Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  “It was in one of his notebooks.”

  “People write a lot of things they don’t mean.”

  “He built the machine. That’s proof enough that he meant it. I’m the daughter of a mad scientist, one who conducted human experiments and everything.”

  “I still fail to see how it’s your fault.”

  “I benefited from what he did. Had I stayed where I was, when I was, I’d still be in Easter. I’d be my mother’s age. I’d be who my mother was. I wouldn’t be here at all. Back then, not even a tenth of the people who’d been to space were women. I’m a person of consequence now. Do you— You can’t understand how rare that was then, can you? I was so mad at my father. It took me ten years to figure out what he’d wanted. And he did give me time, it just wasn’t the way he intended, and I didn’t have a choice. A whole town suffered for it. Everything I do now is important. Every thought, every blink is something to be studied and considered seriously. I became someone important in a way I could never have been, because of him. Because I was his daughter, and that’s inseparable from all the people he hurt. It’s a scale I have to balance. I get to do things now, to be here, to explore. I have to do things now, because of what he did. I might lose my eye for Evgeni. I might die trying to fix Amadeus. I might freeze or starve to death on planet. But I’ll be of consequence. I have to be, because of what he did. Because it was for me.”

  Amit let her go and floated back to the window, reaching out to touch the glass. “You were a little kid. Children can’t process things like what happened to you. The emotional capacity simply doesn’t exist. You were eleven, right? When I was eleven I thought babies came out of belly buttons and that if I concentrated hard enough I could communicate telepathically with my tortoise.”

  Nedda tried to imagine a little Amit, but couldn’t picture his face without a beard. “A tortoise?”

  “My mother can’t tolerate dogs. They remind her of an auntie she hated.”

  Marcanta chose that moment to poke her head into the room. “Evgeni wants to go under for a while. Are you both okay if he’s out for two weeks?”

  Amit fiddled with one of the books in the case. “I suppose it can’t make the situation worse.”

  “I took blood samples, just in case. He doesn’t need new meds. It’s just fatigue. His days and nights are screwing with him. He can’t regulate to the ship’s lights.”

  “We could change them,” Nedda said. Their eventual sunrise would be another star. Twenty-four-hour days were a tie to a place they’d never see again. The irregularity of Evgeni’s days might be their new rhythm. As with his loss of sight, he might have been faster to adapt than the rest of them.

  Amit said nothing, only followed Louisa to Evgeni’s cabin.

  They crowded around Evgeni’s sleep sack, pressing tight to his body. His mad grin was contagious. Lightness in human form. He was smart, resourceful, but he’d been chosen above other candidates because he was buoyant, a bright spirit.

  “Not a bad way to fall asleep,” he said. “A beautiful woman on each side, and a man who doesn’t stink and takes care of his hands. I could not ask for more.”

  “If you make me laugh I’m going to miss the IV port,” Louisa said.

  When Evgeni’s eyes fluttered, Amit leaned in and whispered, “Every woman you dream about is going to have my face.”

  People who floated, who rose, took others with them. You held on to people like that. You gave an eye for them.

  Nedda retreated to her cabin, alone, listening to waves. Amit needed to think of her as good. If she was good, doing noble things, it helped him feel that he was too. Nobility by association, no matter if it was a lie. She preferred Louisa’s view of her: a test subject with an opinion.

  She chewed on a piece of one of their few remaining chocolate bars, bittersweet filling her mouth. Betheen said the kindest thing you could do for yourself was to once in a while fall asleep with the taste of chocolate on your tongue. Dark chocolate. Betheen mixed pomegranate juice with it and poured it into molds shaped like shells or butterflies. Tart, bitter, rich, and sweet—layers of flavors, each a chemical compound her mother had balanced. Designed to heal.

  Missing her mother was an ever-tender bruise. Betheen understood what it was to wake to a culture shift so radical your life could be rewritten. Her father had given her everything. He’d given Betheen chances she’d thought she’d lost. She had degrees on the wall to prove it. A lab, a life. Betheen said living with an obligation could take your soul away, but it gave you purpose.

