by Karen Rivers
The boys look like glow sticks now. I want to tell them, but I can’t. I know it’s serious. Everything is serious. “There are no jokes here, Dad,” I want to say but can’t. (Q: What do you call a mad cow? A: Mooooody.) I don’t have a voice now because I’m a light. I’m light. I am light. Being light is easy. My skin is glowing and I’m not scared. I’m real because I figured out about love. It was at the last minute, but I still did it.
We are glowing more fiercely now, all three of us, we aren’t just illuminated, we are illumination. It’s pouring out of us, lighting up the dome with the dead and dying plants and I can see the remains of everything, of everyone else. Ashes and dust. It doesn’t matter, they’re gone.
We’re shining so hard. We’re burning.
Pretty soon now, it won’t be long.
Then we’ll burst out of this broken place, we’ll float up there, we’ll take our places where we belong, somewhere in the galaxy where we will be our own empty spaces. You won’t be able to tell that we’re dead yet, when you look. It takes light a long time to travel home.
I don’t want to close my eyes, but I do. I close them and instead of it being dark, it’s the opposite, it’s like everything is the golden light of the sun dropping behind the hills and shining low across Lunch Island, turning it beautiful. It’s like that but turned up, and I can see all kinds of stuff. I can see me and Tig in that tree house, trying to build a house of cards, the cards tipping and spilling every time one of us moved or giggled. I can see the bike ramp that we built in the woods, the way we rode down it over and over again until one or the other of us wiped out and started bleeding and the other one fainted. I can see Gavriel. My whole heart cracks open and the golden everything of what I feel is everywhere and then it’s warm, suddenly, the right kind of warm and I know we’re safe, we escaped, we’re OK, it’s over now. It’s over and then there’s not nothing, but not anything either, just a humming in between gold and warmth and love.
Chapter 23
When I wake up this time, I know something is really different and really wrong. I’m cold. Totally freezing cold. Everything is blurry and gray. Something hard is digging into my side. There is a tube in my mouth and I can’t talk. The strangest thing is that there are Christmas ornaments hanging on my IV pole. One is a Snoopy holding a bouquet of holly. The other one is a Rudolph with a broken, crooked leg. There’s a big, pale blue star. My stuffed Ebola is perched at the top like the angel. I blink and blink. My eyes clear a little bit and then blur. I make a sound in my throat, it sounds like a cow, mooing. That’s the punch line for something, I just can’t remember what it is.
I’m in the hospital. It’s a different room from last time. The painting on the wall is of some sheep in a field. It’s pretty terrible. Hospital art must be universally terrible. Maybe they do that on purpose, so you’ll want to leave. I know I must be alive because if I were dead, there wouldn’t be a tube and I wouldn’t hate that dumb picture so much.
I can’t stop blinking. My eyes tick tick tick, just like always. I hope someone hears them. I hope someone comes running over, but no one does. It must be nighttime. It must be the middle of the night. I turn my head a bit and check the vinyl chair that’s in the corner, like in all the rooms in this place, but it’s empty and not the usual green, but instead, the blue of the sky when the sun has just set but it’s not yet dark. I love that color but I hate that there is no one in the chair. That’s not very nice, I think. That no one is sleeping here. Not even Mom.
My eyes are leaking. That happens. I must be sad. Lakes, lakes, lakes, everywhere. I’m having a hard time thinking. Each thought has to be knitted up somewhere by hand and then slowly passed along a chain of people until someone gives it to me and I try to figure out what it is. Is it a sock? No? It’s a mitten?
I can’t remember why I’m here. I have a Brussels sprout, steering this ship right into the path of danger. Nirgal, watch for meteors! I say. Maybe it’s a whole stalk of sprouts now. I grew them in my greenhouse. The stalks would get so full they’d bend over from their own weight. I never saw them on Mars. Mars Now is not a lie! If it was, how could I have gone? The glass cracked. We all died. But at least we went. At least we tried. My head is itchy. I try to lift my hand to scratch, but my hand won’t lift. Well, that sucks. Why is my hand so heavy? I try and I try and eventually I get my hand up and I give my skull a few good scratches. My skull has no hair! I have no hair! Then I remember how Elliott shaved my head. She’s being so nice to me. Maybe she was nice all along. Maybe I just didn’t notice because I was busy being mad at her. I went for a walk with Gavriel. Where is Gavriel?
