Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  “Maybe it’s the motor.”

  “I know what a burned motor smells like, Theo.”

  Shouting had a way of erasing things, and a way of making things that couldn’t be erased want to disappear. Nedda slipped away, balancing on the sides of the stairs to keep the boards from squeaking.

  “It’s stuck in the outlet you shorted.”

  “Betheen, it’s not a short.”

  Nedda had to pass through the kitchen to get to her room, which meant back-to-the-wall and edge-of-the-room inching to avoid Betheen’s notice. Which she did, until her mother smacked the chute closed.

  The fight was done.

  Betheen braced a bare foot on the Formica countertop and pulled at the mixer’s cord, tugging until her hair shook with the effort, crisp blonde waves vibrating. “He doesn’t think about anybody else. He doesn’t think. Now the stupid thing is stuck in a dead outlet.”

  Her mother was fascinating, if a little frightening.

  “In here, Nedda,” Betheen said. “Hands on the cord.” Something fluffy and white was in the mixer, thick and fizzing.

  “What was it?”

  “Champagne water cake.”

  “That sounds gross.”

  “Please, no comments. Just pull.”

  Nedda groaned anyway. She linked her hands by Betheen’s, pinkie touching her mother’s thumb. She’d tried champagne on New Year’s once; it was bitter and the bubbles hurt your tongue more than soda. Like champagne, her mother’s perfume was too much. It was supposed to be magnolias, but mixed with sweat and Aqua-Net, the scent was entirely her own. Nedda had longed for it that morning, but Betheen was someone you missed terribly until she was there.

  “On three.”

  Nedda yanked hard, but the plug didn’t budge. She tugged again. No movement.

  “Lean into it, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I am,” Nedda shouted.

  “Don’t shout, just lean harder.” They tugged and the cord bit their skin. Nedda was sandwiched between Betheen and the counter, her mother’s leg wrapped around her, an embrace gone wrong. A laugh bubbled up and she couldn’t hold it back.

  Then Betheen slipped, kicking Nedda’s feet out from under her. For a moment they were flying, rushing to meet the floor, and then they were on top of each other. Nedda sprawled half on the linoleum, half on Betheen, head tucked beneath her mother’s chin. The mixer dangled from the counter, suspended by its cord, which was still firmly stuck. That was wrong.

  Betheen lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. Nedda squirmed, but Betheen grabbed her hand and held it. Her palm was warm and the pulse tickled, softly thrumming the same way the green monkey had. Marmoset. Silver marmoset.

  “Wait. Just wait a minute,” Betheen said.

  “Should I get Dad?”

  “What could he do that we haven’t tried?”

  “Maybe he could flip the breaker, take the outlet from the wall, cut the cord, install a new one.” Though not today. Nedda tried to pull her hand away, but her mother squeezed it, skin soft like a quilt and just as stifling. Nedda wanted the heavy gloves her father used when he dealt with electricity. It felt good to hold someone’s hand when wearing thick gloves, like they were a mouse and you had to be careful.

  “It’s fine. I’ll mix by hand, or start cookies for the diner instead.”

  “Okay.” Nedda moved to get up, but Betheen tugged her back down.

  “Stay? Just for a little while.” She squeezed her hand again. “We don’t spend enough time on the ground looking up at things.”

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Your dad talked to you about what happened?”

  Nedda’s stomach tightened. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry you watched that. There are things people shouldn’t see, especially not children.”

  “I’m not a little kid.”

  “No, you’re not.” She squeezed Nedda’s hand once more, and then was on her feet, rummaging through cabinets. “It’s amazing how quickly time passes. Yesterday you were in baby shoes.” She set a stack of bright yellow mixing bowls on the counter. “Let’s see what we can make of this mess.”

  She’d watched the launch too. Betheen had also seen the astronauts die.

  Nedda wanted to say something, about light and time, the thing she’d told Mrs. Wheeler. She didn’t.

