Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Kindness made it worse, didn’t it? Kindness made what had happened mean something.

  Cars were backed up along Red Bug Road. People must be heading over to Kennedy. It’d been so long since an accident, she couldn’t remember the last time. There was never traffic this early. She leaned out the window. All she could see up ahead were cars, and the shadows of trees. It looked a bit overgrown, but then the highway department never paid much attention to Easter. She decided to wait it out. There was still plenty of time to make the movie. More than enough to stop for a coffee, then the drugstore to pick up a new eye pencil.

  Please don’t waste a good steak on it, but if you’ve got frozen peas it’ll help with the swelling. It’ll make him feel like a big guy.

  Where had she seen someone put a steak on a black eye?

  Des wouldn’t lay a finger on her. He hadn’t and he never would. She was his princess, which was good and bad because she loved that, and hated that she loved it too. He wouldn’t dare hit her, but he had hit Denny.

  Just the once.

  He wasn’t tough, her son. He might need to be, but she didn’t want that. She wanted him to be smiling and liquid like Gene Kelly, with a kind face like Fred Astaire that could make you believe anything. She wanted him to be soft.

  She balanced on the brake pedal and imagined filling her pockets with bang snaps, tossing them on the ground, spinning in their sound and smoke. She imagined lighting a whole crate of firecrackers with a cigarette and disappearing in the flash.

  Protraction

  A flash hits—lightning from over the grove, plus water from the sprayers. The ones at the south end always overshoot. He’s soaking wet and feels like he’s made of worms. Not worms exactly, but he’s squirming, antsy, and not right, like after sneaking a full cup of coffee from the pot. He could run a million miles all at once and not be tired. His eyes clear. He wipes his face dry and reaches into the pruner, digging for the spark plug caps. Spark plugs, why didn’t he think of that?

  He calls for Nedda, but she isn’t answering. He yells and waits, but nothing happens. She must hear him. She’s in the back of the shed by the hoses and ties. He yells again, but she still doesn’t answer. She doesn’t move.

  He jumps from the pruner and finds himself stopped. Huh. He pushes his hand forward and it hits something, something dry and sleek. Warm. He’s warm. Hot, even. But it was freezing when they left and yesterday he’d had to wear a jacket. Half the reason Pop is mad is the freeze. His eye hurts but he tries not to think about it.

  He tries to walk but encounters the same weird kind of wall, though he can’t see anything different about the air, about the ground, nothing. Nedda still isn’t moving. She’s paused, like on a VCR, but no wiggly line through her. He shouts her name.

  He screams until his throat is raw. She doesn’t even flinch.

  Two days pass. It has to be two days because he’s counting seconds and multiplying them by minutes, then hours. He isn’t great with multiplication tables, so he writes in the dirt with his fingers. He’s slept twice, curled up in the pruner’s seat. He’s cried four times—but Nedda is the only one who could have seen, so it doesn’t matter. She probably can’t tell. She’s barely moved, though she is moving. Slow motion, not pause. She’s turned her head, and her mouth is open a little. It wasn’t before. Sometimes, they are almost moving together. It only happens when he gets cold. Then he starts sweating and she stops. If he squints he can see her tongue in her mouth. He watches, wondering if a fly will land on it.

  There is a fly near him. It is still, paused, midair. It’s close enough to see the veins on each wing, to count the hairs on its back. Everything is still but him. He’s in a bubble. He’s the Bubble Boy.

  He laughs until it isn’t funny anymore; then he cries.

  When he’s sick of crying, he begins ripping the pruner apart, taking out everything he can with his wrenches and his bare hands. He tries to lift the engine block but cuts himself. He sucks the blood. There has to be something, anything, to start the pruner. He’s hungry but not. Thirsty, but not. It’s got to have been a week. He’s gone a week without eating or drinking. That should kill people. It must kill people. He’s seen it on MacGyver or The A-Team, or something. He can’t remember. His feet hurt. His fingers hurt.

  He wishes Nedda were stuck with him, then feels bad for wishing it.

