Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Betheen had a good half-hour. Got mail from box. Didn’t plug ears when Nedda cried. Ate toast.

  That time for her was a fog, but he’d watched them both, cared for them.

  How did you apologize for something that wasn’t your fault, an accident of timing, a betrayal of chemistry?

  “Mom?” Nedda held up a beaten-up notebook, black, the edges picked at and torn. Theo couldn’t ever let things be.

  Ten frantic pages of text. The cramped jottings from a moment when he must have been jittery, enthralled by his own genius. A single equation took up three full pages, at the end of which he’d made a crude drawing of a mushroom cloud, labeled with a childish BLAMMO. But that was it, wasn’t it? Figuring something out was an explosion that forced you to reframe everything you knew. The seven pages that followed were tight equations, open systems, closed systems, and measurements. A dashed note: CHECK WITH LIEBOWITZ. A drawing of a sphere, then a teardrop, then something that looked like her mother’s ancient washing mangle.

  “Good eye. Very good eye.” Betheen resisted the urge to kiss Nedda again; it would be too much if she squirmed away. She needed to talk to Theo, but he was oscillating through himself—was mostly a person she hadn’t known or didn’t know yet. Oscillating. That was important.

  “Mom, we can fix it, can’t we?”

  The best she could say was “We’re going to try.”

  A knock at the door brought her to find Annie Prater standing at the screen, rocking from foot to foot. The moment she saw her, Betheen knew she couldn’t tell her about Denny. That morning was a different lifetime. Before she’d seen Theo.

  “Oh, honey. I’m so glad you weren’t hurt. That accident was awful,” Annie said.

  “Yes, I’m fine. I was just shaken.” She kept the screen between them, willing Nedda to stay in the kitchen, not to come to the door. “Thanks for checking on me.”

  “I wanted to see if Denny got off to school all right,” she said. “It occurred to me he didn’t have a change of clothes, but he didn’t stop by. He and Des have the same kind of temper. You know boys, they’re waiting each other out, seeing who can sulk harder.”

  The lie was easy, a perfectly formed thing better than any truth could be. “He was fine this morning. I watched him eat three muffins. Nedda dragged him to school the same as ever. I’m sure he’s all right. Children can bounce back from anything, can’t they?”

  “And you’re sure you’re okay?” Annie glanced at the door, anticipating an invitation in.

  Betheen should ask her about Desmond, make tea, give her one of the lemon cookies from the jar, and ask what she planned to do.

  “I’m still a little off. That man, he was so young—I should lie down,” Betheen said.

  “If Denny comes here instead of going home, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

  “The second he gets here.” In her head she ran through all the steps in making a napoleon—the rolling, the waiting, the custard—anything to keep calm, to keep the lie going. “Are you sure I can’t do anything for you, Annie?”

  “No, I just—I heard something strange. I ran into Ed Ingram. He saw Marty Neuhaus at the Bird’s Eye and—I wouldn’t believe it, but you saw the roads—Marty told Ed that his clients, I mean the bodies, they plumped back up. Plumped. I wouldn’t be surprised if Marty’s lost it; it’s bound to happen to someone in that line of work. But he swore to Ed that Ross Lattimer’s mother had stitched herself up right on his table. He was serious. He said he had to tell Ross. And I was thinking about the roads because Ross is in Mims and there’s no way to get there. I’m sure I tried every road. And everyone keeps saying it looks like a storm, and if it does storm and we can’t get out of town … I know it’s silly—but, if the school calls or Denny comes here, will you send him home right away?”

  “I will, Annie. I promise.”

  Annie put her hand on the screen door, tapping a fingernail on a chip of peeling paint. “If it is true, what Marty said, and I know it’s not, but if it is and you needed a shovel, I wouldn’t say a thing. Anyone with a heart would understand.”

  Betheen counted each bone in her spine, pictured the way they stacked from coccyx to sacrum all the way through the cervical bones at the base of the skull, locked in place, straight. Strong.

