Going Back Cold

by Kelley Rose Waller

  Jane kissed Sebastian’s nose and closed her eyes for the landing. Last year, she told herself as she listened to the rotors’ whirr. Last chance.

  Once they were settled on the ground, Hal let Sebastian read the post-flight checklist and clear them for exit. Sebbie opened the door and bounded toward The Dome.

  “Mom!” he yelled. “I can see in the windows! I'm so tall!”

  “He really has shot up,” Cheyenne said, smiling.

  “I know,” Jane agreed. “I can’t seem to keep him in pants. He either makes holes with his razor-sharp knees or his ankles are showing. Boys are so rough!”

  “Ana probably buys Dámaris as many new pairs lately,” Cheyenne said with a laugh. “She’s quite the fashionista, I hear. But that’s teenage girls for you.”

  Jane looked around, enjoying the openness of the white landscape. She rubbed her hands together, already feeling the familiar dryness of the desert air on her skin. She surveyed the building and closed her eyes, trying to picture the tiny base from their first year. The original Semotus Base was now just the central hub of a facility that dwarfed its original footprint.

  Her boots crunched against the forever-ice landing pad that Hal and Simeon meticulously maintained. There was a slight wind today, and the air was a good ten degrees below freezing.

  “Early summer here’s still colder than the winter we left in DC,” Jane said aloud to no one in particular. She took a deep breath and smiled, fighting the urge to add a nostalgic, Welcome home.

  Peter emerged from The Dome, giving Sebastian a high-five. “Man, I hardly recognize you, little dude! You’re like a foot taller!”

  Sebastian laughed and parroted his mother’s remark that his pants were always too short now.

  “Can I go inside, Mom?” he yelled as he disappeared into the building without waiting for a reply.

  Lucas laughed and offered to follow him inside.

  “When do we expect the other chopper?” Peter asked, shaking hands with Lucas as they passed. “Good to see you all.”

  “Should be along in twenty minutes or so,” Hal said. “They weren’t far behind.”

  “Well, then playtime’s twenty minutes long ‘til the boss arrives!” Jane laughed. “I’m gonna go jump on my bed.”

  Candace smiled. “Ok, grab the other end of this crate on your way in, Jane. How many people are we up to in The Dome, Cheyenne?”

  “I should probably know that,” Cheyenne said, rubbing her forehead. “Thirty-six maybe? Counting me, I think. Ask MILO when you get inside.”

  “Will do,” Candace nodded. “I should know it, too, don’t feel bad. We’re getting old.”

  “Oh, honey, if you’re getting old, I’m a fossil,” Hal said closing up the doors of the helicopter. “Now, let’s get inside before we miss our window to toilet paper Bonnie’s office.”

  Chapter 73

  MILO Personal Dictation: Rich Chapman

  It’s always up to us, the practical scientists, to actually make stuff happen. Bonnie and her physicists might have grandiose ideas, but when it comes to implementing them… my job. They hand Michelangelo a stick figure outline and then bask in the glory upon the completion of the masterpiece.

  There were literally places in these concept notes from Ana McDell that say things like “fill in necessary materials as needed” and “defer to engineering opinion on angle/size/components.” In other words, she had a random idea that someone higher up liked but she has no idea if it would work or how.

  Typical. Woman. Physicist. Pff.

  That reporter tried to interview Bonnie today, but he ended up getting it handed to him. Bonnie didn’t like his questions about Jane, I guess. She wants to be the star of the show. But honestly, it’s been a whole week and Jane hasn’t even looked up from her computer. She isn’t trying to look like she’s in charge. I’m not even sure she’s trying to look like she’s sane. Maybe this is all her way of being sure they never invite her family to colonize Mars.

  Riddhi and the metalworking team seem to have mastered the layering of these multiple canisters rather expertly. I'm impressed. As long as they followed my designs precisely, I’m sure we’ll have success. They’re not testing the multiple releases for a while.

