by Erika Swyler
The light that was Theo Papas rippled across the universe.
Parts of him sloughed away, absorbed by blackness, caught against other thoughts, until he was a lone brilliant wave. The last of Theo traveled as light, a single memory of a sound—the first time he’d pulled a quarter from behind his daughter’s ear and heard her laugh. She was five, perfect, owl-eyed, and her laugh was like clinking glass. It made him hurt with happiness. That final piece of him was a joy so full it was painful, stripped of the fear that came from losing Michael, from Betheen leaning away, the fear that came with Nedda growing up, worrying she would be hurt, that she would be alone, that she would leave him. That brilliant happiness—his best self, the one who loved her beyond all things—crossed the solar system, sluicing through an empty patch of sky they’d often looked at, sailing to far stars.
This thought touched a small planet in a near system, pinkening as it grazed the surface. Terraformers and bots began to move with ease, and fine blush dust fell from their joints as if swept away on a soft breeze. Atmosphere generators hummed, touched by the passing essence of one who loved and understood machines. The diggers and tillers, machines like ones from an orange grove, all welcomed this light, the wave of laughter.
He circled the bots, the leveled ground, and the mountains, blanketing the planet’s surface, a wave reaching ever onward. In his wake, the air carried something of oranges, a touch of solder, and the subtle salt that makes a human. That best light mingled with the light of another sun, the star his daughter would spend the rest of her days beneath. To welcome her home.
And After
“Come on. We’re going to the Bird’s Eye. We have to eat, even if we’re sad.” Her mother reached under the covers to shake Nedda’s ankle.
They hadn’t eaten the night before. They’d slept in the parlor, falling asleep to radio static. They hadn’t showered, hadn’t changed clothing. Betheen was rumpled, dirty, and close, so close that Nedda had thought about slipping off the couch to sleep on the floor with her.
She’d asked about Michael. She’d learned about grief.
“If I could have been any other way, I would have,” Betheen had said. “If we had a choice about how much we hurt, everyone would choose to hurt less. When you think about your dad, when you can, remember that. If we could have been better, we would have been.”
Nedda had woken up, crying, hot all over, with Betheen shaking her. She still felt unsteady.
They walked.
“We’ll get the car from Mr. McIntyre later,” Betheen said.
It was stupid that she still wouldn’t call him Mr. Pete. Or just Pete.
The roads had cleared, and things were different. Reporters had arrived. There were weird round-fronted vans with satellite dishes on top, and police cars in funny shapes, like they were made from balloons. She wanted to pop them. An ambulance was parked in front of Ginty’s Bait & Tackle, and next to it were two enormous things that looked like camper trailers. MEDICAL RELIEF was plastered on their sides in large letters and lines snaked from them.
“Mom? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” Betheen recognized a woman whose skin reminded Nedda of a crumpled tissue and walked over.
“Claire, what is all this?”
“Oh, everyone has to get flu shots,” the woman said. “It’s mandatory. The CDC sent folks all the way down here, can you imagine? Apparently, there’s some kind of national outbreak, and it’s bad. I’d talk to a reporter and find out more, but I look a mess.” She patted hair that looked like it had once held an aggressive permanent wave, and smiled at Nedda. “Is this your lovely daughter?”
“Yes, this is Nedda. Nedda, this is Mrs. Fergusson from the Rotary.”
“They sent the CDC all the way to our little town to protect us. Doesn’t that just make you feel special?” Mrs. Fergusson spoke in that sappy voice people used when they thought everyone younger than them was a baby.
“No,” Nedda said. Mrs. Wheeler stepped out of one of the vans. There was cotton on her arm, held in place by a Band-Aid. “They’re taking blood, too?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that. I was just told that it was mandatory.” She turned her attention back to Betheen. “Didn’t someone come get you? The mayor’s got his staff going door to door and some of the CDC people are even doing it themselves. Zinnia came and got me, but Darlene said someone knocked on her door wearing a hazmat suit. She thought he was some kind of alien.”
“I can imagine that would be shocking if you’re not expecting it.”
“Oh, and did Desmond Prater manage to find your husband? Everything got confused after the … well.”
Nedda’s stomach clenched. A person wearing a surgical mask and gown ushered someone up the steps into the van.
Betheen’s hand tightened around hers. “You know, I’m not sure? It was good to see you, Claire, but I do need to get food into Nedda.”
The streets were crowded, buzzing, and it was warm. January wasn’t supposed to be this warm.
In front of the post office, someone held a microphone to Jimmy La Morte’s mother.
Then they were seen. Some of the ladies Betheen baked for at the Historical Society. The one with the white hair who washed it with shampoo that turned it lavender crossed the street to avoid them. Mr. Mitchell from the grocery store looked down in that way people did when they were pretending not to see you. Like the sidewalk was really interesting. Jimmy La Morte outright stared.
“Head up, eyes front. You did nothing wrong,” Betheen said, pulling her along.
Nedda didn’t believe her.
Her dad was dead.
Their booth in the Bird’s Eye boiled under the sun, and her hands stuck to the shiny green vinyl. When Ellery came by to take their order, he was pale and sweaty.
