Tethers

by Sara Reinke

  “Yeah,” she said. “Go on.”

  He began to tug. His face flushed with the exertion, and the tendons on his neck stood out like taut straps of rubber under his skin.

  After a long, futile moment, Frank let go and staggered back a step. He was breathing hard and his hands were shaking. “Goddammit! It’s slippery from the rain and it’s too heavy. I can’t get it.”

  Kat looked around the ruined shuttle, searching for anything they could use for tools. She caught sight of a pipe poking out of the tear in the ceiling. She reached up and wiggled it experimentally. There was a good amount of give, and so she caught it in both hands and put some weight behind it as she yanked. The pipe popped free with a lack of resistance that caught her by surprise. She danced back a step to avoid getting clobbered over the head as it fell to the floor with a loud metallic clank.

  “Maybe this…?” she offered it to Frank.

  He smiled at her. “Give me a lever and I can move the world, huh?”

  He eased the end of the pipe under the lip of the console and snuggled it in good and secure. He rubbed his hands together, grabbed hold of the opposite end and glanced up at Kat.

  “You want me to help?” she asked.

  “No, no, I got this,” he said. “You pull him loose.”

  He began to push down on the pipe. The console creaked as it shifted.

  “Keep going.” Kat slipped her arms around Eric. “That’s it, you’ve almost got it, Frank, keep going.”

  “Shit,” he seethed, pushing with all of his might, his forearms shaking from the strain. “It’s too much!”

  The panel rose centimeters more, enough to just clear Eric’s thighs.

  “No, no, I got him, that’s it!” Kat cried, pulling Eric free. He was heavy, and she sprawled him out on the floor. She kept one hand under his head, supporting and protecting. “Eric, can you hear me?”

  Eric moaned lightly. He opened his eyes. He blinked, confused and bewildered up at Kat. “Hey…” he murmured.

  “Hey, yourself,” she said. She smiled at him, brushing his hair back off his brow. She leaned over him, using her back and shoulders to shield him from the rain.

  He groaned. “How long was I out?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just came to a little while ago.”

  He cracked a smile, a wry lift to the corner of his mouth. “You woke up first. Guess that means you won our bet.”

  She couldn’t help herself but to laugh. It was either that or burst into hysterical sobs. Or go crazy, she thought. She kissed Eric’s forehead, blinking against tears. “I’ll collect from you later.”

  “Can you walk?” Frank asked Eric. “I’m not sure how far it is, but the colony compound has to be around here somewhere.”

  “I can make it,” Eric said with a nod.

  Kat gathered Jerica up in her arms. It was like lifting a very heavy doll. Jerica didn’t make a sound, didn’t even seem to blink.

  “Want me to get her?” Eric reached for her, but Kat shook her head.

  “No, no, it’s okay. I’ve got her.”

  “What should we do with…?” Frank cut his eyes toward the back of the shuttle, toward Leia. Eric followed his gaze and uttered a sharp, startled gasp.

  “We’ll have to come back later,” Kathryn said. She caught Eric’s hand and forced him in tow without turning her head. She didn’t want to look at the corpse again. “Let’s just go.”

  Chapter Two

  “Ow!” Kat yelped miserably.

  “Sorry,” Frank said, smiling sheepishly at her. “I know it stings a little.”

  “A little, hell.” She winced as he began to dab at the laceration on her head again with some kind of sweet-smelling antiseptic salve. “What is that? Hydrochloric acid?”

  They had made the infirmary the first stop in their perfunctory grand tour of the compound. Jerica had curled up on one of the cots and immediately dozed off. She slept with one hand buried in her mess of dirty yellow hair, and the other up, almost over her face. Frank had cleaned the little scrape on her lip, and covered her with a blanket. He assured Kat her torpor was nothing more than shock from the crash.

  “I know this hurts, but it’s really not too bad,” he remarked. “Not very deep at all. Scalp wounds will scare the shit out of you, but there’s usually more blood than damage. You’ll probably have a scar, though.”

  “That’s all right,” Kat said as he handed her a white cotton gauze pad. “It will match the others.”