  Chapter 74

  “An essay?” Lucas repeated. “That’s pretty impressive, kiddo.”

  “I hate it,” Sebbie whined as he twisted the knobs on the machine Lucas was loading. “She said it has to be a whole page.”

  “Now, come on, quit it,” Lucas said, waving his son's hands away from the controls. “I’m going to have to reset all of those.”

  “Dad, the settings can’t be changed when the door isn’t sealed,” Sebbie said, shaking his head.

  Lucas paused for a second, then wrinkled his nose. “I know,” he said. “I was just... testing you.”

  Sebastian shook his head. He said, “You know, Mom says I’m going to be even smarter than her.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Lucas said, closing the door and watching all the knobs auto-adjust to their previous settings. “You’re already smarter than me, obviously.” He ruffled his son’s hair and motioned him to follow.

  “Did you ever have to write an essay?” Sebastian asked as he watched Lucas enter numbers in his tablet.

  “Sure, lots of times. I wrote my best one ever on killer whales,” he said.

  “You mean orcas?” Sebastian asked.

  Lucas sighed. “Yes, the orcinus orca, if I’m not mistaken.”

  My kid’s a genius, he smiled to himself. “But I also have to write for my job still, you know. They don’t call it an essay, but it’s sort of the same thing. The Colonel, who’s sort of like our teacher, asks a question, and we have to write up the answer.”

  “Except you can’t read online to find the answer,” Sebastian said. “I can just look stuff up and put it in my own words. You have to actually create the answer. Science!”

  Laughing, Lucas agreed. “You’ll be able to do that someday. Or even right now, depending on the question.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, if I asked you about the migratory patterns of birds, you could look that up,” Lucas replied. “But if I asked you about your family and our seasons here, you’d have to write from your own experience and your own memory.”

  “Or I could ask MILO,” Sebbie suggested.

  “True, but even he would only give you facts,” Lucas said, gesturing to the lifeless panel on the wall. “You’d have to remember what things felt like, and how other people interacted to write a good story.”

  Sebastian leaned his head close to the table and pushed a pencil back and forth with his thumb.

  “Daddy?” he said after a moment.

  “Yes?”

  “Mommy's ok, right?”

  “Of course, Seb, why?”

  “She seemed sad again this morning,” the six-year-old said. “Doesn’t she like it here?”

  “She loves it here, Sebbie. She’s just busy. Working.”

  “It’s about losing Emily, though, right?”

  Lucas put his tablet down and pulled Sebbie over to hug him. “You’re a smart kid, Sebbie. And not just book smart; you’re intuitive. Do you know what intuitive means?”

  Sebbie shook his head.

  “Intuitive means you know something on instinct. That no one has to explain things to you. They just make sense to you.”

  “So that’s how I knew why Mommy was sad?”

  “I think so, yes,” Lucas said. “Today's the anniversary of the day we found out she was pregnant with Emily, so we talked about her this morning.”

  “Oh,” Sebbie said. “So being sad makes her quiet.”

  “Am I acting quiet?”

  “Not right now. But sometimes down here, you’re sad, too.”

  Lucas hugged his son against his chest. “I do still feel sad sometimes, Sebbie. Semotus is a great place, but it also reminds us of your sister.”

  “She wouldn’t be a baby now, th
ough, right?”

  “Nope,” Lucas said, shaking his head slowly. “She’d be three… in fact, about how old you were our first season here.”

  “Do you wish she was here?” Sebastian asked.

  “Yes.”

  Sebbie looked at the floor. “But if she was with us, things would be different,” Lucas added.

  Sebbie lifted up his head. “Oh, really? Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lucas said, feeling more uncertainty than the casual conversation warranted. “Just different.”

  “I guess not,” Sebastian said, shrugging. “But I like it here. I like it now. I think this is ok now to be what happened. I hope that’s ok.”

  Lucas smiled despite his heart feeling low. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Of course.”

