by Erika Swyler
“Hush or leave.”
“Louisa—her breathing,” Singh said.
“I know. Don’t rush me.”
“It’s not bad at all.”
Nedda was in her sleep sack, eye tightly bandaged, ears full of sparrow tittering and waves from the national seashore. She kept her good eye closed, enjoying light from the hologram filtering through the lid with gentle reds and yellows. She was not alone. She smelled Evgeni’s sweetly stale sweat.
“No Louisa?”
“She needed to rest,” Evgeni said. “It was upsetting for her to do this, I think.”
Nedda liked his sometimes-backward phrasing, how his words piled on each other like acrobats, waiting to be flipped. He was warm enough that she felt his heat without having to touch him. She’d always run cold. Her head felt like her brain was trying to escape her skull, clawing its way out every possible exit.
“Painkiller?” she asked.
“Paracetamol is in your IV. Also an antibiotic. No opioids. The printer has left you a beta blocker. Marcanta says don’t take it because it will affect your eye pressures.”
She mumbled thanks.
“Sleep,” he said. “I will make sure you don’t rip your eye out.”
“What, are you going to hold me down?”
“Never. I’ll embrace you until you love me, or Louisa fights me for you.”
His back against her side was like the puff of warm air when opening an oven door, sun on your face, home. She heard him say thank you. She slept. When she woke again he’d been replaced by Marcanta.
“Your eye looks good. Vicious headache, right?”
Nedda groaned, then groaning hurt. “Migraine level. If you need a break from Evgeni’s music, do him next.”
“Noted. I thought you’d like to know that no one’s killed your plants yet. Singh went into a panic about Amadeus, so be warned, he’s touchy. The printer gave him benzodiazepines, and I made him take an extra. So if he falls asleep on you that’s why. Oh, and we had morning call.”
“How was it?”
“They admitted we’re supposed to run on plutonium, so that’s something. Now they’re just lying about whose fault this all is. Eurasia blames North America for miscommunication and shoddy engineering. North America blames Eurasia for the isotope mix-up.” Marcanta sounded like she was frowning. “They’re holding Fortitude for at least an additional year in build.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. On the upside, you’ve got a scheduled call.”
“My mom?”
“Like they’d tell us. Anyway, you get one more hour to sleep and then we need to run tests before your call. I can’t wait to tell you all about how I’m gonna put a blob of oil in your eye when we get on planet.”
She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Half of her was traveling; she was crew and ship and what lay ahead. Half of her was an orange grove and a path in the woods and all the people who had walked it.
Betheen was thinner than when Nedda had last seen her, but the screen might be stretching the image. Or this was just seeing with one eye.
“Oh, Nedda, your eye. What happened?”
“It’s nothing, Mom. You look thin. Are you eating?”
“No more or less than usual. Maybe a little less. There’s a food drive going on for the Coloradans, and I never feel right about eating so much while others go hungry.”
“What happened in Colorado? Our news is always late and pretty filtered.”
Betheen glanced away. “If they screen your news, it’s probably best to let it go.”
“But you’re not eating.”
“Just a little less.”
“Martyr.”
“Pot, kettle.”
“Did you bring it?”
“Yes. It was in the attic. I forgot I’d put all those things up there after the basement flood. It took a minute to find.” The flood had ruined the few things of his that were still left.
Something loosened in Nedda’s chest. “Oh, thank God. I thought you wouldn’t know what I meant.”
“How could I not?”
Mission Control monitored calls in the same way it monitored emails. Under the guise of mental health, under the guise of operation management, under the guise of history and preserving a record for posterity, which was fine, until it wasn’t.
“Can you hold it up to the camera?”
And there, in the pages of one of his unfinished notebooks, was Betheen’s handwriting and the elegant equation. Betheen’s hand was shakier now than it had been when she’d written it.
Nedda wrote quickly, stylus sliding across her tablet.
“Why the sudden interest?”
