The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  “To her,” he said.

  “To her?”

  He said nothing in response. He knew what she meant. Of course he did. But it was not true that the school was important only to him or at least he believed it was not true and so he had not thought there had been any possibility that she would actually choose the public school over the academy. Such an outcome seemed impossible. Then he had started the training and Quinn was in eighth grade and then summer was upon them again and he had simply assumed that the plan they had discussed and decided upon remained in place, had believed it so strongly that when Barb told him that Quinn had decided not to go to the academy, that she wanted instead to attend the regular high school, the information made so little sense that he did not know how to respond and so responded in the only way that would come to him, that it was not her decision to make; it was his decision and, perhaps, Barb’s, but if Barb was not going to support it then it would be his decision alone. Had he only been there every day, talking to her about math and science, pushing her along the path of her destiny, then perhaps she would not have drifted away from it the way she had and then he was angry at Barb for allowing her to deviate from that path or, short of this, for failing to keep him better informed. And then when he talked to Quinn he did not even understand what she was saying. She talked about her friends and the clubs and activities she was involved with at the junior high and how much better it would be in high school and he sat and looked at her and wondered where she had gone or how he had so totally failed to understand her or how she had so totally failed to understand herself.

  “It’s like you have a choice between Harvard and state college,” he told her, “and you’re choosing state college. I don’t get it. If you can go to Harvard, you go to Harvard.”

  She was prone upon her bed, looking at a magazine of some kind—fashion or gossip or something similar—and she continued to stare down at its pages, not looking at him as he stood in the doorway, but not ignoring him either, hearing him even if she did not respond.

  “I just want the best for you,” he continued. “I didn’t have this kind of opportunity when I was your age. I had to wait and wait and wait to learn the stuff I wanted to learn. I dreamed of a school like the academy. I really did. But there just wasn’t anything like that then. At least not that I knew of or that we could afford. But you can do this.”

  “Maybe you should go to the academy then,” she said. She still did not look at him and then he saw that tears had begun to streak down her face.

  “Oh Quinny,” he said.

  He reached for her and she said, “Don’t,” her voice quiet even as she shrugged away from him. He was silent for a long time and then he said, just as quietly, “OK.”

  He turned out of the doorway now and moved in the direction of the living room. As he did so he could hear the sound of the door swinging shut behind him, not slammed in anger but closing gently as if in resignation or defeat.

  It was well past eight in the evening but the midsummer days were long and yellow sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows and across the living room floor. Still at least a half hour until sunset. Barb out with her girlfriends. In the absence of the closing door there were no sounds anywhere except those he himself made.

  He took a beer from the refrigerator and went to the slider and opened it, moving outside in his socks and brushing off one of the lawn chairs there and sitting down. He tried not to think of the conversation he had just had or had failed to have but of course it was impossible not to and he continued to feel irritated and, yes, disappointed, although this latter he still did not want to admit to himself. He opened his beer and took a long drink.

  The coming evening surprisingly cool and the light filtering through the mulberry tree shuffled in the faint, thin breeze. A white glow, then green, then white again. The hum of a distant lawnmower. The voices of children somewhere.

  The sun was lower in the sky when the slider shushed open behind him. He half turned to see Quinn in the doorway. “Can I sit out here with you?” she said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Can we not talk about stuff?”

  “We don’t have to talk about anything.”

  Her face showed no expression. She moved forward onto the concrete and pulled a second lawnchair beside his, close enough that it was almost touching, and sat next to him and they watched as the day ended and the light paled to chartreuse and then shifted into a deep radiant blue and then began to yellow into sunset.

  They remained together like that for a long while, unmoving, not speaking. At some point he reached out his hand for her in that silence and her fingers wrapped into his own. Her hand so much bigger than he remembered it. Not the hand of a little girl now but becoming a young woman. And yet the gesture was the same and the feeling of her skin was the same. The air had become the color of night, the sun dropping beyond the mulberry, the light of the town all around them rendering the sky a dusty emptiness devoid of stars, as if some quiet blanket had been pulled over them.

  He would have held that moment forever. She would have done the same.

  A month later Quinn began her freshman year of high school. He knew that he could not have changed her mind and anything he would now say would simply result in her pulling further away from him. But it felt like a reversal of roles somehow, not between he and his daughter but between he and Barb as her parents, for her willfulness had seldom been directed against him. He remembered that span of days—it had turned out to be nearly a week—in which Barb had flown to Atlanta to attend to the death of her father and how he had been concerned that Quinn might prove difficult to manage. But that had not been the case. It was Barb and Quinn’s teachers who found her difficult to manage; he had always found her willing to accommodate most reasonable requests. He and Quinn had shared some kind of bond then, which he had thought to be permanent because it had been based upon their actual selves, their beings, the people they were, which had fit together with such fluidity that her talent, her gift of numbers, seemed like a natural progression. It was almost to be expected. And yet now she had made up her mind in a direction that made no sense to him, which indeed seemed counter to everything he cared about or desired or believed about her.

