by Erika Swyler
“I could,” Mr. Pete said. “I took some sequencers apart and put them back together a few times when there was a short or when a mouse gnawed on something, but it’s been a couple years.”
“But they’re all the same, right?”
“Mostly.”
“We need one of the generators to run the sequencer, then have the sequencer run the other generator to the magnet,” Betheen said. “Can you do that?”
He nodded.
“Good. Do it.”
She’d get to see a launch sequencer work. It would run and actually do something. She twisted lengths of copper around and around the rebar core, crawling under where Mr. Pete had propped it against the house’s siding. Would it be enough? It looked like her magnet, which had done nothing. But she’d guessed, stupidly guessed, which wasn’t good practice. Her mom had done math and made a better estimate, even if it wasn’t exact. Her mom was always precise—triple-beam-balance-out-to-a-tenth-of-a-gram precise.
Headlights rolled across Mr. Pete’s driveway, as familiar as her parents’ cars—Denny’s mom. Nedda ducked beneath the rebar and hid. She could run home, lock the door, crawl in bed, and never look at Mrs. Prater’s face again. She’d never have to look at her, knowing that Denny’s mom knew she’d left him. But she stayed, back flat against the side of the house.
“Betheen? I know you’re here.”
Her mother set down a copper loop she’d been winding. Her hands were chapped and bloody in the V between pointer and thumb. “Nedda, stay here. Keep working, okay? No matter what.” Betheen walked to the driveway, dragging her hand along the house’s peeling white paint, stepping over the mess and scrap where Mr. Pete had been welding.
Nedda kept wrapping wire, stealing a look. Denny’s mother was bent-looking, like she might crack in two.
“Betheen,” she said. “The mayor called a town hall meeting at the school. Everyone is there.”
“The whole town?” Mr. Pete rose from where he’d been working on one of the generators—an orange-and-black machine that looked like an air conditioner and a tractor had a baby. “What’s the occasion?”
Nedda inched forward until she stood right behind her mother. She knew when Denny’s mom caught sight of her. She wanted to say how sorry she was, how she should have tried harder to stop him from going, how she shouldn’t have left him there. She wanted to say they were trying, but she also wanted to scream at Mrs. Prater. Denny’s dad had hit him.
“Desmond thinks that Theo—he’s sure he did something. He saw Theo and Pete leaving the grove, right before he found Denny. He wants people out looking for him. He wants to hurt him, Betheen.”
The laugh that came from her mother was fierce and loud. “Hurt him? Good luck with that.” Betheen’s arms went around Denny’s mom with a loose softness that looked all wrong on her mother’s body.
“He wanted to fix the pruner,” Nedda said.
Mrs. Prater stared at her. “He what?”
“Denny was trying to fix it. He thought his dad wouldn’t be mad if he could fix it. I told him to wait, but …” The words skipped on each other and tied up at the ends. There was no space between them, not enough to say how scared she’d been, that she’d run to her dad, what her dad had done, and how he was stuck now. Part of her was peeling away, leaving only the clump of words. She couldn’t look at Denny’s mom, or Betheen, or even Mr. Pete, who loved Denny too. Mrs. Prater had helped take care of her. She closed her eyes.
“Oh, honey,” Denny’s mom said.
“Why are you here, Annie?”
“You helped me.”
Those words worked like permission.
“There’s something wrong with Theo,” Betheen said.
“He’s stuck,” Nedda said. “He’s stuck like Denny, but not the same. I tried to get him to fix the machine and he didn’t do it right.” She should have known he couldn’t fix it. His hands had been bad the past few days.
“Okay,” Denny’s mom said. “Let me help.”
“Why?” Nedda asked. Mrs. Prater had every reason to hate them.
“I don’t know what else to do.”
Denny looked like his dad, mostly. His hair, his coloring, the way he walked sometimes—kind of bowlegged, but the good kind. The first day of first grade he’d sat next to her in the cafeteria, bit into a carrot, and spit half of it clear across the room. Denny’s mom had that mouth.
