by Erika Swyler
“We don’t need them,” Evgeni said quietly. “We are the information flow. Don’t you see? We can cut data feeds anytime we please. If we go silent, they lose all data on the project, and it jeopardizes colonization. Bats are dying off, did you know? It is worse than colony collapse was for bees. They don’t have time to lose our data and launch again from scratch. They need us; we do not need them.”
Singh looked ready to start ten arguments. Nedda grabbed the pouch from him and took her sip. Sharp, clean.
“It’s too late, Amit. He’s already picked the fight, and he’s right, we’re in control. And we shouldn’t have to clear phone time through a psychiatrist.”
“Why do you need to speak to your mother out of scheduled time?” Singh asked.
“Because I need to.” Nedda tapped her fingers, thumb to pinkie, to ring, to middle, to index and back, rounds of one hundred twenty. Each two-minute segment made her feel closer to being all right. “She helps me think better.”
Tired had a sound—it was Singh’s breath. “Fine, keep trying.”
The treadmill hummed beneath Nedda as she ran and mapped out new constellations, naming them. Red Bug. Green Man, Whitefoot, Needle. The sudden sound of Evgeni moving close by startled her. She was used to knowing where he was by the sound of his reader. He used a reader for everything, the bot data, the instrument drawers, the names on the hatches and panels. Chawla’s voice was square and distinctly inhuman.
“Ah, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh, no. It’s fine. I was just thinking. I guess I didn’t hear the reader.”
“It was getting on my nerves, so I turned it off.”
“I can imagine,” she said.
“It’s not at all what I expected it to be.”
“Your eyes? I’m sorry.”
“No, the trip,” he said. “But thank you for not dancing around it.”
“I imagined better spaceships when I was little,” she said. “But what’s adulthood but managed expectations and disappointment.”
His laugh was like a dropped rock.
“It is that. As for the blindness, last year, I began to listen to how voices change when the mouth is different—smile, frown, grimace. Your voice gets bright and wide when you are smiling. I don’t miss as much as I thought I might. I’ve managed my expectations.”
“You were training yourself.”
“Obviously,” he said. “There is a lie in my medical record that is, for lack of a better term, not insignificant. There is glaucoma in my family.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I needed to be here enough that blindness was nothing in comparison.”
She would ask if it was worth it, but knew the answer. This mission was worth missing everything you ever knew, everything you’d ever loved. “Are you afraid?”
“No. It’s a relief in some ways to not be staring at screens. You know the Impressionists? It is like that—no definition at all, but there is color. I see you there, some yellow-brown—your hair, am I right? The blue is your suit. I don’t know if you are up or down, but I know where you are. You are there in shape and sound. Only soft.”
“Don’t make it sound beautiful.”
“It is, though.”
“I’d hug you, but Louisa would think I want to have sex with you.”
“Ah, but you do.” He pointed his finger in triumph, then clipped into the bike. “Everyone does. It’s difficult being so charming. Amit can’t keep his hands off me. I’m too much of a good thing. But you are holding out on me, keeping secrets. You are plotting something. That’s why you’re calling your mother, yes? I had planned on reading your psych files, but now I can’t without Chawla tattling on me.”
She sped the treadmill up. “I need an outside voice, and she’s an honest one. I think I know something about Amadeus, but I’m not sure. I don’t want to raise too much hope.”
“A noble thought, but difficult to do if there’s no hope to raise.”
“True. I suppose it’s better than preparing to die.”
“Oh, but we’re always preparing to die, aren’t we? That is what religion is for: planning to die from the day you are born. It’s nice to think that in the end the good are rewarded and bad men get punished.”
“I’m pretty okay with whoever switched out the plutonium burning eternally.”
“My favorite fantasy,” he said. “Louisa believes. Did you know she has a rosary?”
“What, did you see that while you were having sex?”
“It’s in her sleep sack.”
“That’s … disturbing.”
“Only if it means something to you. I do and I don’t believe. Singh calls himself a godless heathen. And you?”