  “Hold that up there a sec. Good.” Frank pressed a strip of medical tape across the gauze. “Thanks. You’re all done now.” He handed her a small foil packet from a nearby cabinet. “Ibuprofen,” he responded to her questioning glance. “Take two and call me in the morning.”

  Kat groaned and he laughed. “You’ve been banged up pretty good, Kat, and those will help. You’re going to be sore.”

  “Too late. I already am.” Kat smiled, hopping down from the cold metal examination table. She walked over to another, where Eric had situated himself.

  He’d shucked out of his flight suit and was sitting in his underwear. Despite her soreness and their circumstances, Kat took in a quick but admiring look at his long torso, the well-defined muscles cleaving his chest and abdomen. The dim, sudden heat this observation stoked in her snapped her mind immediately, cruelly to Alex, and the awful realizations she’d been trying her damnedest not to think about.

  I left Alex to die.

  “Any luck?” she asked Eric.

  His legs were stretched out in front of him, and all sorts of little tools were spread around him. He looked up at her. “No. All of these tools are too big. There’s nothing here small enough for the cybermechanics.”

  “Do you think it’s damaged?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not. I mean, it seems to be working okay.” He wiggled his toes experimentally. “How about you and Jerica?”

  She nodded. I’m fine, she thought. Just peachy. Never better. The man I love, the man I’ve been sleeping with for the past five years is now blown to microscopic bits in outer space, floating around Jupiter’s asteroid belt. The man whose hands were touching me not twelve hours ago, who was undressing me, kissing me—whose goddamn erection I felt pushing against me through his pants and wanted to feel inside of me—is dead now, gone. I didn’t even get to tell him goodbye. Much less that I loved him.

  “I’m fine. We’re fine. Everything is fine.” She pushed her hair out of her face. It felt grimy to her. She winced, and went to rub her hand on her flight suit. It was covered with blood and muck. “God, I hope there’s a change of clothes around here somewhere.”

  “I’ll find you one,” Eric told her, his voice oddly gentle.

  He can tell my brain is scrambled right now. He knew about me and Alex.

  But she didn’t want to think about Alex anymore.

  She began to unfasten the front of her flight suit, and remembered what it had felt like to have Alex’s fingers there, working the clasps free. I remember how he tasted. The flavor of his mouth, his toothpaste. We were just about to make love, goddamn it.

  “Kat…” Eric began.

  “It’s all dirty,” she said, not looking at him. She managed a sharp, barking laugh. “It’s disgusting.”

  She couldn’t get the fastens undone fast enough. Suddenly all she wanted to do was get that damn thing off her, away from her skin. She could feel it pressed against her; wet, cold, sticky fabric.

  “Get it off me.” She jerked ferociously at it, ripping the front wide open, staggering back, twisting and struggling. Her hip knocked against a tray of Eric’s tools and it crashed to the floor.

  She managed to pull her arm free of the sleeve. “Get it off me!” she cried, desperately.

  Eric was off the table and holding her, pinning her arms down at her sides. Jerica was awake, sitting up on her cot, watching them with wide eyes.

  “Eric, help, get it off me!” Kat cried, and then she burst into tears.
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br />   “Kat, shhh…” Eric stroked her hair. He turned his face down toward hers, holding her gently. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not! It’s not okay! I left Alex to die. I tried to do the right thing, and now he’s dead!” She brought her hands up to her face, ashamed of her tears, unable to stop them. “I loved him, Eric! I never got to…to say it…I just…”

  “I know, Kat,” Eric whispered. His hand pressed against the back of her head; warm, comforting pressure.

  Frank gave her a sedative. She hadn’t even felt it as he slid the long silver needle into her the soft curve of her elbow. She supposed she’d needed it. It was the proverbial slap in the face to get her out of her hysterical fit.

  Chapter Three

  On her tombstone: For a brief moment, an angel rested here.

  And sometimes Frank would be sifting through the day’s pile of assorted bills and junk mail, stacking department store circulars in a neat pile here and anything not immediately destined for the garbage there, and it would hit him out of nowhere, like a splash of glacial water.