“There’s some spiking energy in one of Chawla’s drives. We’re dumping off excess radiation into our landing-cushion water. Singh says it’s fine, but it’s better to play it safe.” Nedda said that seeing him run the calculations had made her want to revisit all the math she’d forgotten. The lie was thin at best. Her mother had always known when she was hiding things. Their eyes met. Nedda knew, for once, she was deeply understood.
“The energy spikes are cyclical?” Betheen asked. “And you wanted to see our old math.”
“Yes. Something just feels familiar.”
“Well, you plug in the frequency here, the mass, and the energy output.” The notebook wavered. “I used estimates here. Children’s math.”
“What happened to him wasn’t your fault.”
The notebook pulled away, and Betheen leaned close to the camera, shadows clinging below her eyes. “I know that, Nedda Sue. I do. It wasn’t your fault either.”
Betheen raised the notebook again, and Nedda finished copying, stretching the skin across her good eye, bending the light to make the writing clear. The room felt larger, darker, like their kitchen at night filled with notebooks and pens, the smell of corn muffins.
After Nedda finished copying the equation, they sat in silence for a moment. It was a waste of signal, but it was Nedda’s last luxury, time with her mother, stretched across the universe.
“Do you think it’s the same?” Betheen asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe? It’s possible he worked with someone along the way, maybe a student. You said he had a friend at NASA. I tried to dig around, trace the patent history, but it wasn’t clear. I’m not sure it makes a difference.”
“I don’t suppose it does, but he’d want to know.”
“He wanted to know everything. He sometimes thought he did.”
“I could have emailed this to you; it would have gotten to you faster.”
“It would have been screened. I might not have gotten it for a year or more, and there are some things I’d prefer other people didn’t have their noses in. And I wouldn’t have gotten to see you.”
Betheen would always be striking, no matter how time changed her. No matter how she’d softened. It was in her smile, which had become warm like brown sugar, and wide like the horizon.
“No one tells you how strange it is to see your child as an adult. My mother never said a thing, not when I left for college, not when I married your dad. I always see baby you, even in your flight suit, even when you’re talking to press. I always see you pushing up on your little hands, learning how to crawl. I want to scream ‘There’s my baby, running around in space doing dangerous things, and doesn’t anybody know that a stiff wind could kill her?’ ”
Nothing had killed Nedda, and the woman talking to her from halfway across the sky was tougher than Nedda had ever been.
“You always look the same to me too,” she said, though it wasn’t true any longer. But it was difficult to say anything more. She thought of her mother, not bent over a stove or in a lab coat, not tucking her into bed, but backlit by the sky, holding out her hand. Telling Nedda, Get up.
“How’s Pete?” Nedda asked.
“Claiming I burned all of his nose hair off.”
“Did you?”
“He should know that just because it smells like lemon doesn�
��t mean it’s lemon. Serves him right.” She closed the notebook and tucked it away.
“Are you …?”
“I’m not replacing your dad.”
“It’s okay if you do.”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve been celibate, and it’s none of your business.”
“So you’re sleeping with him.”
“Nedda.”
“Don’t be so old-fashioned, Mom. No one worries about that stuff now. They haven’t in fifty years.”
“Well, I guess I’m antiquated.”
“We both are.”
“I wish I could help you more,” Betheen said.
“You did. You do. More than anyone.” She could not say the words she wanted—they were stuck in equations, in memorizing all the subtle changes in her mother, trapped in a barrage of seeing. Later, when the screen blinked black, they spilled.
You saved my life.
Her hair hurt when she let it down from its braid. The release of tension made her scalp scream with a joyful kind of pain. Almost enough to explain watery eyes.
Nedda runged her way around Chawla, searching for Singh. She found him in his cabin, tucked in his sleep sack and staring at the ceiling.
“Amit, quit fantasizing about our demise. We can fix it, but we need to triple check all our math. Then we get to rip some stuff apart.” She tossed the tablet at him and it spiraled slowly, beautifully. His long arm snaked out from the blue cocoon and caught it.
“What the hell?”
“What did I teach you? ‘What the fuck?,’ ‘What the shit?,’ or ‘Motherfucker’ would be appropriate. We can fix Amadeus.” Her hands were trembling. “Wait until the benzos are out of your system. You need to be extra careful with the math. We have to check each other.”
