was okay. And that’s how I heard about Zach. On the radio in my truck. Lot of chatter, and someone said his name. I hadn’t even been worried about him. Far as I knew, he was at his school, far enough from the coast to be safe. But he wasn’t. I should have been worried. I should have been trying to call every two minutes until I found him. And look what happened,” he finishes. The color has seeped out of his face. “Look what…”
“Hey,” I say. “Hey, come on.”
He clears his throat, then winces. He tries to change the subject. “You, uh, hear anything else? About anything?”
“They’re saying that they’re going to fill the hole. I guess they don’t know if it’ll be safe to rebuild there. I sort of hope they leave it wild, you know? Even if it does mean people have to find a new place to live.”
“Let me tell you what,” Derek says. “Orilly? She’s a working town. No patience for wasted space. In a couple of years, you’ll never know what happened there.”
I sit with him for a while, and we talk about the girls, about their mother. It’s all easy and light until I notice Derek’s eyes are wet. “They don’t tell you this, either,” he says. “Flat on your back, can’t go anywhere, you have all this time to think. I don’t normally have this kind of time.” He hesitates. “All I can think about is Zach. The way he looked. The way he sounded. I just…” His eyes flick to meet mine. “You know?”
I squeeze Derek’s hand. “I know. Me too.”
44
Zach
Vanessa finishes reading the news story aloud, then puts her phone away. She leans forward. Her hair is swept back into a ponytail, revealing the eyelets in her ears. I like it this way, but I don’t say so.
“None of it,” she says. “Really? You don’t remember?”
I shake my head, then change the subject. “I’m sorry. For leaving like I did. I didn’t say good-bye.”
She tells me we have already discussed this. But I don’t have that memory, either.
“You went to school,” she says, “and then you came back. You never said why.”
“Because.” I shrug. “Everyone I love is here.”
She kisses me.
* * *
I am okay.
By that, of course, I mean that my body will recover. “Okay” is subjective. This is “okay”: My right leg has a steel pin in it now, running from my ankle to my knee. “You might set off the metal detectors at the airport,” my physical therapist warned me. But she doesn’t know I’ve never been on an airplane. I don’t see much reason to start now. The doctors installed a thing called a halo, which is this series of metal rings that surround my leg, with spokes that radiate inward and jut into my bone, holding everything together as I heal. Vanessa thinks I look like an android. I’m happy to still have a leg. I’m told it may not work as well as it used to, that I might need a cane for the first six or eight months. This seems both a small price to pay and a fitting reminder of everything that’s happened in the last year.
Well, a reminder, at least, of the things I can actually remember.
I remember searching for Vanessa at the resort. I remember falling in the parking lot. Four cracked ribs, they tell me, along with a separated shoulder and broken humerus; my chest and arm are wrapped in a stiff plaster shell.
I remember the sound of the wave as it came for us.
But that’s all. I don’t remember anything else before waking up here, at the hospital in San Luis Obispo, the nearest hospital that wasn’t already overcrowded. I’m told many times how fortunate I am. “A few more hours in the water,” my doctor said, “and we’d be looking at hypothermia, possibly gangrene. You probably wouldn’t have made it.”
The sea took my father. It came for Derek and for me, and it almost succeeded. But we are, I’ve come to understand, a family of divers. Mama has submerged herself in her memories; unwilling to live only in a world in which my father does not, she moves between both. And so did Derek, who, despite his best efforts, did not kill himself attempting to save me. The two of them taught me something without ever saying a word: that their love isn’t afraid, that it’ll brave the deepest darkness to stage a rescue attempt.
Dad’s boat is gone. I try to imagine it adrift somewhere at sea, for as long as it might have remained afloat. Perhaps, I think, my father will be reunited with it. Perhaps they’ll chug slowly toward the horizon, each of them made whole, together and content at last. It is a nice thought.
We lost our house, but then,
so did almost everyone in Orilly. DepthKor, Derek’s employer, was generous enough to assign our family a small house in the oil district, where the seasonal workers live. Leah tells me it’s even nicer than the duplex Dad worked so hard to provide for us, which makes me a little sad. The girls visit and tell me how nice it is to live in the new house; Leah’s there with them, at least until Derek can come home. I ask if Mama likes it, but they don’t have the right words to answer me. It’s all right, I tell them. I know.
