by Erika Swyler
“I saw him and Pete McIntyre leaving the grove this morning. You know, don’t you? You know what happened.”
“I’ll let Theo know you came by,” she said, like she was telling Nedda to clean the dishes or brush the tangles out of her hair—a scold and an order that would not be questioned.
“I know Denny came here last night. My boy was here.”
There was a way of fighting where you didn’t raise your voice, but every word was a hammer. Shouting without shouting. Nedda’d heard men yelling at each other, but her mother and Pop Prater were doing the other thing, and it was frightening. Pop Prater might punch a man, but right now he sounded like he’d put a pillow over Betheen’s head while she slept. Betheen would poison him.
“He was here. He also had a black eye.”
The veins on Pop Prater’s cheeks looked ready to rupture, like his whole head might explode. He looked at Nedda. “You were with him, weren’t you? He never goes anywhere without you. You left him in that shed, didn’t you?”
Betheen yanked Nedda’s collar, pulling her back, shoving her into the parlor. She closed the door, leaving Nedda inside while she stood on the front stair with Pop.
“You don’t get to speak to my daughter that way.” Clear, firm, even through the door.
“She knows what happened, doesn’t she? He’s my son. You know what that is. My wife watched your daughter. She took care of her all that time you couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed, and she never said a goddamn word about it.”
“Desmond. You need to leave, now.”
“You haven’t seen Denny, have you? You don’t know. Ask your daughter. Ask your husband.” He spat the word husband like Nedda would a swear. “Ask him why the sun didn’t come up right, why my trees are dying. Ask your husband what he did to Denny. If he doesn’t fix it, if he doesn’t …”
True things had a flavor—clean like salt and lemonade. Pop Prater hadn’t said the words, but he’d kill her dad. That tasted like truth.
“Go home to your wife,” Betheen said.
In the parlor, Betheen held her. Nedda was too tall now to bury her head in her mother’s side, too old for things like that. All the things that were supposed to be comforting were for littler children. She’d resisted any small indulgences from her mother. She hadn’t wanted them, and now that she needed them, her body didn’t fit. Nothing fit. Her mother’s ribs moved, in and out, fast like a rabbit. “Mom? Is Dad going to die?”
There were too many seconds before Betheen said, “I don’t know. But here’s what we do. We cry, but no more than fifteen minutes. Any more than that will wear us out and make thinking too hard. Then we work.”
“Okay.”
Nedda had seen an electromagnet before, had even built one in her father’s office. He’d taken a handful of a spaghetti mess of wires and told her to wrap them around a nail.
“Trust me, it’ll be neat,” he said. He’d let her use a wire stripper to rip the plastic off, revealing shiny copper. They connected the ends to a nine-volt battery.
Then he’d dumped a box of paper clips on the floor, handed her the nail, and said, “Go fishing.”
The nail had grown hot in her hands, the current spiraling, warming the metal. But the paper clips clung to it. She loved it—a machine they’d made from nothing. Then it was too hot to hold, and she’d dropped it.
He’d kissed her fingers better. “Looks like we overdid it, Little Twitch. The more you wrap it, the stronger the magnet, but the more heat it makes.”
What Betheen was drawing was big, with yards of wiring.
“It’s going to get hot,” Nedda said.
“It needs to.” Betheen’s eyes were still red from crying.
“Why?”
“We need to pull Crucible apart, so it has to be strong. We need heat. We need chaos.”
But there was poison inside.
The lights at Denny’s house blinked on all at once, then shut off. The sky flashed yellow-green, chewing up clouds, light like at the grove. It was a shock like the one that took Denny. The thing Crucible had made was spreading, leaking everywhere. The roads, the lab, the lights in their houses. “It’s the whole town, Mom.”
Betheen stilled. “Oh god, that’s what he meant.”
“What?”
“A sinkhole. Why does a sinkhole happen? What’s underneath dissolves or collapses, and the top layer breaks. Easter’s on water. All our water’s from underground. The boat pond in Island Paradise. The canals, they’re drainage water. You said the sprinklers went on at the grove?”
