We Are Satellites

by Sarah Pinsker

  “I know what you mean,” Julie said when Val voiced it later that night. They spoke with low voices, in case David was still awake. “It’s like, we don’t need to keep him bubble-wrapped, but did he have to pick such a dangerous career?”

  “Maybe he’s making up for having been such a trouble-less kid.”

  “And in fairness, I don’t think he picked it.”

  Val frowned. “He picked the Army. Though I’m not sure he did it because he wanted to do something dangerous, so much as because he thought it was his only good option?”

  “Why should that have been his only option?”

  “The thing he talks about—the noise . . .”

  Julie waved it away. “I’ve never figured out what that was about. He looks happier than he’s looked in a long time.”

  “I guess. It’s just maybe we should have tried harder to help him with that, or to help him figure out what came next, so he didn’t go off and make this decision on his own.”

  “We did try. You ran with him. We had a million conversations about what he might want to study, and visited a million schools, and helped him with a million essays. What more were we supposed to do?”

  “Maybe we should have asked.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not sure he would have answered.”

  Val wished she thought that were true.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SOPHIE

  Sophie heard all kinds of things if she pretended to sleep. That was how she’d found out she wasn’t a candidate for brain surgery, and how she’d learned the phrase “intractable seizures.” Sometimes she understood the things she overheard. Sometimes someone explained later or she looked up words, and the mysteries sorted into neat boxes.

  All in all, her parents were pretty good about telling the truth, but often it took a while. They talked it out between themselves before telling her, even when it was something that concerned her. The “brain surgery” conversation took place in her hospital room. “Intractable” in the car. The two best places to learn things were on the couch when they were talking in the dining room, or pretending to sleep in the back seat.

  When she was little she would add in the occasional fake snore, but she had since taken a theater class and learned that the trick to acting was not overacting. “Most people playing drunk exaggerate,” the teacher had said. “Real drunk people try hard to come across sober.” Sophie thought that was an odd thing to explain to middle schoolers, but she filed that information away, too.

  The hardest part was when she overheard something major and knew they were never going to tell her. Money stuff. Money stuff because of her. Seizure stuff they thought she wasn’t ready for. It was about her; why wouldn’t she want to hear it? She deserved to know.

  Now the thing David said—that he was being deployed. She already knew the word; they used it in school when discussing current events. How long did they plan to keep this from her? David had said he wanted to wait until the end of the visit, and Julie had supported that, and Val hadn’t said anything. David had called her “squirt,” too, like she was a baby. It was one thing to have your parents lie to you; another when it was your brother.

  What else had he not told her? Sometimes she hated being so much younger than David. It had always been cool having an older brother; she had counted on him to look out for her, even if he’d pretended she bugged him when his friends were around. Now he’d come back acting like a grown-up, and she was stuck as the only kid. If that was how it was going to be, she was going to make sure it was hard for them.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered to David when he nudged her awake to go into the house. “I missed you.”

  The truth, exaggerated for maximum effect.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, Saturday, Sophie was all smiles. Some of her mood was legit and some was an act. Once she started smiling, it was hard to figure out where one ended and the other began, but she was both happy and mad, and she would let only the happy show.

  It didn’t help that David was already downstairs making French toast. French toast was her favorite, and she never got to have it. Ma would make it too healthy, hiding vegetables in the batter. Mom would research a dozen recipes online, maybe buy the ingredients, then abandon the project before she ever got around to cooking. David had started the coffee machine, too. She loved how coffee smelled and hated the taste.

  “I missed you,” she said again to David, still calculating truth to sting. She sat at the end of the table where she could watch him at the counter.

  David mixed batter. He smiled without turning. “You missed me, or you missed French toast?”

  “Both.” Truthful again.

  “I’m going to have to use that gross sprouted bread. It’s the only one in the house.”

  Sophie made a face. “Will that work? Peanut butter bounces off it.”

  “I’ll make it work.”

  “I could go to the store and get real bread. Fake bread. Whichever is which. The other one.”

  He turned, a surprised look on his face. “Are you allowed to go to the store on your own now?”

  “No, but I could do it.” Sophie shrugged.

  “Somehow I thought they’d go easier on you if I wasn’t here. I don’t know why I thought that.”

  “Me, neither. It’s the same. I can’t go anywhere on my own. I think they would have me sleep on their bedroom floor like a dog if I was willing.”

  “Why aren’t you?” David pulled a slice of bread from the bag and dunked it in the batter. He poked at it, pushing it deeper.

  “Why aren’t I what?”

  “Willing to sleep on their floor? Woof woof?” He scratched an imaginary flea from behind his ear with his hand.

  Sophie looked for something to throw at his head, but didn’t spot anything and settled for a “Jerk.”

  Julie stumbled into the kitchen. She grabbed a mug from the cabinet, filled it with coffee. Fingers wrapped around the warm mug, she slid into the seat opposite Sophie but turned the chair to see both kids. “Who’s a jerk? Not the boy who made me coffee?”