  I don’t remember how she sounded.

  There would be times when he would almost hear her, when his wife Lauren would laugh despite herself on the phone with her sister. He would think on it, think hard, and try to cement the melody of his daughter Elaina’s voice in his mind.

  I can’t forget you, I can’t.

  He remembered Elaina playing with her Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls one afternoon. She was sitting in a warm, fat, yellow beam of sunshine that cut a diagonal across her playroom floor.

  He, Lauren and Elaina had lived in a beautiful split-level Cape Cod that was what his grandfather would’ve called “spitting distance” from where the cold Atlantic Ocean pressed itself against the edge of New England.

  He and Elaina would go digging for clams. They would wake before dawn and tiptoe through the house, careful not to disturb Lauren.

  He remembered how he would pack their lunches, and how she would raise up on her tiptoes so she could see over the edge of the counters and make sure he didn’t get too much mustard on her hard-salami sandwich.

  “More?” he would ask her, poised with a butter knife. He would hold the slice of Roman Meal out for her inspection, and she would either nod her approval or wrinkle her tiny, delicate nose.

  “Too much, Daddy,” she’d say in a hush, her blue eyes dark like polished steel in the dim light from the bulb over the range. “Take some of it off, yucko.”

  They would dig for clams all morning long, furrowing with their feet through the wet, cold sand at the tide’s lip until their toes would be numb. They would collect the clams in a big plastic pail, sometimes until it was filled to the brim with mussels. Then they would hike out to the overlook, sit on the rocks while waves smacked around them, and eat sandwiches, Frito’s corn chips and share a thermos full of raspberry lemonade.

  “Do you believe in monsters, Daddy?” Elaina had asked him once upon a time, out on the damp rocks.

  He had leaned over and tugged the hood of her red cotton sweatshirt more securely around her ears. Autumn was encroaching, and the breeze blowing in off of the pewter grey ocean was chilly.

  He remembered like it was yesterday; the small, rhythmic movements of her lips as she chewed her bite of sandwich, and the way the tip of her small pink tongue darted out to catch a smidgen of bread on her lip.

  He had packed yogurt that day, too. Strawberry-banana, her favorite. She had taken a mouthful of some, and licked the spoon clean.

  And he remembered her that day in her playroom as well, with the rag dolls, and how she had taken off all of their little clothes, and how she was pushing their small, stuffed bodies against each other with savage fervency, and the words that were coming out of her mouth.

  “Sea monsters?” Frank had asked, smiling at her. He had not been able to coax her into doing much more than wading out into the ocean. She shared her mother’s irrational fear of water.

  “Just monster-monsters,” Elaina had said, looking up at him. A loose strand of her dark hair had blown across her cheek, and he had pushed it away, trying to tuck it back under her hood.

  “Remember, this is our secret stuff, it’s a secret thing, remember,” she was whispering, her voice hoarse and nearly panting. “Stop crying, be quiet, it doesn’t hurt you, it doesn’t hurt…”

  “Nope,” he’d told her, and he flicked a corner of bread crust up into the air with his forefinger and thumb. A particularly deft seagull had caught it and swooped away. Elaina had giggled, delighted.

  “This is our secret stuff, remember, a secret thing. It doesn’t hurt, STOP CRYING.”

  “Besides, even if there were monsters—which there aren’t,” he’d said, dropping her a conspiring wink. “They couldn’t get to you.”

  “How come?” She had licked her yogurt spoon again.

  “El, what are you playing at?”

  “Nothing—nothing, Daddy.”

  “I wouldn’t let them,” Frank had said, and he’d put his arm around her and pulled her close and loved her more than his own soul.

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  The feel of her cold, wind-chafed lips pressing against his cheek, and the smell of her, like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and detergent and something beautiful and vaguely clean that was distinctively Elaina.

  “Who plays with you like that, El?”

  “Nobody, Daddy. Like how? I dunno, I just…I…nobody, Daddy.”

  “I love you, too, El.”

  ***

  It had been a man who lived up the road from them, the closest neighbor in five miles.

