Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  You’re just jealous, because you think they might actually pick me, Elsa said. And Dad would have loved that. You know that you would never get picked.

  Nolan shook his head. Listen, I know you’re so tough. Such a badass. But you’re not a fucking astronaut, Elsa. You really think that when colonization happens, they’re going to recruit a team of random civilians to remake society? You’re a second-grade teacher, not to mention a drinker, and you haven’t done anything in the way of serious exercise in twenty years and—

  I hike all the—

  It’s a scam, Elsa. A publicity stunt to get people excited about the space program. Maybe put their company’s name on the map. Best-case scenario? It’s to get people used to the idea that people like you and me could live on Mars someday. But I’ll tell you right now—it doesn’t matter whether you get picked or not. No one on that list is hopping a spaceship anytime in the next fifty years.

  Elsa stood up. The laces of her hiking boots were muddy and spotted with dead leaves. She felt like running. Leaving. But she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do that again. She would stick with Nolan this time. She pulled at the straps of her sports bra where her shoulders had started to ache.

  Nolan was staring, as if waiting for her to come clean.

  But Elsa wasn’t lying. She felt like her insides were being crumpled.

  She was an idiot. Of course she wasn’t going to Mars.

  The real surprise was that it had taken Nolan, of all people, to make her see this.

  The era of certainty Elsa had hoped to bring back with Mars was impossible. It had never existed in the first place.

  Elsa had trusted in the realness of the mission so blindly. She had considered that she wouldn’t be picked. But she had not considered that the entire mission was not real. Would not happen. She’d trusted the people who ran the program because they claimed to be scientists. And Elsa believed in scientists.

  But scientists, Elsa was realizing, were humans. Were sometimes also sad and wrong and desperate for any credible evidence of something to believe in. Sometimes, they were just as in the dark as the rest of us. Or maybe more, because the good ones knew better than anyone all the things we do not know. How important it was not to be ignorant, but to fully comprehend what was not yet known or knowable. To sit with this kind of necessary uncertainty struck Elsa as a harder task than her current burden of feeling she knew too much. A worthier one.

  I mean, you knew that, didn’t you? Nolan said. I can’t be the first person to tell you this.

  But you are, Elsa said.

  Elsa was living on an island of crazies, and she hated home, and now she didn’t even have Mars to escape to. All that was waiting for her when she returned was a new class of doomed second graders in the fall.

  I’m sorry, Nolan said. I guess I thought you knew. I thought you were lording it over me because you thought I was too dumb to know it wasn’t real.

  In the bay, the ducks swam around each other in choreographed semicircles. Their wakes spun in concentric ripples, then disappeared into the larger current.

  I really wanted to tell him I’d made the final interviews, Elsa said. She sat down on a rock. Even if he’d gone crazy, I thought Dad would think it was really cool.

  He would have, Nolan said.

  Elsa shook her head. He would of seen through it faster than you. It would have been so embarrassing. Him realizing how easily I was duped would have been even worse than this.

  Worse than what?

  Than New Baby telling me I’m a fool.

  Nolan exhaled. You can’t keep calling me that, he said. I’m a grown man with a job and a girlfriend and an apartment, no fucking parents to speak of, and about two decades’ worth of shit from you. So please just stop.

  Elsa considered Nolan. He was sweaty, his mane of hair tousled wildly, and he was wearing Ian’s caterpillar t-shirt. He looked totally serious. He looked a lot like Ian. He looked a lot like Keiko. It was true that he was grown. His face was still beautiful, but his jaw had hard angles to it, and he had a fierce certainty about him that Elsa coveted.

  She squeezed his shoulder. You are, she said. I’ll stop.

  Nolan nodded.

  The buffleheads were finished feeding. They flew up in bursts of flapping and then perched, all in a line, on the branches of the fallen tree. They shook themselves and twisted their necks. Then, as if part of some ballet, not Bach, but Tchaikovsky maybe, they raised themselves in unison and extended their wings to dry.