  Her mother poured the strange mixture into a new bowl and sprinkled it with powder from a green plastic bag on the counter. The bag had writing all over it in another language. Then whisking, familiar and irritating. Flittap, flittap, flittap, flittap. Betheen’s forearm was a knot of thin-roped muscle born from bending food to her will.

  There was a small skip in the whisking. “Do you want to help me figure this out?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s water cake, only I’m using champagne, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It looks like a clear bubble but it tastes like whatever you want it to.”

  “Like Jell-O?”

  “No, much better. Champagne and orange extract, maybe Flame Red grapefruit, and it’s going to dissolve into nothing. It’ll be soft. Imagine setting a stack of raindrops on a table, a table that has slots in it and glasses underneath them, and all the raindrops you don’t eat melt into the glasses. Wedding cake you can drink if you want.”

  It sounded wonderful and impossible. “Cool.”

  “I think so. I think I can win the Orlando Cake Show with it. Do you want to help? I’ll have to do a lot of experimenting.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good,” Betheen said. Then, softly, “Thank you.”

  Nedda sensed she was supposed to say something else, but couldn’t figure out what.

  “I have homework.”

  “Of course. Go.”

  Once in her room, she turned out the lights, flopped on the bed, and stared at the sticker stars on the ceiling. They glowed just enough for her to make out the Sea of Tranquility on the puffy moon sticker by her window.

  She flipped on her nightstand light and pulled out a notebook, sandwiched between her bed and the wall. Her cursive too messy, she wrote in print.

  Dear Judy,

  You’re gas, carbon, and star parts.

  Her stomach hurt. Gus Grissom had said space was worth it, that the conquest of it was worth your life. And he had died.

  Dinner was a quick, uncomfortable silence—thrown-together fried chicken Nedda thought of as “fight cutlets.” Pale, dry, and flavorless. Her father argued with absence. Her mother argued with food. Something in the kitchen smelled like seaweed.

  Before bed, she turned to a fresh page in her notebook and began a list, titling it Observations. It grew from the morning, from the cold, the explosion, the monkey, and the mixer. She underlined the word monkey three times. She’d long suspected people had been lying about the monkeys, but she’d seen one, it was real, and she couldn’t touch it. She wrote the sky’s weird color. She wrote entropy with three asterisks next to it and left room for notes. Then champagne water cake. She turned the page and wrote the astronauts’ names. Seven. Like Friendship 7. Lucky 7. 7UP. 7th Heaven.

  She turned back.

  Dear Judy,

  You’re gas, carbon, and star parts. You’re light and heat. You’re spreading everywhere all at once, like the universe. Nerves aren’t as quick as combustion, so I bet it was probably too fast to hurt. If you did hurt, it’s okay. Your light will reach the moon. It’ll touch the lunar rover and make it less lonely.

  Love,

  Nedda

  1986: The Dogs

  The air smelled off. Two sniffs told Rebekah La Morte that there was too much dog piss in it. She smelled the dog piss only when it got too hot or the wind really picked up, but it was cold and still. There was something else in the air it too; maybe it was from the space shuttle, but who wanted to think about breathing that in? She hefted a bag of Purina over her shoulder and kicked the screen door open with her flip-flop. The dogs looked off too. Kind of flat. Not that g
reyhounds ever got a proper flop to them, but a greyhound taking ill was all ribs and bones and looked like a squashed birdcage. Fast dogs, but almost made of glass. One explosion, not even as bad as a thunderstorm, and they were all wrung out. Bad news. That asshole from Sanford was supposed to look at them tomorrow.

  “Jimmy, you fed them, right?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Don’t ‘Yeah, Mom’ me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I fed them. Watched them eat too.” Her son’s voice was high, threatening to crack soon, which made the fact that he was a whiner worse. His dad hadn’t seemed the type; he must have gotten it from her side of the family. Her mother could bitch up a storm when needed, but god, did it shame her that her son was a whiner.

  “Well, keep an eye out. I’ve got a buyer coming and the dogs are dragging like they’ve been through the desert.”