  Amit didn’t understand. Louisa tried to make her feel better or unhelpfully suggested talking to Dr. Stein. Evgeni, much as she loved him, was barely the same species. He didn’t process guilt the way she did.

  She closed her eyes and made lists. Cataloging so she wouldn’t forget, though she already had.

  Glasses, black frames

  Graph-paper shirt with pocket

  Pocket: two pens, tire pressure gauge

  Black hair, curly, gray shot through

  Crumbly fingernails

  Dent in chin where his beard bristles grew together

  Bobby pins, blonde hair

  Lemon dish soap

  Aqua Net hairspray

  Coral nail polish

  Clear safety glasses

  Pen marks on fingers

  Peach fuzz on her chin that catches light

  Pocket: greasy lipstick, tissues, wind-up watch

  1986: Electromagnet

  “Please eat something,” Betheen said.

  “I’m not hungry.” Nedda’s stomach made noises, but not the hungry kind.

  “The stove is out. How about cereal? Can you do cereal for dinner?”

  Nedda poured a bowl of Lucky Charms, swirled it with her spoon, and watched the milk turn rainbow colors and eventually a muddy tan. She’d had a brother. A brother she didn’t know. And her mother and father had kept it a secret. Michael had died and it was so bad that her dad had built something terrible. And now he was stuck in it. Denny was stuck in it.

  “I’m still mad,” Nedda said.

  “I’m aware,” Betheen said, which had the immediate effect of making Nedda’s anger feel pointless.

  “You should have told me.”

  “I should have.”

  “Can’t you just say you’re sorry?”

  “I would if it would make you feel better.”

  “Well, it might.”

  “I’m sorry. We should have told you. We thought it would be easier for you if we didn’t.”

  It didn’t feel better. Nedda kicked the table. “Why didn’t we stay at Mr. Pete’s?”

  “Because we need to think and I can’t think in a place that cluttered,” she said. “Sinkhole. Your dad said something about a sinkhole. Do you remember?”

  “No.” Sinkholes swallowed cars and houses. She’d seen a story once about a town falling into one, but it was in one of those tabloids that wrote things about Bigfoot and Bat Boy. There was always a rack of them at Ginty’s Bait & Tackle.

  Nedda peered out the kitchen window. There were cars in Denny’s driveway, and all up the street in front of his house, some of which belonged to parents of kids in her grade. There were lots of people in the house too; as they walked around, lights shifted.

  Betheen pulled the curtain closed, cutting off Nedda’s view. She chewed on a rice cake, the most miserable food that was ever made.

  “I have to help, Mom.”

  Chair legs scraped across the linoleum as Betheen sat down, boneless and heavy. Her breath sounded just as tired. “We need paper, pens, and a calculator.”

  We.

  Nedda moved her dad’s books to the floor so Betheen could fit two big graph paper pads on the kitchen table. It was weird to see her using his things, weird to see his things in the kitchen. Betheen wrote like she whisked, fast, vines of muscle in her forearms sliding. It was weird that an arm could look smart, but Betheen’s did. Nedda looked for the same muscles in her own arm, but
figured she wouldn’t get them until she was older.

  Equations took shape like sentences, paragraphs, whole books in a language she didn’t understand. Rows upon rows of letters and symbols, curves and arcs.

  “What is that?”

  “Calculus,” Betheen said. “Well, bad calculus. I haven’t kept it up. Calculus—all math—is a language. If you stop using things, stop speaking a language, you forget.”

  Nedda had skipped a year in math and was just learning algebra. For the first time, letters were involved. It seemed like the more complicated math got, the more letters and symbols there were, numbers vanishing almost entirely. Nedda slid her chair next to Betheen, dragging it in a way that would normally make Betheen yell. But she didn’t.

