It sounded like a really nice restaurant.
EDEN
The taxi dropped them back at school, where they stood on the sidewalk for a long moment. Eli said, “I can’t believe it’s over. I’m so glad she’s not dead.”
“Me neither,” Eden said. “And me, too.”
Eli sighed. “I’m so tired.”
“Same,” said Marwan.
Eli looked around, then at the ground, then back up. “Well, I guess I’ll see you guys around?” He half laughed.
“For sure.” Marwan smiled.
“Definitely,” Eden said.
“I mean, what even was that that just happened?” Eli said, bewildered. “A drone?”
“At this point, I don’t even care,” Marwan said. “All that matters is that it’s gone.”
“Agreed.” Eden felt free. Spared. Her breathing wide open. Like the universe had dropped an oxygen mask down to her.
“Well, I’m gonna go.” Eli walked off down the street, leaving her and Marwan alone. She looked at him, but he seemed not to want to make eye contact.
“You okay?” she asked finally.
“Yeah.” He looked up but again not at her. “You mad at me? For doing that?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Good.” He finally looked at her. “So it’s got nothing to do with this, but I have to say something since … I don’t know. Since I don’t know when we’ll see each other again?”
“We’re going to see each other,” she said. “What is it?”
“Your mother had dinner at the restaurant the other night. With a man. It was probably just a friend or whatever, but I never mentioned it and I thought I should.”
She inhaled, exhaled, trying to keep her breathing even. “What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. Short blond hair. Fit. I saw his name when he paid the bill. I don’t have to tell you it, but—”
“Dan Rankin,” she said.
Marwan nodded. “Who is he?”
Eden shook her head, about to cry and unable to explain why, and he reached out and took her hand and squeezed it, and it felt like some small relief. Maybe Dan had a work phone? Maybe that was why the numbers hadn’t matched.
Nothing made sense.
Certainly nothing about tonight.
They’d destroyed the device, but had it been the right thing to do? She suddenly wasn’t so sure.
“Why did it want us to think Svetlana was dead?” Eden said.
He shook his head and shrugged gently, letting go of her hand. “To make us scared, I guess. So we’d do what it wanted. I guess that’s why it pretended to be a bomb, so we wouldn’t stay at school and see her?”
Eden got caught on the word “school,” because even though they were standing right there in front of the building, the whole concept of it felt unfathomably foreign. School was Kathmandu. Madagascar. Fiji. It couldn’t possibly be a real place, let alone one she’d ever been to.
“What do we do now?” Marwan asked. “I just mean, it feels weird.”
“We go home,” she said. “We sleep.”
He nodded and took her hand again, and she thought that maybe now a kiss was forming in the space between them and would draw them into each other any second, but then he said, “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
ELI
Eli’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table with crumpled tissues scattered in front of her. His sister was in the chair beside her, in her unicorn pajamas, looking more scared than upset.
“What’s going on?” Eli asked as Cora walked over, her head hung low, to say hi. Eli bent to pet her; you could tell she knew something was wrong.
“Your grandfather …” His mother trailed off into tears.
“He died,” his sister said, and something about her being the one to say it made it worse.
“How do you know?” Eli asked, wanting to reach into his bag for the device, wanting to ask it if it had done this, not quite understanding that it was actually gone.
Looking confused by the question, his mother said, “I got a call.”
“You spoke to an actual person?” Eli said, his heart starting to quicken.
“Yes, I spoke to a person. How else would I have found out?”
Eli turned around and walked back out of the apartment—“Where are you going?” trailed after him—and down the stairs and down past the house that always smelled of pot and the one that always smelled of curry and then the Walgreens and massage parlor and nail salon and 99-cent store and falafel place and bodega and the dry cleaner and bagel store and the new grocery store, if it would ever open.
The whole thing with Svetlana had been a trick; that meant that this could be, too.
He passed the tutoring center and the deli with the massive sub that was free if you could eat the whole thing and the Korean bubble tea place and the real estate agency with photos of nicer apartments than Eli’s in the windows.
Inside the nursing home—finally—a nurse he knew well enough, Janine, spotted him in the lobby, where the air smelled of his grandfather’s favorite meal—Salisbury steak, which Eli was pretty sure was served only in nursing homes.
“Oh, Eli,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I need to see him,” he said.
“He’s gone, Eli,” she said.
“I still need to see him,” he said.
“No, I mean the funeral home already came and took him,” she said.
“What funeral home?”
“Your mother said to call Clancy’s.”
He supposed he could go there, though it would be hard to explain. People didn’t typically storm into funeral homes after hours, demanding to see the dead. Or maybe they did. “Was it the pacemaker again?” he asked.
A movie was playing in the common room to the right. A handful of bodies hunched in wheelchairs silhouetted in front of the screen.
“No,” the nurse said. “He just fell asleep and didn’t wake up.”
“But it was because of the thing with the pacemaker earlier?”
