by Erika Swyler
“We didn’t see it,” Nedda said.
Mrs. Wheeler didn’t answer.
“My dad told me how light travels before it gets to your eye. I forget the exact speed it goes at, but I can find it for you later. It’s like a boat on the water, because it goes in waves. You know when you see something? It’s already done. It already happened, because light had to travel to get to you before you could see it.”
“Nedda.”
“We didn’t really see it. Maybe just, like, an echo of it.” Echo wasn’t right. Echo was sound, not light, but it traveled in waves too. That wasn’t it, but defining it was impossible. “The light went to a lot of places before it got here.”
“Nedda, hush. Please.”
As cold as she’d been, Nedda was now hot and sticky, and her stomach churned. The patch was stuck to her. If she took it off there would be a small red ink stain, a mirror of the apple. No one was going to tell her parents about the C word.
The auditorium was half-full by the time they arrived. The fourth graders came in last, some crying, some chattering, most quiet. There were empty seats from kids who were out sick, or whose parents had taken them to watch the launch. Her class, the sixth grade, filled the middle section. She sat next to Tricia Villaverde, who immediately moved two seats away. Nedda looked around for Denny Prater, but his class was in the back row. When no one took the empty chair, Mrs. Wheeler sat beside her.
Mrs. Leigh, the school counselor, walked to the center of the stage and asked for silence.
Then there was prayer.
While everyone prayed, Nedda thought about light, about combustion. She thought about sitting on the roof with her dad, watching stars. Not just stars—some dots of light were comets, asteroids, nebulas, and planets. Some planets she and her dad had looked at were already gone. It wasn’t sad; it was true. Those things were different.
Principal Lauder said there would be early dismissal, then called for another moment of silence. In the row in front of Nedda, Liza sniffled and picked at the fabric on her chair arm. She caught Nedda staring and whispered something to Keith. Nedda looked at the floor, at the ink on her thumb, at the air between her chair and Liza’s.
She must have seen millions of dead things, things that were light years away, eons ago. She chewed a small raw spot on her lip. Her feet tapped against carpet. The thump of it felt wrong somehow. Everything felt wrong. She needed to go home, to her dad’s small lab in the basement, to curl up on one of the tables like she used to. It had been a long time since she’d last brought a quilt down and made a nest for herself among the books, tubes, and wires—a million years or however long it took light to travel. She’d rest her cheek on the table and listen to her dad talk about space. She’d been little when he’d told her about the beginning of the universe and how the solar system was born. How the sun was like an island, and the planets were ships sailing around it. He’d said, “Pluto is our far star sailor,” the way other people said Once upon a time. His words opened a door inside her.
She wished she’d brought her NASA book, with six full pages on the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” the Astronaut Class of 1978, NASA’s first new group of astronauts since 1969. On Sally Ride, on Challenger—which she realized was gone now—on Judy Resnik, mission specialist, the second American woman in space. Who Nedda wanted to be. Who was gone now too. They were gas and carbon—and what else? They had to be something else.
She wanted her stupid little-kid pony, but it was in the classroom. She wanted to go fishing with Denny, even if it was too cold. She wanted to smell her mother’s perfume until she was sick from it. She wanted to eat all the icing roses off that stupid cake until Betheen yelled. She should be yelled at. For saying cunt, for sitting next to Tricia when Tricia hated her. For losing count before the two-minute mark. She shouldn’t have stopped counting.
It was her fault.
She wanted not to think about the fact that even though light was a wave, despite the time and distance it had to travel to get from Launchpad 39B to the Thomas A. Covey School, she’d watched seven people die.
Judy Resnik was gone.
1986: Fabrication and Loss
End-stage prototypes had personalities, and Crucible was an utter bastard. Its frame expanded and contracted with the slightest temperature shift, which today meant every single nut was loose, three seals had cracked, and Theo Papas was swearing. Metal had life in it, which made fabrication a war between satisfaction and frustration. Frustration was winning.
He winged a wrench against the wall and was instantly sorry he did so. A student’s head peered through the lab door’s window and he forced a wave. He rubbed his eyes, missing the days of graduate school and amphetamine-fueled energy. He missed the access to materials he’d had at NASA. The partnership. He missed having Avi Liebowitz to bounce ideas off. There’d been cutbacks, Theo had been let go, and eventually he’d found a position at the college. He spent his days teaching intro classes and surveys, bargaining for sabbaticals, and trying to convince Dean Babcock that his work was practical, feasible, and worth investment. The dean humored his project, but didn’t see its practical applications the way Liebowitz did. Babcock thought he was hunting cold fusion. Half-life acceleration meant nothing to him. The department’s main concerns were that the cesium-137 stayed properly shielded and that any patents would name Haverstone College.
Liebowitz knew what half-life acceleration meant. Getting the most out of a smaller mass. Powering bigger things for practical applications. Half-life acceleration could change space travel. Half-life deceleration? He could make something that would run until the proverbial end of the universe. Yet he was stuck in a painted cinderblock room with rows of white shelving stacked with boxes and crates that overflowed with wires, glass tubes, and circuitry. He was being strung along by the school, and they would wring what working years he had left in him for as little money as they possibly could.