  “Nobody,” said Sophie, remembering at the last second her plan to smile through the morning. “David’s making French toast.”

  “Trying to,” he said with a frown. “Are we sure this is bread and not shingles left over from redoing the roof?”

  Julie made air quotes. “I call it ‘breadish.’ Make do, or go buy something else, but if you buy, you have to explain to your ma why you’re bringing processed flour products into the house.”

  “Because they make better French toast? Nah, I think this’ll work. I’ll just soak it longer. And it’s going to need a lot of syrup.”

  “Nooooo,” said Sophie in mock despair. “Not lots of syrup. Anything but that.”

  She crossed to the fridge, grabbed the jug of syrup, and returned to the table with it. The handle was sticky, and she put her knuckle in her mouth where it had touched. It was hard staying angry when she had real things to smile about. They’re lying, she reminded herself. Treating you like a kid like they always do.

  She spotted a rubber band on the table and shot it at David’s back. “Ow!” he said, though it couldn’t have hurt at that distance. “What was that for?”

  “Before,” she said sweetly.

  The kitchen started to smell like cinnamon and nutmeg and something else she couldn’t name that she had smelled before, like déjà vu perfume.

  “No,” Sophie said. “No, no, no.”

  Mom and David both turned to look at her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Unless she didn’t say it.

  She

  Mom’s face was too close to hers and David stood behind Mom and something sizzled somewhere (on the stove) (French toast) (David was making French toast) (David had left the French to
ast to sizzle because he was over here because why because she must have had another stupid seizure) (What kind of seizure? Not the Big One because they were near her but not on top of her and she wasn’t on the floor and they looked like they were waiting for her to say something and why? Because she must have had a seizure). (Say something.)

  Mom bit her lip and smiled. “Hang on, honey. You had a seizure.”

  Gather the words. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  She stood and walked into the living room. Not with any thought behind it. Following her feet. Something was burning.

  “Shit!” said David.

  The scrape of a chair told her Mom was following her. She wished they’d get that she needed a few minutes alone. They couldn’t help it, though. Bad Things Could Happen, they always said, at the same time as saying There’s no reason you can’t live a perfectly normal life. Contradiction, she thought, pleased her brain had picked such a large round word and that she knew what it was and it was the right word. If she pushed for other words they would come in a minute. She sat on the couch and waited for her head to clear.

  “Deployed,” she said, trying another word a minute later. It didn’t have the same balance as “contradiction.” The p and the y facing each other in the middle of the word were ugly. An ugly word. A word with a “ploy” in the middle. She knew what a ploy was; it was a plan, but a tricky one. She didn’t feel like pretending anymore. All of a sudden it was like a bad taste in her mouth, all the fake smiles. Game over.

  “What, honey?” Mom riffled through the mail on the front table, but Sophie knew she was there to keep an eye on her.

  “Deployed,” she said again. “David’s going away and you were all going to lie to me about it.”

  Sophie watched her mom squirm. Lie about lying? Tell the truth about lying? Even if her own head weren’t jumbled, that would jumble it again.

  “We were going to tell you, but why ruin your enjoyment of the time together with counting the days?”

  “I’d be counting the days in any case. He was going to leave either way. The difference is where he’s leaving to and that nobody thought I deserved to be told.”

  Her mom didn’t respond, which meant she was right.

  “Breakfast?” The note of question in David’s voice didn’t speak well for its edibility. It didn’t matter. Sophie was hungry or maybe not hungry. She headed back into the kitchen. At least David’s idea had been to hold out on all of them; equal-opportunity lies were better than lies that excluded only her.

  “Sorry, Soph. We shouldn’t keep things from you.” Her mom’s voice called her back.

  “You don’t have to baby me.”

  “I’ll try to remember, sweetie. I’m sorry.”

  Sophie nodded, but she knew it would happen again. That was how it went when you were the youngest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  VAL

  David vanished into the terminal.

  “You can just drop me at the airport. No need to stay,” he’d said. “That way you won’t get stuck in morning rush hour.”

  No need, but what if they had wanted to? An airport good-bye is for everyone, the leaver and the left. Val would gladly have followed him in, all the way to security, but instead she hugged him curbside at his insistence and watched the automatic doors swallow him. He turned once to wave at her, grinning. It was too broad a smile, and she was pretty sure he’d put it on for both their benefit; he was telling himself everything was fine, too.

  She had trouble reconciling the soldier with the careful, thoughtful boy who had looked out for his sister and run with Val and worked out his math homework at the table with Julie. Nobody gained that much confidence in a few months. It had to be a facade. A car horn honked and she turned to see if she was blocking anyone; when she turned back, he was gone.

  For all Val’s appreciation of running in silence, this was not a silence she could tolerate. She wished Sophie were there to break through the quiet with something funny or random. Kid excitement, that was what she wanted, but the kid had refused to come.