“Like you, I guess,” she said. “My dad said when we die we become carbon and gas. But the thing that makes us us, the soul, or whatever you want to call it, is energy, light. He said that when people die, they keep traveling. We’re all just light traveling across the universe.”
“He wasn’t entirely wrong,” he said.
“But it sounds like he invented his own faith, doesn’t it? And that’s how I was raised. I’m worse than a godless heathen.”
“You are a madwoman, but not for that. So you are looking for God when you stare out the windows?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “It isn’t out there.”
In her sleep sack, she clicked on her tablet and enlarged the type. There was a message from Dr. Stein instructing her to scan in on the printer first thing in the morning for a medication check and to have Marcanta send new blood sample data.
Her message had been received.
1986: Books
The first rule was to never let them see your fear. Parents were supposed to be a beacon in a storm—something to that effect. Every parenting book Betheen had read championed a calm demeanor without mentioning that maintaining a calm demeanor sapped every emotional and intellectual reserve you had, and even then, a hand twitch would escape, or a bitten-back swear. Comforting a child was no comfort to a parent.
Nedda was where she’d left her, at the kitchen table, shredded muffin wrappers and a mountain of crumbs beside her; rather than eat, she’d chosen to break her food down to its smallest state. No one ever mentioned how children thwarted all your efforts to keep them alive. Nedda was working in a notebook, and her resemblance to Theo was frightening. What percentage of mannerisms could be pinned to a gene? Or was it all learned behavior?
Betheen turned her wedding ring inward and pressed the stone into her thumb to stop her hand from shaking.
“Nedda?”
“Yeah?”
Three. Two. One. “Your father was in an accident.” She squeezed Nedda’s shoulder, gently. She wasn’t typically allowed to be the comforting parent, and it wore like the wrong skin. Nedda stiffened at the touch. Like coat hangers trying to embrace. She waited for the shudder her daughter was holding back, the inevitable tears. They didn’t come.
She saw the notes in Nedda’s blocky scrawl and picked out words.
Bubble. Needle. Pop. Entropy. Pulse. Heat. Cold. Clouds. Rubber. Entropy. Black eye. Soap. Water. Soap. Entropy. Water. Soap. Water. Air. Soap. Entropy.
Betheen had interrupted her work.
“Not a car accident.” Nedda’s voice was small.
“No.”
“A machine accident.”
“Yes.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“No.” Nedda’s fist hit the table. “That’s not good enough. You’re supposed to have an answer. You’re supposed to say you’ll fix it. You’re my mother and that’s what you’re supposed to do. So do it.”
A sharp daughter, prickly, maybe even a little mean. Good for her. Betheen wished sometimes she’d been meaner. Niceness made girls bend. “I don’t know how yet.”
“That isn’t good enough. Try again.”
“Nedda.”
Nedda stamped her fo
ot, bouncing her pen from the table. She’d done that when she was two, standing outside Betheen’s bedroom door, pounding her feet on the carpet, demanding attention. She couldn’t have helped then any more than she could now, but not for lack of wanting.
“He’s stuck like Denny, isn’t he?”
What Betheen had seen in the lab was something worse than just moving forward. “Yes,” she said.
“You’re supposed to say you’ll fix it. You’re supposed to lie to me and make it feel like you’re not lying. And then you’re supposed to fix it.”
Betheen’s knees bowed before the rest of her, and her arms went around Nedda, the chairback caught between their bodies. Theo wasn’t Theo. He was gone, and she needed him to explain what he’d done, how to fix it, and how to tell his daughter what had happened to him. His little girl—her little girl—glared back. And she should.
“All right. I’ll fix it,” Betheen said.
“Denny too. You’ll fix it.”
“Denny too. I promise.”
“You don’t mean it. You’re just saying it because I told you to.”
“I promise I’ll try. We’re going to try, okay?”
Nedda gave way like a sigh. “Okay.”
There was no way to apologize to your child for not being the parent they wanted. Betheen would never be Theo, would never have the rapport or the admiration that existed between Theo and Nedda. But she could never hurt Nedda, not the way Theo had.