  The children watched the ducks. This was their big step backward, the cause for all the alarm, and yet, Nolan and Elsa didn’t think the buffleheads looked inconvenienced by having to perform this practical task. They did not seem hindered by the evolutionary trajectory that had deprived them of past generations’ convenient waterproofing. If anything, the children thought the buffleheads looked purposeful. At ease.

  After all, they were ducks.

  What else did they have to do but these small things? The business of everyday life was not so dreary. It was the stuff a day was built of. It was what kept you alive.

  The buffleheads shut their eyes and sat in the sun to dry.

  Look, Nolan said. He pointed at the ducks’ newly exposed ankles, rubbery pink beneath the dripping fringe of belly feathers. There was a pale green band around almost every one. He lifted his field glasses and began reading off the numbers.

  Elsa was staring at her dirty boots again. He’s not there, she said.

  Nolan lowered the field glasses. You’re right.

  Elsa said, When we find him, I really think we’ll know.

  Park Rapids

  TWENTY YEARS BACK

  It’s only a game, Keiko called. Nolan, it’s only a game.

  They’d come to Minnesota for Elsa’s fifteenth birthday. The mothers were sitting with margaritas in lawn chairs, and they held hands, swinging their arms. Elsa was splayed in the grass at their feet, plucking the tallest blades and knotting them together in a chain. The daisy chain grew ominously longer until it began to resemble a great length of rope.

  But Nolan was not paying attention to them. Elsa’s yard was a long alley of untrampled grass and Nolan wanted to be master of it. His yard. His legs. He loped and cartwheeled desperately, as if to use the yard up by inhaling every gust of grassy air. And there was his father next to him! Ian loped easily, his legs long and so white. Nolan happily smacked at his father’s thighs, and Ian tried to snatch him up from the grass, but Nolan, little rabbit, was too fast and darted away. He knew his father was pretending that he could not catch him when really he could, and this was what Nolan loved most of all. To be free but confident in the knowledge that should Ian need to scoop him up, in a second, he could. I’m going to get you I’m going to get you. Nolan tumbled, forward-rolling out of Ian’s grasp. He was laughing, evilly triumphant, when Ian proposed the race.

  Elsa, come race, Ian said. She popped up.

  So, Ian said, you’ll race from the parents to the tree at the far side of the yard and back again.

  Ian was still out of breath, wiping his glasses on the tail of his shirt. He sat, taking Elsa’s place, and leaned against the knees of his women. Elsa snorted at this, skeptical of the trinity of parents. How happy they seemed together. How unlikely it was. It had taken a while for the dust of the divorce and remarriage to settle, but since then, the parents had loved each other.

  Ingrid and Keiko in particular loved each other. They first met over dinner at an Italian restaurant that served slabs of garlic bread and red wine in carafes. There were posters of Marlon Brando on the walls and bunches of dusty plastic grapes on a fake arbor. At first, both women were formal, deferential, not wanting to impose on each other. This lasted half an hour, until Ian excused himself to the bathroom in what was obviously a need for relief from the social awkwardness. As soon as the door swung c
losed behind him, Keiko and Ingrid laughed at his obviousness and squeezed each other’s hands and started to talk in earnest. Ian returned, warily, and found the women imitating his way of squinting at the television remote like it was some strange artifact. He smiled, as if he had orchestrated all of this perfectly.

  Ian and Keiko were happy together. And Ingrid was happy single, sometimes dating. But the three of them were never as totally happy as when they were all together. Any number of times Keiko had asked Ingrid to move to San Francisco. Nurses were needed everywhere. They could share a neighborhood so Ian could see Elsa more. But Ingrid shook her head. She was a lake person. For her to leave Minnesota would be the end of her happiness. And in truth, Keiko was relieved. Not because of Ingrid, but because of Elsa. Keiko had forgiven Elsa for the events of five years ago, leaving Nolan in the old well like that. She had been a child, and it was understandable she was jealous.