“We don’t know, Eli,” she said. “And at his age, in his condition, here, under care and supervision, there’s no push for an autopsy. One way to look at it was that it was simply because he was very old and it was time.”
He wanted badly to hear some laughter from the next room, just to make the whole scene less sad. Were those figures in there even alive, or were they just cardboard cutouts, another ruse?
“You saw him? With your own eyes? That he was dead?” Emotion chiseled a crack in his voice.
“Yes, Eli. I’m so sorry,” she said. “He had a good day today … before, I mean. He seemed to actually enjoy his time with robots for once. He had the seal sit with him for a really long time.”
Eli nodded and turned to go, feeling like he might throw up. Out on the sidewalk he took a deep breath and let it out and his exhale vaped the air, proof of life. It had gotten cold out; he was underdressed.
He stopped at one point, at a bus stop enclosure with a bench, to open his backpack and take the device out before hitting the hour mark but remembered again that he didn’t even have it; it didn’t even exist anymore. It had had some hand in this—he was sure of it—and he wished, now, that they hadn’t destroyed it. Because if it were here, it could maybe give him some answers. If it were here, he could maybe bring the people behind it to justice.
Maybe he still could?
A bus pulled up, and its doors opened and let out a handful of passengers, and Eli wished he could get on and just ride it to the end of the line, wherever that was, like he and his grandfather had done a few times when he was younger.
He zipped his jacket up and put his hands in his pockets and headed for home, taking the long way because maybe he’d pick up some flowers for his mother or a cookie for his sister or maybe not.
MARWAN
There were more voices in the house than were usual for the hour when Marwan got home. Namely his father’s—rising above
the regular chatter of his mother and sisters as they got ready for bed. Why were they still up? How was it only nine p.m.?
Typically, at this time, his father was at the restaurant or at the dining room table in front of his computer, dealing with orders and bills. Now, he was on the couch, feet up, watching some international football match.
Marwan sat down on the couch with him. “How’s it going?”
“Fine.” His father yawned. “And you? Where were you?”
“Helping a friend,” Marwan said. “Did you find someone to fix the glass?”
“Not yet, no.”
“But we’re gonna lose a lot of money if we can’t open again like really soon.”
His father picked up the remote, changed the channel. “We’re not sure we’re fixing the glass,” he said. “Not sure we’re opening.”
“What do you mean?” Marwan reached out and took the remote from his father’s hand. His father’s whole body seemed to relax, and then he said, “Your mother and I, we’re talking about a life change.”
Marwan’s sisters were fighting in the bathroom—“I was here first!” “No, I was here first!”
“What kind of life change?” Marwan asked.
“A move,” his father said.
“To where?”
His mother was negotiating a toothpaste situation. (“That’s too much.” “You don’t actually have to get it wet first.”)
“Home,” his father said.
“This is home,” Marwan said.
“Is it?” His father took the remote back with a shaky hand and turned the TV off. “Anyway, doesn’t have to be.”
“Dad,” Marwan said. “You can’t let them … win.”
“Your uncle’s business. It’s doing well. He has a job for me in Cairo if I want it.”
“This is crazy!” Marwan said. “We’re not moving to Egypt!”
“Your grandparents won’t live forever. You hardly know them. It could be a good time to—”
“I honestly can’t believe this,” Marwan said. “We can’t just … leave.”
“We can,” his father said. “I think we will.”
His mother came into the room, and Marwan said, “Mom?”
She said, “Not now.”
His sisters ran through the room, playing catch with a stuffed sloth. Backing out of their path, he said, “I’ll be down when they’re asleep,” and headed for the stairwell to the roof.
Pushing the latch door open, he saw sky and felt freedom. It was colder than he’d realized, though. Huddling in a corner of the bench seat, he pulled his legs up close and put his hood up and tried not to shake. You had to relax into cold if you didn’t want it to really bother you; his father called it “conditioning” whenever the seasons were changing in that direction.
The city sky was clear and as dark as it gets, which was never really dark except in a blackout and not even then. He saw mostly planes, not stars, but knew that whole galaxies of them were up there and that even if he couldn’t see them, other people could and were wishing upon them—pleading, like he was, for things to somehow get better.
He found what he thought was a planet, but it was possible it was moving, so it was maybe a satellite that was maybe watching him and judging him for what he’d done.
But it had been right to destroy it.
Of course it had.
He just wished, somehow, that the whole thing had gone another way, and that he had even an inkling of what it had even meant. He felt sure that, given another chance, they’d do it all differently.
EDEN
Eden’s mother was reading in bed when Eden poked her head in.
“I’m home,” Eden said softly. She’d arrived home ravenously hungry and had made herself a plate of leftovers downstairs before heading up.
“Yeah, I heard you come in.” Her mother didn’t look up. “I’m glad you’re not dead in a ditch.”
Eden said, “Why is being dead in a ditch worse than being just plain dead?”