  At some point there is a rumbling, impossibly low, too low to hear, but it settles in his chest like a second heartbeat. It’s Nedda. Nedda shouting.

  She’s slow. Everything is slow but him.

  He’s the monkey he told Nedda to poke with a dipstick.

  She’s smart, he thinks. Really smart. She can get her dad, who’s the smartest guy ever, and they can fix it. He’s lucky. Really, super lucky. What if he’d been stuck and didn’t know her?

  He sits on the pruner’s hood. He waits.

  After what he figures is another week, he’s run out of songs he knows. Sick of singing the same ones, he makes up his own. He counts things, the seams in the shed’s roof, screws he’s taken from the pruner, the hairs on the fly’s back.

  It’s a month or so before her hand touches the bubble. He’s stopped counting. The cuticle on her left pinkie finger is torn and there’s a stain on her thumb that’s red. It’s a mirror of the apple on the patch she made.

  He runs through every movie he’s ever seen and tries to remember the dialogue. The Goonies was good, but he can’t remember much of it other than Chunk being funny and Sloth looking a little like Eddie at the bait shop. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is better than Goonies. Way better. He saw it four times in the theater, but can’t remember any of the words. He thinks about the part where they have to eat monkey brains, and thinks of the monkey in the truck, its head cut open.

  A year in and his shoes are too tight. He’s picked holes in his pants and pulled the fine hairs from his lower arms. Sometimes, when he remembers his voice works, he says her name. Her arm is closer now. He knows that much, though trying to figure out how much she moves every day is pointless. Sometimes there is a great leap and she’ll move a whole foot, but most of the time there is nothing at all. Those odd minutes when he sees her move are cold and they feel like December. He wants to brush the dirt off her face.

  He talks to her, but she never answers.

  Sometimes he sleeps for more than a day. Sometimes he tries to sleep for weeks. He bites his fingernails to nothing. He’s not hungry anymore, but he eats the chewings rather than look at them. If he doesn’t, he’ll count the weeks and months in pieces of bitten-off fingernails. His toenails have made holes in his socks.

  When he shouts now his voice cracks.

  His legs are making him itchy. He needs to run, but he can’t run, but he needs to run, but he can’t run, but he needs.

  She puts her hand up to the bubble, his home, the wall of heat between him and the world. He touches it but can’t feel her on the other side. She’s gone. He’s somewhere else too.

  He cries.

  He sleeps. He dreams sometimes, dreams they are together, the only people in the world.

  A patch of hair above his ear curls the wrong way and drives him crazy. He tugs at it. It comes loose with roots and skin and a little blood attached and it feels good. It settles him. He pulls a little more.

  Pop will come. Pop will see him on the pruner and he’ll know.

  He screams for days until he coughs up bits of blood and snot.

  It takes her months to walk away, maybe a year, he doesn’t know. He pounds on the edges of the thing that holds him, the film, the glass, the air that keeps him in place. Then her back is to him, and he learns it as well as he ever learned her face—how narrow her shoulders are, that her knees bend slightly inward. Her left ankle rolls out and wears her shoe funny.

  Her shadow takes a week to disappear.

  He doesn’t speak, for a year, two years. He looks for her.

  By the fifth or seventh year, he doesn’t look anymore. He s
leeps on the pruner, which rusts around him. He huddles in the chair. He puts his shoes on the ground because they haven’t fit in years.

  He waits.

  1986: The Thread

  Betheen measured kanten flakes with a triple-beam balance, weights clunking solidly into notches. As in chemistry, weight was more accurate than volume. A kitchen scale was easier to use, to store, but she loved the satisfaction of hanging five-hundred-gram masses on it, the shhck of weights sliding across the beams. It was a balance she’d once used to measure poisons, caustic things, chemicals that ulcerated skin. The scale was purchased with money set aside for her wedding. If anyone had noticed that the flowers at the chapel were crepe paper, they were polite and never mentioned it.

  The lamp above the stove flickered. She ought to change the bulb. She ought to change a lot of things. But long relationships bred an abstract desire for something different. Boredom could be what drove you apart, or what kept you together. Staying was habit, as was thinking of leaving. You stayed because you loved them. Sometimes that love changed from a roaring fire to a sweater, but sweaters were warm and held your shape.