He was fully awake now. “Sure, yes, absolutely.”
“Careful math, or boom,” she said.
“Or boom.”
1986: Mr. Pete’s House
The Cadillac sat in front of Mr. Pete’s house, one of three dead cars in the driveway. Tricia Villaverde said that’s how you knew someone was trash, if there was a car on blocks in their driveway. Nedda didn’t think it counted if the person fixed cars. Mr. Pete kept things from being trash; he rescued them. The Cadillac’s side was crumpled, paint gone, metal crunched. There were traces of the other car on it, stripes of white paint, glass stuck in the seam of the bumper. Her mother had been inside, French twist rising high over the headrest, elbows braced against the steering wheel. Betheen pulled the seat up far and Dad always teased her about it. “You try looking over a mile of hood,” she’d said.
The other person had died. Her mom could have died.
“What happened to the other car?”
“It slid into the canal,” Betheen said.
“You’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
For right then, it was enough.
Mr. Pete’s garage door was open. Nedda was used to seeing him rummaging inside, tossing things into a pile of cords, wires, and tools. But the garage looked different, felt different. The light inside flickered at irregular intervals, distorting Mr. Pete’s shadow, and made all the things in the garage seem bigger than they were, scarier.
Betheen squeezed her hand and said, “We can’t tell him what happened to your dad.”
“Why not?”
“He might get too scared and we need his help. I need your help. I need you, okay? Come on, let’s go in.”
“Fine.” It wasn’t fine.
Mr. Pete’s front yard had a palm tree that dropped coconuts everywhere, dark shapes on a lawn that was mostly dirt, gravel, and bits and pieces that never made it back into cars. The sky was the same color it had been over the grove, though it had taken them what felt like forever to get through the woods. The sun should be high now, but it hadn’t moved.
“Mr. McIntyre? Pete?” her mother called.
The lanky shadow put a hand to its eyes. Denny’s dad called people like Mr. Pete rat people. Rat people were families who had moved here before Easter was Easter. Hunters, fishermen, and fruit pickers, they’d come down for cheap land, then stayed on after the money ran out, through frosts and fires. Everyone’s family came from somewhere to get to Easter, but the people Pop Prater talked about seemed like they’d always been there. You’d see them at the dog track, or racing hot rods, or fishing all day even during the week. Some had hooked up with bootleggers during prohibition. When Island Paradise had been open, they ran rides. After the moon landing some of them sold fake moon rocks. Pop Prater said the whole town could disappear and they’d still be there because they could live off the trees and the Indian River, like the monkeys that escaped the park. He hadn’t meant anything good by it. Mr. Pete was one of those people. McIntyres had always been in Easter. They didn’t have money like the Praters, but they weren’t in the trailer park either. She knew Mr. Pete had done a bunch of different things, but it was good to do different things, to like lots of things. Coffee berries. Magazines. Mission patches. Space junk.
“Mrs. Papas?” Something clattered as it fell from a table. “Are you all right?”
“Pete, I’m sorry to bother you, but Theo is working on a project and he said you might be able to help with materials.”
It was a dumb lie. Nedda knew her dad called Pete anytime he needed anything. She watched to see if he bought it.
“Copper,” Pete said. “I saw him earlier.” He dug his hands into his pockets, a thumb poking out a hole. He noticed Nedda and flinched. “Nedda Sue.”
“Hi, Mr. Pete. My dad’s having trouble with the phone today, so we’re helping.” There, that was better.
“He was—his hands were acting up. He had me drive him to the grove to look at something, then I brought him back to the school,” Mr. Pete said.
“You saw Denny, didn’t you?”
He was supposed to say something about how it wasn’t that bad, even if it was a lie. That was the contract, between adults and kids, and why there were moments of silence, assemblies, and why people said stupid things about everything happening for a reason. Mr. Pete said nothing.
Betheen didn’t say anything either, and it made Nedda burn.
