Midnight at the Electric

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Midnight at the Electric Page 11

by Jodi Lynn Anderson


  “Well if it isn’t Rumplestiltskin,” a woman said. She and Lily were drinking coffee at the table.

  “It’s the celebrity,” one woman said drolly. And then, standing, “Would you like a beergarita?”

  “It’s eight in the morning,” Adri said, after a moment’s confusion.

  “Exactly,” the woman said, pouring her a glass. “I’m Carol.” She and the other women were much younger than Lily—maybe in their seventies. They were all dressed in bright colors, and one wore an orange cloth visor.

  “We tried not to wake you,” Lily said more kindly.

  “I’m the dealer,” the woman in the visor said. “Abigail.”

  “Where’d you all come from?”

  “Didn’t you know I had friends, honey?” Lily teased. Apparently, Lily wasn’t as lonely as she’d thought. Adri felt a stab of jealousy, but she wasn’t sure of what—of Lily having four more friends than she did, or of the friends having Lily.

  “You said all the people you knew were dead,” Adri said, knowing she sounded ridiculous. Lily looked amused.

  “Well, that’s true, but I made more friends.”

  “Play a round?” Carol asked.

  Adri sank into an empty chair as Carol dealt her a hand (“I used to deal, but I’m too forgetful to do it anymore,” Lily said) and before she knew what hit her she was knee-deep in a game of seven-toed Pete.

  “You were up late last night.” Lily eyed her with concern. “I got up to go to the bathroom around three, and your light was on.”

  Adri chewed on a thumbnail, still trying to adjust. She felt like she’d spent the night somewhere far away. “Lily, did your mom ever mention any of the Godspeeds by name?”

  Lily looked thoughtful for a moment then shook her head.

  “Nothing about Catherine, or her sister, Beezie? Or what may have happened to them?”

  Lily was about to reply, but Carol cut her off. “Ooh.” Carol’s eyes widened and she leaned forward. “Yes. The two dead sisters. My friend used to say that if you stood in the yard at midnight, you could hear them coughing.” Adri’s arms prickled.

  “Oh, what a load of bull,” Lily said. “I grew up here, and I never heard that. Don’t listen to her, Adri, that’s just a mean old story.”

  “Well.” Carol gave Lily a firm look. “They died, like, a hundred million years ago. Either way, Lily, it’s not like we’re hurting their feelings.”

  “Do you know how they died?” Adri pressed warily.

  “Oh, they died of dust pneumonia, very young,” Carol said and sorted her cards. “Both of them. Very tragic. It’s one of those local stories everyone knows.”

  Adri’s throat hurt began to hurt. “Even the older one?”

  “Well, I never heard that.” Lily said, squeezing her hands, then seemed to remember herself and pulled her fingers away. “And I live here.”

  “You heard it, and you don’t remember,” said Carol.

  Lily blew a dubious breath through her lips. “I bet they survived. I bet things worked out for them.”

  “I think I found those letters your mom had,” Adri said.

  Lily nodded. “Ooh, I’d love to see them, honey.” She looked interested, but not as much as Adri had expected. The women went on with their cards.

  “Catherine and Beezie went to this place called the Ragbag Fair,” Adri offered, her voice faltering. She felt like everyone had already moved on. “To see a show called the Electric. They got tricked into thinking they could live forever.” She stared down at the table and rubbed her thumb against a crack in the wood. She felt heavy and dark.

  “The Ragbag Fair,” Lily echoed. She looked up. For a moment, her eyes brightened in recognition, then clouded over again. “I knew about that once. You know . . .” And then she tapped her head and rolled her eyes apologetically.

  Every weekday, Adri borrowed Lily’s car and drove into Wichita for simulations and training. There were zero gravity sessions that made her vomit, launch and landing run-throughs for troubleshooting the dangers of a Mars landing, and engineering sessions where they all took various sections and circuits of the ship apart and put them back together again. Evaluators stood by, studying how each trainee fared, marking things up on a tablet. Adri was always aware of their presence and always keenly aware that they held her future in the balance.

