If I think of Annalise and Janine as forms of energy that were neither created nor destroyed, then where did they come from? And where are they now? What happens to the energy my father creates playing the piano? He says it changes things. How?
I fall asleep rereading Nam’s poem. I dream of a deep blue ocean with waves so big they swallow the entire earth, pulling it up inside them like a child cocooned underneath her mother’s skirt.
The next morning is perfect. I open the window and breathe it in. My tree waves its heavy, leafy boughs in the crisp air. A small brown bird alights on a branch, singing. The day of the Blackout Bombing was like this. Clear and cool. Smelling of possibility.
I listen as the bird’s short, sharp notes ring out across the garden. Underneath them, I hear that hum, like the sound of the earth’s motion. And then, another sound. It’s muffled, but I hear it. My stomach rolls.
I slam the window shut and pull on a pair of shorts. I go out into the hallway. I hear it again. I move slowly toward the stairs. It gets louder and clearer. Time jumps forward and I’m standing in the doorway of my father’s bathroom. My dad is sitting on the floor. He’s coughing. I see red like a blaze of fire. The toilet is full of vomit. His mask lies on the floor next to him.
“Dad.” The single syllable is distorted in my ear like I’m underwater. He raises his arm: Stay back.
Finally the cough calms and he sits up against the tub. I drop to my knees.
“Lu,” he starts. His voice is gentle. “You can’t be in here. It’s not safe, lamb.” I flash back to the hospital and his bare hand on the revolving door. This is my fault.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. He starts to speak, but I don’t let him. “We can’t tell Mom.” Colors envelop me. Strange tones fill my ears. I grab at the tiles on the floor. How will I manage this?
“Sweetheart,” he says, looking all the way through my eyes straight into my breaking heart. He puts his mask back on.
I look away and trace the grout with my fingers. “We can’t tell her. She’ll never let us stay here with you. We need to try and find some kind of treatment. We have to figure out how to keep you alive until someone finds a cure. Ben!” I yell into the hall.
“What?” he yells back.
“Get up here.” His heavy stomps on the stairs combine with the rhythm of my dad’s breath. I tap my foot and clutch the doorframe as everything spins.
Ben walks in and finds us. “No,” he murmurs. He steps back and seems to fall through time, becoming a little boy before our eyes.
My father starts to cry.
“We need to figure it out, just the three of us,” I plead. I can’t look at either of them.
“Lu. I’ve already called your mother. She’s on her way.”
“I don’t believe this,” Ben says under his breath.
“We have to do something,” I insist.
“Please go downstairs. It’s not safe for you to be near me.”
I stand up and look back at my father. I am five years old again wanting to wear sandals in a snowstorm and he’s looking at me like I’m just a silly kid. Maybe I won’t be cold. Maybe I know something he doesn’t.
I whip around and rocket down the stairs. Fourteen steps to the bottom. I need to think. I need to figure this out.
That woman in that video. Evans B. She said she knew something no one else did. I search FLN for Thorny Rose. The page you are looking for cannot be found. Fuck. I Google it. The video seems to have disappeared from the planet. But I find her picture. Evans Birkner from Redlands, California.
Her pearly teeth sparkle from the homepage of a ten-year-old biotech conference website. She was the keynote speaker. An expert on the regeneration of plant cells using a digital DNA replication technique she invented. It says she plays volleyball in her spare time and is “mother” to a dachshund named Jenny. Her photo is polished, professional. But behind her plastic smile, there’s a fire in her eyes. God, I could swear I know her from somewhere.
I open a message to Bell. My father is sick. Can you help me? I pace around my room in a haze of red. I refresh my e-mail every three seconds.
Finally, a reply. I’m trying to help everyone, he writes.
Is that a no?
For now. I don’t have the cure, yet.
I stare at the screen.
You’ll have to solve your own problem.
Fuck you.
