Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  When they returned to the school from lunch, Sarala had taken Rose aside and asked her to explain the conversation about the Academy, so Sarala, unlike Abhijat, had a better sense of what was afoot. As the hearing continued, she began to guess, correctly as it turned out, at why Meena had not before mentioned this opportunity.

  Abhijat, however, now found himself distracted, half following the hearing, and half curious to learn what it was that Rose had been referring to, what this opportunity for Meena was, and why she hadn’t shared this information with her own parents.

  Meena sat stiffly next to her parents as the hearing continued. Surely, the moment they found themselves in the car on the way home her father would ask her about the conversation. And what to say? she wondered.

  After the two mayoral candidates had come a kindly old lady, who urged the panel to pray over the matter. “Please don’t build this terrible machine under our homes, our schools, our beautiful farmland,” she urged them. “All of us, on both sides of this auditorium, want safe homes for our families. Don’t you want that, too? Then don’t take that away from us.”

  Throughout the afternoon, the audience grew restless in their seats, and tempers grew short. Outbursts came from both sides, followed by stern reprimands from the moderator. Listening, Abhijat could feel his heart pounding. He felt afraid for the Lab and afraid for himself. Beyond his own hopes for what the collider might mean for his legacy, he had begun to worry over what would become of the Lab if they lost this bid. The Lab was the one place he had ever felt at home in the world, and the opponents seemed to be threatening its very existence. He felt Sarala’s hand on his, and he looked at her, grateful for her presence.

  “We will next hear from Mr. Horace Emery,” the moderator announced, his voice crackling over the auditorium’s speakers.

  Mr. Emery approached the podium. He took off a hat with what Rose recognized as a seed-company logo on the front—her father had worn one like it—and tucked it into the back pocket of his overalls.

  “My name is Horace Emery,” he began. “My family roots go back to the land that is now part of the Lab, and I want to go on record as being 100 percent in support of this project. When the Lab was first proposed twenty years ago, I was opposed for many of the same reasons you folks are. But I was wrong, and you are wrong today.”

  At this, booing from the audience.

  The moderator leaned toward his microphone. “We have all agreed we will not have that sort of outburst. Mr. Emery, please continue.”

  “With this new proposal, I am going to lose 189 acres of farmland, and it is probably going to destroy my way of life. I’m getting too old to go out and start all over again. But that’s okay, because this is for a good cause.”

  Here there arose a series of shouts from the opposition’s side of the auditorium.

  “You folks want to yell?” he said, turning to face them. “Well, that’s all right. I like those kind of discussions. Progress always involves risk. We cannot stand in opposition to progress. I know people who have been cured of cancer out at the Lab with their medical experiments, and in my mind, losing my land is worth keeping one of my neighbors alive. I wish this sort of thing existed back when my father died of cancer. He had a tumor. He went into the hospital and they cut a hole in his head and he lay there a vegetable until he died. Nowadays, I hear about people who go down there to the Lab and in a few treatments they’re healed. No knife, no blood transfusion, not even a Band-Aid. I certainly hope we cut out this monkey business and get on with this thing, the sooner the better.”

  Mr. Emery turned from the podium and walked back to his seat, the audience, for a moment, strangely quiet.

  “And now we will hear from Ms Lily Winchester,” the moderator announced. Lily had told no one, not even Meena, that she had registered to speak. She had kept it to herself, and for the past several days had spent her evenings, like many of her fellow citizens, poring over her comments, timing herself so as not to exceed her allotted five minutes, refining her points down to the most salient, the most persuasive. She inched past Meena, Sarala, Abhijat, and Dr. Cardiff, who watched, as surprised as her mother on the other side of the auditorium, as she made her way down the aisle.

  “Good afternoon,” she said, speaking into the microphone affixed to the top of the podium. “My name is Lily Winchester. I am fifteen years old and a student at Nicolet High School.

  “Many people are against this proposed project. Some because they are afraid of change and progress.” Here there was shouting from the opponents’ side, but now, hours into the hearing, it had begun to feel both expected and half-hearted, as did the moderator’s move to quiet it. Lily continued. “But if we listened to people like that, we’d never have gone into space or done any of the other important things our country has done. By the time construction on the super collider is completed, my peers and I will be freshly out of college, and this project will open up countless opportunities for those of us pursuing careers in science. We should be honored to have the collider built here. I see the super collider as a tool, an instrument of science that has much to teach us and will help us to unlock the mysteries of our universe. It is true that the new facility will displace families. Your dreams may be affected. What, though, is wrong with another, bigger dream? Thank you.”

  Rose watched Lily return to her seat on the other side of the auditorium, filled with a pride she hoped did not show on her face.

  The moderator spoke again into his microphone. “And finally—” at that word, signaling an end in the nearby future, it was as though the entire audience, supporters and opponents alike, sighed deeply in relief “—we will hear from Dr. Gerald Cardiff.”

  Dr. Cardiff rose and made his way down the row of seats, Sarala giving him an encouraging smile. Abhijat noted his friend’s slow and careful pace, the grey encroaching on his few remaining dark hairs, and again Abhijat became conscious of the fact that they were, both of them, aging.