  The pull to her mother was almost too much. On the moon, gravity was next to nothing; a jump could make you fly. In a shuttle, you were weightless, always falling, disoriented and free. On Earth, you were supposed to know where you were, how your feet spread on the ground, the weight of your body. But right now the gravity of Betheen was like Jupiter, enough that all your bones would break. She wanted to crush herself into her mother, to breathe her perfume, the hairspray, the ink and paper and the crumbs of rice cake on her pink collar. But she was still furious.

  “What’s it for?”

  “I timed your father,” Betheen said. “It’s not as specific as it should be, but it’s the best I can do given the circumstances. It was easier to see his end point rather than the beginning—but you get what I mean.”

  “End point?”

  “He’s moving forward, then backward in time. So, end to end is one full cycle through. I start counting when he’s at his oldest, and end once he’s old again. It’s like a loop. Divide it by half, and you have the midpoint of the cycle, which is about one lifetime. So, I’m taking that and trying to figure out what kind of spike we’d need, when we’d need it, and how it would work.”

  “You timed Dad.”

  “I timed how long it takes him to go through a cycle. It varies some, but there’s a pattern.”

  “How long he’s alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know exactly how old he’ll be on the day he dies.”

  “It’s not quite like that—it’s the curve I showed you. The top and the bottom are the start and end; we can approach those and estimate.” Betheen bit into another rice cake, chewing it dry.

  Her father, old and dying. Nedda didn’t want to see him young and scared either. She wanted him sitting with her on the hood of the car, looking for comets. And she never wanted to see him ever again.

  “He built it because he didn’t want me to grow up.”

  Betheen’s pen stopped moving. “What?”

  “It’s in his notes, I saw it. I hate him,” she said. And it was true. It was wrong that someone could make a decision for you, for your whole life, and never talk to you about it, never ask what you wanted. He’d decided all sorts of things just because he could.

  She didn’t expect Betheen to smooth her hair, sending warmth up her spine, or the way it made her eyes sting. She didn’t want to lean into it or for it to feel good, but she did and it did.

  “You don’t hate him,” Betheen said.

  “I do.”

  Betheen leaned back to look at the pages she’d written. “When Michael died, we were both sad for a long time. You were so young. We didn’t know what to do, and there was no one to talk to. We did the best we could, and we weren’t always good parents, but we loved you so much. No matter what, he loves you.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Nedda’s foot started bouncing, so she pressed her knees into the underside of the table. There would be red marks on her skin that matched the wood grain.

  “It always matters.”

  Betheen pulled her chair back and stood, allowing Nedda to see the pages. There were crossed-out lines, holes in the paper, and what started out as looped, pretty handwriting had slanted into a scrawl that looked almost like her father’s. Maybe being smart demanded handwriting like that, another language only certain people could read. Somewhere in those lines and letters was her father’s life from beginning to end.

  Betheen dropped something into Nedda’s hand. The white kitchen timer her dad had gotten for Betheen for Christmas. You could time three things on it at once, down to the second. “Here,” she said. “Put in two hours and seventeen minutes, then press start.”

  The red buttons made a cheerful beep that was wrong, considering. The numbers ticked silently. Seconds were weird; they always took a little longer to pass than you expected.

  “That’s how long,” Betheen said. “Two hours and seventeen minutes, or about four cakes, in and out. The clock in the lab wasn’t working, so I used my wristwatch.”

  “That’s not accurate,” Nedda said. Swiss watches were supposed to be good, but Betheen’s was a Timex you had to wind and the second hand didn’t even tick, just swung around smoothly.

  “No, it’s not,” Betheen said. There was a tilt to her mouth that was almost a smile. “And the start and end points are estimates. So I’ll lose at least twenty points for sloppy work.”

  The triple timer was too quiet. Not like the egg timer or the red hour timer Betheen still sometimes used, which whined with a satisfying tick. You should be able to feel time passing in your skin, in your ears.

  “How do you know when he ends?” She didn’t want to say dies.