  Certain recipes were rote, and she used the scale for the sheer joy of it, the tactile comfort of the weights. Inventing new recipes required her tools and her mind, thinking about alkalinity and acidity, beautiful bonds. Texture. Texture was chemistry. The right balance between chew, crunch, give, smoothness, and graininess—it was all in the structure of the fats, sugars, proteins, and water.

  She weighed and thought about agar. It was more flexible than gelatin. A sugar polymer. Sugar, instead of peptides and proteins. A cleaner sweet.

  At one of Theo’s department mixers, a co-worker had brought jelled coffee. It had a clean dark flavor, smooth texture, soft but solid, the most un-gelatin-like jelly she’d ever eaten. Betheen had cornered his wife, an Asian woman whose desperately bored expression mirrored her own.

  “This, this isn’t gelatin, is it? This is wonderful.”

  “Oh, no. It’s kanten flakes,” the woman said. Betheen remembered her name was Jeannie. “It’s a kind of dried seaweed. My mother uses it in all sorts of stuff. She sent me some. You can jell anything with it.”

  “It’s brilliant. Where do you get it?”

  “Not around here. You have to order it.”

  She traded her recipe for grapefruit sugar glass for the name of a Japanese grocery supplier.

  She’d laughed when the packages arrived and she’d realized kanten flakes were agar, what biologists used as a growing medium. The things she could make with it—sweets that looked like molded chocolate and had the texture of mousse but tasted like lemon drops, or desserts that tasted like vanilla and anise and looked like berries suspended in ice. Up the agar ratio to combat the acidity, and she could make an entire wedding cake from sugar-dusted champagne cubes, with bubbles trapped inside that fizzed on your tongue.

  Fuck stiff wedding cakes. Champagne cake would melt in half an hour. If you didn’t eat it in time, you could drink it. Presentation would be difficult—she’d need tiers of slotted trays, held up by champagne glasses. But wasn’t that the point of food’s gentle bonds? They were delightful in their impermanence, a single perfect instant. A champagne water cake could easily win the concept cake category. Last year’s cakes were clichés—sculptures of horses, molded chocolate, everything the consistency of bathroom caulk. A cake that wasn’t cake, that changed states, would challenge the entire concept of cake. A win could change things. There was the money, five hundred dollars to spend however she wanted. She’d get free advertising, notice, and maybe a client who didn’t want dry, flavorless cake tiers, plastic Grecian columns, fondant, or hundreds of sugar pearls. Nedda would like it too: a not-too-sweet dessert that skirted rules. Did Nedda realize that Betheen was gently wooing her? Imagine tricking your own daughter to admit that you liked the same things. Luring her into letting you love her.

  Dessert, the secret love language of chemists.

  When customers asked why Betheen’s baking was better than anyone else’s, she forced herself to blush and say her kitchen was downwind from Prater Grove; everything had a little orange blossom in it. She did not say, “Because I’m a chemist, asshole,” though the words always threatened escape. Women at the Society House wanted folksy comfort. Chemistry—though it kept them alive with their heart pills, made their food sweet, and held their dentures in their mouths—was not desired, not from her. Which made her miss Theo, who didn’t blink when she ordered kanten flakes and xanthan gum, who smiled when the house smelled like soured papaya and burned sugar. Which made her stay, even though she missed who he was when they’d met, the way he’d been in awe of her. She missed the head rush of the semester she’d spent working with aromatics, and the wonderful terror of seeing her light blue ballet flats in a room full of awkward men in loafers.

  She’d loved it, being the only one.

  She hadn’t known it would change.

  Kanten flakes soaking in water, orange rind soaking in alcohol for extract, all of it needed to sit. She grabbed her keys and coat. January meant delivering cookies in the dark, though it wasn’t dark today. There was an unnatural brightness to the sky, likely from NASA. People must be investigating the accident; they’d have all sorts of floodlights, helicopters. NASA could light the sky up if they needed to.