Vanessa is here every day. She rants about the newspapers getting the details wrong. She reads me stories about how the federal agencies have taken charge of the recovery and rebuilding efforts. The sinkhole that I’d been trapped in has been drained; the hole was nearly six hundred yards across at its widest, she tells me, and ninety-four feet deep. When I’ve had enough of disaster literature, she reads to me from The Varieties of Scientific Experience.
I’m lucky, everyone says, and I think about that. My brother pried a house off my leg, then dropped it on himself and broke his back—but he’s alive. The admissions officer at Fleck wrote to tell me they’d hold my spot, and wished me a speedy recovery. My family’s safe and dry. Every day, Vanessa appears in my doorway.
Lucky.
Imagine that.
45
Vanessa
The skywatching group meets near Annette, thirty-five miles east of Paso Robles, on a vast and empty plain between craggy hills and farmland. The seasons have changed, and the hillsides have gone orange and gold. Not that I can see the colors; from here, the city lights are muted by the mountains, and the night skies are rich and black.
The meetup is part science club, part hippie commune. There are weekend stargazers and serious astronomers alike. Scattered all over the field are clusters of people with tents and telescopes. Some drink wine. Someone’s playing a guitar.
The irony is not lost on me. Take a year off, my father had said. Just drive around, look at the stars. Here’s something I’ve learned in the last few months: Even an asshole can be right once.
Mom waits until I’ve parked the Volkswagen, then unbuckles and climbs into the back, already yawning. “Coffee,” she mutters. “Where did you put the coffee?”
She brews us each a cup on the portable stove, then sits in the open door of the bus, taking in the scene. “This is … kind of cool,” she reluctantly admits. “I might envy you. Don’t get me wrong. I’m never going to sleep, not until you come back home.”
The Annette meetup is my dry run and something Mom and I agreed on. She’d join me for a short overnight trip, ostensibly to put her mind at ease. In the morning, we’ll sleep late, and I’ll drop her in Orilly before I leave again. I’ll drive north first, spend a month or so in the Northwest, then head east before the snow comes. Aaron and I had pored over a map, plotting a course that would take me through as many of the darkest Bortle sites as possible; that meant spending half my gap year right here in the West, venturing into the least populated regions of Nevada and Utah.
“I wish Cece had taken a gap year, too,” Mom says, not for the first time. “I’d feel better knowing you had someone with you.”
“I’m going to be fine,” I tell her for the fiftieth time. “And I’ll see her when I get to New Haven. She’s got her own stuff going on.”
Cece was desperate to coordinate my visit with Ada’s, ensuring we wouldn’t overlap, and that I wouldn’t cramp her style. She’d been texting me for days:
you have to give me DATES, nessa.
WHEN ARE YOU COMING
To which I’d replied:
I’ll see you when I see you.
THE ROAD WILL NOT BE RUSHED.
“I know, I know.” With a sigh, Mom sinks onto the bed. “I’m just saying.”
Outside the bus, the field is utterly dark. A shadow approaches, holding a flashlight with a red bulb. “Cool setup,” the new arrival says, taking in the bus. “Did you build this?” She’s a few years older than me, hair tucked in a loose bun beneath a kerchief. “Tell me it has a name.”
Mom elbows me, but I’m embarrassed to answer. So Mom gives the girl a smile and says, “It’s my daughter’s bus. She named it Voyager Three.”
The girl laughs. “Of course you did. It’s perfect.”
She invites us to join her group, and we do for a little while. They’re knotted around telescopes, taking turns at one another’s eyepieces. Someone’s brought a gorgeous Celestron—but before I can ask to try it, I spot the Meade.
“Is that…?”
The girl is Tallulah, but she goes by Tally. She introduces me to her friend, Geoffrey, who owns the Meade. “Not every day you get to look through a fifteen-thousand-dollar scope,” she says. “He’ll let you try it. Won’t you, Geoff?”
He does, and the sky is crisp and alive, both larger and smaller than I’ve ever seen it. A sigh escapes my lips, and I hear Geoffrey laugh. “Everybody makes that sound when they look through this beauty,” he says. “I should name it that sigh.” I laugh, a little uncomfortably, but he goes on: “It’s the sound people make when they see the stars for what they really are.”
I look up from the Meade. “And what are they?”
“Why, they’re us,” Tally says.
I usher Mom over. “I’m afraid I’ll break it,” she says of the Meade, but Geoffrey says, “No, dear, the view’s more likely to break you.” Mom bends over the eyepiece, then snaps upright: “Oh my god.” She whirls to face me, accusingly. “You never told me it was like this.”