  “When I was a boy, many, many decades ago,” Dr. Cardiff began, “we were taught that the atom was the smallest thing in the world.” He paused. “How woefully unimaginative that turned out to be. What has been revealed to us by the Lab’s work and accomplishments is a magnificent world, more astounding than any of us could have imagined.”

  Listening to him, Sarala felt like he was explaining to her all of the things that Abhijat loved about his work but so often did not have the words for. She reached over and took Abhijat’s hand in hers.

  “It is my most cherished hope,” Dr. Cardiff continued, “that we might work together as a community to ensure that this sort of revelation is available to the young people who join us here today, to their generation.” Here he looked at Lily and at Meena beside her. “They will, I believe, discover things that today we are unable to even conceive of, but we must provide them with the tools to do so, to participate in this remarkable unveiling of the world’s mysteries. The greatest gift we can bestow on future generations,” Dr. Cardiff said, turning to the audience, “is to encourage their curiosity. Thank you.”

  The moderator leaned in to his microphone one last time.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Cardiff being our final speaker of the evening, this concludes our hearing. I, and the panelists who have joined me here today, wish to thank you for your thoughtful comments. With that, we are formally adjourned. Thank you and goodnight.”

  Whereupon, at 7:30 p.m., the hearing was concluded.

  CHAPTER 21

  Cartography of the Time

  Abhijat managed to wait until he, Sarala, and Meena had gotten into the car, the doors closing, one—two—three consecutive thumps, before raising the question.

  “Meena, what is this opportunity, this academy Mrs. Winchester mentioned at lunch?” he asked, turning from his place behind the steering wheel to face Meena in the back seat.

  All around them doors slammed, engines started up, the cars of the other hearing participants snaking up and down the parking lot aisle
s toward the exit, brake lights glowing out into the dark.

  Meena had been expecting this, had buckled herself grimly into her seat waiting for one of them—of course it would be her father, she realized now—to ask the question. “I didn’t want to bother you,” she said.

  “That you have mentioned,” he said. “But what is the opportunity?”

  “It’s a special school,” Meena began haltingly, doling out as little as she could. “For science and math. You live there. Mr. Delacroix… the guidance counselor. He said Lily and I should apply.”

  Abhijat was quiet for a moment, taking this in. “And do you want to apply?” he asked finally.

  Sarala, listening from her seat beside Abhijat, was surprised by his choice of question. It was exactly the right one.

  Meena scratched at a spot on her jeans. She spoke without looking up. “I didn’t want to bother you while all the stuff about the collider was going on.”

  “Yes, but it is my responsibility as your father to help you pursue opportunities,” Abhijat answered. “It is not a matter of bothering me—this is my duty as your parent. And now, again the question—do you want to apply?”

  Sarala turned in her seat to look at Meena, offering an encouraging smile.

  “No,” Meena said, her voice small, apologetic.

  “A useful piece of information,” Abhijat replied, nodding. “And, may I ask, why?”

  “I don’t know,” Meena mumbled, hoping her vagueness, her lack of enthusiasm for the conversation might deter her father from pursuing it further.

  But, like parents everywhere, Abhijat instead took this as encouragement to forge ahead, imagining that somewhere, underneath that “I don’t know” thrown aside so carelessly, she did in fact know, did in fact want to share this information. He pressed forward, and it felt to Meena a little like the evenings around the kitchen table, so long ago now, when he would gently nudge her on through the difficult terrain of a particularly tricky math problem, displaying a kind of certainty in her ability that even she did not feel.

  “I just.” Meena started, then stopped again, assessing the hazards of the tangled path before her. “I like my school. And I don’t—” She took a deep breath, as though preparing to dive. “I’m sorry. I know this sounds mean, and I don’t mean it to, but I don’t want to have a life like you.”

  For a moment this ricocheted around the quiet of the car. Abhijat felt himself absorbing the force of it in an almost physical way, as though being tackled. And then, like parents everywhere who have pushed forward and learned something they are no longer sure they wanted to know, he wondered if he should have, perhaps, not pressed her. Should have let her float in the cool uncertainty of her mumbled “I don’t know.” Should have let himself float there, safe from knowing this. Though of course he had known it already.

  After a long moment, Sarala spoke. “Meena, we have never asked or expected that you choose a life like ours.”

  For Abhijat, there was a moment of light in that pronoun—ours. He listened as Sarala continued. “But we do ask that you respect the choices we have made, the hard work and dedication your father has given to his work. Whether you apply to the Academy or not is of course your choice,” she said. “But it seems to me that Lily was quite confident that you had applied or were planning to.”

  Meena looked down at her knees. She nodded.

  Abhijat started the car, the noise of the engine filling the silence of the interior in a way that felt welcome to all three of the occupants. By now, the parking lot had cleared of all of the other hearing participants. Abhijat swung the car around in a graceful circle, down a row of empty parking spots to the stop sign at the exit, and headed for home.

