“Did you eat?”
“Since when?”
“Since you landed, dummy,” I said. “Since then.”
“Does coffee count?”
“Some genius.” I refilled my glass, emptied it again, listened to my stomach grumble in protest. “Even a dog knows to eat when it’s hungry.”
“I know.” She was shaking all over, not just her hands, not just the water under her eyes. “I h-h-have to start the paper to-nuh-n-night, do the writeup... patent... test protocol... if I c-c-call in all my favours, I could maybe get it patented in f-five, six months, published in...”
“Tonight? You are good for nothing tonight except looking cute and drinking water. No offense.”
“I’m offended!”
“I know you are, but you are also in pieces. A bunch of very small, tiny pieces.”
She burst into tears and pressed the wet towel to her face, but that was okay; I’d seen her at various levels of this kind of utter, strung-out collapse before. It wasn’t real crying, it was her body trying to get rid of stress hormones or something. Nothing could be done till she was all cried out, so I just moved her water glass away so she wouldn’t bump it with her elbow, and politely looked away, down to the backyard, a lake of fragrant grass lit here and there with the starey, luminescent eyes of rabbits.
Look at us, hitting escape velocity away from each other. Look at her, in pieces, letting me watch her be in pieces, as if we were grownups. How old were we when the unspoken agreement came that we couldn’t do kid stuff any more? No more Marco Polo in the ravine, no more play wars with imaginary soldiers, memorizing tactics from her old Roman manuals. No more water-balloon fights. No more self-authored plays fighting over who played the boy and who played the girl, ending up with two armadillos of indeterminate gender flying away on their dragon to be emperors of their far-away planet. No more one-legged races or pretending to be dinosaurs or scuffling over colouring books. No more skating on their family pond—although to be fair, that was kind of a mutual decision after she fell through that one time. Maybe that was when we decided it. We hadn’t had a referendum or anything.
“Let me make you some supper,” I said when she had tailed off to just snuffles and hiccups.
She laughed. “There you go again, trying to take care of everyone.”
“Just people who can’t take care of themselves,” I said.
She put her head on her side, looking at me. I stared back, steadily, waiting for her to smile again. Would I know if I were falling in love with her, I wondered. A different, a grown-up love. Would something tell me, like a bolt from above? Or would it be something as small as that I wanted her so desperately, so uncontrollably, to smile at me and she wouldn’t? That I wanted her to look at me the way she looked at that shoebox?
“Yeah, okay,” she said, tossing the towel on the counter. “Food. Sleep. Yeah.”
“Deal?”
“Yes, deal. What do you get out of it though?”
“Same thing as you.”
BACK HOME, I parked and sat on the Geo’s warm hood listening to the engine tick down. The streetlights were out on our side—typical—and the night sky was startlingly clear and bright. The stars, that would be the only thing that Johnny’s discovery wouldn’t change. You’d have to look that far to find something she hadn’t touched.
On the horizon, a faint, green shimmer rose over the rooftops. My gut twinged, a memory scratching at my ribs. Dad loved the northern lights, had driven us all out to see them when I was younger. It seemed you didn’t get those in the Caribbean, so he and Mom had never seen them till they moved to Canada. Some kind of magic, a small magic, I used to think: how did he know when to go? It turned out he had tracked the solar storm dates using a phone tree round robin with other amateur enthusiasts and the observatory at the University of Alberta. They were good; sometimes the lights would rage for half the night, captivating us on some gravel road an hour from town, no light pollution, just the green and pink ribbons.
Johnny got a much better view from her observatories, but she was always grateful to be invited. In the winter we’d bring hot chocolate, run the car to warm up. The good old days, before everything went to shit. Our parents got divorced less than a year apart when I was in grade eight; we were both shocked, reeling, couldn’t even comfort each other. We dove into distraction instead, and spent as little time at home as possible, like it was a prickly sweater we were occasionally forced to wear. Johnny picked up all sorts of weird hobbies: soapmaking, paddleboarding, Japanese flower arranging, three different martial arts (incompetently, as she hated to be touched so much that she never sparred). I learned to cook. Johnny’s mom started a chain of private spas.