  Michael. Michael was in the garden, beneath a solemn slab of Pennsylvania blue slate.

  “I can’t talk about that, Annie. I can’t think about it. I’m so sorry, but I need to lie down for a while.”

  She gripped the knob long after closing the door. Counted to twenty. Slowly. Annie didn’t know she was losing her son. She’d lied to a woman who’d trusted her with her son, a woman who’d helped raise her daughter when she couldn’t. Because of Theo.

  Anyone with a heart would understand.

  “Nedda? Bring that notebook. We’re going to see your father.”

  Protraction

  There is great pressure and pulling that lasts a thousand years. When he is aware of skin, the separation between him and the tender heat that surrounds him, he feels cold, then a burning that lasts for decades. Language does not exist for him, but sensation does, and the intense screeching and shouting of life. Light comes in, filtering through his skin, where before existed only dark. It is wondrous. Muscles contract, forming a rictus of the spirit—oh, so painful—but new. The rhythm inside him speeds. Running with joy, fear, and thrumming, thumping light.

  There are sounds. Roaring, screaming. The thousand years before this moment came were water, a gentle thudding of hearts—his, hers— and calm mumblings that came from outside the water, beyond the dark. Now there is light and sound exploding alongside it, a brash herald of the world. And here, brighter, is a murmur he knows; where it had been muted, it is now keen. Clear! Pricking jabs when it had existed before as a brush of sound and vibration. Had he words he’d know it as a voice—her voice, without barrier between them. Had he language he’d hear the panic and worry for her, for himself.

  He revels, unknowing what it is to savor, or how the act of savoring bends time and world. Piercing, light and sound both. Bright, bright, bright.

  Skin pulls and pinches, every sensation seismic, rattling.

  There is softness on his back, though it is rough, scratchy compared to the water of a thousand years. He nuzzles against it to learn the feel, test its give. The lower reach of him, well below the place inside that stutters and hammers, is jabbed. Then, more sound, familiar like the mumbles from the water. A deeper, vibrating sound. In the water, he’d been unable to notice the rhythm of the sounds, the structure.

  The skin—his skin—is taut. It strains for years, months, seconds in a violent act of unfolding, which he loves and hates in equal measure. Each sensitivity he picks apart, analyzes, and burns into himself as a new thing understood about his world.

  There is pressure in his center, in the heart of the hammering; it is brutal with its force, almost as strong as when he was pushed and tugged from the water. It runs through the extremities and he studies it, never more aware, never more perfect. For weeks, he listens to jangling, crashes, beeps, and pings, the whooshwhooshwhoosh of things that are around him, in him, everywhere. Through it all are the warmer sounds, the twin vibrations, the clarion and the deep. He listens for a millennium, perhaps two. And he loves them, loves them so. Even the pressure, the twisting and yanking, yes, even the pricking and the sting. He loves them.

  Joy. Such joy. Perfection when compared with the darkness and the water where he’d been.

  “It’s an impossible decision, but you’re sparing him suffering. I’ll leave you with him. Take as much time as you need.”

  “Oh.”

  “I love you. I …”

  “Goodbye, Michael.”

  The sounds are softer, warmer too. He listens to them, devouring their feel until his skin that barely holds together, cell clinging to cell, isn’t enough to contain him. The pressure in his chest is warm and good, and so painfully happy that it stops.


  His final thought erupts with elation and light, a burst lasting longer than anything he’d known.

  His hour. It had been joy. All of it.

  1986: Infancy and Age

  Notebook in her backpack, Nedda jogged to keep up with her mother. Betheen was in her good wool coat, the long pink one with the wide shoulders that made her look like a stick of bubble gum and somehow made it even more implausible that her mother understood the same math as her father.

  “You lied to Mrs. Prater.”