  “So what’s this essay of yours going to be about?”

  “Candace said a lot of schools make you write about what you did over the summer, but since it’s summer here and winter at home, means she wants me to write about what I did in the fall.”

  “Well, that’ll be fun since you started first grade.”

  “I guess,” Sebastian rolled his eyes.

  Lucas poked his son in the belly. “Your eyeballs are going to get stuck like that,” he teased.

  Chapter 75

  “How come I have to write something that’s like a hundred pages long?” Dámaris whined to Candace in the school room a few days later.

  “I could make you read my thesis,” Candace offered.

  “Gross,” Dám said, shaking her head. “I just think since I’m already down here with a bunch of scientists that I should get a break from school.”

  “Do you? Really? Ok, fine by me. Just get your parents to agree to that.”

  Dám flopped down onto the couch and gently smacked her forehead with her palm.

  “Get to work, sweetie, seriously,” Candace said. “The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be done.”

  “Fine,” Dám said in a huff.

  I should tell my parents I’m sorry for ever being a teenage girl, Candace thought to herself. I couldn’t have been this overdramatic, could I?

  Candace sat back down at her computer and finalized Dám’s synchronized class schedule. The school district back home was being very accommodating with her studies and gave Candace an easy time passing along assignments, even if they were received with sarcasm.

  “Hey,” Dámaris said, interrupting Candace’s work.

  “Yep?”

  “Not you. I’m talking to MILO.”

  “Then you have to use his—”

  “I know, I know,” Dám interrupted. “MILO, please show me a list of the launches NASA did for this project over the last 12 months.”

  “Whacha thinking?” Candace asked.

  “Maybe I’ll write about the inefficiencies of government bureaucracy. All the overlap in department communications.”

  “My dad would be an amazing resource for that,” Candace offered with a wink.

  Dám smiled. “No, I was just thinking it might be cool to put together a scrapbook of our last year down here.”

  “That’s very creative, Dám. Now write your essay.”

  “Can my essay be about the space launches?”

  “Does it answer the question?”

  “Her question is boring,” Dám whined. “‘Has social media ruined face-to-face communication?’ Yes, it has. Essay done.”

  Candace smiled ruefully. “Social media never did me any favors,” she said. “But, I still use it to keep in touch with friends, especially when I’m down here.”

  “Can I count Instagramming as research time?” Dám asked.

  “No.”

  “Snapchat?”

  “Still no.”

  “What if—”

  “No.”

  Dám was smiling now, and Candace knew the teenager’s frustration from earlier had dissipated. She’s just teasing me now.

  “How about this?” Candace offered. “We’ll review the space launches for you to plan a scrapbook, and then you spend one hour doing good, solid research before lunch.”

  “Sold!” Dám said, walking over to the screen where Candace asked MILO to pull up the timeline. “Ok, from Cape Canaveral, they launched the first one in April.”

  Candace used her finger to trace a line of text across the screen. “I didn’t realize they did it that soon after we got home last season.”

  “That was the only way to get it far enough away in time to test my mom’s theory on the layered capsule this season.”

  “I see.”

  “Then that conveniently gave them a few more months to finish the entirely new one, the one that lets the capsule shed its outer layer and re-launch,” Dam said. “That one went up in August.”

  “You know an awful lot about this for someone who says she hates science, Dam,” Candace said. “Now, one hour of good research before lunch. You promised.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dám said, settling in with a keyboard. She typed her name, the class name, and the date. Then she typed the essay question and centered it. Staring at the blank screen, she changed the font six times, then made it a little larger.

  “So, hey, you’re a nurse,” Dám said, turning back around to Candace.

  “I'm aware.”

  “Well, I just thought you should know that I’m a lady now.”

  “Meaning…” Candace waited, then suppressed a giggle when she realized what the young girl meant. “Well, congratulations. I hope it wasn’t too… unexpected. My first period was after a soccer game, and it wasn’t exactly a great moment in my life.”