The electromagnet they’d made, the needle that would pop the bubble, wasn’t so much a needle as a bulky tree branch of iron and copper. Four pairs of hands hefted it. She’d never seen Betheen move anything heavier than a wedding cake or the stand mixer, but her mother bent low, taking the weight with her legs, as though practiced. The needle scraped along the bottom of Mr. Pete’s truck, a deep screeching that rang her ears. Moving Mitzi was harder. The sequencer was unevenly balanced; Nedda and Denny’s mom were much shorter than Mr. Pete, and Betheen bridged the distance between their heights. They tottered forward, wobbling with the awkward bulk, a coffin without handles.
What would happen after? If Crucible stopped, if their plan worked, what would happen? The machine would pull apart. It would leak gasses. Poison. Mitzi was a remote trigger. But her dad wouldn’t be able to leave the room. What was there just before gas, carbon, and light? There was a body. When it wasn’t ash, wasn’t carbon, there was a body. She didn’t want to name the body that took shape in her mind. She didn’t define it or give it glasses and flaking skin. Specificity gave sadness mass.
Mitzi’s sides bit into her fingers. He’d wanted to keep her young. What would it be like to stay this size forever? To be these cells and molecules always? What if she was like the monkey? Who would touch her? Who would check to see if she was still alive? Who would wait for her, watching, looking?
“Lift up, Nedda,” Betheen said.
“I’ll keep people away from Theo as long as I can,” Denny’s mom said.
“It’s not just for him, Annie. It’s safer for everyone, I promise.”
Mrs. Prater hugged Betheen again. “I could take Nedda with me, if you want. I’ll be sitting with Denny. We’ll be far from the lab.”
“No.” Nedda realized she’d shouted when Denny’s mom backed away. She couldn’t go back to the shed. Not with her dad the way he was. “I need to help.”
Betheen didn’t try to calm her down, comfort her, or pawn her off on Denny’s mom, and Nedda loved her more for that than she ever had in her life.
“Take a blanket, Annie,” Mr. Pete said. “It’s likely to get cold in that shed.”
“There’s coffee berries in Denny’s backpack,” Nedda said. “They’re purple. Some of them are probably squished because he forgets them, but could you take some? Can you show them to him? He’ll know what they are.”
“Okay, honey.”
Then her mom hugged Mrs. Prater.
“I was in Cocoa watching movies when they sent them home from school. If I’d been home, he would never have broken the pruner in the first place. He’d be fine,” Mrs. Prater said.
Betheen said, “We’re going to fix it, Annie.”
It sounded like a lie.
Mr. Pete opened the truck door and Nedda climbed in, slid across the vinyl, and strapped herself in to the middle seat. A jump chair in a shuttle. Any minute the floor would rumble with fire and steam; flame channels would fill, and she would rise, stop asteroids from hitting Earth, find new life, find another world to live on. Save this one.
Betheen sat beside her and held her hand, squeezing the bones so hard it had to be love.
They rolled down Mr. Pete’s driveway. She closed her eyes. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Things slipped between Mississippis. Her dad could die. There was an entire room in the house that belonged to him. You couldn’t have a room for someone without that person. There wouldn’t be anymore looking at stars. No comets. He’d never know she’d lied to him. She’d never get to tell him why. She dug her fingernails into the seat, peeling up the vinyl.
&nb
sp; Forced to turn whenever roads became impassible, they took a circuitous route through Easter that brought them by the abandoned park.
“Oh,” Betheen said. “Look.”
Over her mother’s shoulder, the eyes of the tiki head were alive, bright with gas flames flickering against the twilight. “How?”
“The time anomaly—it must have gotten into the gas lines,” her mother said. “The utility grids are connected. It’s in the water under and around town. It’s above us too, in the power lines.”
There was something off about the power lines, a thickness to the air around them, as though it had become liquid. It looked runny like dish soap. The road narrowed; brush and brambles had creeped in from the shoulder to cover the asphalt, parts of which had buckled. Frost heave. Eventually the road was lost between thick forest and palmetto scrub.
It was everywhere.