  Luckily, she excelled at everything she did. She got to know the belly of her ship the way she’d known the belly of her car. While the others in her group talked between lessons, shared their histories with each other, and started making inside jokes, she focused on redoing things she had already done right, just to make sure.

  Whenever one of the other trainees tried to strike up a conversation with her, she answered them in monosyllables.

  When Alexa approached her and asked if she wanted a mint (she’d been handing them out), Adri told her without a trace of humor she was trying to quit. And when D’Angelo laid a tray down next to hers at lunch one afternoon and tried to ask her more about herself than just where she was from, she said she had to pee and left. She was never rude exactly, and they all had to interact fairly regularly. She was cooperative and respectful. But she sidestepped any attempts they made to get to know her.

  In the evenings, Adri searched the house for more evidence of the Godspeeds’ fate, or of Lenore’s arrival in Canaan. She connected Lily’s Curiosity chip to her ear and searched online, breaking a rule only to turn up nothing but that the Allstocks had been a wealthy family who’d made their fortune during the industrial revolution and a picture of Lenore (a dark beauty in a nice dress, fuzzy and unfocused).

  In the house, there was plenty of evidence of their lives. She now knew that the dusty copies of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Ethan Frome had been Lenore’s and then Beth’s. But there was no sign of how things had ended for them. And Adri was so methodical, so thorough, she knew that if anything had been left behind, a few hours would have been enough to find it.

  She tried to shake the dead people out of her mind, but she couldn’t shake the mystery of them. She couldn’t help seeing them layered on the landscape around her—in the decaying bunkhouse, in the view of the abandoned farm that had once belonged to the Chiltons.

  Finally one morning, Lily—seeing her thumbing through the bookshelves for more letters that might have fallen between the volumes—shuffled up behind her. “You’re like a dog with a bone,” she said.

  Adri looked up at her. “I just hate loose ends. They annoy me.” There was more to it than that, but it embarrassed her to say so. And she didn’t understand herself why it mattered.

  “You should try the library,” Lily said. “They have some local records that probably wouldn’t make it online.”

  “This podunk town has a library?” Adri asked, disbelieving.

  “Yeah, the Podunk Regional Library,” Lily offered blandly. “Off Main Street.”

  The following morning, a Saturday, she followed Lily’s directions. She found her way to the library on her run, her breath puffing out behind her in the cold. It was down a street off Main that said No Outlet, its windows brightly lit in the gray morning air. She slowed and walked back and forth past the front door a few times, hands on her hips to catch her breath, and then walked inside.

  Most libraries were sleek and bookless information hubs, good places to search for archived content that wasn’t online. The Huygens Library on Mars looked out of enormous windows onto a canyon, and there you could print 3D replicas of almost any landscape or house or cell structure you could find online or in the data archives, you could check out soils, or skeletons, or fossils, or Pixos that projected old concerts all around you. This place smelled like paper.

  A young man came walking out from behind a desk to the right. “Can I help you with something?”

  “I’m looking for information about someone who used to live in town. Catherine Godspeed. Or her mother, Beth.”

  The man studied her for a second, then smiled. “You’re Lily’s
cousin. The famous one.”

  Adri blinked at him, surprised.

  “You’re in the local paper, didn’t you know? Do you want to see it?”

  “Um . . .” Adri shook her head. “No.”

  The man looked slightly disappointed. He introduced himself as Steven, pulled out two chairs that stood in front of an archaic-looking machine. “I may be able to help. We have some really old microfiche that were supposed to go online but never did. Clippings from the Canaan Sentinel, local stuff. If they’re not online, they may be there. Birth announcements and public records and things like that. It’s such a small town almost everyone’s made it into the paper at some point.”

  Adri sat down as Steven powered up the old machine. They scrolled back to the years that she wanted and began scanning the headlines.