It was all bullshit, anyway, a Band-Aid over a broken bone. Particularly for us, because Dad’s side blamed Mom for the divorce, and Mom’s side—fretful, class-paranoid—blamed Dad. At least Johnny had avoided all that. Divorce was so normal with her parents’ friends that it was almost a given, like having a live band at the wedding.
Tears rose, looking at those northern lights. Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of those trips for a long time. Dad loved the sky just like me, noticed it wherever he went. I wondered if he could see them in Toronto now. Maybe I would ask when he made his monthly call.
Tonight there must have been a really big solar storm; the lights were a silk scarf draped over the black angles of the roofs, gleaming with rich hints of turquoise, even purple—I’d never seen that before. Deep in their wavering centre, something big and fast streaked past. A shooting star? A long, low rumble followed it—I looked up instinctively for a plane, since there weren’t any thunderclouds. Then I kept watching for another star. Were we due for the Perseids or the Leonids or whatever else Johnny got so excited about every year? I didn’t know what the dates were. But God how beautiful, the silver stripe straight and true across the silky colours like a needle.
And if it really had been a shooting star, I would get a wish. Deserved a wish.
But I stood out there for almost an hour and couldn’t think of a single wish that wouldn’t be a waste, now that everything had changed.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEXT MORNING I made pancakes from the big Costco bag of mix and stared out the window as we ate. Another hot one. Get the boys to weed the front lawn. I had to clean the bathrooms. Carla could help with laundry. Grass didn’t need cutting just yet. Didn’t want the neighbours to call bylaw on us for unkempt property. Who had a year-end book report due? Mom had a late shift at Gold Dust... check the calendar...
The phone rang, interrupting my to-do list. I hoped it was work, but it was Johnny, talking even before I said hello. “Are you busy today?”
“Define ‘busy.’”
“A state of occupation, absorption in a task, engaged in an activity which precludes getting everyone dressed and coming out to the Creek for a pre-Canada Day picnic.”
“A picnic?” Every set of eyes in the room swivelled to me in the sudden quiet. I laughed, at their double-take, with sheer happiness, maybe even with relief that she had survived the night, hadn’t got irradiated or sucked into a black hole or whatever her shoebox did, that she still wanted to be friends, that our family was still her family. “I’m getting some looks here, John.”
“Yeah, scrub ’em up, I’ll pick you guys up.”
“You mean Rutger will. Are you ever going to get your license?”
“How about you shut your piehole and wash your stank ass before I come. You probably smell like the back of the Vengabus. Noon.”
She hung up before I could think of a decent comeback, and I turned to the kids and Mom. “Everyone up for a picnic at the Creek?”
I had to cover my ears to drown out the squealing.
THEIR OLDEST FAMILY property, the Creek—which included a creek, a lake, and the pond that had almost killed us—was an hour out of town, but traffic was light for a long weekend and we were out and unpacked before one in the afternoon. Mom had begged off, p
robably to enjoy a house without us for a while. I couldn’t blame her.
Chris and Brent, who should never have been raised in a city, and who had already announced their intention to become scientists like Johnny, vanished into the bush with a “sample jar” and a “net,” hastily kludged together before we left. Carla collapsed onto the high-tech picnic blanket, sighing happily in the silence.
“I’m so glad the boys are gone,” she said to Johnny.
Johnny chuckled. “They only get louder, don’t they, Cookie? I bet you don’t remember when you were little, and you asked me to invent something to ‘make the babies be quiet.’”
“I would still want it if you made it now,” she said under her breath, darting me a sly glance. “I didn’t know I was going to end up with all brothers.”
“Ew.”
“Ew.”
“I’m gonna sue you both for libel,” I said.
“Slander, Nicky.”
We got the food out—catered sandwiches, salads, juiceboxes, Nanaimo bars, everything sealed tightly in plastic clamshells.