“Shit.” Mr. Pete turned the truck onto a bumpy trail that went under the powerlines themselves, a utility road that ran clear to the shore. He rolled through radio stations, searching for a signal, but all that came through was static. No radio. There was always radio. A sudden hard left brought them onto College Drive. The truck windows frosted over, and the light shifted. The infrared in sunlight made your skin feel warm, loose and soft, but this light was missing it; her skin pulled in, hairs on end.
A hedge beside the entrance had grown up and over one of the doors to the lab building, its branches stretching to form a cave. The other door had rusted on its hinges, and remnants dangled.
“It’s time, Nedda,” Betheen said.
Through the truck cab window, over the sequencer’s shadow, she looked back at the woods, which seemed more alive and wilder than they’d ever been. Maybe the monkeys were running in there, looking for the monkey house or their little brother who was trapped in Mr. Pete’s yard.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Be scared,” Betheen said. “But don’t let being scared keep you from doing something. Important things are always frightening. We can be scared, and we can work scared.”
It was better than a kiss on the cheek or a hug. Nedda unbuckled.
They moved Mitzi from the truck and she slid the last few feet, landing on Mr. Pete’s dolly with a crash so loud Nedda swore something must have broken. The echo of the wheels on the ramp into the building was loud enough to bounce off the sky.
As they pushed through, the last of the door crumbled, leaving them covered in rust that smelled like blood and old Band-Aids. Pete went back for the generators and the needle.
“It’s going to take me a minute to get the wires attached right,” he said.
“Do you want to see him?” Betheen asked. “You might want to know what we’re working with.”
He shook his head. “I’ve seen enough. Some things are just for family.”
The narrow window in the lab door hummed with light. Her father was in there, him and not him. Terrifying. What did you do when you were afraid? You did the thing anyway, even if it might kill you. For the greater good. Judy Resnik knew. Gus Grissom knew. For the greater good. She opened the door and went to see her father.
When he stilled enough to really look at, he was older than he should be, his hair white, knotted around his shoulders like Spanish moss. His face had the same lines, but deeper, like he’d been folded too long and all the creases wouldn’t come out. All his thinking faces had marked him. He’d bitten through his lip at some point, maybe while they’d been in the hallway. His skin knit itself together as she watched.
She wanted to be angry, or happy she was seeing him at all, but there was just sadness, dry like dead grass. He was right—Crucible could have fixed things, broken limbs, people. His hands. Maybe her brother.
He moved and it was painful-looking, jerking and heaving, like when someone got hit by a phaser on Star Trek. On TV it didn’t look like it hurt, but this did. He was hurting and he was frightened. His glasses were gone, but his eyes found her, no matter where she moved in the room.
Betheen’s drawing was still on the white board. His pens were still out, as though he might pick them up to make an important note, might start being himself at any second were it not for Crucible. Its legs spun, gliding, circling its core, and the room flickered and strobed with the movement, stuttering. Nedda climbed onto a table, setting her jacket beneath her to keep away the steel’s cold bite.
His hair pulled back into his scalp. There was a baby doll that did that; the hair grew when you cranked its arm and receded when you wound it the other way. A doll, not a person. Not a dad.
“How much longer, Mom?”
Betheen pulled the kitchen timer from her coat. It was close to halfway through. “A few more minutes and we should be able to talk to him again.”
The plaques on his arms moved up and down, and for a few seconds faded away. There, a week, maybe a few days, when it wasn’t itching or bothering him, when his hands and feet might not have hurt.
“Soon now,” Betheen said.
“How do you know?”
“It’s the plaque on his back. It just showed up last week. See how it’s shrinking? When it’s small, almost like a quarter, he’ll be close to us.”
How did you know someone well enough that you could recognize the size of a spot on their back, know when it came and went?
“What do I say to him?”
“Whatever you want him to know,” Betheen said.
“How do I know what that is?”
“It’s the thing you’re most afraid to say. Always.”
There were too many words, so many that she knew there’d be none at all.
