“Mommy!” Toft shouted and ran into my arms.
I picked him up and thought how heavy he was.
My mother came behind him, holding out the baby bag. She looked exhausted.
“Have fun?” I asked.
“If you think that being torn apart by a two-foot hurricane is fun,” she said.
I kissed her cheek and gave her a quick hug. “Thank you.”
“I fed him sand and worms,” she said. “Have fun for the next two days.” She waved goodbye on the doorstep.
Toft was already nearly to the flyer.
I had to run to catch up with him. I didn’t want him to see the machine first, without an explaanation.
Hopeless.
Jode had reached across the front seat and opened the passenger door before I got there.
Toft hopped into my spot and stared at the machine.
I leaned over the door. “He’s not your daddy,” I said, because Toft was looking back and forth between the two of them like he couldn’t tell.
It was only later that I realized I had changed from calling the machine “it” to calling it “he” at that moment, when Toft saw it. Him.
To Toft, he was not just a machine.
“My seat,” I said, and pushed Toft into the back through the middle. He ended up sprawled head over heels in Joe’s lap.
It happened that quickly for me. I thought of him as Joe, and that was what he was from then on.
Jode got takeout. Chinese food. Too spicy for me. He never remembered that I couldn’t stand General Tso’s chicken.
I got a frozen meal out and opened the top so it heated up automatically.
I watched as Joe sat at the table, across from Jode, Toft in between them.
I sat to Jode’s side. He didn’t pay attention to me all night.
He talked to Toft, and to Joe.
Talk about self-centered. I wanted to ask a psychiatrist then what it means if the deepest conversations you have are with yourself.
I got Toft into his pajamas while Jode had fun making him squirm with tickles. Then Jode had the job of getting him to quiet down. Since he was the one who’d riled him up, I thought that was fair.
I went back to the kitchen to find that Joe had cleaned it up. The table was cleared. Dishes were washed. The countertops were shining. Even the floor had been swept and mopped.
It seemed like magic.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, with a slight inclination of his head.
His first word.
Toft’s first word, after much prompting from Jode, was “sphincter.” Jode thought it was hilarious. Me, not so much.
“Well, good night,” I said.
“Good night,” he said.
I turned to go into the bedroom, and then turned back. It had never occurred to me that I should have a bed for him. I’d thought of him as a machine, like a new broom or a new fitness trainer, the kind that shouts at you not to eat that, or to “work harder” while you’re on the treadmill holo.
But he wasn’t going to disappear, and I couldn’t exactly put him in the closet.
When Jode was gone . . .
No, Toft’s room. That was the place for him.
“Come with me,” I said.
“With you,” he echoed. He followed me down the hall.
Jode was still telling Toft farting jokes.
“He’s going to sleep here,” I said, moving inside the room.
“In my bed,” said Toft, scooting over to make room for him.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“He doesn’t need sleep,” Jode reminded me.
“Then he can sit over here, by the door. Like a guard,” I said, to Toft.
Toft liked that and he and Jode pretended to shoot at Joe for a while.
Joe didn’t get it and didn’t really play along, but he sat with his back against the wall by the door, like I’d asked.
It still felt wrong to me to leave him there. Maybe tomorrow night I should offer a blanket and the couch?
Jode came into our room and said, “He could have stayed in the kitchen.”
“What, standing up?” I asked.
“Why not?” said Jode. “It’s not like he gets tired. Or needs to eat. He’s really not human at all, Kooa. I don’t know why you see him that way.”
I was stunned. The way Jode had been treating him, I didn’t expect this disconnect.
“Toft thinks of him as human,” was my only response, as I turned over and fell asleep.
#
Two weeks later, Jode was gone.
I had taken him to the Space Base and said goodbye for the last time. Lots of kisses. We’d made love twice the night before, and I thought of the virtual women who would not have sagging butts or nagging voices, and of Joe, who was on the couch in the living room (a compromise between Jode and me). He didn’t lie down, just sat there.
I picked up Toft at my mother’s again.
Joe was waiting for us at home. He stood in the kitchen. “How are you?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, not feeling fine at all.
He stared at me.
Toft ran straight at him, butting him in the knees with his head.
Joe staggered back and gave a credible laugh.
Then it was Joe and Toft the rest of the afternoon.
I usually tried to get Toft to take a nap, but it wasn’t necessary, not with Joe there. I could take time to myself, could go wherever I wanted, could take a nap of my own.
I didn’t do any of that.
I made homemade bread.
No one does it anymore. Even my mother doesn’t do it. But I like the feel of the dough in my hands and the way that I can punch it with as much force as I want. It’s good for it, that violence, and it’s good for me, too.
Jode goes into space and uses lasers.
Bread is good enough for me.
Later, the bread in the oven, the smell of it overtook me. I sat there on the chair that was usually Jode’s, and I cried because it was so sharp and perfect.
Joe came in and saw me there. He came close and wiped my tears. “Crying is not for babies,” he said, as if he were still talking to Toft.