  It was only her choice of schools and yet it was also much more than that. Indeed it seemed to him that the whole of her had changed while he was away at training and he hardly recognized the new tall brightly dressed teenager she had become. What bothered him even more was realizing that she had not signed up for any math classes whatsoever and hearing slightly later, from Barb, that Quinn had made the freshman cheerleading squad. He did not know that she had tried out or had even been interested in doing so. Barb had been a cheerleader but Quinn was not like her mother, although now he was not sure he knew his daughter very well at all. Indeed, it was as if the vacant rooms in that infinite hotel they had spoken about had somehow all been filled and no further expansion was possible, the sets of infinity eliminated, cardinality vaporizing all at once into a dull gray mist that drifted, became transparent, and was gone.

  The plan had been that Keith would finish his training and when he was officially an active-duty astronaut Barb and Quinn would finally move to Houston and they would be a family again. He knew that Barb would not want to move, knew also that Quinn would be saddened by the decision but that she too would want to remain and continue her high school in the town where she had grown from a child into a young woman. Nonetheless when he was at last presented with the silver lapel pin indicating that the training period had ended and he had entered the roster of active-duty astronauts, he collected some information on relocating to Houston from the personnel office, a thick envelope of printed materials lauding the myriad cosmopolitan aspects of the city, and when he returned home he handed the entire packet to Barb and then watched, for a full week, as those pages remained on the kitchen counter, unread. He asked her if she had thought much about where she wanted to live or if she wanted him
to poll those NASA employees he already knew who were living in Houston but her response was vague and he was left to wonder when the argument would come. When it finally did, it was exactly as he knew it would be. Barb maintained that he would be gone so often that it made little sense to move to Houston, particularly as Quinn was already established at her new high school.

  “The only reason I was flying back and forth was because of the academy,” he had argued. “If she doesn’t want to go there I’m not going to make her, but there’s nothing keeping us from Houston now.”

  “That’s not the only reason why we didn’t move,” she said. “You’re gone all the time. You’re still going to be gone all the time.”

  He was silent. Incredulous.

  “And Quinny has her friends,” Barb continued, “and she’s popular and she’s so beautiful. The boys are falling all over themselves for her.”

  Silence, and then he said, “I can’t believe you talked her into this.”

  “She talked me into this.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute,” he said, but he did believe it, immediately and completely, and the sensation was like a vast star collapsing all at once in his chest. It had not been his idea to commute back and forth to Houston but he had agreed to do so and in making this agreement had set a precedent that could not be undone. Perhaps he had thought he could shift her into the faster current, the current that he could see flowing under her feet but which, for reasons he still could not understand, was somehow invisible to her. Had he pushed too hard or had he not pushed nearly hard enough? But these were not even the right questions to ask. He had simply done what he had always done; he had fallen into the numbers like a man falling into his dreams and thought that somehow the people he left behind were locked into the orbit paths he had calculated for them and would continue to turn in those perfect paths, a radial distance forever matching the most simplistic articulation and needing no further calculation or concern.

  Of course Barb won the argument; he did not even know why he tried to talk her out of it to begin with.

  And so they did not move to Houston but they did move one last time. She brought him the brochure soon after he had been assigned his first mission—the only mission he would ever undertake—amongst the first of his ASCAN group. The group had been told that the order in which they were chosen for the mission schedule was no reflection of their individual capabilities but he could not help feeling that he had been chosen for precisely such a reason. He had taken over a project to replace the current robotic arm on the ISS with a longer, more mobile version and rather than approaching it as if it would be a new model of the existing arm, he threw out the original schematics, the notes and ideas of other minds who had worked on the project, and thought instead about basic and fundamental notions of functionality—motion, power, strength, dexterity, control. He poured himself into the project, the numbers fluid and sleek and beautiful, and when he had a full draft of the whole project he showed it to the main office and within days was presenting it to various members of the NASA staff. They checked his calculations again and again but he already knew he was correct. Over the subsequent year he would work on making the numbers a reality.

  Once the arm was complete he would bring it to the ISS. He would install it. He would test it in person aboard the station. That would be his mission. My god. He would at last be going into space. And Barb and Quinn both seemed excited for him this time, Barb even suggesting that they go out to dinner to celebrate and there were days when he felt as if some syzygial moment had come upon him: he was fulfilling his dream, his daughter was happy, his wife loved him. But it was only that span of days, for he was gone again for more work on the robotic arm and when he returned everything had regained its normal silence and distance. Barb wrapped up in her life, Quinn in her own, and these lives separate from his.