  When they had bought the split-level Cape Cod, Frank and Lauren had found that charming, one of the selling points of the place.

  His name had been Campbell Greene and in the summertime, he’d brought them grocery bags full of freshly grown corn, sweet peas, beans and bright yellow summer squash from his half-acre wide vegetable garden.

  He had been a charming and delightful bachelor. Sometimes he and Frank would sit out on the wraparound porch of the Cape Cod and swap stories while sipping Budweiser out of brown glass bottles.

  Lauren had talked about fixing him up with one of her friends from the city. “Or maybe one of the nurses at the hospital, like that one, Jenny. You said you post-op a lot with her, and she’s single and pretty…”

  ***

  Frank had blown Campbell’s brains out all across the bed where the man had raped his beautiful six-year-old daughter.

  He had made Campbell deep-throat the barrel of the gun, almost to the point where he gagged. “You son of a bitch,” Frank had said, and he had been shaking, thinking about Elaina shoving the Raggedy Andy doll against the Ann doll.

  “Vvvtthnnoo,” Campbell had pleaded around the black metal stock of the 48-caliber handgun Frank had picked out at a pawn shop. He’d driven more than five hours to New York City to buy the pistol. Pawn shop owners in New York didn’t ask questions when someone was murdered, but in small towns, they buzzed like late-season cicadas. Frank had watched enough true-crime television shows to know that. And he hadn’t wanted anyone to ever trace the weapon back to him.

  “Eeeez, vvtthhnnnooo…” Campbell had pissed his pants. Of course, that was before Frank had kicked him furiously in the balls and smashed them into a meaty, useless pulp.

  “Stop crying,” Frank had told him, and then he had blown Campbell’s brains out across a navy blue bedspread.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Frank had whispered. He’d left Campbell’s house, driven to the city again and dumped the gun in the Hudson River. Double shifts, that’s what he’d told Lauren. He’d had to pull double shifts at the hospital in East Windsor and that’s where he had been. She’d never questioned him on it, and neither had the police. Frank had returned from New York, locked himself in the bathroom, turned on the sink faucets and sat on the toilet, sobbing for Elaina under the cover of the water’s rush.

  In the end, Elaina had died anyway.

 
He hadn’t been able to protect her from another monster, this one almost more dark and foul and insidious than the molesting neighbor.

  Leukemia. The goddamn leukemia.

  There had been no time after the diagnosis. And throughout that brief time, Lauren had watched him bitterly, her dark eyes quick and bright. He knew what she was thinking. He shared the same sentiments.

  I’m the doctor. Why didn’t I see it all sooner?

  Lauren had left him shortly after the funeral. The cancer had taken everything from him.

  Frank sat alone in the dark quarters he had adopted as his room in the compound on X-1226, trying to remember his daughter’s voice. It was somewhere in his brain, trapped like forbidden music, but it would eventually come. It always did.

  From somewhere down the hallway outside, he heard Eric’s voice, soft and distant, followed by Jerica Emmente’s, louder, shrill with something that delighted her.

  He could hear her laughter, and for a moment her voice reverberated in his skull, and he smiled, remembering Elaina.

  Chapter Four

  Kat had a weird dream about Chris Emmente, her first and only and not-sorely-missed ex-husband.

  She dreamed about being back on board the Daedalus, and they were headed for the escape shuttle because the ship was burning, and piping and conduits were crashing down out of the ceiling.

  For Kat, it was like being at the movies. She didn’t feel panic or fear. She felt distant, disconnected, like she was sitting in the back row of an empty theater, watching a show. In the dream, Frank was behind her, holding Jerica. Kat could hear her daughter crying, frightened. She watched the pipe come crashing down in front of them, and heard Jerica shriek in terror. She saw Eric in front of them, holding Leia, trying to shield her body with his own from the showering sparks. Leia was screaming.

  Kat watched with a strange, detached fascination as Leia clutched desperately at Eric’s flight suit, her fingers splayed wide.

  “Kat!” Eric cried, holding his hand out toward her, reaching around the collapsed portion of the ceiling. “Kat, give me your hand!”