Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  Nothing.

  Then.

  She gasps. Her eyes fly open.

  The wave recedes.

  * * *

  Drew presses on the glass that separates us from where Nah lies in a hospital bed, his palms flat against the window, as though he could will himself into that room. He keeps saying her name, over and over. I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I will be saying those words to him for the rest of my life.

  Nah is alive.

  She is alive because of him.

  Drew knew where to find her. It is the only reason she is breathing right now.

  My sister is lying in that bed, and I see her in the snow, her hair spread out over the clean cold of it.

  Drew is silent.

  “Drew.” I rest my hand over his. “I’m so glad she has you.”

  He looks at me, eyes hollow. “I’m not. You were right about me. Everything you said, Mae. I…”

  His eyes fill, and I think maybe there is nothing more lonely than seeing a boy cry. Nobody ever lets them. I like that this one can. That he does. That he cries for my sister.

  “I could have stopped her. So many times. And I didn’t. Not until it was too late. I was too scared to push her away, to lose her. But I almost did anyway. I can’t believe how stupid, how selfish I’ve been. Your family’s been through so much, and … fuck. I’m so … Sorry isn’t enough. I’m so…”

  I look away. Look at Nah.

  I rest my forehead against the glass. All that adrenaline from the past two hours has evaporated, and now I am filled with stones and sand and gallons of seawater. You can’t reach the surface when you’re this weighed down.

  “Nobody can stop her, Drew. All the books say that. You and I made the same mistake. I didn’t tell my aunt and uncle until my plan with Micah failed. I didn’t want to lose her, either.” When I sigh, the glass fogs up. “She told me to name a star after her. She was trying to tell me. And I didn’t get it.”

  I didn’t work the problem. I didn’t think about the next thing that could kill me.

  I would make a terrible astronaut.

  “She meant it, Mae.” A tear slips down his cheek. “The amount she took. She wanted it to work. She doesn’t want to be here anymore.”

  With me. She doesn’t want to be with me. I’m not enough to keep her here.

  Aunt Nora and Uncle Tony trudge down the hall, looking ancient. I’m sure the hospital brings back too many memories of Annie, of the constant treatments. Of the medicine not working.

  Uncle Tony’s eyes fall on Drew, and he opens his mouth, closes it. Nods at him once. “Thank you.”

  “We appreciate what you did, Drew,” Aunt Nora says. “So very much. But I think it’s best for Hannah if you leave now.”

  He looks at Nah through the window, then nods. “Yeah. I understand.”

  Drew turns. Starts down the hall.

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  He stops. Stares at me.

  “Mae—” Aunt Nora starts, but I shake my head.

  “If it weren’t for Drew, we wouldn’t be here right now. We’d be at the morgue, identifying her body.”

  I look at Drew. His hair is wild, dark and sticking up from running his hands through it, over and over, worrying about my sister. I grab Drew’s hand, pull him back toward the window. “He stays.”

  I feel the shift then. The moment when I truly step over into adulthood, when everything I say doesn’t get to be up for debate. They feel it, too.

  This night, it has burned away whatever remained of my childhood. That’s done now. I am the commander of my own life.

  “Okay, then,” Uncle Tony says.

  They move Nah into the room she’ll be in for the next day or so. She’s not in here because of the overdose—the medicine worked, and she could go home right now, though she does have some hypothermia. This is a suicide watch.

  I make sure Drew gets to see her before visiting hours end, since I can be here whenever I want, but he has to be out by eight p.m. I don’t know what happens in that room, but when he comes out, he’s a mess.

  I surprise myself when I reach up and hug him. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I … don’t think you will,” he says softly. “You’re a good sister, Mae. She’s lucky to have you.”

  He walks away, shoulders slumped forward, head down, and I don’t have the heart to ask.

  I walk into the room, and it is quiet except for the machines: beeps and whirs. Most of the lights are off except for a row above the bed, where Nah is sitting up. Her eyes are red, skin like tissue paper, an IV stuck in her hand. Mostly fluids, some medicine. I’m sure she’s nauseous. The withdrawal is already starting.