  Soon after, Barb brought him the brochure featuring the image of a young couple with a blonde child and a red dog with long shining fur, all posed happily on an expanse of green lawn. “The Estates,” the text read. “Your home. Your future. Your family.” He did not know why Barb or anyone else would want to live in a neighborhood comprised entirely of cul-de-sacs, but when he raised this objection she reminded him that he was going to be gone on his mission for six months and he would be home so seldom between now and departure that his opinion was of little import. “Just let me do this,” she told him, and his response was to nod and tell her, “OK, fine,” and then, “Whatever you want.”

  She chose a floor plan and a color scheme and five months later they hired another moving company and everything was boxed up and loaded into a truck and delivered to the new house across town and then everything was unboxed and put away in bedrooms still smelling of plaster and fresh paint. One weekend when he was home Barb dragged him through six or seven different furniture stores, asking his opinions of various sofas and tables and chairs and finally purchasing the sofa he professed to like the least, the gray beast that she had subsequently left behind. There had been an argument, of course, but even then he did not know why he had bothered or why she brought him along to the stores if only to ignore every opinion he offered.

  Despite this, he thought in the end that the new house might make Barb happy or if not happy then at least content and that it might even make Quinn happy, the two of them settling into a neighborhood so new that much of it remained empty, streets ending abruptly at dirt lots, sidewalks circling empty spaces where houses had yet to be built. She had wanted a new house and it certainly could not be any newer than this.

  His last conversation with Quinn occurred the evening before he was to return to Houston for the launch procedure. He had been home for a few days. When Quinn was home she stayed mostly in her room or passed through the house talking on her mobile phone and so he hardly saw her at all even though she dwelled under the same roof. She had her own life of cheerleading, social gatherings, and high school dances and did not seem to notice him unless she wanted something from him. And he did not like to admit it but he was afraid too, afraid of her lack of interest in him, afraid of her silences, perhaps afraid of further pushing away whatever connection they had once shared, and it was this fear that continued to concern him even as the months and weeks and days passed and up until there was simply no time remaining. He had decided that he should talk to her about her future just once more before the mission and actually convinced himself that it was worth at least attempting, as if he might shake her resolve just enough for her to consider her future while he was away, and so, the night before he was to leave, when Barb was out at the supermarket, he walked up the stairs in the house that six months later would be empty of everything except for himself and knocked, waiting for her to say, “Come in,” before opening the door.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she answered. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Just stopping by.”

  She was silent, looking at him. She was not a girl anymore but a young woman; the skinny gangly child she had once been had faded into some more distant memory and this daughter who looked up at him was a young adult. In his memory she was shining. In his memory she was alive.

  He glanced around the room: a white box the walls of which were mostly covered over by music posters. “How’s the new room working out?” he said.

  “OK.”

  “Did you decide on a color?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing much.” She waved her mobile phone at him. “Texting.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Texting who?”

  “Shawn.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s the tall kid?”

  “Yeah, he’s the tall kid. I only have one boyfriend.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Don’t be mean,” she said.

  “I’m not being mean. Why do you and your mother always think I’m being mean? I’m nev
er being mean.”

  “Just don’t be mean.”

  It was silent then but for the faint strains of music from the stereo behind her. After a moment he said, “How’s cheerleading?”

  “Good.”

  “Good game on Friday?”

  “Yeah. We did our new pyramid at halftime. Mom said it looked great.”

  “I’ll bet it did,” he said. “Did she video it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good, I’ll watch it later then.” He stood looking at her and still she did not look back at him. “School?” he said at last.

  “Fine,” she said. A pause and then, “How’s work?”

  “Hard. We leave tomorrow.”

  “I know. Are you excited?”

  “Of course.”

  “Cool.” A long silence now.

  “So,” he said, “I wanted to talk to you about something before tomorrow.”

  “Uh-oh.” She looked up at him and then sat up and leaned against the headboard.

  “Well, I guess I wanted to know what you had planned. Or if you were thinking about that at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re seventeen.”

  “Are you asking me what I want to be when I grow up?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Any idea what college you might want to go to?”

  “Probably City. At least for a while.”

  He was silent, staring at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “You can do better than that.”

  She did not say anything in response.

  “I just want to make sure you’re thinking of your future. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I am thinking of the future,” she said.

  “City College is not your future.”

  “Says who?”

  “Look, honey, I want you to do something. At least go to the university.”

  “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. I figured you’d be a math major or something.”