“He has a friend who might help.” Liebowitz’s number had been in Theo’s things, a stained card in a broken Rolodex. She’d crumpled it walking back, forcing her fear into the paper. The first call didn’t go through, ringing endlessly. On the second try, there was no dial tone. The phone was out entirely. Whatever Theo had done was moving, growing.
Nedda was watching. “I’ll keep calling, okay? We’ll figure it out.”
“He has lab books in the basement. He takes notes on everything, always. I can’t read them,” Nedda said.
Theo had left her the kitchen; Betheen had let him have the basement. The room resembled how she’d come to view him: dozens of half-finished projects, scraps of metal on the floor, drawers of screws, nails, circuitry, the remains of Nedda’s tree-ring science project, a small climbing arc, shelf after shelf of notebooks and textbooks so outdated their only practical use was kindling. Scattered among all this were magazines, journals: Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Science. After they’d lost Michael, she’d been in bed, reading grief books, baby books, cookbooks, anything to get her mind back, and he’d had all of this. It would be easy to be angry with him.
But she’d let him have this. After the NASA layoff he’d been tight, pacing in all the spaces she’d carved for herself. He’d taken to standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning in to sniff whatever curd was bubbling on the stove.
“Here,” she’d said, “I’ll show you. Whisk from the elbow. Let your forearms do the work, not your wrists. Slow at first, to break it up. Then fast to work in the air.”
“Why? Why by hand?”
“You learn by hand to understand the feel and the look. The mixer goes too quickly. If you don’t have a sense of what you’re doing first, you’ll overbeat. Don’t worry about your fingers. It’s all the elbows. We’ll stop if it’s too much.”
“It’s so inefficient. Can’t we put a timer on and use the mixer?”
He’d put a kiss on the side of her neck. He did every time he complained about tempering eggs or leveling or crumb coating. Emulsions. She’d had a hard time forgiving him for a quart of curd spilled down a stove burner.
Her efforts ended the day he’d argued in favor of box mix.
“It’s the same ingredients, Betheen, the exact same.”
That it made no difference to him said much about the time he was amenable to giving her, what he refused to learn, and what she could never teach. She’d offered him the basement.
“Write a book, Theo. Build something. Go down there and do whatever you need to do to keep yourself sane.”
He’d done this.
“Which books does he work in?” she asked Nedda.
She ducked under her arm. “All of them, I think.”
“Then we’ll have to look at them all,” Betheen said. “Start with whatever’s the least dusty, and bring it up to the kitchen table.”
“Can’t we stay down here?”
“The light’s better upstairs and we can spread out,” she said. It would be easier too, to be in her space, not seeing all the ways she might have fit into his.
The notebooks were filled with his narrow scrawl, the triangular shapes that might be Delta but could also be his version of an S. It was returning to a language after years away, calling back all the typing she’d done on his dissertation. Because by then his hands were hurting. But also, she’d wanted to read it. Even when his hands didn’t hurt, she typed faster, and it was what a good girlfriend would do. What a good wife did. Clacking away on her tan Smith Corona, she’d wanted that then—the notion of goodness. Of being a nice woman and wife.
“I don’t understand this,” Nedda said, pointing to a rushed looking portion of Theo’s notes. “Is it about entropy?”
“You’re not supposed to understand it yet. And no.” Betheen remembered that too, the burning need to know everything. “Where did you learn about entropy?”
“He told me that’s what the machine was for. To control it. To speed it up, or to stop it. It’s heat loss, energy loss, but it’s time too?”
Oh. A machine to stop loss. That Theo had built. A book fell from the table and clapped against the linoleum. She sat in the sound, pins running across her skin.
“Mom?”
Betheen’s nails dug deep into the meat of her thumbs. “Get me a pen.”
For all of Theo’s mannerisms, Nedda was undeniably Betheen’s daughter, from her blonde hair to the set of her frame. Theo must have wondered what a son of theirs would be like. If at this age he’d have that same build. He must have thought it.