It made me laugh, and cry a little more.
Then Toft rushed in and my tears were forgotten. Joe had come in to ask if we could go to the park and have a barbecue there. Toft was too impatient to wait for the answer. He pulled on my hand until I said yes.
“I’ll have to go to the store,” I said. “We won’t get to the park for at least an hour.”
“Let me do it,” said Joe. “I can do it more quickly than you. And you can play with Toft.”
“No, let Mommy do it. You play with me at the park,” said Toft. “I want Daddy!”
Toft got Daddy.
Joe was “allowed” to flip the burgers on the grill, because that was what Toft had seen Jode do before.
I got to push him on the swings.
#
Another four weeks passed.
I woke with a start in the middle of the night to see Joe standing in the doorway, the light from the bathroom behind him.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Toft is sick. He has a fever. I have him fever reducer, but he thrashes. I do not know what to do now.” He sounded distressed, more than I had ever heard before. More than Jode would have been.
“I’ll come. Thanks for telling me,” I said. Joe had taken over the bedtime routine with Toft and I had been getting plenty of sleep, for once in my life.
I didn’t feel the same anxieties about Jode that I usually did, despite the fact that I’d only had one note from the government telling me that his ship had hit light speed without incident. But I didn’t sit in bed and listen to every noise, imagining a thief or a marauder coming through the house.
I grabbed my robe, though it was summer and plenty warm to sleep in underwear, as I had been doing.
When I reached Toft’s bed, I pu
t a hand to his forehead. He was sweating under his thick quilt. I pulled it off him.
He kicked me in the stomach and turned over, muttering in his sleep.
“I think he just needs to rest,” I said to Toft. The fever wasn’t bad and he had always been a restless sleeper.
I stayed a moment longer, but then Toft opened his eyes and whispered, “Daddy.”
I moved out of the way and let Joe take my place.
I tried to stifle my frustration. Toft had never asked for Jode when he was sick before. Jode wasn’t good with throwing up or diarrhea, or kids who only wanted soup and juice. I had always thought that was the least pleasant part of motherhood.
Joe caught me before I left, a gentle touch on the shoulder. “He will be well?” he asked, a touch of anxiousness in his voice.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine by morning,” I said.
“I do not like to see him hurting,” said Joe.
“No, I don’t, either,” I said. And then I thought about how long Jode had been gone already. Was Joe still trying to be like him? Or had he begun to mirror me instead, because there wasn’t any other adult model around?
And here I had complained about Jode being fascinated with himself.
#
My mother came to visit us for her birthday, in September. Joe made her favorite meal: pumpkin soup and green salad with dried cranberries and pine nuts.
I could have done it, but there was no reason to. Joe did everything I considered a burden, but never made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough.
“He looks like Jode, that’s certain,” said my mother, when we’d settled in the living room and Joe did dishes while chasing Toft around the kitchen.
“Why does that sound like the beginning of a criticism?” I asked.
“You think everything I say is a criticism,” said Mother. “Can’t I just make a comment.”
I waited.
It came.
“All I meant is that Jode always was a handsome man. Too handsome, if you ask me. I think you fell in love with the outside of him and didn’t pay much attention to the inside of him. I tried to tell you, tried to warn you about being in love with a soldier.”
“Yes, Mother. I remember that,” I said tartly.
“But Joe isn’t a soldier at all. Not an ounce of soldier in him.”
“Mother, he’s not human,” I said. I didn’t think of him as a machine anymore, though. How did I think of him? As Joe. That was all.
“What do they make them of?” Mother asked. “They’re not steel and rivets, are they?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you think there are cogs and wheels underneath his skin? If you cut him, does he bleed?”
“I don’t know, Mother.” I had never thought about it.
“Maybe they made him out of vats of human flesh. Or used Jode’s DNA to shape him or something. So, in a way, he is Jode. But a better Jode,” she said.
“Mother, when he came he couldn’t even talk. He’s like, five months old.”
“He doesn’t look five months old,” said Mother. Her eyes settled on the blanket which had been on the couch in that same spot since the second night Joe was here.
I flushed, even though there was nothing—absolutely nothing—to be embarrassed about.
“One of my friends, her husband died,” Mother said. “Left her a big pile of money. Enough to get her one of those that looked like him.”
“She likes him?” I asked.
“Hates him,” said Mother. “He’s exactly like her husband was. She wishes she’d never done it. But there’s no sending them back and getting a new one. She says that she needs him around to balance the budget every month. Otherwise she’d have him incinerated.”
I put a hand to my throat.
“Yours isn’t like that,” Mother said. “Maybe something is wrong with him.”
“They did all the service checks,” I said. “They didn’t find anything wrong.”
“Well, what’s going to happen to him when Jode comes back? Did you ever think of that?”
Almost four years in the future. It seemed a long time away. “He and Jode got along just fine,” I said.