“Don’t be fresh.” Now Mom took off her glasses and looked up from her book. “It’s been hours since your last text. I would have expected that on a day when there was a bomb threat in your school that you’d be a little more thoughtful about letting me know your whereabouts.”
“There wasn’t a bomb,” Eden said wearily. This morning felt like another decade.
“Well, we know that now. Where were you anyway?”
She selected a partial truth: “I was with Marwan.”
Her mom set her book aside. “No more hanging out with this guy until I meet him.”
“I need your approval,” Eden said with so much sarcasm that she almost sounded Southern. “Really.”
“I’m your mother,” her mother said. “If you haven’t forgotten.”
“Maybe I should be able to approve of who you spend time with, too,” Eden said, and her heart went wild with panic or something else. Exhilaration? “I know what’s going on with you and him,” she said.
Her mother sat up.
“I don’t even want to say his name because it’s so wrong.” Eden heard her own voice quiver.
Her mother threw off the covers and got up and walked toward the bathroom. “I know it is.” She pulled a tissue from a cube-shaped box with a skyscraper design on it.
“Then why are you doing it?” Eden sounded like a child but couldn’t seem to help it. Why had it said, I know you are but what am I as it died out there in the marshland?
“I’m not!” Her mom sounded childish, too, in a way. “I mean, nothing’s happened.”
Eden said, “Then why are you two texting all the time? And why is he hidden as a contact named NH?”
“Why are you looking at my phone?” Her voice escalating with irritation.
“That’s not the point!” Matching her mother’s tone.
Her mother’s shoulders caved forward; she walked back toward the bed and sat. “He just wants to talk about these … feelings we have. I don’t want to. I should have never admitted I felt them.”
“So you have actual feelings for him?”
“I would never act on them.”
“Did you have these feelings before?” Her father’s ghost was right there, with his arms crossed, eagerly awaiting an answer. “Like when Dad was—?”
“When you’re married, Eden, you don’t suddenly never have a connection with anyone else. That’s an important thing to know going in. The important thing is that you don’t act. Ideally you run in the opposite direction. That’s why I have him in my phone as NH! Never happening.”
“But you’re not running.”
“I’m trying, but it’s complicated.”
“She’s one of your best friends.”
“So is he!” her mother nearly screamed, and the words seemed to travel around the room, leaving a crisscrossed field of red lasers in the air. Eden saw no way to cut through.
“These boys you’re hanging around with”—her mother got up and climbed back under the blankets—“I hope it’s because they’re good friends to you. Not all the other stuff.”
“They are,” Eden said. “I mean, he is.”
Her mother yawned again.
“Promise me you’re going to stop texting him,” Eden said.
“Good night, Eden,” her mother said.
“So that’s it?” Still sounding like a child, like someone who wanted her mother to somehow make everything right and easy again.
Her mother didn’t answer.
In her room, Eden went to close her blinds and saw, in the light of the streetlamp, that their tree was now bag-free. She felt a twinge of disappointment over not having witnessed the precise moment of the bag’s liberation and wondered whether it had floated into the sky like a birthday balloon or blown into the street and been flattened by a car. At the park, she and Eli hadn’t thought to look up, where probably the device was just sitting on a branch of a tree, messing with them. They hadn’t known it could fly.
She changed
into pajamas, then crossed the hall and went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, put her hair up and threw some cool water on her face. Back in her room, she climbed into bed.
She checked her phone.
Marwan hadn’t texted.
No one had.
An iPod had been stolen at a basketball court, and some people were stuck in an elevator.
There were stories to catch up on, but it didn’t feel urgent to do so.
It was over.
She didn’t even know what they’d say to each other tomorrow, what life would be like now. Everything and nothing had changed.
She could tell people about the device now—even her mom if she wanted to. She could explain it all, except that she couldn’t explain any of it.
She went to put on the “Songs We Used to Sing to Eden When She Was a Baby” playlist, then remembered the lists were all gone. She’d played that one often enough these past few months that she knew that the first song on it was called “Falling Slowly,” so she tried to sing it to herself, but her whisper-singing felt pathetic and creepy, even to her.
I know you are but what am I?
Mark texted: How did it go?
She wrote back: Good. Tired. Going to bed.
Mark texted: You destroyed it?
She didn’t feel like answering, had already told him she was going to bed. So she turned her phone off and set it aside and lay there in the near dark. A distant siren came closer, then faded away again, and she thought about turning her phone back on and checking Citizen again but didn’t. A car with booming bass flew up the street at probably twice the speed limit, driven by one of the people her father called VIPs—people who expected the world to bend to their will, for traffic to part for them like biblical seas. She could almost hear him in the room, saying something like, “If you’re tailgating a school bus, you need to check your priorities. Amirite?”
The ceiling fan and its shadow self were up there and seemed somehow inquisitive once the room quieted—maybe even challenging—wondering, like she was, what the hell had just happened … and what could possibly happen next.
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