But Nedda was happy here. She was near things she loved. Comet watching was good. She’d have something wonderful to remember, and he’d gotten to see it through her eyes. Which was as good as seeing it himself, maybe better.
Were he at home, Nedda would be sprawled across a table in his basement office, asking questions. Part of him had hoped Betheen would be interested too—that she might have wanted to help. But she had put a limit on what she would allow in the house, and Crucible far exceeded that. Radioactive isotopes in the basement crossed the line.
He appraised the damage to Crucible, ducking beneath one of its limbs. Entropy and time weren’t the neatest concepts, and his machine’s form embraced that chaos. Crucible was a daddy longlegs—a spherical center of glass, gold, and lead, from which long metal legs extended, raising it from the floor and lending it an arachnid appearance. The legs were dual-purposed, supporting the central drum and cooling it as they glided around a magnetized track. Crucible’s center had a door into its deep belly that sealed with a broad flange of rubber and lead. It shielded his cesium samples, contained errant radiation, and kept light from escaping and raising eyebrows.
The machine looked like an enormous fuckup. Enormous being the key problem.
It needed too much power. He’d stuck to his notes from NASA, from before his hands had been wrecked by psoriatic arthritis. He’d had funding then and Liebowitz to talk to. Liebowitz, who could have built it the right size. But layoffs left Theo with a professor’s salary and seven scrapped half starts, rather than a finished machine that had the potential to revolutionize space travel, medicine, and the concept of time. The arthritis was his undoing. His hands refused to keep up with his mind. Even corresponding with Liebowitz, who’d landed on his feet at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was difficult most days. When the plaques were angry, his knuckles heated and swelled, making small work impossible. Often, work wasn’t possible at all. When he could work, he had to work large, resulting in this Brobdingnagian contraption that could blow the power grid. His initial plans had called for a door only large en
ough for small test materials—a minute amount of cesium, sample cells for nonisotope work, a lab rat at most. In its current iteration, a small person could climb inside and pull the door closed behind. But he loved Crucible, even if it was ugly.
Five yellowing notices from the facilities manager—a glorified janitor—were on his desk. Today he’d had to come in early to prove that his work was not a fire hazard, that he had proper ventilation, and that any power shorts in the sciences building were unrelated. Even if they weren’t. What was one more facilities note? He should have taken Nedda to the launch.
Raising Nedda was painful in ways he hadn’t anticipated, as though a cord connected them, its pull as strong as any chemical bond. One day, it would break and she would leave. Eleven was a spectacular age. Her brain was blooming, her mind ripe for learning. She was building new cells to contain everything she learned, forging new neural pathways, and each day she was different, a little more, a little brighter. All the while, his brain was wearing down; every brain over twenty-five was. Nedda was at the point of infinite potential, the moment where genius was born.
What an incredible thing it would be to hold on to that precise moment.
There was wonder in how she pressed her eye to a telescope, how she’d memorized all the lunar craters. What child didn’t deserve a lifetime of infinite discovery? What child deserved it more than Nedda?
What if?
He tightened a leg joint, righting Crucible again. The seal on the door flange was cracking; he’d have to see if Pete McIntyre had something in his garage that might do the trick. He shook his hands out. The tingling ran through his knuckles, which would be followed soon by burning, as his body attacked itself. When the attack subsided, days, or even weeks, from now, he’d be left with new lumps on his joints and a hand that functioned a little less. The last attack had deformed his ring finger; the top knuckle was now bent as though clamped in a death grip on some imagined thing. He took two aspirin from his shirt pocket and ground them between his teeth.
At eleven twenty A.M., his hands forced him to abandon the lab and college for his car and the drive home to his basement office and his notebooks, to a house that smelled like sugar not meant for him. The flare-up came on quickly. He was adept at steering with his knees and elbows, but shifting was a stabbing pain. His dreams for Nedda, for all the time she had and all the time he wanted to give her, were balanced by an urgent need—to fix himself, to mend a body designed to break.
Once back home and ensconced in his basement workspace—basements, he was forever confined to basements—Theo flipped through his early notes on Crucible, from before it was Crucible. He and Liebowitz had called it the “entropy machine,” and its practical applications had seemed endless: deep space travel, fuel conservation, specimen preservation, orbiter reuse. The human potential of it had drawn him, selfishly. Few innovations ever began in pure altruism.
He could hear Betheen pacing upstairs. There was distance in her steps. They’d reached a point where everything meant something else, each conversation was layered, all of it exhausting. When Nedda grew up, Theo knew, Betheen would likely leave him.
But they’d go down trying. That was the price of keeping secrets, even when you both understood it was for the best.
When the ground shivered and announced the shuttle launch, he paused to listen, and to curse the facilities prick and his idiotic notices.
Part of parenting entailed learning the exact expression your child made when you broke her heart, and knowingly breaking it again and again. Nedda’s disappointment manifested as a Mendelian cross of Betheen and himself. She turned splotchy like her mother and gnawed on her lip like him. She’d yet to develop psoriasis; for that he thanked Betheen. The good bits. Your child was supposed to get the best of you.