I open LightYears. I look at the analysis of the Hugo video. A bunch of curving lines, a bunch of words and percentages. Now I know Bell was right—it solves nothing. It does nothing. And yet, he chose me. Why?
I hear my father coughing through the closed door. I double over. My mother will be here soon.
I stop in the center of my room. The walls orbit my dizzy head. I plant my legs wide and close my eyes. I imagine my feet heavy in the sand.
Think.
There’s only one other person to try. I text Kamal: I need to talk to Phoebe.
Seconds later, the trill of an incoming video call sends my heart into my throat. The number is blocked. I put on my glasses. My exhausted face appears in midair.
“Accept,” I command, shaking the fear from my voice. My image shrinks into a thumbnail and Phoebe’s perfect features and razor-sharp bangs come full-screen into my view.
“Hello,” I say. I try not to sound like a kid.
“Hey Lu. What’s going on?” Her tone is kind. I relax a little.
“Well, I’m not really even sure,” I begin. “My father is sick.”
“Oh wow,” she says. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Her face is close, her voice intimate. We are like schoolgirls whispering secrets. The taste of salt.
“I thought maybe there’s something you know of, some way to help him. Somewhere that might have a treatment or something. Seriously anything. I don’t want him to go to one of those camps.”
I look at her and suddenly feel like a fool. Phoebe Lowe might seem all-powerful to my sixteen-year-old, Kamal-obsessed self, but in the big picture of the actual world, she’s basically nobody.
“Well,” she says slowly. “I don’t think there’s much I can do. I’m leaving for LA in a couple of hours.”
“Wait, why?” How could she travel to Los Angeles while I stay home and watch my father die?
“They need help there, managing volunteers. And …” She stops herself.
“And what?” She pauses. Her eyes. More salt on my tongue.
“This remains between us, okay?”
“Okay,” I respond.
“That Hugo video. We got a message from someone saying he sent it. He says he knows about ARNS and since I’m the one he sent it to, the Peers want me in LA while they try and figure out who he is.”
“You got a message about the video?” Uneasiness rumbles through me.
She nods. “On x.chat. Totally untraceable.”
My eyes sting with the punch of yellow light. My entire body erupts in chills. “Theodore Nam,” I murmur.
Phoebe’s eyes narrow. “What?”
“He sent me a message too. Last night. I got an x.chat message from Theodore Nam.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a poem about a Hindu myth I randomly studied in fifth grade. When I told him I recognized the reference, he told me the cure for fear is knowledge.”
“You should come with me,” she says.
“To LA? Yeah, right.”
“You’re obviously involved in something or you wouldn’t have gotten that message. We can keep you safe.”
Safe from what exactly, besides ARNS?
“Look, do you actually want to sit around and watch your father get sicker and sicker and—” She stops herself. “Sorry. But seriously, do you? Want to come?”
“What would I even do there?”
“You would help us find Theodore Nam. Find out what he knows, if he even knows anything. You would do something besides sitting on your ass.”
Logic goes to war with temptation. “I don’t have t
he money for a ticket.”
“We’re driving. Flights are impossible, not to mention dangerous. They’ll probably close the airports soon.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Kamal and I.”
Now I really want to go.
“What?” Phoebe asks when I say nothing.
“What if I get sick? What if I’m already sick?”
“You can take precautions. But we need to do what we can to make a difference.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“Maybe it is,” she says. “Look, I have to go. We’re leaving at eleven, so if you want us to pick you up, text Kamal. Either way, I’m sorry about your dad; I really am. But maybe don’t let yourself be a victim?” She pulls a mask over her face and clicks off.
I look back at Evans Birkner’s picture. I map the distance from Los Angeles to Redlands: seventy-three miles.
“What should I do?” I say aloud. Silence.
I collapse onto my bed. Milk-white pillows smother my ears. I stare up at the walls papered with photos—three-inch square pictures of the city, me, Janine, trips I’ve taken. My life story covering the walls like church mosaics.