“That was then,” said Mother.
I thought about it. Joe had been a novelty then, one of those gadgets that Jode liked to buy and play around with for a while. They didn’t last long, certainly not past one of his returns from duty.
And there was Toft.
“You said you can’t send them back,” I pointed out.
“No. But you can put them into stasis,” Mother said. “Michaela does that sometimes. Just turns him off until she wants him on again. I think she does it more and more now. But—do you think Jode will be going out again?”
I knew he would. As long as Jode was alive, he would be thinking about his next time out, dreaming about the stars, thinking of the rest of his men and eager to fight any threat to his own.
“We’ll cross that bridge,” I said.
“You could never marry him, either,” she added.
“Mother!”
#
I looked up the information I already had about him, and they only referred to “materials” when describing how he was made.
He was on the couch one evening when I came in. I was still fully dressed. Toft had just fallen asleep, which I knew from the sudden lack of sounds emanating from his room.
I sat down next to Joe. “We need to talk.” And then I didn’t know what to say.
I put a hand on his bare arm. I swear, I could feel the blood pumping underneath it. They wouldn’t go to that much trouble to imitate the feel of a pulse if they didn’t have to, would they?
“Do you miss him?” asked Joe.
I pulled away from him. “Of course,” I said. “Jode. Of course I miss him.”
He stared at me, as if waiting for something.
“When we—had you made—it was for Toft,” I said.
He nodded.
“Do you ever wonder what will happen, when Jode returns?” I asked suddenly. I wondered if he was human enough to worry, or if he only thought from day to day.
“I wonder,” he said.
“And what do you think?”
“There is no answer to that,” said Joe. “The future that comes will be from the present that is made every moment between now and then.”
“But you do worry?” I wanted to tell him not to worry, as I told Toft not to worry. But he wasn’t a child to me anymore.
“I worry about many things,” said Joe.
“Tell me,” I said. And then thought that I had no right to demand that. He was my machine, bought and paid for. He had to play with Toft and do the dishes when I asked. But did that mean his thoughts belonged to me, as well?
“I worry about the war,” said Joe. “If the humans will win it. And about the planet itself. If it will heal as quickly as it is hoped for. I worry about others like myself. I worry about Toft. And you.”
I wasn’t convinced that these were real fears of his. They sounded like something that could have been programmed into him. To worry about us, of course. But also the generic worries that supposedly made you a good human. Worrying about others. Worrying about the planet.
And then he said, “I worry about the colors of the sunset and if they will ever be as beautiful again as they were four nights ago as I looked out the window doing dishes.”
I remembered him calling to Toft, and to me, to look out the window.
I’d looked out. It had been a beautiful sunset, but I would never have thought to worry about it. To me, it was something that came and went, a passing beauty, something I had learned you could not hold on to. I put my hand on his. “I worry about the cold,” I said.
“Is the indoor temperature incorrect?” he stood and looked to the house computer.
It made me smile, because that was not so human of him as the other had been.
He was still learning.
“It is not that it is cold now.
That is what worry is. Thinking about what might happen, even if it never does. You can still worry about it.”
“When have you been cold?” asked Joe. “I will make sure you are not cold again. You need a better coat for winter. And a covering for your face.”
“That won’t stop me worrying about it,” I said. “I’ve been cold before, and the memory is always there, to tear at me when I feel the summer dying. I think that it will be summer again, in time. But the fear tells me it never will be. That it will only get colder and colder until I cannot stop it and it goes into my heart.” I put my hand to my chest.
Joe took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said.
In the morning, I found two pictures that I thought at first Toft must have drawn. They were crude, and in pastels like crayons. One was of a sunset, and the other of a tree standing naked in a blanket of white.
I put them on the fridge until Toft told me they weren’t his.
“Very bad attempts at art,” said Joe, when I looked at him. “I will destroy them.”
“No.” I took them into my own room and hid them at the bottom of a chest. It was strange to me that he had captured so exactly the feeling of winter for me, the tree in the middle of the snow.
The colors of the sunset were soft and melting into each other. They were not striking, but they were unique. I wished that I had seen the sunset that he had seen, so that I could mourn it the way that he did. But I had the picture he had drawn.
#
It was the one year anniversary of us picking up Joe. I made him a cake. It was a sad thing. I hadn’t been in the kitchen for months. The cake had fallen in the middle. It was chocolate, and it occurred to me I had no idea if Joe liked chocolate or not. Jode did.
I wrote “Joe” on the cake, and when Toft pointed out that I had forgotten the “d,” I told him he was a smart boy, and blew him a kiss. I had not forgotten.
Toft and I sang “Happy Birthday” together that evening.
Toft did not realize, as Joe and I did, that his daddy’s birthday was actually in December. We’d celebrated it then, half a year ago, but he had no concept of time and six months ago was as good as a year to him. He’d sung to Joe as his “daddy” then, too. But Joe had made the cake.
Saving the Moon Page 9