Rutger stiffly passed me a big thermos of icewater. “Please keep an eye on the children. There are no safety measures at this property.”
“Good to see you too,” I said, and Johnny laughed. It was good to see him, though.
He and Johnny were a package deal, had been ever since she was six and discovered him as a physics student at Heidelberg University. She’d paid for his doctorate, given him his own lab, and asked him to start coming as a technical advisor on her lecture tours—cries of “babysitter” and “pedophile” notwithstanding.
Years later, he had settled into a kind of in-between space between advisor and assistant. He scheduled lectures and flights, proofread papers, filtered her emails, dealt with the 24/7 management of her labs and facilities, booked telescope time, negotiated research contracts, dealt with zoning and environmental permits, and that was just the stuff I knew about. They never struck me as friends or even really friendly, and I knew part of his coolness towards me was simply resenting the time I took away from her science, as if I had bullied my way into her ivory tower—but he was solid, smart, dependable, ever-present. When he was around, you felt like nothing could go wrong. A flat tire, a bee sting, a meteorite strike, all fell within his purview. Anyway, it was good to have a qualified adult out here.
He sat on a corner of the blanket, fat and handsome, like a bronze statue in his monotone khakis and polo shirt, and ostentatiously fixed his gaze on the creek downslope from us, watching for kids to fall in. I grinned at him, knowing he wouldn’t see it.
Johnny said, “So, big plans for the summer?”
I gave her a look. “Keep the grass cut and the kids from killing each other. You?”
“You know what I meant.”
She meant that she wanted me to apply for postsecondary now that I had graduated; we’d had a tense talk about it last year, before she left. It had been so awkward, in fact, that I had wondered whether it had actually ended the friendship. We hadn’t talked for a week afterwards. I kept telling myself: She’s busy, she’s busy, you’re being paranoid, no one’s that sensitive, you’re both grownups here. You’re both almost grownups. Act like a damn grownup. No one would stop being friends with someone for that. And of course at the end of the week she had called and we went to see The Fast and the Furious, and everything seemed fine. Was that about to happen again?
“It wouldn’t even have to be university,” she said, watching my face, where everything I was thinking must have been printed like a tattoo. “Even a two-year diploma at Grant Mac, or NAIT. Your earning potential would—”
“I know that. I’m not stupid.”
She ducked her head. “I just meant...”
I sighed. “Listen, don’t let’s ruin the day by rehashing this, okay? The kids were so freaking excited. See you again, see the Creek. Look, they’re not even paying attention to the food. So let’s just say: no, I still can’t afford four years, or two years, or a year. No, my grades are still not gonna get me any scholarships. No, Dad won’t kick in. Still. Nothing’s changed except that if I get good shifts and work all summer, maybe, just maybe, I can save up enough to not work for a month or two while I look for a better paying job. I can’t leave them like this. You know why.”
“But if you—”
“You can’t just throw people under the bus to run off and do what you want.”
“But this isn’t something frivolous. It’s... it’s following a dream.”
“If you have to fuck people up to follow a dream, then it’s a bad dream and you shouldn’t follow it,” I said. “I mean, not that you’ve ever had to pick.”
My ears were ringing, and although I was staring down at the picnic blanket she’d designed—traditional red-and-white check on one side, nanopolymer temperature-and-moisture control foil on the far side, warm under us, cool under the food, emitting repellent pheromones to keep ants and wasps away—I was aware that she was staring at me with her mouth open. Past my shame and the pounding blood in my face, I felt a little thrill of pleasure. She was so hard to shock and I had finally said something she hadn’t expected.
Or maybe it was just that it had been said at all, maybe she thought I’d never say it, after a decade of us both realizing that even though she plowed virtually all her profits into new facilities and people, she still had a hundred times more money than we did, and we never talked about it. I had never asked her for money, even five dollars to cover snacks at the movies. I paid my way. My parents, in a thousand ways, had indoctrinated us never to ask for help. No handouts. Ever. Gifts might be tolerated, within reason. So she gave us treats for the kids, took us on trips sometimes, bought clothes or light-up shoes or shrill toys; and not one word was ever spoken.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a dick about it.”