I settle on a shot of Janine sitting on my stoop wearing plaid bellbottoms and a don’t-fuck-with-me expression. I pull down the picture and stare at it. I want to call and tell her I was wrong the other night. Photographs are just as good as memories, maybe better.
“What should I do?” I ask again. My pulse ticks in the quiet. Then a single word, a whisper so soft I can’t be sure I even hear it: “Go.”
I bolt straight up.
“Ben! Luisa!” My mother’s voice rings out from downstairs. Footsteps on the stairs and then she’s standing in my doorway. She looks like an astronaut in her protective gear. A blast of white.
“Do you have symptoms?” she asks. Her breath sounds shallow. I shake my head. “Put these on.” She tosses me a plastic pack. “Where is he?”
“Upstairs,” I answer. She nods and pauses. Her eyes are glassy and wide.
“Do not leave this room. You’ll put on the gown and everything in the pack and stay here. I’ll get your father into the car and take him where they can help him. Then I’ll come back and sanitize this house so we can stay here. It’s safer here than my apartment.”
“You can’t—”
She cuts me off. “This is not up for discussion. Y ya. Entiendes?” She walks out.
I follow her into the hall. “I know you’re freaked out, Mom, but—”
She whips around. “Stop.” Ben comes out of his room. “When you have children of your own, if you are lucky enough to survive this and whatever else comes your way and you have babies of your own, you can talk to me about being freaked out. Right now, you put on the stuff in the fucking bag and you stay in your room.”
“You can’t take him to one of those camps. He’ll be left to die in some corner.”
“That’s not my fault,” she says, her voice cracking.
Yeah, I think. It’s mine.
She breaks my gaze and goes upstairs.
I turn to Ben. “We can’t let her do this.”
“I don’t think we have a choice, Lu.”
My parents’ muffled voices drift down from the landing above. “Are you okay to walk?” she asks. I back up to the wall and flatten my palms against it. I tap my feet against the floorboards.
Then, footsteps coming down.
My father moves toward me slowly, clutching the banister in his gloved hand. A blanket hangs from his shoulders. His face is obscured by a mask, but his eyes are searching and warm, like the beam of a flashlight.
They reach the bottom of the stairs. Waves of red and brown cloud my view. Heat swirls off my father’s body. Sweat drips down his temple even as he shivers against the blanket.
He looks at Ben and then me. “I have to go,” he whispers.
“No,” I manage to say.
“Yes, lamb.” He lifts the mask. His beautiful smile sends the sound of wind rustling trees through the empty spaces in my body. “I can beat this,” he says. He’s trying to convince us both.
I look down at my bare feet. My skin and bones press onto the hard wood of the hallway floor in the house where I have spent my whole life in some way preparing for this moment. How did I ever feel safe? I wonder.
“I love you both,” he says. He looks at Ben who stands by the door to his room, not saying a word.
“See you soon, Dad. Okay?” I say. I need him to say yes. I need him to make it true that we’ll see each other again. He nods.
I lean against the wall. My hands beg for texture as they slide down behind my back. “I love you,” I say. His eyes close. His lips curl upward in a smile. He replaces his mask and turns to go. My mother follows behind him.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she says. “Stay in your rooms, don’t touch anything, and don’t talk to anyone.”
“Where are you taking him? Which one?” I call as they disappear down the stairs.
“New Jersey is closest,” she replies. I stand motionless. The sound of the front door closing. Then quiet.
I turn to Ben. “I’m going to LA.” The words make the decision for me as they fly out of my mouth. “I’m going with Phoebe and Kamal. They’re driving in an hour.”
“Um. Not funny?” he replies.
“Not joking.” I head for my room.
“I know you have some sort of lame high school crush on him, but he’s never gonna be into you and using Dad as an excuse to try and tag along on some suicidal road trip is pathetic,” Ben calls.