“Did the mayor come by your place?”
“No, not yet. Unless we missed him.”
“You talk to any of the reporters yet?”
“I don’t see a reason to,” Betheen said.
“You don’t know then, do you?” Bits of powdered sugar and sweat clumped on the ends of his dark mustache. “They’re saying something like fifty years passed. They’re saying it’s 2036. May thirty-first, 2036.”
Betheen twitched, small enough that Ellery wouldn’t notice, but Nedda saw the tiny jump below her left eye. It was the sort of thing you noticed only when you knew someone’s rhythms day in and out. Betheen was scared, but her smile was still pretty like that of an Orange Blossom Parade Queen.
“Well. We’d like two slices of vintage galaxy cake.”
Nedda couldn’t eat hers. Three bites in, Betheen stopped eating.
They sat for hours, and Ellery let them. More trucks rolled in, soundlessly. None of their engines made noise. Large glossy black panels unfolded from the top of a tractor trailor, and men and women hooked cables up to the truck and began unspooling them down the street, toward the fire department, toward the police department. Soon, lights were set up from them.
For a while, Ellery watched with them. “Any idea what on earth all that is?”
“Photovoltaic panels, I’d imagine,” Betheen said.
“Solar power,” Nedda said, when Ellery looked confused.
“Those things Carter put on the White House? Huh.” He took a long drink from his coffee mug before walking away.
Betheen’s fork rang too loud against the plate. “Twenty thirty-six. He’s been gone so long.”
A man whizzed by the window on a two-wheeled skateboard. No handles. No kicking. Her stomach lurched. A woman shouted at a piece of clear plastic that glowed neon around the edges.
She shut her eyes.
Years expanded and folded. Nedda had seen her father hours ago, his young self, and said goodbye. The world had been moving while Easter was trapped like the monkey in Mr. Pete’s truck. Had anyone tried to find them? Had the monkey survived? Had it found its family? Were they dead now? Her father was gone, had been gone for a very long time
. Fifty years. She was both eleven and sixty-one. Did that time still count? She picked at a flake of coconut. Were there moon bases now or colonists? Was there an elevator that could lift you through the atmosphere? There could be people on Mars; there could be anything. But her dad was gone.
Nothing fit inside her, and her orange juice fought to come back up. Being sad, angry, hopeful, ashamed, and scared at the same time was like having a stomach bug. Too much thought.
“Mom? I’ve been eleven for fifty years and seven months.”
Underneath the table Betheen’s knee pressed against hers. “It doesn’t feel real, does it? We can try to go to the lab if you want to. Just to see what’s left, if there is anything. That might help it settle in. But only if you want to.”
They should go. Part of her wanted to see if there were any pieces of Crucible, and a part of her like an itch wanted to believe her father was alive, maybe a little younger, maybe a little older, but there. But he was gone and had been since that snapping thread. She wedged her fist into her stomach, into her diaphragm, to keep it from jumping and keep her from crying onto her plate.
“No,” she said. Then, “Fuck.”
“Fuck,” Betheen agreed.
The blood draw was normal, even though the woman taking her blood was wearing a full surgical gown and mask. It was a needle like she was used to, and the head rush was just from watching what was part of her leave her body. Nedda bit her lip. Hard.
“Are you all right? You can breathe,” the woman said. A calm voice, a good voice.
“I’m fine. You’re really from the CDC?”
“Yes. It probably doesn’t feel like it—I know I don’t like people poking at me—but we’re just here to keep you safe.”
The vaccination was different. The woman held something the size and shape of one of Nedda’s shooter marbles. It was clear and blue, with some kind of liquid in it. And when the doctor pressed it to her arm, she felt a bunch of needles pinch all at once, then a small hiss. A fist-size patch of her arm went numb.
“What is that?”
“It helps protect against Pan-Euro flu. It doesn’t always prevent it entirely, but it shortens the length and duration. That’s what the mask is for, it’s protecting you from me. Not the other way around.”
She wanted to say it was a shitty vaccine. But it was hard to say anything to someone who was wearing a mask, whose expressions you couldn’t see. Medically appropriate distance gave them anonymity. It made it hard to say anything at all.
Outside the van, she rubbed her arm. Betheen was doing the same.
“Well, at least it’s better than the smallpox vaccine,” Betheen said.
“Don’t forget to pick up your water,” someone called. As they walked back home, they passed newly arrived trucks, and gloved people handing out bottles.
Betheen must have decided she was done waiting on lines for the day, because she kept walking.
“Mom?”
“I just can’t now, Nedda.”
Nedda peered around stacks of bottled water to look through the window in the door. The woman on their porch was a reporter. A van, a sloped white thing that looked more like a marshmallow than a car, blocked the driveway and a cameraman stood nearby. “Mom? She’s back again.”
“We’ll wait her out,” Betheen said. “We don’t have to say anything, and if anybody asks something that you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. Ever.”