  She left three muffins on the table for Nedda and Denny. She should have made pancakes, but the line between just right and too much was difficult to navigate. She was reaching but missing with Nedda. June said it was because she’d started trying too late. But how long was she supposed to atone for grief?

  She drove. At least she wasn’t Annie, who’d married a man who hit children. Theo could be difficult, but he wasn’t unkind. She turned left at the Mauna Kea and had to stop for an armadillo, a dark, lumbering shape. They carried leprosy. She felt like she did as well. Her daughter would rather spend time with anyone else. Her marriage had fallen into a habit of not touching. She did bake sales and PTA meetings and tried to make small talk, but she lacked the rapport other women had with one another, the language of shared experience that came from having grown up together. She’d come to Easter as a scientist’s wife, without ties. There were still whispers about how broken she’d been after Michael died. She’d overheard the words nervous breakdown.

  Annie Prater had never judged her.

  The Bird’s Eye got three trays of limoncello almond cookies. Ritchie Lester took them at the back door, leaning into the Cadillac’s trunk, his shirt riding up and exposing the soft handles of a man who worked by taste. She worked by chemistry until ingredients and methods and temperatures built paths in her brain and the sense of five hundred grams was as ingrained as her name.

  Motherhood was supposed to be like that, instinctive, natural feeling. But as much as she tried, she couldn’t seem to learn it.

  Ritchie bumped her hip when he took the trays, an accidental touch that wasn’t accidental. She could have sex with him if she wanted. If she appeared the slightest bit willing, Ritchie would bend her across one of the booths and hammer away. It should be reassuring that men would still screw her even though she was long out of her twenties, even though she’d had two children. It wasn’t. Men were all different corners in the same room. She ignored the touch and scheduled the next order.

  She kept driving. Nedda and Denny should have time. It was good for them to be unsupervised in little bits. It built character, imagination, helped them form their identities. She wound around town before heading for the interstate. Driving gave her peace to slide formulas and recipes around. Royal icing over a chocolate shell holding a strawberry reduction—a bubble that, once pierced, would release a flood of strawberry flavor to be soaked up by thin layers of caramelized sponge cake. It would smell better than perfume. Or better, a faux orange—a thin paraffin shell piped full of orange curd, coated with layers of orange royal icing and dappled with dots of red and brown food coloring. A small real leaf held on by an
icing bead. She drifted back to champagne water cake and the Orlando Cake Show. Her first attempt had made an alcoholic brick. Today she’d use more alcohol, less kanten. More liquid. She wanted teardrops. A cake made from a tower of teardrops that would lose integrity. And wasn’t that a marriage? People who were trapped by crumb texture, fondant, and flower sculpting would be scandalized. She’d need a magnum of champagne. While Annalise Stevens hand-painted headlights on whatever ridiculous car cake she made this year, Betheen would uncork a magnum into an enormous stockpot of kanten and water. Sip on the extra while the molds chilled. Dust crystallized orange rinds—Prater orange rinds—over jelled champagne teardrops. And when it was finished, when the cake melted, like the marriages of anyone who purchased a Ferrari-shaped wedding cake, she’d pass around the glasses of sweet champagne her cake had become. And she’d never divulge how she’d done it. Annalise, Veronica of Veronica’s Delights, and the beehived women from Candy’s Cakery would have to haul their uneaten cars, houses, and horses back to their bakeries. Betheen would spend the night in a hotel, drinking the leftovers, stretched out on a bed she didn’t have to make in the morning. Chemistry.

  Dreams of a night in a luxury hotel were interrupted when she was forced to a stop behind a line of cars. Red Bug Road became a service road that fed into the highway, which ran the coast for six hours of mindless driving. Every now and then someone would stall on the on-ramp. She looked ahead for the cause of the jam. Drivers were getting out of their cars, and a man paced around a little sedan, notebook in hand. There was a semi from Prater, then Pete McIntyre in his pickup and Annie Prater’s Mercury. Had she gotten Denny already? Pete McIntyre was out of his truck and walking around, hand on the back of his neck.