“Right before it happened.” It. Denny.
“And they were on over the trees?”
“Yeah.” A sky of milky rainbows.
Betheen’s pen tapped a furious rhythm on the table. “We’re floating on top of it. It must be in the water plant too. He’s right. The ice, the boiling, the trees. It’s in the water. We’re a sinkhole.”
A sinkhole meant a break in the crust. If you stepped just wrong, if something fell, a crack could open that would grow and swallow everything you knew.
The clock on the range had stopped working and the sky hadn’t shifted in too many hours, trapped halfway between day and dusk. It would almost be pretty if it wasn’t so wrong.
“We’re stuck, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know. We have to work fast,” Betheen said. “What do you think?”
Nedda thought she was asking about the light and the cold that hung around them, but then her mother pointed to the finished diagram. It was the kind of electromagnet Nedda was familiar with, but there were symbols on it she didn’t recognize. Her father’s drafts were usually done in thick, squared lines. Betheen’s had an elegant lean.
The kitchen timer beeped. Two hours and seventeen minutes. Her father had been born, died, and done it in reverse again.
Betheen restarted the timer.
“It’s pretty,” Nedda said.
“It will have to do.”
Her father had lived and died again when Betheen put her hand gently to Nedda’s back. “Upstairs now. To bed.”
The sky hadn’t changed at all. The astronauts might still be in it. The gas, carbon and light that they’d become might be trapped in the sky. Perhaps they were moving around Easter, stuck.
“I was thinking,” Nedda said.
“You can think when you sleep too. Bed. No brushing your teeth, and no showering, just in case. That’s a nice change, right?”
“Sure.”
Betheen followed her upstairs, closed the bedroom window, and rolled down the shade, but the cold still came through. It came up from the floor, from everywhere. When Betheen got up, Nedda grabbed her hand.
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Betheen said. “But I need to keep working. I’ll be downstairs.”
“Can you stay for a little?”
The sheets were still on the floor from where Denny had spent the night. Her mother stepped around them, never letting go of her hand, not even when she climbed into bed, next to Nedda.
She must have been tucked in by her mother before, but she only remembered her father, the occasional brush of the scaly back of his hand.
“Did you ever tuck me in, or did he always do it?”
“Not as much as I should have,” Betheen said. “It was mostly your father. By the time I could handle it, you were already so grown up you didn’t need tuck-ins.”
She’d been used to her father, had wanted his voice. She’d wanted stars on her ceiling exactly like the sky. “I know you couldn’t take care of me. Would you tell me about Michael?”
Betheen smoothed the sheets over the bottom of the bed. She squeezed Nedda’s toes through them, a touch so light it almost didn’t happen.
“I got pregnant so soon after you were born, it was a surprise— the best kind. But your brother came too early. He couldn’t survive the way he was, and there was nothing doctors could do for him. He didn’t even live a day, just a little more than an
hour. When things like that happen … well, I was very sad for a long time. I still am, and part of me always will be. Remember what I said about light? He took a little of it with him.” Her face did something that wasn’t a smile or frown, or anything Nedda had a name for.
“I’m sorry I didn’t always take care of you the way I should have. I tried, but I couldn’t for a while. We didn’t start out trying to keep Michael a secret. We decided you were too young to understand, that it was better not to tell you when it happened. Then too much time passed and it was easier to never talk about him at all. Maybe that was wrong, but we didn’t know any better.”
Betheen tucked a bit of hair behind her ear, and it looked like the way a movie star would do it, a perfect, painful sad. “I wish,” she said, but nothing followed.
Nedda blurred her eyes. It made it easier to see the parts of her mother she’d inherited—her neck, the shape of her wrist bones—though everything that looked right on her mother had come out wrong on her.
“Do you miss him?”
“Yes. All the time.”
Her brother had lived a little more than an hour. Her father’s entire life could pass in two hours and seventeen minutes. Two and a quarter Michaels. What if you counted your life in other people? How many Michaels old was she? How many Michaels since Michael died? Could you count him in launches? Two-minute marks—was one Michael thirty launches? How many Challengers made a Michael?