  Still, Keiko sometimes had what she called Bad Dog Feeling around Elsa. When she was a young girl in Kyoto, she had seen a beautiful snowy dog on her walk home from school. When she looked at the dog, something in her gut had told her that it was bad news, not a nice dog at all. But she’d ignored the feeling because the dog looked so soft and white with its fringed white plume of a tail, its large dark eyes, and soft muzzle, and she wanted, of course, to grasp his fur. But she had barely approached the dog when it growled and snapped at her, biting her cheek. It was the smallest wound. A nip so barely there that her mother said it was probably the mark of a single tooth. A one-tooth wound, she called it.

  Keiko would never say so to Ian, but there was something about Elsa that reminded her of that dog. Elsa gave her the same inexplicable warning feeling that she knew was unfounded but had served her well enough in the past that she could not totally discount it. And so perhaps it was for the best that these other-Greys stayed away.

  Okay, Ian told the children. This is the starting line. He drew his naked toes across the lawn.

  Nolan did not know why his father was doing this. They’d been so happy a moment ago and now suddenly this was very serious. But he and Elsa took their places by the parents.

  Ian said, Ready, steady, go!

  Elsa wheeled across the yard. She gave herself over to the race with the confidence of a human who does not fear that to give all will be too little. Nolan pumped across the yard trying to keep up with Elsa, six years older and many inches taller. He pushed his legs to do more.

  It’s only a game, Keiko called, only a game.

  The parents were alarmed by the frenzy with which he chugged along. They were distressed by the intensity of his small face.

  You’re doing great, Nolan, Ian said.

  Nolan heard them worrying for him and so he worried for himself. They saw he didn’t have enough to give.

  (Sometimes Nolan thought he must have been happy as a child, carefree and zipping across the garden, but no, even then he’d been worried that for his parents, for anyone, he was not enough. And why had they made them race each other? Why set them up to compete in this way? They had been racing for years. He had always thought this Elsa’s doing, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was the parents who taught them that their love was a thing to be angled for.)

  And so, pushing himself to run faster across the lawn, when the parents called out to Nolan in their worried voices, he began to fear that if he pushed any harder he might run up against the exact limits of his self and strength. And he didn’t want to know. So Nolan stopped running, his thin legs flecked with bits of mown grass, still damp from the morning’s rain. Nolan sat. The ground was spongy and the cold damp of it seeped into his pants.

  He did not move, not even when his father shouted, Run! Nolan! The race isn’t over! Come on, Nolan, run!

  Elsa bulleted toward the parents, legs wheeling gracefully. And Nolan watched her do it.

  Leap’s Island

  They’d crossed the island, hiking toward the second site, the sinkhole in the middle of the island, but the center kept eluding them. It was five o’clock and they still had not arrived. They’d been trying to avoid the obvious trail routes, where they might be seen by Mitchell, who would want to know what they were doing. But this had proved more difficult than they’d anticipated. The dog was hot and exhausted. They’d been lost twice already and blamed each other for the loops they’d traveled, walking so long only to trek back to their beginnings.

  Desperate, they followed what they thought was a trail but became a flooded stream bed full of mud that sucked at their shoes. They walked face first into spider webs invisibly knit across the pathways. They turned their ankles on root after root after root.

  The third time they arrived at a lichen-y rock they had seen too many times before, Elsa shouted and Nolan groaned and Jinx yipped to be a part of things. They were disheveled and sweaty. They were furious. They wanted to punch the trees. They wanted to bite each other. They wanted to find the fucking Paradise Duck and wring its neck, because it could not be worth all this.

  It has to be that way, Nolan said. We can’t be so far.

  What if we can’t find our way back from here, Elsa said. What if we’re stuck out here for days and we miss the post boat.

  Shh, Nolan said.

  They heard a woman’s laughter. They smelled a fire. They heard the same man’s voice coming from two directions. The ground was marshy around their ankles. Gwen Manx’s shack. The brothers. The good news was that they’d found someone. The bad news was that if they were close to Gwen, they were lost again. Almost an hour from the site. They’d done another circle.

  Jinx woofed and ran out ahead of them, and the Greys followed.