  “Ew, TMI!” Dám said, laughing but turning red. “No, it was fine. I just think it’s cool that I could, like, be a mother now. Not that I want to do that soon, but, you know. It’s empowering.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy.” There was a pause when they both returned to looking at their respective computer screens.

  After a few minutes, Dám spoke again.

  “Candace?”

  “Yep?”

  “Do you… like have you… are you going to have kids? I mean, I know what I read online about sometimes abortion can mess up your ladyparts and stuff, but I was just wondering. You seem so great with kids and stuff, like Sebbie loves you, but I wasn’t sure if you could still like, if you wanted to do that… or, like, if you—”

  Candace interrupted by raising her eyebrows.

  “Sorry.”

  Candace rubbed her arm thoughtfully and walked over to sit beside her student. “Dám… honestly, I don’t know. it’s hard to sort out the truth from propaganda. There are a bunch of studies that link abortion and infertility, but as far as I know, I can still have kids. And yes, I think maybe I’d like to.”

  Walking up, Jane stopped just outside the doorway, unseen. She had been coming to say ‘hi’ to Sebastian, but having overheard the sensitive topic under discussion, she indulged in some eavesdropping and stayed out of sight.

  “Mom got some calls from tabloids, you know.”

  Candace felt her face get hot. “I didn’t know that.”

  “She told them all to get lost,” Dám continued. “And one girl at the school paper tried to interview me about my time here, but it turned out all she wanted to do was talk about you, so I told her to leave me alone.”

  “I’m really sorry you had to deal with that, Dám,” Candace said, her cheeks steaming.

  Jane brought her hand nervously to her mouth and chewed her thumbnail. She had also told some nosy writers where to put their questions about Candace over the last year.

  “Sorry for me?” Dám said. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you. I would have died if that many people were talking about me.”

  “It hasn’t been fun,” Candace said mildly.

  “Would you change it? If you could, I mean.”

  Candace stared at her shoes as she thought about how she could ever answer that question.

  Pressed against the hallway wall, Jane hel
d her breath, waiting for an answer to the million dollar question that plagued them both. She felt sweat dripping down her back.

  Would I change it? If I could?

  “Would you give up everything now to have that baby?” Dám repeated.

  “What’s the point in thinking like that?” Candace replied.

  “But if you could… I mean, would you be here, now, if you hadn’t made that choice?” Dám pressed. “Didn’t that one thing, however sad, lead you to be right here where you are now? How can you have real regrets when you’re so, I don’t know… successful now?”

  “Dám, I hope you’re never in a position where you’d trade everything for a do-over,” Candace answered after a pause. “Because if you had a time machine in your closet, I’d hop in it right now and rewind six years. If instead of being a nurse practitioner on a dream assignment now, today I was instead working a mindless job in some dirty city, at least I’d have given myself and that child a chance.”

  Jane felt pressure in her chest as the words pushed her to the edge of sanity.

  “There’s nothing worse than regrets,” Candace added. “You just… long for this unknown possibility.”

  How can there ever be a real promise of hope tomorrow if today is spoiled by yesterday’s heartbreak? Jane wondered.

  Candace continued for a few minutes, gently reflecting on the freedom she’d found with the help of a counselor and sharing with Dám ways she fought against these negative thought patterns, but Jane was gone.

  Having heard the million dollar answer, her mission was clearer than it had ever been.

  Chapter 76

  “You know what I miss when I’m down here?” Cheyenne said to Hal that evening over rehydrated beef stroganoff.

  “What’s that?”

  “Eating outside.”

  “Well, you could try it, but I don’t recommend it,” he said with a laugh.

  “Seriously, though, I like picnics,” Cheyenne said. “It’s a little bit of privacy, too.” She eyeballed the cafeteria where a dozen or so others were also eating.

  “You have something on your mind?”

  “Jane,” Cheyenne said very quietly, nodding her chin toward where the physicist was nose-deep in her laptop.