  The pups were a pile of brindle and brown and they weren’t bouncing enough, not like they should be. Rebekah opened up Mama Girl’s kennel, a tall chain-link fence box, and watched as the bitch limped out and threw herself on Rebekah’s feet.

  She’d be tired too if she had six pups. One at a time was more than enough. Rebekah had never been happier than the day Teresa got married and she’d finally gotten her bathroom back. That girl was half mousse and hairspray, and it had been hell on the plumbing. A pipe snake Rebekah made from a coat hanger still hung on a hook in the bathroom. Jimmy didn’t care for washing much beyond a washcloth and the kitchen sink, and she wasn’t about to push him on it. There weren’t enough showers in the world to get rid of the smell of kennel. Especially when some of the kennels weren’t cleaned enough. A gargantuan pile of shit sat in the back corner of Mama Girl’s kennel, a monument to exactly how Mama Girl felt about her latest litter.

  “Jimmy? What did I say about hosing down the kennels?”

  Her son didn’t answer. There was crashing around in the kitchen, which meant he was fixing himself a sandwich. Well, that was something.

  The pups started to yelp, and Rebekah looked up. The sky had a funny yellow color to it, and it smelled like hurricane. That’s what it was. Too much water and lightning in the air. It was the wrong time of year for it, but definitely the right sky. If she were running a boat, she’d haul ass back to dry land. No wonder that shuttle blew up. NASA idiots launching the day before a hurricane.

  Mama Girl whimpered. Her face had the long hang of a horse.

  “All right, then. We’re doing this? We’re doing this.” Rebekah lifted Mama Girl and groaned at the weight.

  “Jimmy, get your ass out here and help me bring in the pups. It feels like lightning.”

  Mama Girl yowled and Rebekah patted her head as she struggled with the door. But the dog kept whining at something in the pond.

  The water behind the La Morte house was too small to be called a lake, or even a proper pond. Rebekah liked to think of it as a hole, but the truth was that it wasn’t much more than a large puddle from Easter’s sewer system. Rather than let its undesirables run into the Indian River, Easter pumped it into the land that butted up against the La Morte backyard. You could call it an overflow receptacle, but whatever words you chose didn’t make it pretty or smell nice. On most days it buzzed with mosquitos, grasshoppers, and a few dragonflies. As Rebekah looked, she realized what Mama Girl was bothered by. There were clouds rolling off it, and the sawgrass was curling up and rotting. It smelled like boiling weeds. Boiling weeds while it was freezing cold outside. That had governmental bullshit written all over it. Easter Municipal had pumped straight sludge out on the land before, but never anything boiling.

  “Jimmy, the phone still out?”

  “Yeah.”

  Time to haul herself down to the mayor’s office and raise a little hell. She eyed the sky, that storm-yellow tinge to it. “You’re staying home tomorrow.”

  “I’m gonna need a note, Ma. Mrs. Wheeler says I can’t miss any more.”

  “Fine. I’ll talk to her, but you’re not going in.”

  The dog whimpered and she took Mama Girl inside, holding the screen door open as Jimmy stumbled out to the pups.

  Her son looked like his father, Eddie Ingram, though no one said it—especially not Eddie, who was married. Eddie still got around with girls from everywhere, even though he was starting to look like salt cod and smell just as bad. But she’d gotten Jimmy out of him at least, and that was the good end of the deal.

  Jimmy scooted back in, a puppy snuffling in the crook of his arm. It was one of the runts, the one he called Bats, because the dog’s ears stuck out like wings. Kind boys were good with animals. Tough boys could give them away. Kind and tough? That was something. She wished she could let Jimmy keep Bats, but Bats was good money because Mama Girl’s blood was strong. That pup would be fast no matter how big he got.

  Maybe on Mama’s last litter she’d let him keep one and train it, let him raise up a bitch himself, get a little business going on his own. A puppy tried to squirm down her collar, gnawing at the edges with teeth too small to do any more damage to an already-wrecked Van Halen shirt. She shoved two pups in a dog bed below the kitchen sink. Their claws couldn’t do much damage to the linoleum, and any pee would wipe right up.