  For a minute, we just look at each other. Then I hold up my phone.

  “I found a website. Where you can name a star after someone for seventy-five bucks.” I try to smile. “Can we do it that way instead?”

  My sister bursts into tears, and I surprise both of us by doing the same. When I get to the side of the bed, she scooches over and I lie next to her. I can’t smell her rose smell, Mom’s perfume she’s been wearing since the wave. She smells like starch and a little bit sour, and a lot like winter. Deep cold.

  “I’m so sad,” she says. Her voice is scorched from all the vomiting that happened after she woke up.

  “I know. I am, too.”

  We lie there, snow howling past the window, the quiet sounds of the hospital all around us. When the Russians are on a space walk, they just hang outside the ISS during each ninety-minute period of night, waiting for the next sunrise. It’s too dark, too cold, to get any work done. Getting in and out of your suit is such a hassle that it’s easier just to hang on to something and bob around in zero gravity. The Americans work through the night, but I think the cosmonauts have it right. Sometimes you just need to hang out and wait for the light. There’s always another sunrise. You can’t force things in the dark.

  “You must think I’m a coward,” Nah says after a while.

  I shake my head. “I wish I could be like you.”

  She closes her eyes. “What a dumb thing to say.”

  “It’s true.” I squeeze her shoulder. “You’re not afraid, Nah. Of anything. It seems like. I’m terrified. All the time.”

  “I’m so afraid of living that I’d rather die.” She opens her eyes. “You literally want to fly to outer space on a bomb. You want to test fighter jets in the air to see if they work. What the hell are you talking about?”

  I wave a hand. “I’m not afraid of heights. I’m afraid of … falling.”

  I’d started to believe that if I worked hard enough, I could control the outcome of any problem put before me. Eliminate all possibility of human error. Be two steps ahead of the universe itself. Maybe River’s right. I’m clinging so tightly to everything in my life, thinking it will keep me from falling. From failing. But if you look at every space disaster in history, you know there is often nothing you can do. The Apollo 1 team died in a training because when their cabin caught on fire, they couldn’t get out—one of the hatches opened the wrong way. No one realized that was a problem until it happened. That was the engineers’ fault, not theirs. They never went to the moon. They never went anywhere.

  “You always land on your feet,” Nah says. “Always.”

  I reach out and comb my fingers through her long, black hair. “Not anymore, I don’t think. I’m beginning to realize I don’t know very much.”

  She snorts. “Welcome to the club.”

  “But you’re okay with not knowing. I wish I could be like that. Could like mystery. Ben’s favorite words are I don’t know. I HATE those words. I think the not-knowing is starting to drive me crazy.”

  She sighs. “There’s something I don’t know that’s driving me crazy. Something I haven’t told you.”

  Oh god.

  Nah smiles a little. “Not a bad thing. I saw Mom. Twice.”

&
nbsp; “In a dream?”

  Nah has very vivid dreams. We used to draw pictures of them when we were little.

  “No. After the wave, I saw her doing yoga in her room—fish pose. And then I knew she was dead. She didn’t say anything, but I knew. And then she came to my room after I found Dad’s emails. And she was doing a headstand.”

  I open my mouth, but she shakes her head before I can say it. “I wasn’t high. This was real.”

  Today I will suspend my disbelief. I will let there be a mystery. And I will not think about why Mom didn’t visit me.

  “It was just those two times?” I ask.

  She nods. “But when I woke up here, I realized something. The headstand—her legs were in the same pose as the Hanged Man.”

  “That sounds scary.”

  “It’s not. In tarot, the Hanged Man is dangling from a tree the way we used to on the jungle gym when we were kids—from his knees, not his neck. He’s just hanging out. And he seems, like, enlightened. The card is all about looking at the world from a different perspective.” She takes my hand. “Astronauts are the most badass Hanged Men, I think.”