I dig through my closet looking for my hiking boots. “This isn’t about Kamal,” I yell back. Ben appears in my doorway. “This is about Dad,” I continue, “and the fact that Mom’s currently taking him to some hellish place where he’ll be left to rot on some mat on the floor until they get around to dragging his dead body away.”
“Stop,” he says. “I don’t want to hear that.”
“Well, you have to. Because that’s what they’re doing, out there, right now.”
“I said stop.”
“I need to do something. If we do nothing, he will die.” I find the boots and put them on. I throw a lightweight vest, some underwear, and a change of clothes into a backpack.
“If you go out there, you’ll both die,” Ben says.
I freeze and look up at him. “I am not going to die.” I move to the door. “But seriously, tell me, can you sit here in this house, with her, waiting, while Dad’s out there somewhere all alone? If you tell me yes, then maybe I’ll start to believe I can. But at this moment, there is no fucking way that’s possible.”
We stare at each other.
“Okay,” he says, exhaling. “I get it. You should go.”
“Okay,” I say. I charge out of my room, half-hoping to feel his hand on my shoulder as he tells me I’m crazy, tells me he knows how to make this all go away. But that hand does not come.
I shoot down the stairs while texting Kamal: I’m coming with you. I unlatch the door to the basement.
I pull down the red Tahoe Gear two-person tent and the lightest weight sleeping bag I can find. I go to the food stores and grab a pile of Mountain House meal pouches and a few packs of water purification tablets. I take some bungee cords, a canteen, a flashlight, a headlamp, and enough new batteries to power both.
Halfway up the stairs I stop and turn back. I climb the stepladder to the top shelf of the camping cabinet. I find the smooth brown suede box. I open it and pull out my dad’s old hunting knife by the rosewood handle. I gently press my fingers to the sharp blade. It’s been sitting up here for years, its deadly edge never softening, its pure potential just waiting for someone to come along and use it. I pull the sheath from the box, slide the knife inside, and stuff it into my back pocket.
I go back up to my room and attach the tent bag to my backpack with the bungee cords and stuff the sleeping bag inside along with my laptop.
I’m ready.
What will I look like as an old woman? Will my features be the same or will they be dulled by time like a piece of glass churned by the sea?
I snap a photo of myself and hit Print. I pull it still damp from the machine and tack it up on the wall. The contrast of my blond hair draws an invisible line between this image and all the other pictures, between the life I’ve lived up until now and my unwritten future staring back at me. “Go,” I hear again. That whisper that’s barely a sound.
I turn to leave, then stop at my dresser. We once spent the summer at the beach on Long Island where my father was given a house to work on a commission. At the end of those two months, our skin brown and hair streaked golden, we trudged with our bags half a mile from the house to the train station. My father stopped at the crossing while we waited, knelt down and put a quarter on the tracks. When the express came tearing past, the coin was crushed into a beautiful brushed metal disk. He drilled a hole in the top and strung it on a long silver chain.
I haven’t worn it in years, but here it is, sitting in a dish next to my black wooden jewelry box and the turquoise glass dolphin my mother brought back from a conference in Miami. I put it on, grab my pack, and a second later I’m out in the hall. Ben’s coming up the stairs carrying his own tent and backpack.
“You sure about this?” he asks.
“I don’t have an answer to that,” I tell him. “I just know I’m going.”
“Well, I’m coming with you. But you have to listen to me and not do anything stupid. I’m your brother and I’m older and I know more and you can’t forget that, okay?”
A smile spreads across my face. I exhale relief. “Okay.”
“And you can’t die,” he says. “Neither of us can die.”
“Neither of us can die,” I repeat. We head down the stairs and out into the summer day, the temperature rising now as the sun climbs toward its peak. Kamal’s SUV is waiting. My whole body buzzes with nervous energy as I open the door.
“ ’Sup,” Ben says as we climb in.
Phoebe turns from the front seat. “Good to see you guys,” she chirps. Her eyes are hidden behind gold Ray-Bans that reflect my masked face.
Light Years Page 9