  “Ma?”

  “What’s the matter, Sweet Potato?”

  “I think the pond’s boiling.”

  Then, like crying infants, the frogs began to scream, a sound that would stay with Rebekah La Morte until the day she died.

  1986: Bruise and Tape

  There was a specific scraping that meant Denny was on the trellis. He’d started climbing it the day he’d learned to climb trees. He didn’t usually knock, but Nedda had shut the window against the cold. She gaped when she saw him. A mottled bruise stretched from the top of his cheek across the bridge of his nose; his right eye wasn’t swollen shut, but it was a near thing.

  “Sonofabitch. What happened?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yeah, but be quiet.” Downstairs, Betheen rattled pots in the kitchen. They had to be the only family in Easter without a dishwasher. “What happened to your eye?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It doesn’t look like nothing.” There were darker points at the top by his brow and across his cheek, like the deep mark Betheen’s fist left when punching down dough.

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “How come you won’t say?”

  “How come you called Jimmy La Morte a cunt?”

  “Fine, don’t tell me. I don’t care.” How had he found out? If she wanted him to, Denny would give Jimmy a black eye as bad as his own. He was allowed to do things she wasn’t—punch, kick, make somebody hurt when they deserved it. He would too, if she asked. But suffering Jimmy was easier if she didn’t talk about him, didn’t think about him.

  Denny sat cross-legged on the braided rug, a jumble of bones. “He probably doesn’t like you because he got left back and you skipped.”

  “Yeah, but so did you and you like me.”

  “Sure. But you’re cool, and I know I’m dumb. Jimmy’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s stupid.”

  She hated when he said things like that. “You’re not dumb.”

  “Then I’m lazy. Did you ask your dad about the monkey?”

  “We talked about other stuff.”

  “Like what?” He picked at one of the rug loops with fingernails still dirty from the truck.

  “What happens after you die.”

  “Easy,” he said. “You go to Heaven or Hell. Unless you’re Jewish. Josh Ast said Jews don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. I bet they’re super surprised when they wind up there. Think how pissed off you’d be, being dead and finding out you’re totally wrong.”

  Judy Resnik was Jewish, and Nedda didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell. If her dad was right, people who died were just thoughts traveling like light, continuing. It was sad, but not. Being sure about things, like Denny was, seemed easier. “Do you think there’s any juice left in the truck battery at Mr. Pete�
��s? Maybe the monkey got electrocuted.”

  “I don’t know. Car batteries drain if you don’t run them and cold isn’t good for them either.”

  The phone had been going in and out all day, so it was startling when the kitchen telephone rang. Sometimes Betheen called Aunt June at night, and they would talk for hours, but no one called after nine. Nedda put her ear to the door. Denny scrambled next to her and bumped his brow on the jamb. Some words were muffled, lost to the stairs.

  “No,” Betheen said. “You know he’s welcome here. Of course. And you told him to? Good. Are you all right?” It wasn’t Aunt June. Aunt June had hearing aids the size of conch shells and you could lose your voice talking to her. “No, it’s no trouble. Theo won’t mind. I’m sure he’ll barely notice.”

  Then the call ended. Denny lay on the floor, pressing his hand to his eye.

  “Does it hurt bad?”

  “Yeah, but not like getting hit with a hardball.” Last spring, he’d been hit in the face with a baseball in gym class. He’d been proud that he could read the ball’s stitches across his cheek. This bruise had knuckles.

  The worst Nedda had been hurt was a broken pinkie toe when she’d fallen through a rotted board in the treehouse behind Haverstone House. Denny had helped her limp all the way to his house where his mother had taped her little toe to the others and set her on the couch with a bag of ice. “I’ll get ice once Betheen’s asleep.”

  “Maybe we could cut the bruise like they do in Rocky. It’s supposed to let the blood out and help with swelling.”

  “My mom would kill me if we got blood on the rug.”

  “Okay, fine. Hey, can I see your mission patches? You’ve got pictures too, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said.