  When they broke through the bushes, into the clearing, they found Mick with his arm around Gwen and Jim rolling on the deck, telling a story about the highest he’d ever been in his life and how he’d thought he’d been transformed into a beetle and could not get up and so missed an entire day of specimen collecting in Peru. A fire burned in a small pit dug just beyond the deck. And beyond that, three domes, pupae under construction for the ducks.

  The Greys presented themselves, their faces streaked and scratched, their legs bitten.

  Children! Gwen said, standing. What happened to you?

  Nolan and Elsa thought it was strange how everyone on the island thought of them as children. They were Ian’s kids, but they were old. They were millennials. They were young. They were ex-siblings. They were ex-lovers. They were technically nothing to each other anymore. Maybe the shared loss of Ian had allowed them to be something again or maybe the island had. The children. Like much the Reversalists said, it wasn’t technically correct, but sometimes it felt right. So when childless Gwen called Nolan and Elsa out of the woods again, they went to her and let their scrapes be tended to.

  Gwen cleaned their wounds with iodine that ran down their calves like rusty water. They loved the firm way she patted on their Band-Aids.

  Where were you trying to go? Gwen asked.

  Elsa said they were on a trek across the island to process their grief.

  I get it, man, Jim said, patting her arm.

  What are you guys doing out here? Nolan asked.

  Domes for ducks, Jim said, gesturing at the enormous pupae. This is going to be the new nesting ground.

  We put in some garden satellites, for good measure too, Mick said. The muck back here is fertile if you can keep it dry enough.

  In a raised bed behind Gwen’s house, there were lines of green shoots. A horseradish plant with huge fanned leaves. Small radish foliage. Mick pulled a white-and-pink bulb so perfect Nolan could not believe it. Bloody pink stripes across its skin, a dandyish flourish of style—what would Ian make of the elegant radish? Once, Nolan knew, he would have thought its beauty beside the point. He would have thought of its nutrients, its life cycle. But that was before Ian came to Leap’s. Nolan was not sure what Ian wou
ld have made of the radish now. Something different. Something new.

  Eat it, Mick said, holding the radish out.

  It’s not washed, Nolan said.

  Dude, Mick said.

  Nolan wiped the radish on his shorts and ate it. Watery, fresh, and bitter.

  Good? Mick asked. Nolan nodded.

  Are you going back to Ian’s tonight? Gwen asked.

  We’re camping, the children said.

  Camp with us, Gwen said.

  The brothers said, Party!

  They drank tea on the deck, in folding chairs, facing the ocean and far distant mainland. They ate more radishes from the garden. Gwen sliced fruit she’d been saving from her last post-boat delivery, oranges and melon. Jim rolled a joint and they passed it around.

  Everyone was merry and telling the good kind of stories. Not the sad “let me explain why I am the way I am” kind, meant to excuse or explain. Tonight, they told small stories, the kind you collect like marbles, odd or pretty. Travel stories and epic feats of wildness from Mick and Jim, funny animal stories from Gwen’s days as a vet. Nolan talked about the absurdity of his job and the inappropriate things people posted to the Giants’ page. Elsa told children-say-the darndest-things stories about her students. The fire had crumbled to an ember-bright glow and smoke drifted up around them. They settled into peaceful silence. Jinx lay inside the shack with water and food, legs twitching in her dreams.

  Gwen picked up her pack of Virginia Slims and tapped one out. Mick cast his arm around her shoulders and drew Gwen to him. It was such a familiar gesture. Elsa saw in it a man confident of his own charms but well aware that a woman had no need of him. The kind of gesture that had endeared Dylan to her in that Minnesota cowboy bar a million years ago. It had seemed a trait unique to him at the time. Elsa found herself relieved to see it again. To know it existed elsewhere, in the wild. The fire popped and she sucked the last flesh of her cantaloupe. It was obvious they were sleeping together. Or was it? Because now Jim was squeezing Gwen’s hand. Maybe it didn’t matter which of the brothers Gwen slept with, or both. Gwen was being offered something she deserved, and Elsa hoped she accepted it.