Aboard Chawla
There’d been a rainbow-colored assortment of mood stabilizers in the printer tray that morning, so Nedda assumed the call was from her mother. It was a shock when Denny’s face took shape. The video screen lent him a flatness that was nothing like how she remembered him. Faces were mountain ranges no camera captured as well as the eye. Then, having one working eye leveled landscapes too. Though she’d had years to get used to it, the gray in his hair was still surprising. There was a lapse in the feed before he’d see her, before the signal cut through space, bounced off satellites, to find him at the other end. The him she viewed had already happened. Seeing him through the fog of her warping eye made it clear: They would never again occupy the same time.
His chin was square now, dark; he was terrible about shaving, which came as no surprise. He seemed nervous, lost and fidgeting. She hoped he would smile, that she might be able to make out his broken tooth. He had a grown man’s face now. When you were away, alone, people reverted to how you best remembered them. To her, Denny would always be twelve.
“Hey.”
The delay made his reactions slow, turning everything into a spit take. Twelve years old, but a grown-up.
“What happened to your eye?” His voice was digitized; there were corners to it she was unused to, but it was him, a dusky seaside sparrow out of time.
“Just space stuff,” she said. “I doubt they’ve said anything on the news. We’ve tried to keep it quiet, but we’re going blind. I let Louisa—that’s Dr. Marcanta—do some spinal taps and take fluid out of my eye to see if it will help.” The delay meant she saw the exact moment he heard blind. “It was always a risk. We understood that when we went up.” It was a neat lie. Vision loss was a slow goodbye that was impossible to comprehend until you were in the middle of it.
“Blind? Jesus. How’d she get the fluid out of your eye?”
“With a vitrector. It’s basically a big needle that’s also a knife.”
“Jee-sus.”
There was a quiet between them while Denny contemplated that. Waiting was a risk; satellites moved.
“Betheen told me there’s a problem with the module,” he said. “There’s nothing on the news. Not about your eyes or anything else.”
“We’re working on it. I’m going to fix it.” Even before the lag caught up to his expression, she knew
he didn’t believe her. “I promise. We’re fixing it.” The last time she’d seen him her feet had been on the ground, actual Earth, a spit of Florida, and he’d been furious. Somewhere over the miles, she’d grown accustomed to the idea that she’d never see him again. That he couldn’t forgive her for leaving. “I don’t want to talk about that, okay? Just tell me how you are. I miss you.”
“I sold the grove,” he said, and then came the tooth, the jagged grin he’d never gotten fixed. Its appearance brought a deep ache in her chest. Hearts didn’t pop out of ribs; they ran too fast, stopped, died. And yet.
“Betheen said your father died. She said she thought you might sell. Dates are hard to keep track of up here. How long ago was that?”
“Two years,” he said. “I was going to run it. I tried for a little while.” Seconds expanded as he searched for words. She wanted to touch the screen, but knew it would feel like all the glass on Chawla, cold, hard. It was a shame she couldn’t touch his hair, feel the wiriness of the white and gray in the black.
“What happened?”
“Turns out I don’t like oranges all that much. I guess I should have taken pictures or something to show you what it looks like now, but I didn’t think about it. I’m sorry,” he said. “Pop was there forever. His whole life was the grove. And I never had to make any choices about what to do with my life. The grove was there, waiting for me to run it. I didn’t understand that until after he was gone. Maybe I couldn’t understand it with him there. But then he went and died, and the grove and everybody kept going without him. The guys knew what to do for the oranges better than I did. They didn’t need me. And then, my mom, you know? I didn’t know how things were between her and my dad until I saw Mom without him. She’s happier. It’s kind of like she woke up. I mean, he was nice to me after everything, so I didn’t know any better, but after he died Mom finally told me what happened, what he did to me and why I was on the pruner in the first place. I got to thinking about you. I’m pissed off. You both lied to me about him and you did it for so long. My mom says she lied to herself a lot too. That she had to overlook a lot of things to stay with Pop. I understand that some. But I didn’t understand why you did it. Then Betheen told me you’d thought you were doing me a favor, and that if I ever wanted to talk to you again I should probably do it now. That’s fucked up, Nedda.”