  “Hanged Women,” I correct. She smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. It never reaches her eyes anymore.

  “I think Mom was telling me I need to look at the world in a new way. She couldn’t give me a reading, so she became the reading.” Her eyes slide to the window, the snow. “I just don’t know how.”

  And I realize: I don’t know, either.

  “All the things I don’t understand—about people and feelings and how to be human … You seem to know already, in your bones,” I say. “I bet if you just meditated a few times upside down or closed your eyes and listened to the wind, you’d have your answers. For me to find anything out, I need to be in a space suit in zero gravity. And to get there, I have to acquire several advanced degrees and have the most dangerous jobs known to humankind. After beating out thousands of people to get those jobs, I have to live four hundred kilometers above Earth—just to figure out what you can in your bedroom.” I squeeze her hand. “So who’s really the genius here?”

  “I’m not a genius,” she says.

  “But you are. In your way, Hannah, you’re brilliant. I might know how to be an astronaut someday, but you know how to be a human today.”

  Nah’s hand goes to the little diamond around her neck and she takes in a shuddering breath. I can see the missing in every Karalis splotch on her face.

  “You told Drew you love him. I know you did.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “That’s brave, Nah. Telling him. After Micah, and Mom and Dad. You could say it. Even though you knew you could lose each other in a second. You almost did lose each other. But you still said it.”

  “I broke up with him,” she says. “Just now.”

  I run my hand over her hair. “Why?”

  “My heart’s tired.”

  “That’s very unscientific,” I say, after a little while in the silence. “But I get it. That’s how it feels. These days.”

  She nods. We lie, watching the snow whip past the window. It was sixty-eight degrees in LA today. I checked.

  “Did Ben tell you he loves you?”

  I nod. And there must be something on my face that her genius self reads because those lines we both get when we’re confused appear between her eyebrows. “You … you haven’t said it back to him?”

  It’s a relief to confess.

  “My heart’s tired,” I whisper.

  I’ll never forget the agony on Drew’s face when he arrived at the hospital, certain she was dead. The way a part of my insides started to tear into pieces when I felt my sister’s pulse, like it was in a distant galaxy and would disappear at any moment. No. No. I can’t do that again, not with anyone else.

  “But you love him. I know you do. It’s so obvious.” She stares at me, hard. “You do.”

  “Every time I look at him, all I can think about is how it will feel when he dies.”

  Nah slips her hand into mine. She understands.

  I look into her green eyes, and I see Dad. “I don’t want to be a hungry ghost.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Buddhist thing. How we try to fill the empty places inside us with people or things, but it doesn’t work.”

  “Things like pills,” she says.

  I nod. “And boys.”

  The snow falls. The hospital gets quieter. The nurse comes in to check her IV. Nate drops off flowers. Says good night. The room is dark and quiet.

  The snow falls. My sister is alive. I will be her bronze angel tonight. Watching.

  I think Nah is asleep, but then she says, “I’m such a loser.”

  “You’re actually in very good company,” I say. I pull the blanket up higher, tuck it around us. “Ben Franklin was an addict in later life. That shouldn’t have surprised me, because he misbehaved quite a bit in his day. And the DEA raided Monticello back in the eighties because Jefferson had poppies planted there.”

  “The Founding Fathers got high?”

  I nod. “It might account for them forgetting the rights of over half the population during the Continental Congress. Maybe all these years, we’ve just been cleaning up the messes of the most famous users in American history.”

  Nah snorts. “Leave it to you to give me a history lesson after an overdose.”

  “You can learn anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” she says, her voice soft. “I guess you can.”

  I search her eyes, that bit of Dad in her forever. “Are you mad, Nah?”

  “At what?”

  “That we saved you?”

  “Do you want the honest answer?” she asks, her voice faint as her pulse had been a few hours before.

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes fill. “I don’t know.”

  There are many stories from people who survived the wave, how they fought to hold on to the people they loved. Daughters and husbands and moms. They tried so hard not to let go. But it took them anyway. They didn’t stand a chance against all that force and acceleration. Against nature. But Dad said the long shot is the best shot. So.