“It doesn’t mean I didn’t love you,” Betheen said. “I do, and I did.”
Nedda stared at her clock. Time passed strangely when you were sad. She wished so many things that a pit formed in her stomach. She wished she could sleep. She wished there was something to say to her mother.
“Mom—”
“I’ll wake you when we’re ready to go to Mr. McIntyre’s.” Betheen kissed her forehead.
Nedda tried to imagine her brother, Michael, but could only picture him as Denny. She thought about bubbles and how slippery they were, how they popped in the sun as water evaporated, how cold made them last longer and fly higher. If she could, she’d float up in the sky like a bubble. Maybe she’d touch Judy’s light. Maybe she’d touch Michael’s.
Betheen unzipped Nedda’s book bag, took the pony from it, and placed Cotton Candy on the windowsill. Her tail was knotted and her astronaut helmet was all scratched up. Soft somehow. Old and loved.
After Nedda’s eyes closed but before she went to sleep, she heard pages flipping and then her mother was on top of the covers beside her, a furnace in the cold. Nedda leaned in to that heat, wanting to dig her hands in, not caring if she got burned. She would hold on until her hands blistered.
1986: The Town
Geoffrey Macon, mayor, and the second Macon to be so, made the decision to gather while staring down a piece of galaxy cake at the Bird’s Eye Diner, his fork halfway in. He’d just gotten through being yelled at by Desmond Prater, who’d barged into his office like a bat out of hell, going on about how his boy was sick, none of his trucks could get out of town, and he couldn’t get a call out to anybody, and maybe that was a mayor’s responsibility. Geoffrey decided it was time for a break. He was swallowing down a bite, mulling that over, when Ellery Rees told one of the waitresses—Lynn? Julie?—that Marty from the funeral parlor said a body had sewed itself up on his table, and Ed Ingram said there was a car with a dead guy in it frozen in the canal on Satsuma.
Geoffrey Macon had led Easter through hurricanes that should have wiped them away, personal darkness around labor practices at the sugar factory that had been the source of his family’s wealth, and a specific town law regarding alligators and where and when you could or could not walk them. But bodies stayed put, stayed dead and preserved—or not—as their families saw fit. They didn’t go sewing themselves up. That was for bigger towns with bigger histories, like New Orleans, where they let that kind of foolishness happen in the streets. Sick kids? That was for Brevard East to handle. Phones and power outages, that was for Bell and Florida Power & Light to manage. He’d put Zinnia, his assistant, on it the night before, and that should’ve been enough.
The cake, for all the coconut and marshmallow, was wallpaper paste in his mouth. Frozen canals in Florida? Dead bodies sewing themselves up? If that wasn’t a bridge too far, he might as well resign.
“Ellery,” he yelled, “gimme the check. And tell anybody who comes in here there’s a town hall meeting at the elementary school at seven. Mandatory.”
“Damn good thing,” Ellery said. “Little Mike Costas was in here earlier, saying the grove’s eating itself up and the Prater kid got himself stuck in some kind of bubble.” He leaned in, gut spilling over the table. Ellery was equal parts ooze and ease. “The sun cooks those guys, you know?”
Those guys. Geoffrey’s father, Geoffrey Macon, Sr., used to talk that way and it was disconcerting to hear words like that come out of a younger man’s mouth. People were people, and damn it, Easter was progress. The Last Place Before Space. “Des Prater said his kid was sick.”
Ellery leaned in to whisper, the small-town kind of whisper meant to be a shout: “Little Mike says the kid’s aging like crazy. Nobody can touch him or even get near.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that. Just tell people we’re meeting up at seven at the elementary school. I’d be obliged.” Obliged was the kind of word that Ellery would appreciate. Geoffrey threw ten dollars on the table, too much by three times over. He needed a walk. His lights and phone had been out since the night before, he’d not gotten the proper amount of coffee in him, and Patty’s mother was in town besides. That woman had a way of making his underwear crawl up his ass.