Fish-boy, Fish-boy. He was nice, after all. He was OK. He told me that thing about the Velveteen Rabbit, which was important.
“ISH!” he said. I remember that. He’s always shouting at me when I’m passing out, so I must have passed out. Was there a crackle? I try to remember, but I don’t remember a crackle. It’s really lonely in here. I mean, I’ve only been awake for five minutes and the loneliness is huge. It’s like I’ve swallowed a lake of loneliness and it grew inside me and all that loneliness filled me up, like a jellyfish. No, it’s not like that. Why am I thinking of jellyfish in the lake? I’ve never even seen one in there. I think they are in the sea. I’ve never gone swimming in the sea. I guess I won’t now. It’s too late for that.
They found running water on Mars. Maybe there is more of it. Maybe just under the cracks in the surface, there is even more and more. There’s this lake somewhere on Earth that is full of jellyfish. Not the stinging kind. You can swim with them. I bet on Mars, they have those. The jellyfish who don’t sting. Maybe they will eat all the perchlorate. Maybe they will save the world. Well, not the world, but their own world.
After the spill in the lake, there weren’t any fish, much less jellyfish. Those rainbow trout. All dead. Iris thinks the spill gave me the Brussels sprout. I never liked Brussels sprouts. No one does, except Mom. She cooks them up in the fry pan with bacon, which is a waste of good bacon, if you ask me.
Iris looked at all the kids in the chemo room and frowned. She said, “This is an awful lot of kids to have cancer in a small town.”
And I told her, “They come from all over.” The lake can’t have given me cancer. I loved the lake. Lake Ochoa without the lake would just be Ochoa.
My tongue is super dry, but there is no water that I can see, plus this tube. I don’t like it. I press my tongue against it and try to see if I can use my tongue to spit it out, but I can’t. Once, I was eating a popsicle and it stuck to my tongue and I couldn’t get it off. Tig had one, too, but his wouldn’t stick. He tried to make it, but it just melted and then he ate it. He must have had a warm tongue. “Yourth ithn’t thticky,” I told him and we laughed and laughed, that popsicle just stuck there like a kid licking a frozen lamppost in a movie. Then he reached over and ripped it off and my tongue started bleeding and then he fainted.
Actually, that’s not the best memory ever. I miss Tig but I think we’re in a fight. I can’t remember what it’s about. Things don’t have to be about so much, that’s the truth. I’m like one of Mom’s old people. “Where is my ride? I left the cookies in the oven!” I look at my hand to see if it’s old, like maybe I’ll see that I’m an old lady now and that’s why I’m so confused, but my hand is the same as ever. It looks silver in the shadowy light in this room. Silver is so cold. I don’t think I like it. It’s like you can be a dog person or a cat person, a gold person or a silver one. I’m a gold. We never had pets, except Buzz Aldrin. Some people are bird people. I think I let him go. I think he flew and I didn’t follow him. Things that fly: Parrots. Butterflies. Moths. Stars.
It’s like I can almost remember something important, but the memory keeps slipping away; the more I try to get to it, the further it goes. I fall asleep trying. I dream about Mars again. In the dream, we are rebuilding something. It’s hard work. Everything is heavy and cold and impossible. But I keep doing it. I lift things and hold them in
place. Tig is there and so is Gavriel. We build and build. The dream is tiring. At the end, we go inside and we look around and there’s this huge pool.
“This can’t be,” I say through the blurry dream. “There’s no water like this on Mars.”
“It’s just a dream,” says Tig. “We already died.” He looks happy when he says it, but also sad.
“You said you’d never leave me alone, and then you did,” I say. I’m mad.
“Get over it,” he says. “Everyone messes up. You, too.”
“I did, a lot,” I say.
Then suddenly I notice people in the pool. It’s all the kids from my class! They are wearing sparkly bathing suits. They are swimming like synchronized swimmers in the Olympics, these fake grins plastered on their faces, the water splashing all around. I start to cry, watching them.
“What’s wrong?” Tig says. The light shines off his bald head.
“Leave her alone,” says Fish-boy, who is also bald. “Don’t you get it?”
“No,” says Tig. “I don’t.”
“I do,” says Fish-boy. “She’s my friend, too.” He puts his hand over my hand and squeezes it.