The tremor rattled his desk and a box of notebooks fell, sending up a cloud of dust and knocking over the high-voltage traveling arc he’d gotten to entertain Nedda on Halloween. There’d be a mess at the college later, cracked glass and piping that would need to be replaced, more facilities notices. Crucible’s exhaust—a gaseous form of N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, a noxious mouthful—tended to melt rubber tubing. Glass had been his only option, fragile and subject to every seismic hiccup.
“Theo!” Betheen’s voice carried down the laundry chute.
He heard the crying before he saw her. She gripped the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Betheen was art, empirically beautiful, engendering awe in its full capacity—wonder and fear. He adhered to their rhythm of wait, approach, and retreat.
“Beth?”
“They’re dead. They died.” Her body clenched, a stiff extension of the bentwood chairback. Knuckles bloodless. She’d held his hand like that once, squeezing his fingers until the joints popped. Now, that too-tight grasp could break him. They pretended they didn’t miss those things.
“What happened?”
“It’s gone, the whole shuttle. An explosion.” A flicker from the living room showed that the television was on. Smoke against blue sky. “They’re supposed to be safe now,” she said. “Like school buses.”
“There’s no such thing as entirely safe,” he said. There was chaos on the screen, shots of the crowd, the sky, lingering smoke.
“It’s irresponsible,” Betheen said.
“Everyone knows the risks. They all made that choice,” he said.
She turned to look at him.
“Always. You always have an answer.”
“It’s always the wrong one, isn’t it? I’m sorry.”
It might have been the light from the kitchen, that it was warmer than lab fluorescents, but he saw the gentle crenellation of her jaw, the wisps of hair that hadn’t made it into her clip, and that no matter how straight she stood, she was bent inside—like him.
“Mostly. You’re occasionally right.”
“Come here.”
He opened his arms, and she quickly brushed her lips against his cheek before stepping away. She began scrubbing the countertop as if to sand it bare. “You know they’re watching it at school.”
The teacher, right. They were broadcasting it in school because of the teacher astronaut. Nedda would have seen everything. “Hell. I was supposed to take her.”
The telephone rang.
“One of us is going to have to talk to her. It’s probably better if it’s you.”
“Sure.”
“If you keep it cold and clinical, she’ll like that. You’re good at that,” Betheen said. She picked up the receiver, stretched the cord, and let it snap back against the flowered wallpaper. “Yes, this is she. Hello, Mrs. Ocasio.”
Clinical. After the first miscarriage, he’d purchased an obstetrics textbook. He’d read the chapters on spontaneous abortion aloud to Betheen while she lay on the couch in the front room, hands tucked between her knees. He’d lingered over words and names only circumstance could have brought them. Kisspeptin. It sounded innocent, romantic. She’d listened until she fell asleep. When she woke up crying, he’d start again. He could have tried something else, but science was their language, the vocabulary they’d loved together, and the only way he could understand. It was warm. In the litany of Latin and Greek—fluctuation of hormones, low plasma levels, percentages—was science, plainly stating it wasn’t their fault. She’d breathed chemistry when they’d met. They could break apart the biology of kisspeptin, find the beauty in the math.
Clinical had been enough at first, pulling them through miscarriages until they had Nedda. Then there was Michael, and the wall of silence that came after him, how it had been easier to not talk about him at all, then too difficult to bring him up.
“I understand,” she said. “Yes. It makes sense given the circumstances. Absolutely. I’ll start the phone tree. Nedda usually walks home with Denny Prater. It’s probably best if they keep to that for some normalcy.”
She hung up. He reached for her, his hand and hers, and the touch burned in his bones. She let him hold her. Her thumb stroked the ro
ugh patch at the ball of his wrist.
“They’re letting them out early?”
“Yes,” she said. “The kids saw the whole thing. They’re in an assembly now. What good that does, I have no idea. What’s a few more hours? What’s done is done.”
“I’ll cancel my late class.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
He used to imagine the lines on their palms crosshatching, locking in place. They held on too gently now. The second hand on his watch did its usual stutter, ticking backward as it reached fifty-five. The sound stretched between them.
“When is she coming home?”
“They’re dismissing in an hour.”
An hour was a lifetime.
“Mind helping me with the Physics 102 syllabus? It would pass the time. A fresh eye would be good.”
Betheen straightened her skirt. “I need to start the phone tree. Then I have to deliver the cake to the Rotary. Rockets might be falling out of the sky, but God forbid a Rotarian goes without lemon cake.”
He’d said something wrong again. He should have offered to help her, but he’d already chewed enough aspirin to down a horse. And the Rotarians looked at him like he was a leper.
“Betheen?”
But she was already on the phone again, looking out the window onto the street. On days his schedule allowed, he stood in that same spot, watching Nedda walking home, curtains pulled almost closed so she wouldn’t notice. She would appear as a dot in the distance by the edge of the palmettos, with Denny tagging behind her. Hanging moss played tricks with the light, and he indulged the idea that she’d manifested just because he’d wished it. Children were like that in a way, thoughts you’d willed into being.