“You never asked,” I say, but she’s already returned to the eyepiece.
The hours unspool, and it only gets darker. The meetup will last all night, and Mom is having more fun, I think, than she’d anticipated. Tally offers her a glass of wine, then takes her around to meet new people. While she’s occupied, I slip away, back to the Volkswagen.
I roll open the skylight, set up OSPERT’s tripod. With my eye against the silicone cup, the sky gives up its secrets effortlessly. Against such darkness, Saturn is sharper than I’ve ever seen. I can almost track the little freckle of Titan’s shadow upon her rings. The skies, the stars, all these wonders: For so long I’d been afraid my father had marked them as his own, that I had no right to them myself. But it wasn’t true. It never had been.
It occurs to me then that the email from Cornell is still in my inbox, unopened; I haven’t thought about it since graduation day. Does that mean I’ve made my peace with that lost dream? Was it ever the dream, really? Cornell is, after all, only a school. Here, beneath this vast, dark sky, it’s hard to believe I ever could have been satisfied dreaming so small.
I wonder about Zach in San Diego. It’s the middle of the night, but maybe he isn’t sleeping. He has a cell phone now, and I take out my iPhone to text him. But outside the bus, in the dark, a murmur passes through the crowd, and I wonder what they’ve seen. I step down into the field and crane my neck upward in time to see the winking marble that is the International Space Station as it drifts smoothly past.
The phone is smooth and cool in my hand. Without thinking much about it, I slip it back into my pocket and leave it there. The night is humming, alive; a glowing screen would threaten that. I stretch out on the grass, drenched in the dark, and watch as the universe wheels overhead. This is everything I’ve ever ached for. Everything else falls away, and I understand, for the first time, that the skies belong to me.
They always have.
Acknowledgments
While writing is often a solitary pursuit, publishing a novel is no such thing. To that end, I owe a great deal of thanks to many people.
I am most grateful to Connie Hsu, my editor at Roaring Brook Press, for bringing out of me a book that might otherwise never have existed, and for pressing and shaping it into the novel she knew it could be. And to Seth Fishman, my agent at The Gernert Company, who lined up all the pieces so that this book could happen.
My thanks to Jennifer Besser and everyone else at Macmillan and Roaring Brook who pitche
d in to make this book what you hold in your hands. Aimee Fleck, Brian Luster, Tom Nau, Jennifer Sale, Kristin Dulaney, Jill Freshney, Lindsay Wagner, and Morgan Rath: thank you for everything you brought to this project. Special thanks to Megan Abbate for her steady hand and quick attention throughout.
Catherine Frank edited some early drafts of this novel, for which I’m deeply appreciative. Felicia Gurley, Monica Villaseñor, and Daniel H. Wilson each read early pages and drafts and steered me away from certain death more than once. Thanks to Sarrah Figueroa and Philip Elizondo, who double-checked some of my inadequate Spanish. Any mistakes that live on in this novel are entirely my own.
Writing a novel set on the California coastline was a daily journey back to the years I spent in Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo, but my depiction of California should be taken with several spoonfuls of salt, as I’ve taken a few liberties. Orilla del Cielo, you’ll be startled to hear, does not exist. The disasters that befall the town, however, bear similarities to some real events: The wind telephone, for example, is a real thing. It’s in Otsuchi, Japan, and has been visited by mourners since the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Tohoku. And in 1985, the eruption of Colombia’s Nevado del Ruiz volcano trapped thirteen-year-old Omayra Sánchez in water for three days before she succumbed to her injuries.
For this novel’s devotion to the stars and the sense of wonder they provoke, I must thank Ann Druyan and her late husband, Dr. Carl Sagan, for their lifelong ambition to share that wonder. Their work on the Voyager project and its Golden Record are timeless. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on or around August 25, 2012, some thirty-five years after its launch. The probe will continue its mission until around 2025, when it will finally run out of power; the probe itself, however, will keep right on going. It will likely outlast the existence of our entire species.
And finally: For eighteen months, this novel required much of my attention, which would not have been possible without the support and love of my family. Felicia, thank you for stealing me away—or sending me away—to the movies when I’m exhausted, and reminding me that I can do this; Akiko, thank you for the homemade chicken and dumplings, and for reminding me that I work too hard; Emma, thank you for the ticklefights and snuggly Star Trek marathons and afternoons spent sharing hot chocolate and reading together. Without you all, this would be no kind of life.