  Lily and Rose’s car ride home had been nearly silent, Rose in the driver’s seat negotiating the traffic, Lily staring determinedly out the window. Rose stopped at the mailbox to gather the day’s mail before piloting the car into the garage. In the laundry room, both shed their coats, hanging them on the hooks along the wall.

  Sorting through the envelopes in her hand, Rose made her way into the kitchen and turned on the television on the kitchen counter, hoping to catch the evening news.

  But the regular programming had been preempted, and nearly all news channels showed maps of the Indian Ocean.

  Lily turned on the larger television in the family room and sat down before it. The voice of the reporter floated out into the room. “Reports today that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a remote chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal, have been devastated by a tsunami that struck the island early this morning.”

  Lily turned to look at Rose, who held in her hands a letter from Randolph bearing the return address: Andaman Islands.

  For two days they had no word. Lily stayed home from school and rarely moved from the couch in the family room, where she monitored the news coverage, grainy videos taken by tourists in the more populated areas of the islands, aerial images showing sixty percent of the island chain’s landmass now under water.

  The first night, Lily appeared in the doorway of Rose’s bedroom.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said.

  “Me, either,” Rose said.

  “Could I stay here with you?” Lily asked.

  “Of course,” Rose answered, holding up the comforter and making a place for Lily beside her.

  Lily slid into the spot, what would be Randolph’s place were he there with them, and allowed her mother to wrap her arms around her. Rose buried her face in Lily’s hair, spread out over the pillow, and gathered her daughter to her.

  “Do you think he’s alive?” Lily asked, her voice small and muffled by the pillow.

  At the very thought of it, Rose could feel her heart beginning to race. What was best in this situation, she wondered. She could feel her careful veneer of parental authority and competence beginning to fracture, a slow spreading, like a cracked windshield.

  She imagined herself saying, “I think he’s probably dead.” But she did not say this, for by saying it aloud, wasn’t she calling that very possibility into being? She felt like a traitor for even allowing herself to think it. She was meant to be a better wife than that, a better mother, the kind who kept faith, who believed in his survival.

  She imagined herself saying, “I think he’s alive.” But she did not say this either. It felt dangerous to admit, as though acknowledging any small chance of hope would only irritate fate into snatching him away.

  Still her heart raced. Lily would be damaged beyond repair—the thought passed through her consciousness, and her heart beat faster. This is your fault for allowing him to go, for permitting such a life. Pressed against Lily’s back, she wondered if her daughter could feel her heart thumping so furiously inside her. It felt as though it were trying to escape the confines of her body. Rose took a deep breath, hoping to calm her racing thoughts.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart,” she said finally. And although—or perhaps because—it was as unsatisfying an answer as she could have given, Lily did not ask again.

  Rose counted slowly to ten. She listened to Lily’s breathing and tried to breathe in tandem with her, slowly, deep, long breaths. She could tell the moment Lily slipped off into sleep, and Rose thought of all of the times when Lily was a baby that she’d watched for that moment, laying her down gently in her crib, tiptoeing quietly from the room, afraid of waking her.

  When she was sure Lily had fallen into sleep, Rose slid from the bed and padded downstairs to Randolph’s study. In his office, she sank into the large wing chair before the bookshelves and opened the tin box of his letters—line after line of his small, cramped handwriting (economical, he would argue, she thought with a smile), sketches, here and there a memento tucked between the pages.

  She had always been keenly aware of how Randolph had chafed against his overprotective parents, and in their marriage, she had taken great pride in her willingness to tolerate, her enthusiasm, even, for his wanderings, for his work.

  The moonlight shon
e in through the windows, reflected in the glass of the display case. She thought of how it had all once seemed so thrilling, but now—now it seemed so futile, such an unnecessary risk.

  And what if he didn’t return? She and Lily would continue on without him. What else could they do? Break down entirely? Let their lives come to a standstill? No—Lily would go to the Academy as planned. Rose would continue on with the election. Her day-to-day life would look much the same. But, she thought, holding the tin box in her hands, she would have no more letters to add to it. She ran her fingertips over his handwriting on the page. For so long, he’d been her dearest friend, her closest confidant, her greatest love next to Lily.

  Meena brought Lily her books and assignments from school, and in the evenings sat with her in front of the television, though Lily hardly spoke, and her schoolwork remained untouched.

  Sarala prepared a large stack of casseroles and filled the Winchesters’ freezer. Before she left, she put one in the oven and reminded Rose to take it out in forty minutes, but neither Rose nor Lily remembered or even thought of it until they began to smell it burning.

  In the kitchen, Rose kept the radio on and tried to work, listening for each time they cycled back to the story.

  “Mrs. Winchester is so calm,” Meena had said to her mother. But Sarala suspected that, while on the surface the waters appeared still, below it was a rolling boil.

  Lily tried to prepare herself for the worst. “He’s dead,” she told herself over and over again, imagining that, somehow, anticipating this possibility, preparing herself for it in advance, might offer her some sort of protection once the news arrived, might somehow make it less painful.