She placed a fierce kiss on the top of Nedda’s head, then found a blank sheet in the back of a notebook and drew a slanted S. “If you see an ‘S’ like this or a triangle in front of a slanted ‘S,’ in a bunch of equations, show me that right away, okay? The equations will look sort of like this. Go through every page. This is called the Boltzmann constant. If you see this ‘S’ and equations that look like this, I need to see it.” He’d be looking to measure kinetic energy at all levels, wouldn’t he? She marveled that she still remembered the Boltzmann constant. But she’d read with him, she’d typed for him. She’d been his shadow. There were moments when she’d reached the same conclusion faster, more neatly, but marriage meant certain things; your sense of self changed, your pride got bound up with your husband’s. Your accomplishments were his. His accomplishments were yours, or they were supposed to be. It was supposed to be that way. It wasn’t. But she’d never had to prove her intelligence or her worth to him. He knew, and the relief that afforded allowed her, at last, to relax. To breathe. It was like that with Nedda too. Everything your child accomplished was better than anything you’d done. You loved them in a way you couldn’t love yourself.
“There will be different numbers here and here, but it’ll look a lot like this. This is a constant, okay? I need that.”
“That could be anything,” Nedda said.
“It’s going to keep this shape, though. Look for the ‘K.’ Look for the slanted ‘S’ and the triangle. That’s Delta. It’s Greek.”
Betheen scanned the shifts in Theo’s handwriting, from frustrated to inspired, bad days, good days.
“How come you know all this?”
“Don’t think for one second he’s the only reason you’re smart.” Nedda’s shocked expression was both satisfying and sad.
“When do I get to know this stuff?” Nedda asked.
“Whenever you want.” Later was for talking about chemistry, math, champagne wedding cake, children, and fathers. N
ow was for hunting. “Keep looking.”
Pages and books flew by: things she’d loved in school, a volume on magnetics, an early draft of his dissertation, each notebook a catalog of his errant thoughts. A thought of life without him took root.
But then she wouldn’t have Nedda.
You had to love your children. It was supposed to happen instantaneously, when a nurse put a squirming body to your breast to let her suck. Hormones—adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, progesterone, prolactin. That awful oxytocin. Molecules hit molecules and caused reactions, formed connections; hard and soft sciences mixed and created love. But pregnancy with Nedda had been like carrying a parasite, a tapeworm that drained her. She’d dreamed of botflies, that her stomach housed a brood of thousands, ready to burst through, punching holes like a sieve. When Nedda was placed on her chest she was terrified; here was an entire person her body had made, but she knew nothing at all about her, only that she would suffer. For being a girl. For all the things she’d learn she couldn’t do. For all the men she’d ever meet.
She couldn’t love Nedda right away, and there was science behind that too. Her adrenal glands were overworked. She was still grieving the miscarriages. The chemicals that carried her through labor ebbed and left her dry. Her insides were like wool. She wouldn’t love Nedda for another month, when she’d set her on the floor and Nedda lifted her head, looked up, and showed such wonder. Betheen recognized her then, and loved her like she’d been skinned—it was raw, sudden, an overwhelming ache. Nedda was fierce. Determined. Smart—not brilliant, like Theo thought—but hardnosed. Tough, like she’d once been.
And then, eighteen months later, Michael. Love like a rock through a window.
In front of her were notes on classes, a diagram for a perpetual motion machine. And then a list.
Peach puree: Good. Spit up once. Smiled. Asked for more.
Strained peas: A solid no. Tantrum.
Stories: Pat the Bunny x3. Goodnight Moon x1.
PUT FUSES ON HIGH SHELF
The clench in her gut was immediate. She moved on to another notebook, but dog-eared the page.
Nedda had gone through what must have been twenty notebooks, showing her the occasional S, but nothing with promise. They were in a stack on the floor. Betheen had accumulated her own pile, notebooks that weren’t useful in the moment, but were important nonetheless. His notes on Nedda and, worse, on her.