  Denny’s mom made mac and cheese with the crunchy top and cut up hot dogs in it. Mrs. Prater played records and sang all the harmonies and listened when Nedda said that harmonies felt good because the sound waves of each note synched up. Mrs. Prater had given her Peaches ’n Cream Barbie last year. Nedda didn’t like Barbie, but it was nice of Mrs. Prater to try.

  “What should I have said? There’s nothing she can do, and nothing will make this better except for fixing it. That’s what you want, right? That’s what we’re going to do.” She slowed and put her hand on Nedda’s back. Warm, steady.

  “What else were you talking about?”

  “She saw the car accident. She just wanted to make sure I was all right.” Betheen stepped over a fallen trunk, and extended her hand to help Nedda over.

  Nedda glared but took it. Her mother had force, direction, and Nedda wished she could absorb it by osmosis.

  “It’s like a bubble,” Nedda said.

  “What?”

  “The thing that happened to Denny—it’s like a soap bubble. You can slide your hand around it, and there’s a wall between inside and outside. If you look at it right you can almost see it.”

  Betheen’s hum could have meant anything.

  “Is Dad … is it like that?”

  “It’s like water cake,” Betheen said. “He’s different. I don’t think it’s exactly like what you saw.”

  Nedda hoped it wasn’t. “Bubbles have three layers—soap on the inside, water, then soap on the outside. The more glycerin there is in the soap, the stronger the bubble. Is water cake like that?”

  “It’s agar, so no, not really.”

  “Dad and I did an experiment to figure out what dish soap makes the best bubbles, and it’s the one with the most glycerin to water. But that’s the stuff that stays on your dishes longer because the water slides off, so you have to use a scrubber to break up the surface tension.” She needed a scrubber.

  They’d mixed one part water with one part soap, with each variety of soap, and measured the height of bubbles, timed how long the bubbles lasted before they popped. They measured surface tension, testing how many droplets from an eyedropper made a water bead change from round to flat. They measured the height of water beads with playing cards for consistency. It was good to be next to him, to figure out how he knew the way things worked.

  “That was a good experiment. I watched a little, but you both looked so happy I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  Nedda hadn’t noticed. How many of their experiments had her mother watched? “If it’s cold, bubbles last because the water takes longer to evaporate. When it’s cloudy and cold, bubbles last a super long time.” It was cold in Easter now, the kind of cold that made bubbles last forever.

  In the hallway of the sciences building, the light from the lab looked like the grove—cold, pulsing.

  “It’s okay to be scared,” Betheen said. “If you need to, you can stay outside.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “I am.”

  Nedda wanted to yell a million things—that she was fine, that she did lots of stuff on her own, that she knew the lab better than Betheen. But she didn’t want to open the door.

  “He’s inside?”

  “Yes.”

  You did science when you were scared because the more you understood something, the less afraid of it you’d be. You did things you were afraid of when it was for a good reason. You opened doors. For the greater good.

  “You don’t have to look,” Betheen said softly.

  Nedda looked.

  There was a little boy in the lab. He was three, maybe—the age they got annoying, pulled your hair, and hung on your legs. He was sitting on the floor, bathed in Crucible’s glow. His hair was thick and black. His mouth was open, like he was screaming. Like Denny.

  Her father was supposed to be fixing things. He was—

  “There.” Betheen pointed to the crying boy, who looked younger than three now, maybe one and a half—whenever it was they learned to make that noise that shattered your ears. There were patches of broken skin on his elbow.

  Oh.

  It wasn’t staring into a planet’s distant past, it was staring into her father’s. She wasn’t supposed to see this. Looking back was never meant to be this close.

  “Mom?”

  Betheen sat in a blue plastic chair by the white board, pulled up another, and patted the seat. “We need to wait a while. In a little bit, you may not want to look and that’s okay. You don’t have to.”

  She sounded calm. How could she be so calm?

  You weren’t supposed to see your parents as children. Most definitely not as babies. For a few minutes there was an infant, frightened, howling, though she couldn’t hear it. She buried her face in Betheen’s shoulder. Going through the books had felt good, like she was doing something, helping. But waiting was the worst kind of loneliness.