They deadbolted the door and hid in the kitchen, letting the reporter pound on the door. It was easy to do what her mother said, easy to take her directions. She watched as Betheen drank a full bottle of water. Disaster management said their pipes had to be tested for lead before they could drink their own water again. That their infrastructure had expired, whatever that meant. It meant a lot of bottles, but if you put a little salt in them after the water was gone, the plastic melted away and ran down the drain in a blob of gelatinous goo.
The knocking continued.
“Betheen Papas? Angela Valentini from News 6. Authorities are saying your husband was involved in the explosion. Do you have any comment?”
Nedda grabbed cookies from the jar by the sink, lemon. Fifty-year-old cookies that were four days old too. Through the thin yellow curtain, she saw movement at Denny’s house. Pop Prater opening the door to his truck. He was big as ever, red from the sun, and he still made her skin jump. He climbed inside.
The porch door opened.
Denny. Skinny, messy-haired. He walked the same, moved the same, like he had before that morning on the pruner. He was the way he was supposed to be: twelve years old.
She tapped on the glass. Waved.
Denny looked at her, stared for a second. He didn’t look angry, or frightened, but something else, something she couldn’t quite read. He wasn’t like him, not the way he’d been on Wednesday, or even Tuesday, and every day before. He ran to his dad’s truck. She watched as Pop ruffled his hair.
Betheen handed her a slice of toast, soft from a river of melted butter. “He’ll come around,” she said. “But for now, just eat and rest.”
In her room, she laid out mission patches. There was a coffee berry on the floor that must have fallen from Denny’s backpack. Mrs. Prater probably hadn’t shown them to him at all.
His eye hadn’t been bruised.
The reporter knocked again in the evening. Nedda couldn’t tell if she’d gone home and come back, or just decided that this time knocking was going to work. Betheen still didn’t want to answer, but the knocking made Nedda want to throw things.
She opened the door to a woman with short, slick black hair. Her lips were a strange color that looked like khaki and skin.
“Hi, you’re the daughter, aren’t you? Nedda? I’m Angela.”
“You want to ask questions.”
“Only if your mom will let you talk to me.”
“Why are people always yelling at those things?”
The reporter held up the plastic-looking square. “This? It’s a telephone.”
“How’s it work?”
“I … I don’t know.”
“That’s stupid. You should know that.” The reporter’s eyes widened. For the first time since it happened, Nedda was in control. “What year is it?”
“Twenty thirty-six.”
“It’s May?”
“The thirty-first, yes. What’s the last day you remember?”
Betheen walked up behind her, floorboards squeaking. Nedda scooted onto the porch and closed the door before her mother could step out, leaning on it to keep it shut. “Challenger exploded Wednesday morning. Everybody on it died. Do you remember that?”
“Not personally, but I know about it,” the woman said.
“Well, it’s important,” Nedda said. “I want to know if they stopped shuttles. I want to know when they started again. Is there a colony on the moon? Do we have a space station there?” The questions started in her chest, from the empty space where her father had been. She needed to know about the shuttles, about space. If the Russians sent people back to the moon. If people were going now. Where they were going. Where she could go.
“I shouldn’t talk to you without your mother,” the woman said.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. Come back when you can tell me something important.”
Schools were closed until power and water were sorted out. The immediate surge from a long-dead town had shocked the power grid, sending much of the town into darkness almost as soon as it had come back. Newspapers trickled in slowly. On a Saturday night, Nedda saw a picture of herself in a paper, on the way to the grocery store. Scientist’s daughter, age 11. She touched it and her fingers came away with black ink. She cut the picture out and tucked it in her drawer, next to Judy’s.
She pulled out her notebook.
Dear Judy,
I was thinking about time, where you are and where I am. You’ve probably traveled the entire solar system by now. I stayed in the same place. I didn’t move at all, but I
moved forward. I read about electrons once, how they jump like a skipping record. You traveled like a record playing straight through. I skipped the whole middle part of the song.
The trellis rattled with shoes jostling bougainvillea. A week. Denny hadn’t talked to her in a week. A week and fifty years. She listened for the tap on the windowsill.
“Can I come in?”
“I guess.”
He climbed in like he always had, as though she hadn’t seen him go crazy and pull his hair out, as though the town hadn’t gotten stuck, as though her father wasn’t dead. He sat on the floor cross-legged. He wore the Reeboks he’d wanted for weeks. They’d been brand-new in 1986 but were now so dated the store was giving them away. She looked for where he was different.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She wasn’t, but you were never supposed to say you weren’t, not even to people who knew. “Are you okay? Do you remember anything?”
“Stuff’s kind of fuzzy. Mom thinks I might have hit my head on the pruner. Pop is being extra nice too, so maybe. I know Challenger blew up. My mom said your dad died. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said. It was worse hearing someone else say it. Nobody understood, not even Denny. Maybe especially not Denny. Her dad was light and heat and energy, like Judy and the other astronauts, like her little brother, like the Big Bang. Denny chewed on the side of his thumb. She’d never seen him do that before. “Is your eye okay?”
“Huh?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“You called Jimmy La Morte a cunt and you didn’t even get in trouble for it.”
Downstairs, Betheen was stacking notebooks, returning them to her father’s shelves, or throwing them out. The thumping of books on the table was regular, like a heartbeat.