  As promised, there were front page articles about people’s blue ribbon pumpkins and a collision between a car and a beloved turkey. Still, most of the headlines were about the Dust Bowl:

  Violent Storms Dim Capitol for Five Hours

  Mayor Pleads for Government Aid

  Roosevelt Blames Farmers for Dust

  “Poor people,” Steven said, scrolling through one article after another. “All these investors give them incentives to move to ‘the breadbasket’ and farm the land. But the farmers don’t know that the bluestem and buffalo grass they’re tearing up is what holds the soil in such a windy place. Then comes a drought, and up goes the dirt.”

  “They should have known better,” Adri said. She leaned her chin on her hand and stared at the headlines: more bad news as the years stretched on.

  Dust Reaches Statue of Liberty

  Roosevelt Urges Federal Relief

  She relaxed into her chair, the warmth of the room making her drowsy. Then a headline blinked onto the screen, and Steven let out a pleased “huh.”

  November 15, 1935: Government Offers Resettlements

  The point of interest was not the headline but the caption, which lay beneath a grainy photograph of a skinny severe-looking woman standing on the front porch of the house where Adri now lived.

  Mrs. Beth Godspeed is one of the many local farmers who’ve sold part of her land for government resettlement, following the deaths of her husband and daughters.

  Adri sat for a few minutes in silence, feeling Steven’s eyes on her. So it was true, they had both died the year that Catherine had written in her journal, though it didn’t make any sense. Catherine had never been sick. Her heart sank.

  “Would you be able to find out where they’re buried?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing,” Steven said after ten more minutes of searching. “A lot of the cemeteries were private back then . . . family plots, stuff like that—nothing official.” He thought for a second. “You could put in a request at the archives in Wichita. They carry records on so many of those families—death certificates, things like that. If you wanted a death record.”

  Adri didn’t think she wanted a death record.

  She thanked Steven and, her chest aching, walked out into the cold, zipping her fleece over her chin.

  All the way home she practiced the positive visualization techniques she’d learned in school growing up. She tried to visualize herself on Mars, doing her work, looking down on the landscape from her apartment in the dome. She wanted to be practical.

  She couldn’t explain how her heart felt like rocks in her feet, weighing her down. It shouldn’t matter whether Catherine and Beezie died in the dust or fifty years later of natural causes. They’d all been dead for so long that even their grandchildren were dead.

  Why should she grieve for people she never even knew?

  CHAPTER 5

  The sky was slate gray for the first half of November. Adri’s trips to Wichita began to feel routine, and she got more and more nervous about her one-on-one meeting with Lamont. She wanted the certainty of him signing his name to the contract and her signing her own.

  In those weeks, Kansas was more bone-chillingly cold and wind-whipped than she could have imagined, but she tried to appreciate it while it lasted. There would be no seasons in the Bubble; it was always a perfect seventy-two degrees. At noon every day she started mixing an Optimal Protein shake and took the new supplement that had been prescribed for the forty-five days leading up to launch.

  She drove past the Wichita Archives each time she headed in and out of the city, but never stopped.

  The day after Thanksgiving (a printed meal of turkey and mashed potatoes, eaten in front of the woodstove) Lily came down the attic ladder, her arms full of little plastic angels. “I forgot I had these! I got them at the Nickel & Dollar. They were so cheap I got twenty,” she said. “Santa’s coming, and I’m not even ready.”

  “It’s still November,” Adri said. Earlier, they’d filled Galapagos’s shed with fresh warm hay and turned on an electric heater. Already Lily had put up an anemic Christmas tree in the library and a manger with the baby Jesus, which she adjusted just so in what she called the place of honor. “And I read somewhere the other day that Santa’s not real,” Adri offered.

  “I think the Grinch has been spreading that rumor,” Lily said and ascended the ladder again.

  “You’re too old for that,” Adri called up to her, looking at Lily’s feet. “Your bones are brittle, and you could break something if you fell.” Lily ignored her.

  Adri was on the parlor couch reading when her cousin finally came downstairs for good, closing up the attic with a creak, her white hair askew and her shirt bunched up on one side under her bra.