Typically, trucks bounced along Red Bug Road with regularity, going to and from Canaveral and the grove, delivering to the Albertson’s, but today there weren’t any. Used to their rumble, Geoffrey found the absence startling, and it gave weight to what Desmond Prater said. En route to his car, he passed Anita Marvin.
“Seven o’clock tonight at the Covey School, Mrs. Marvin,” he said. “I’m holding a town hall. Tell people and bring people. This is mandatory.” He added a wink, so as not to be too harsh. People didn’t trust a harsh mayor. He’d learned as much from Macon, Sr.
“All right, I’ll be there,” she said, looking at him as though he’d also cooked too long in the sun.
Come to think of it, Zinnia had never gotten back to him about the power or phones. He looked across the roof of his Lincoln and saw the glow coming off Prater Citrus, a large halo that thrummed in time with the headache taking shape behind his eyes. Well, that was distinctly not right. He ducked into his car, buckled himself in, and let his belt out a hole, needing room to breathe. It was set to be a lulu of a day.
The phones weren’t working, so the townspeople traveled door to door, knocking, seeking. Jim Barr rolled his father’s wheelchair down the cracked sidewalk, Patricia Barnesdale and her husband rode their bicycles, and the Sandersons walked, their eldest daughter pushing the twins in their stroller. Treat it like a hurricane, they thought; gather where it’s safe, up on high ground, away from trees. Collect one another, move forward. Rusted trucks from the grove, filled with workers and their children, parked in the semicircle drive in front of the school. Police knocked on doors, which meant some people hid. Everett Lawrence had a bench warrant for something he’d done at the dog track while high. He couldn’t remember what.
Everyone avoided the Papas house. The lights weren’t on—though most people had lost power—and most preferred to avoid Theo Papas. He made them uncomfortable, the way he carried on a conversation while thinking about five or six other things. Always shedding pieces of himself everywhere he went. There was a handing off of responsibility. Surely Annie Prater had told Betheen.
No one told Pete McIntyre either. No one told a McIntyre anything. They lived on the edges of Easter’s days, as much a part of it as the asphalt or pavement and were spared as little thought.
People flowed from the auditorium into the
hallway. The room was well over capacity, but the fire department was there, which made it as safe as a town hall could be with a town too big to fit properly in a single room.
The Praters walked in and the crowd parted. Desmond demanded space, both by size and disposition. Annie walked in front of him, something she rarely did. She looked frayed at the edges, like she’d been crying. One of the Rodriguez brothers said something awful had happened to the Praters’ son, but he wouldn’t say what.
Mayor Macon winced when he spoke into the microphone and tried to cover it with a cough. He never managed to pick up a mic without feedback, and never did remember that beforehand. He launched into his prepared remarks about contacting FPL about the lights, even though Zinnia couldn’t reach them, and getting police and firemen on the roads. Aggressive flora was one of his better turns of phrase.
“The sun isn’t setting,” called a voice from the back of the auditorium. High and nasal, but not someone Geoffrey could immediately place. As though he could personally do anything about when the sun rose and set on Easter. Though it wasn’t doing either.
“The priorities are lights and roads. Anybody who is without heat and has difficulty with cold, partner up with somebody who has heat. We’re lucky to be a town full of good, kind people. Get to know one another. Love thy neighbor,” Geoffrey said.
“My pool’s half froze and the half that’s not is boiling.”
“I tried to wash dishes and there’s no water coming out the pipes.”
Complaints gathered in a low roll of discontent, which amassed, forming a wave. As a Macon, Geoffrey recognized it for what it was: civic dissatisfaction that would culminate in mob rule.
“Follow hurricane protocol,” he said over the chatter. “Make sure you’ve got flashlights. If you’ve got running water, bottle it up. If you’re on well water—that’s you folks on Verdigris Circle—fill the tub now so you can flush the toilet. Use common sense.”
“Well water’s what busted the pipes.”