I’m relieved because I don’t have to explain to him how the synchronized swimmers make the dream so clearly a dream. We already said good-bye to Mars. My last Mars dream was the final one. This is just one of those normal ones like everyone has: a compilation dream. In the dream, Mr. Wall strolls into the room and shouts, “POP QUIZ!” I haven’t studied. I laugh. The clock hands spin backward. A bunch of tiny purple Martians run by, twirling and laughing, like a punctuation mark at the end of the story that was my dream of Mars. It’s not real, not Mars, not a vision of the future or anything like that, just my brain making a pattern of memories and twisting them up into something that’s a lie. It’s not ever going to happen, after all. I mean, it’s a lot to convey through a hand squeeze inside a dream, but it’s still pretty nice, to feel understood.
I wake up crying, choking on the pipe in my throat. I might be laughing. I can’t tell.
“Ish!” Dad says, and he’s beside me, hugging me and saying things that are too fast for me to understand.
On Mars, we learn to talk slowly. There’s probably a reason, but I don’t know what it is. Brain mush or something that happened on the trip, our bones melting away into our brains.
I try to tell him to slow down but there’s a tube in my mouth so I squint my eyes. I try to tell him with my eyes. He’s talking and talking about a seizure and a coma and new medicine and I’m going to be OK. It’s just that the Brussels sprout is now a cabbage, but a small one, and does my head hurt?
Yes, it really does, Dad, I want to say, it’s bad. But I can’t. I’m so sleepy. It shouldn’t work this way, I think, and then I fall asleep again and when I wake up the person next to my bed isn’t Mom or Dad or Iris or even Elliott, it’s Tig, and he’s bald. I blink and blink. Slish, slosh, slish. Either my dream is leaking out my eyes or this isn’t real.
“Oomf,” I say, because I can’t talk. I mean, “I waited, like you said.”
“Hey,” he says. He looks really uncomfortable.
Well, I can’t blame him. I want to say, “Don’t faint,” but I can’t.
His eyes slide off the IV needles in my hand, the tube in my mouth, and finally land on the window.
“Mom finally drove me down,” he says. “I’d been asking and asking and asking and finally she did. I was super mad. I was like, she’s going to die!” He stops himself. “I mean, I didn’t want it to be too late.” He holds his hands out and inspects them. I don’t know what he’s looking for. Maybe just to make sure he’s still the same as always, even though I’m not. “It’s weird here now,” he goes. “Like everything is smaller. The park benches and everything.”
I nod. When I look at his face, even though it’s blurryish, I see everything we ever did together. That time we thought it sounded like fun to climb up onto the roof to look at the stars but the roof was sloped and we both slid right off and he broke his arm. Mom and Dad were so mad at us. The go-kart race we entered in third grade and our go-kart broke on the starting line, the wheels just splaying out like it couldn’t even stand the idea of our combined weight. The time he spat on Kaitlyn’s hair when she was mean to me and then pretended he hadn’t done it. All those Mars Now applications. The ones we filled out with fake names (who didn’t get accepted, either). The way we thought it was real. He thinks everything looks smaller, but I think everything looks younger. He looks really young. He’s a kid. I’m so confused. He’s just a kid. We’re both kids. Why do I feel so old?
We’ve only been on this planet for thirteen years. That’s not very long when you think about forever. It’s a blip. We’re blips. We’re still in the early stages.
He goes, “I went to the tree house and it’s gone. Like it crashed, completely.” He makes a crash sound with his mouth somehow. “Um, you probably knew that.” He shrugs. “I found this.” He puts my old copy of The Martian on my chest. It’s all torn up. It smells like mold and water. It’s been raining. It must have rained.
I’ve missed the rain. I wonder if the lake filled back up, if he’ll go to Lunch Island, and I try to blink the questions but he just shifts back and forth from one foot to the other. I can tell that talking to me while I’m not answering is making him struggle for words. “It’s like email!” I want to tell him. “I’ll answer later!”
“I gotta go,” he says, and then really fast, so fast that if I blinked, I’d miss it, he leans over and kisses me on the forehead. “I shaved my head for you,” he adds. “I don’t have cancer or anything.”
“Thanks,” I want to say.
I want to tell him what I know about love, but suddenly I don’t remember and I don’t know and then I’m asleep again.