  Soon, Betheen looked away. “Just a few minutes now.” Her breath was warm in Nedda’s hair. “Then we’ll talk to him. We’ll figure it out.”

  The cold shifted and pockets of air warmed around them. The change was in the light too. “How do we talk to him? Denny couldn’t hear me.”

  “It’s when he slows down. You’ll see. Get me his dry-erase markers.”

  The drawing Betheen made used the heavy black marker, spanned the whole of the white board, and made Nedda think of a road sign. The markers were pungent, like things Betheen used—pistachio extract, anise, and rubbing alcohol. A thick vertical line ran from the top to the bottom of the board. Midway down, a broad horizontal line cut through it. Below that, Betheen wrote in clear block letters ME + NEDDA. Next to the vertical was TIME SPEED/DIRECTION. She drew a curve that arced above, then snaked under the horizontal line, the pattern repeating all the way across the board.

  Nedda chewed on her braid, grinding the hair between her molars. She could have written to Denny but instead she’d just run.

  “Think he can read that without his glasses?”

  “Maybe,” Nedda said. If he squinted, if he knew where to look. If he could read at all. She stared at the curves. “What is it?”

  “Sine. The ratio between a small angle in a triangle and the long side. The math for it makes a curve like that.” The marker squeaked as she wrote, SINE = THEO. “Right now, you and I are moving in one direction in time. We’re like the long side of the triangle. This is where your father is in relation to us. Or when. It’s when he is. You don’t have to understand it yet,” she said. “We need him to be able to see this, to understand what’s happening to him, even when we’re not moving in the same time. But if we wait, we’ll sync up. I promise.”

  But her dad was a baby. He’d been less than a baby; for a while she’d been unable to see him at all, there and not there. He was speeding, like Denny, but backward and forward, like the trees. Rewind, pause, fast forward, pause. If you did that too much the tape broke. No matter how tight she tried to hold her insides in, she couldn’t stop shaking. “How do you know?”

  “I waited. I’ve seen him older. I don’t know exactly when we’ll sync up. But we know what he looks like now, and we’ll know when it’s him from this week, maybe from this morning. When the sine curve approaches ‘X,’ that’s us. He’ll be when we are.”

  Her mother wasn’t sure. It was in her voice and in the way her back was perfectly straight. Betheen’s hand slid under Nedda’s braid, to lightly scratch her neck. When and where had never felt so separate.


  “Mom? I’m scared.”

  “I know.”

  Her face was hot and she’d lost count of scratches when Betheen said, “You can look again if you want. He’s back now, not so messy.”

  “No,” Nedda said. “It’s not him.”

  “It is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can tell you about him.”

  Stories were her father’s realm, but she wanted her mother to keep talking, needed the soft scratches and the tickling smell of hairspray. “Okay.”

  “Your granddad didn’t like your dad very much. He loved him, but that’s different. Your granddad was the kind of man who never really left the military. He used to wake up at four thirty every morning. He said it was because in the service they used to wake soldiers up with cannons. Your dad says that’s a lie, and your granddad just couldn’t stand being asleep when he could be awake and pissing someone off.”

  The word pissing was dirty and intimate. “How come he didn’t like Dad?”

  “They were different people. Your dad is bookish, your granddad wasn’t. Your dad loves taking things apart but wasn’t always good at putting them back together. He still isn’t.”

  Nedda peeked. The little boy was back, thrashing like Denny did, stretching like Denny, blurring in high speed. Nedda looked away. “What else?”

  “School was hard for him,” Betheen said. “He told me about all the books he read, how he’d built his own watch from parts, and that he’d once accidentally blown up his mailbox. But he never talks about friends, and he certainly didn’t have anyone like Denny. He went to college early. College was easier, I think. Then NASA. He had a friend he worked with there. Some of the notes in those books are his.”

  “When did you and Dad meet?”

  “College. I was an undergraduate in chemistry. He was in graduate school.”