  “I don’t like good-byes,” she had said. “And anyway, he’ll be back to visit as soon as he can.”

  Val frowned. “But what if he feels bad that you’re not there?”

  “Don’t guilt her.” Julie looked up. “I’ll stay with her. You take Davey.”

  “You don’t want to go to the airport?”

  “Of course I do, but Sophie doesn’t, and we can’t leave her home.”

  “You can leave me alone. I don’t mind. I can get ready for school on my own.”

  “No way, buster.”

  “Maybe she can go to a friend’s house? Lisa West?”

  Julie shook her head, and Val remembered that Lisa’s parents had taken the girls ice-skating the previous winter, and Sophie had gone down on the ice. They didn’t get the full details of what type of seizure it had been, but she’d fallen without protecting her hands or her head from the other skaters who didn’t have time to avoid her, and returned with a bruised chin and cuts that went clear through her gloves. The Wests had assured them they understood what to do if Sophie had a seizure, but knowing in theory wasn’t the same as seeing one for the first time.

  “Lisa doesn’t invite me over anymore.” Sophie echoed Val’s memory.

  So Julie and Sophie had gotten up in the dark to say their good-byes at the house, and Val had driven David, and now there was too much silence in the car, threatening to leave her alone with her thoughts. She jabbed at the radio until she found a talk radio host so reprehensible she could focus on hating him instead of the people who had taken her son away. Except nobody had taken him; he’d gone willingly. He had chosen, but who lets an eighteen-year-old make a choice like that? They aren’t ready. They don’t have the sense.

  She pressed buttons again until she found a song she’d heard her students play. She turned it up and sang along at the top of her lungs, inventing the words she didn’t know, which was all of them.

  Singing made her feel a little better, not anywhere near right, but better. When she got to school, she remembered it was a charity fundraiser day, and those were always entertaining, too, as the different homerooms derived new and interesting ways to earn donations off their fellow students.

  Her homeroom girls’ fundraiser involved a narwhal costume they’d found in the theater closet. “It’ll only work if you do it, Ms. B,” someone had said. She had promised that if they raised enough money, she would spend one lunch hour—just one—standing in the lobby in the costume. She hadn’t considered it was a Friday, and she would be sharing the lobby not only with the other fundraiser tables—the bake sales and the various o-grams— but also with the recruiters.

  If that wasn’t enough, the recruiters had set up their table directly beside hers, forcing her to stand next to the handsome young man in his Air Force dress uniform. He was stunning, really; no wonder they sent him to the girls’ school. By the time four juniors had stammered their way through conversations with him in which he gallantly held up the other end, seemingly oblivious to their awkward flirtation, she’d had enough.

  “So,” she said in a lull between students, “Do you get a cash bonus for bringing in a certain number? A car?”

  “I’m sorry?” He looked confused.

  Maybe it was her costume; she lacked gravitas. “Bonuses? Quotas? You must have target numbers.”

  “My priority is to give our best and brightest an opportunity to serve their country.” He threw a look at the Army recruiter to his right, a prim young woman who couldn’t have been much older than the students.

  Val felt as if somebody else were speaking through her. They were all words she wanted to say, but she couldn’t believe she was saying them out loud. She raised her voice, as her parents had done, as she’d promised herself never to do. “What are you here to do? Lie to my students? Tell
them they’ll be safe and then send them halfway around the world to get shot at?”

  Students watched, whispering to one another. She saw someone raise a phone: they were being recorded. She knew she should stop.

  The Air Force guy clearly realized they were being recorded, too. Had probably realized it long before she had, thanks to his Pilot. She was shouting and he was calm, though his perfect smile had faded. “Ma’am, we aren’t lying to anybody. We offer opportunities. Financial opportunities, career opportunities. I’m not sure what you’re upset about, but I’ve never done anything to you.”

  A single tear rolled down Val’s face as she struggled to keep her temper under control. She hated confrontation; hated even more that she cried when she was angry. Better to run it off than turn and face someone, yet here she was. “You people rolled into my son’s school and told him you were his best chance to succeed. He believed you. You said he’d be safe and far from the action and now he’s being deployed.”

  “Ma’am, we don’t lie to the students.” Air Force had a new look on his face. Sympathy, maybe, or else pity. “I promise. You can ask anyone I’ve spoken with. We make sure they understand the risks. They decide if it’s worth it.”

  Army joined him. “Are you sure he was lied to? What if your son was just trying to make you feel better about his decision?”

  “Now you’re calling David a liar?”

  “No, ma’am,” the girl said with sincerity. She lifted her hands in a placating gesture. “I’m only saying, um, you think he’s smart, right?”

  “Of course. He wasn’t great in school, but he’s a good kid.”

  “I’m sure he is. You raised him to be a good person.”

  Val nodded.

  “So maybe you need to trust that he enlisted because he’s smart and a good person and this was what he wanted for himself.”