“He’ll be fine,” Nedda said. Somebody had to say it. If nobody said it, then what was the point of trying to do anything at all? “We’re going to fix it. It’s like a soap bubble and we need to pop it. We need a needle.”
The lights flickered. A bulb in the back flared before burning to nothing, leaving the rear of the garage in darkness.
“We need a stable power supply,” Betheen said. “I remember you lending Ellery Rees a generator after Hurricane Bob.”
“Mmh.” Mr. Pete rubbed his neck.
“He needs it for an electromagnet,” Betheen said.
Mr. Pete looked at Nedda. “Were you with Denny?”
“I thought it was lightning, but it wasn’t,” she said. Her shoe bottom rolled over a pebble, and she pressed down on it, hard. She wanted it to hurt, but it didn’t. She pushed harder. “He’s going to be fine.” She knew how to lie. Why to lie.
“Well, come on in. I got a pair of generators.”
His garage was packed, a jigsaw puzzle of bits of boats, fans, and pieces of what were probably airplanes. In a corner, something that looked like a propeller leaned against the wall. She trailed her fingers over things. Sometimes rightness was a feeling. Sometimes you didn’t know something worked until you touched or smelled it and saw where it fit. Denny was oranges, Ivory soap, and moss. Her dad was a hinge creaking, unbent paper clips, and boiling salt water. A launch was rain, ash, and eggs. Those things weren’t supposed to fit together, but they did. The things in Mr. Pete’s garage, the tool boxes and empty cans of Crush, belonged here.
She touched the propeller, which was from a fan boat, not an airplane. Mr. Pete leaned back, looking at her, then her mother.
“It’d be easier if the professor gave me specifics.”
“Consider me his assistant,” Betheen sa
id, sugaring her voice, making a willful decision to use sweetness for a purpose. That was power too.
The door into the house was open, and a hall light shone on a row of lockers. Mr. Pete had everything: plaster casts of Neil Armstrong’s feet, containers of freeze-dried food, toothpaste tubes of roast beef, tire treads that matched the ones on the lunar rover. There were things her father might have worked on, pieces of him other people never saw.
“We’ll need a lot of current.”
“I can’t say for sure if the generators I’ve got are enough if I don’t know the specs of what he’s working on. I can talk it through with the professor. If his hands are the problem, I can help.”
Nedda cut him off. “Mr. Pete? I have to use the bathroom.”
“Sure, sure,” he said.
She ducked inside the house. She’d seen the locker bank before; it was from the maintenance building. Mr. Pete said he’d found John Glenn’s hard hat in it, but he must have made that part up, because nobody would leave something like that in a locker. She touched the paint. Maybe John Glenn had touched it. Maybe Neil Armstrong. Maybe Judy Resnik. Mr. Pete’s house was winding, one of the older houses in Easter that had been built out, torn down, and added on to, but never quite right. There were telephones everywhere, disconnected. Some of them were probably from Kennedy, maybe from Mission Control. Even if they weren’t, Mr. Pete told people they were. A fire axe hung on a wall, beside it a faded black-and-white picture of a group of men in gear. Mr. Pete’s face was in the back row. Under the axe was a heavy glove, like the kind her dad kept in his lab.
Her dad needed copper. Betheen said he wanted to make an electromagnet; she’d gotten that from his jumbled words, from copper, magnetic current. There was copper in phones, in phone lines, in everything in houses. She walked. Touched. The kitchen had drawers that didn’t close, things hanging out of cabinets, screwdrivers and wrenches on the countertops. There were dishes somewhere, she guessed, but one person didn’t need a lot of dishes. She only used a plate and a cereal bowl and if you washed those, you wouldn’t need anything else.
Something caught her eye. On his kitchen table, a perfect little thing, neat, as though it had just been set there, as though Mr. Pete had been looking at it this morning. A mission patch with efficient machine embroidery, the black, yellow, and red of the German flag. STS 61-A, Challenger. A Spacelab mission. James Buchli, Guion Bluford, Henry Hartsfield, Bonnie Dunbar, Steven Nagel, Reinhard Furrer, Ernst Messerschmid, Wubbo Ockels.