“No, you’re not. You’re trying to be a parent. Don’t do that either. Come on. We’re here to celebrate, right? Celebrate your shoebox. What are you going to call it?”
“Well, the Chambers Chamber, if I can get away with it.” She yawned. “I was up all night again writing it up, e-mailing people, translating stuff, doing figures. Getting some weird numbers on each test run, although the wattage stays steady as a rock. And I can’t get rid of that noise.”
“I guess when you start mass-producing them you can bury them under a mattress or something.”
“I was thinking a building. I’ll need time to design a basic structure though. Maybe tomorrow.”
I laughed. A lot of her peers (you wouldn’t necessarily call them friends) teased her about how she got her hands dirty all the time. You were supposed to pay people to do that for you, they said. By this stage in the game. Farm it all out and put your name on the final report. But she hated having anything out of her control, and even, I was sure, resented the little that she had farmed out to Rutger.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hey, gang! Come eat!”
We fell silent and sat there waiting for Chris or Brent to yell back. It was silent except for the burble of running water; a magpie in the tree next to us opened its beak a crack, then seemed to think better of it. And I felt a sudden, strange, cold wave wash over me, so abrupt I looked down to see if I had broken into sweat, but I hadn’t. Johnny surged up from the blanket and planted herself in front of me and Carla, legs spread like a boxer.
“What is it?” I said, scrambling up next to her. Something dark was moving in the trees across the creek from us—not one of the boys. Something else. Dark and featureless enough that for a second I thought it was a black bear, half-hidden by the thick undergrowth. And no bird sang.
I stared at it—a stranger, had to be, a thin man in a black coat and pants. But it didn’t move like a person, and the pale thing atop it wasn’t quite a face. Johnny’s breath whistled in her throat. I opened my mouth to speak and found, like the magpie, that my voice had been stilled, an invisible hand over my face. My blood became i
ce, freezing me in place as I tried to turn my head to escape something I couldn’t even see.
“Rutger, go start the van,” Johnny eventually said. Her face had turned a pearlescent grey. “Nick, get Carla inside. Lock the doors.”
I choked on the unseen barrier, straining against it, only a throttled yelp coming from my throat. Her arm snapped out and connected with my chest almost hard enough to stop my heart, knocking me onto the blanket.
“Go! I’ll get the boys. Leave the food, go!”
“Are you crazy? If there’s something out there, I’m twice your size! I’ll get them!”
“No, I will. Go, quick, go on. Get inside.”
She tore off at a dead run, skidding on the grass. Hazily, I hoped the boys hadn’t crossed the water towards the thing in the trees. It skulked there still, drawing the eye and yet impossible to look at, not even following Johnny as she splashed into the shallow water, simply turning to watch her.
But the fall had released me, and I rose to find Rutger already rushing Carla back to the gravel road. I glanced back to see that the dark thing was gone—oh Jesus, where did it go? Was it going for the van?
I ran,half expecting the thing in the trees to flutter up behind me and smother me, all of me, not just my voice, bury me in its light-absorbing blackness, crunch into me with the razor teeth of its skull, yes, that’s what it was that’s why it didn’t look like a face it had no features because it was just a skull—
I fell into the gravel and screamed when something grabbed me by the belt and pulled me up, turned flailing and kicking to see it was just Johnny, easily dodging my panicked blows, the boys behind her. The dark thing was nowhere to be seen.
We packed into the van and Rutger peeled away, throwing me around the back, spattering blood from my skinned palms onto the leather seats.
Everyone was yelling—”What’s wrong? What happened? Nicky? Nick? Johnny?”—and as I scrambled up from the floor, I caught a glimpse of Johnny’s face, which scared me almost as much as seeing that thin black thing. My heart was hammering so hard I wondered whether it was just going to stop, whether Johnny’s push had fucked it up somehow.
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