  “You just do. One minute someone is there; then they’re gone. You know it, like how you know someone’s turned a light off, even if your eyes are closed. It’s a little bit darker. There are bonds connecting people,” she said. “If something ever happened to you, I’d know. No matter where you were, I’d feel it.” She rolled her lips inward, and her mouth almost disappeared. “He’s still—you know your dad, he’s never still. And when he’s gone, he takes all the light with him and it hurts, just under my ribs, like I’m a little less me.”

  Betheen slid the notepad across the table and put her arm around Nedda’s shoulder. It was loose and awkward and didn’t feel right, but it was warm when everything else was cold. “About what you read. He didn’t mean what you think. It takes a long time and a lot of growing up before you learn that the things you want most aren’t always what’s good for you.” There was a loneliness in her voice Nedda hadn’t noticed before.

  “What do you mean?”

  The knock at the door came like an explosion. Nedda hopped up to get it, but Betheen pulled her back. “Let it go,” she said.

  The knocking continued, then the doorbell, then the hard tap of the brass knocker.

  “THEO GODDAMN PAPAS OPEN YOUR FUCKING DOOR.”

  It was Denny’s father.

  “I’m getting it,” Nedda said.

  Pop Prater’s cheeks were purple-red with veins on them that looked like the moss you used for bushes in dioramas. She thought about that instead of how mad he was and how bad she felt. If you made a diorama of Pop’s face, you’d carve foam, maybe use plaster, stick those little moss things everywhere.

  He’d expected her dad or Betheen to answer, which gave her the advantage. She took a breath.

  “Hi, Mr. Prater. Did you see on TV yesterday? It was on. The whole thing, the explosion. We were all watching it in class, on the big TV and everything. I don’t think anybody’s ever seen anything like that before, not on TV. Seven people, all of them, died at the same time. Mrs. Wheeler—she’s my teacher—she had even applied to go up in the shuttle, the teacher in space thing? So she was really upset, crying and everything. I bet she thought about being dead too. It’s really hard not to think about being dead when you see people die, isn’t it? I must have thought about being dead all day. I bet that’s how you wind up a funeral director, thinking about dead people too much.” Her words ran to dark places, things too close to Denny. She bounced on a porch board and powered on. “So I guess they’re probably going to stop shuttles for a while because you have to do that when people die u
ntil you know what’s going on. They did that after Gus Grissom and his crew died. Everybody just talks about Gus Grissom because he was one of the Mercury astronauts, but Edward White and Roger Chaffee were in there with him too. And NASA stopped stuff for a while until they figured out the oxygen problem. So I bet this wasn’t oxygen because they’d figured that out already. But it was really bad weather for a launch. But I bet a ton of people are going to come down through Easter just to try to figure out what happened and it’ll get busy—they’ll probably want oranges too—and then it’ll get empty for a while when they’re figuring out how to fix whatever it was.”

  There was a look that adults got when Nedda dug into a good chunk of words, when a word bubble rose and burst. There was power in letting loose, a tiny rush that she could say anything she wanted, all at once, and no one could stop her. Like Betheen’s sugar voice, it overwhelmed.

  Pop Prater’s eyes widened, trying to figure out how to deal with a child when what he needed was to scream at that child’s father. But Nedda kept talking, loudly, about smoke trails and astronauts. She talked like it didn’t hurt, though it did and each word made it real. Each word became a brick between her and Denny’s father, a brick between her and Denny, who was in the equipment shed, growing older, growing scared, a brick in the wall between her and the things she couldn’t stop.

  There were limits to what a wall could do.

  “I need to talk to your parents,” Pop Prater shouted.

  He’d shouted at her, actually shouted at a kid who wasn’t his; parents weren’t supposed to do that. As long as she stayed behind the screen door and the edge of his brown boot never crossed the metal bar that marked the barrier between step and house, it would be fine. His shoe, his foot, needed to slip away from the house, like a soap bubble.

  “Desmond.” Betheen’s voice came from behind her.

  “Where’s Theo?”

  “He’s not here right now.” Maybe all the shouting down the laundry chute did it, but Betheen had a way of talking that made her seem bigger. Pop Prater was taller than Betheen by a whole head at least, but it didn’t seem that way when she spoke.