  I wrap my whole self around my sister as she falls asleep. Hold on tight.

  36

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 6 December

  Earth Time (EST): 00:48

  Ben is waiting for me by the aquarium in the lobby.

  For a second, I turn into Nah. Wish I could do a crazy thing: take his hand and run. Not look back, just grab his hand, outrun every wave that tries to follow.

  He’s sitting at a small table, next to a huge wall of glass that cages bright pink coral, a little stone castle, and darting sunshine-yellow fish. When he sees me, he bolts to his feet.

  “Hey.”

  That smile. For a second, the clanging thoughts in me go silent. It is a Tibetan bell, ringing, deep and clear and ancient.

  Good morning, Earth.

  I try to smile. “Hi.”

  “How is she?”

  “Alive.”

  He reaches out, wraps his arms around me. Coffee and wind.

  “God, Mae, I seriously almost left with you. Just walked right out of Castaways.”

  He’d had to stay, since he was the only person working.

  “Nate was with me. And I had Drew on the phone. He was amazing. He knew right where she would be.”

  My eyes fall on the aquarium. Will I ever see the bottom of the ocean and not think of Dad? I pull away from Ben, sit down at one of the tables.

  My heart’s tired.

  He stays standing for a moment, watching me. I notice the empty paper coffee cups stacked on the table. His backpack on the floor. He has three finals next Monday alone.

  “Have you been here this whole time?”

  Hours. It’s nearly one in the morning.

  He nods. Slides into the seat opposite mine.

  “I forgot to check my phone until j
ust now,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  I can feel myself detaching from him. Like a space capsule from its rocket. Hold on and let go at the same time. Maybe this is a Zen koan—those riddles the masters like to come up with. If it’s not, it should be.

  “It’s okay,” Ben says. “Nate told me what was happening. I saw him with your aunt and uncle on their way out. You want me to call a car? I can take you home.”

  “I’m going to stay the night.”

  I don’t want her to be alone. Don’t trust her. That I don’t know pulsing inside me. Ben’s favorite words, my nightmare.

  He leans forward. “How can I help?”

  I look away from those eyes—my mother’s eyes. Warm and brown.

  “When Hannah was little—really little—she would do this thing. Play this game,” I say. “She’d pretend to be dead. I’d walk into a room and she’d be lying on the floor, eyes closed, in some twisted position. Or floating facedown in my grandparents’ pool at the Cape.” I shake my head. “I believed her every time. And I would get so upset, you know? And shake her and scream and—not cry, I couldn’t cry, but I’d really believe it. At some point she’d open her eyes or give this awful waking gasp or just get bored or whatever and she’d laugh and laugh at the look on my face.” I wrap my arms around myself, the snow from the angel’s garden deep in my bones now. “Even later, when I was pretty sure she was fooling me … I still believed her, a little. Because what if she wasn’t pretending? I was so scared that, one time, it wouldn’t be a game. That she really would be dead. And I could have saved her.”

  Ben reaches across the table, but I stand, move deeper into the empty lobby with its bright colors and happy murals, meant to cheer up sick kids and their families. No amount of sunflowers or smiley faces will fix this.

  Ben stands behind me, close but not touching. “I want to help, Mae. What can I do? How can I make it a little better?”

  “You can’t.”

  He reaches out and turns me around. “Try me.”

  “Ben.” I swallow. “I can’t do this.”

  “Yes, you can. You’re so strong, Mae. You’re—”

  “No. I mean—this. Us.” I slide out of his grip. “My sister almost died tonight. Because I was with you. Because I missed you and I went anyway, even though I should have stayed with her, and it’s my—” I shake my head. “I know what she did isn’t my fault. But she tried to tell me. And I left her. I didn’t see. I’m too—there’s too much in my head right now. Everything’s … It’s like particle acceleration in here. I can’t right now. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. But I can’t be with you.”