This time, there’s just a space. This time, there isn’t dreaming. I try really hard, but I don’t hear any music.
Not yet.
Chapter 24
I sleep and wake up and there are people and then there aren’t. Mom is saying something. What is she saying? “And comma hast thou slain the Jabberwock question mark carriage return Come to my arms comma my beamish boy exclamation mark carriage return O frabjous day exclamation mark Callooh exclamation mark Callay exclamation mark carriage return He chortled in his joy period.” He chortled in his joy period, I think. That’s funny!
Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m imagining the people or not. One time, I open my eyes and Camilla and Zoe are there, just staring at me and crying. Another time, it’s Buzz Aldrin (the astronaut, not the parrot) and he’s crying, too. So much crying! I want to say no. I want to explain, “It’s the joy period!” I want to tell them that it’s OK, but it really isn’t, so I don’t. Elliott sits in the vinyl chair and throws my stuffed Ebola up and down. When it spins, it leaves a rainbow trail in the air and I want to say, “Look, did you see that?” It’s all in slow motion and then it speeds up. There are doctors and nurses. People use flashlights to look into my eyes. I’m dying. The Brussels sprout won and I lost, but isn’t it just a part of me, it’s a part of everything. It makes sense to me and then it doesn’t. It’s as big as a cabbage now. Have you ever looked closely at a cabbage? Those leaves have these beautiful patterns. They are the same as a bee’s wings. Those lines tracing through them, I mean. The cabbage blooms and blooms and blooms like one of those animated gifs, growing forever leafier, filling me up with leafiness.
Everything is just elements, jumbled together, old stars trying to make themselves into something else, even if it’s just for a minute, even if it’s for twelve years. I mean, thirteen.
Fish-boy reads out loud from The Martian. It’s so unrealistic! I want to say. He never mentions the perchlorate problem! I want to tell him not to go now. The glass will break. I don’t know what is true. The dreams come crowding in when I’m awake, and I’m scared because I can’t tell the difference.
Gavriel’s mom touches my forehead like she knows me
, and her hands are smooth and cool. Paging Dr. Klein. The truth is, I’ve forgotten everything except this joke: Q: Have you heard about the first cow to go into space? A: He landed on the moooooon. It’s funny to me. Oh, I’m funny. Me! Funny! I’m not so hard-edged as everyone thought. I’m not so serious. I wish I’d bought that sparkly sweater. I should have had pink shoes.
Dad’s there in the chair sipping water out of the water bottle. Some of us are stars but some of us are water. He’s the good kind. Golden, warm, and welcoming. Dive in. I’ll miss the lake. I miss Buzz Aldrin. Just as I think that, he flies by the window outside, glowing like a moon, in slow motion. I can feel his feathers pushing down the air. I miss my laptop, even though it didn’t curl up and purr. I miss the way the light filtered through the trees and made long rays of sun that Fish-boy and I walked through that day on the path. “God’s fingers” he called them, and I hope he’s right, I hope there’s a God and he held us in his hand, just for that minute we passed through. I don’t think it’s God, necessarily. I think it’s Everything. That’s what love looks like, I guess. I guess I love you. We walked through it and now I’m going to go into it again but this time alone, but it’s OK. I like being alone. It’s good for my Mars Now application for them to know that, in case everyone else doesn’t make it. They have to know that I’ll be OK. I’ll just keep going, planting things and waiting for everyone else to come. I’ll have potatoes to feed them. Maybe even Brussels sprouts.
“Oh,” they’ll say, “you were so brave to go first!” and I’ll nod and say, “I totally was!” and they’ll tell me about all the lists that I’m on, the way everyone remembers me. And anyway everywhere everywhere everywhere the golden light. Look at it. It’s right here. It’s in the room. It’s in me.
It’s raining, too. Pouring. It’s filling up the room. It’s overflowing in my eyes. It’s the kind of rain that fills empty lakes, that fills everything, sloshing back and forth in a bathtub, overflowing. Clean rain. It’s lashing against the glass in huge prisms, pink and silver. I think it’s a miracle. It’s finally a miracle. I’d been waiting and then it just came, it just happened. Look! Can’t you hear how beautiful it is? A symphony, a whole symphony, playing everywhere, playing inside me, singing about all my beautiful forevers.