  “Well, it’s no use,” she said.

  “What, perpetuating lies about the red-suited fat man?”

  Lily rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t even doing Christmas stuff anymore, smarty. I was just seeing if there were any relics to help us”—she tugged her shirt down and smoothed her hair—“to figure out about the house, about those girls from the letters you found. I guess I don’t have anything for you. Looks like you just get coal again this year.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve never really been on the nice list,” Adri said. “And we already know everything there is to know. They died. End of story.”

  Lily sighed and sank down onto the couch. She shook her head. “I keep thinking there’s something I wanted to tell you. About the Ragbag Fair. But each time it comes back to me, it slips out of my head before I can get my words together.” She shook her head, frustrated. She gazed around. “Don’t you wish you could gaze into the bones of any place? A house or a field or a tree, and see its secrets?”

  “Trees don’t have bones,” Adri said, but Lily went on, ignoring her.

  “I could tell every detail of my favorite rain boots when I was four years old. I can see them as if I were wearing them yesterday. But so many other things, I forget. I guess I’m like my grandpa now.” Lily was amused and forlorn at the same time. “Permanently confused.”

  Adri knew she should reach for her hand, to give her an encouraging squeeze. She curled her fingers but didn’t move them.

  “Well, I know my guardian angels are watching out for me anyway,” Lily said. And then, suddenly brightening, as if this led her to an idea, “Do you want to see where I’m gonna live?” she suddenly asked. “When my brain’s finally . . .” Lily pantomimed an explosion with her hands.

  The Holy Redeemer Home for the Aged lay on the edge of God’s View, one town away. It looked more like a small strip mall than a home. It sprawled over two acres, enclosed by a cement wall.

  “So us crazy ones don’t wander off,” Lily said as they approached the entrance.

  Inside, the place was bustling. A room to the right was full of people playing bingo, in another large living room a woman was playing records. There were more people in Holy Redeemer than Adri had seen altogether since she got to Canaan.

  “My fellow earth ruiners,” Lily said with a wink, as they watched people push their bingo chips around. Two women held hands, white haired and hunched over a table, one reading t
o the other.

  The whole place was a contrast: homey yet not home, cozy yet institutional. It was a nice place, but of course, nothing like Lily’s own house.

  Lily sighed. “I guess this is my Mars,” she said. “That I’ll be launching off to someday. Someday soon, I guess. Planet of the Old People.” She looked around, resigned, accepting. “You think you fade,” she said. “You look like you fade. But believe me, you don’t.”

  Adri was silent. What could she say to that?

  On the ride home, she tried to be upbeat, to agree with Lily that it was “such a lovely place,” but she kept sinking into silence. Finally, she forced herself to say what was on her mind.

  “Hey, Lily? If you knew about me for so long, why didn’t you ever call me? Or write me? Or tell me you were here? How come you never wanted to know me?”

  Lily looked over at her, surprised. “Well, I wrote them about it. I called. For a while after . . . the flood, your parents . . . I thought maybe I could adopt you. But they said I was past the age limit. And that it would be disruptive; you were doing so well in school. And I thought, well, maybe you just didn’t have any use for some old fart in Nowhere, Kansas. Maybe I assumed that you just wouldn’t think much of me.”

  Adri stared out the window.

  “Was that wrong? Have I hurt you?” Lily asked, her eyes big and uncertain.

  Adri swallowed. “No.”

  “It always made me happy to know you were there, doing well,” Lily went on. “I always felt like you were partly mine. Like, part of my life.”

  Adri nodded. “Thanks, Lily.”

  Would it have changed anything if she’d known? Would she have turned out to be better—just better in general at all the things she was bad at with people—if she’d had someone in her life like Lily? Would she have been better at touching someone on the hand to console them? Would she be going to Mars at all?

  The city fell away quickly, and they entered the open plains, the vast expanses of land people had left behind over the years of drought and never come back to. Then Lily did something unexpected. She rolled down the window and pressed her face to the frigid air. She breathed deeply.

 

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