This was the most amazing thing about it: He believed me.
As soon as we were home, I closed myself in my bathroom. I had a fluttery feeling that something might be finally starting for me, that this might be a beginning. I felt all my worries—all the more important things—sliding swiftly away. I could already picture how the strap would look on my shoulder, poking out from under my shirt the way Michaela’s always did at school.
But when I tried it on, after struggling for many minutes with the clasp, I discovered that a terrible transformation had taken place between the drugstore and home: I had brought home a cheap and girlish bra. The satin ribbons were too blue and too shiny. One of the seams was already coming loose. Even worse was the way the cups rippled unsexily across my chest, like two empty water balloons waiting to be filled.
I heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
“What are you doing in there?” she asked through the door.
Just her nearness in the hall made me nervous.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you sick?” she called. She had begun to worry that I would develop the syndrome, too. “Your father says you’ve been in there for almost half an hour.”
I could feel her wanting to open the door. I could feel her hand reaching for the knob. I unhooked the bra and threw on my shirt.
“I’m fine,” I called. “I’ll be out in a second.”
Later, when she was asleep and my father was at work, I buried the bra deep inside one of the trash cans in our side yard, so that no one would ever discover how little I understood what seemed so obvious to the other girls I knew.
20
February: The dark hours seemed somehow darker than before and the light ones more radiant than ever. The heat was so extreme you could see it, rising from the asphalt in waves. As the days grew longer and longer, I found it harder than ever to sleep.
My mother’s illness fluctuated wildly. Some days she was fine: She’d go to work, run errands, make dinner. Other times we’d lose her to the force of some new symptom. I came home from school one day to find her wrapped in three blankets but shivering, her teeth knocking. It was the eighteenth hour of daylight. It was eighty-five degrees outside.
“Don’t worry,” she said, shaking as she spoke. “It’ll pass.”
But I did worry. I watched her whenever I could.
In those days, some suspected the syndrome was psychological in nature, that the effects might be caused not by a shift in gravity but by an even more powerful force: fear.
“Maybe it’s just anxiety,” said my father when he got home from work that night.
My mother took a deep breath. “You think I’m making this up?”
“That’s not what I said, Helen.”
My father slid a frozen pizza into the microwave for dinner. When my mother was sick, he did whatever needed to be done. But I sensed that there was something hollow about him during that time, that his mind and soul were elsewhere even as his hands poured me a glass of milk, even as his mouth spoke the appropriate words: How was school? Have you finished your homework?
“I’m just saying,” he continued, “you’re under a lot of stress.”
My mother shook her head. “No,” she said. “This is real.”
“Yeah, Dad,” I said. “It’s real.”
I always took my mother’s side these days, but secretly, his theory appealed to me. You can’t die from worry.
The next night we heard the first shimmer of good news in months: We had gained just six minutes the day before, fewer than on any day since the start of the slowing.
“That’s good,” I said. My parents said nothing. “Right?”
“It might be too late,” said my mother. Her hair looked flat. I realized she hadn’t washed it in a while.
“Helen, come on,” said my father. Then he looked at me. “Of course it’s good news.”
A cold breeze rattled the blinds behind us.
“Denial doesn’t help,” said my mother.
I wasn’t sure my father necessarily agreed. He had different ideas about truth.
“It’s good news,” he repeated. He stood and squeezed my shoulder.
My mother turned off the television.
“You might as well know the truth, Julia,” she said. “Everything is going to shit.”
A string of tense days followed. My parents spoke less and less. After hours of spying with my telescope, I finally caught my father with Sylvia again. It was in the morning this time, after he’d left for work and while my mother was dozing on the couch. He’d left in his car but came back down the street on foot. He kept turning his head toward our house, once, twice, and once again, before disappearing through the side gate to Sylvia’s. I had little sense of how these dramas worked. I worried more and more that my father would one day leave us for good.
And then, one night my father told a new lie. This was not the first lie I ever heard him tell, and it would not be the last. It was just the boldest and the best. Simple and succinct. An elegant, outlandish fiction. One untrue sentence.
It happened on a Saturday, a daylight day: The sun rose in the morning and shone all afternoon. A salty breeze rustled the eucalyptus trees while the twins splashed in the neighbor’s pool. My mother, feeling better than usual, was reading a magazine out back, a glass of iced tea sweating beside her, as a fleet of hot air balloons drifted across the open sky. The passengers were waving from the balloon baskets as they floated over our roof. It was seventy-six degrees. You might never have guessed from that scene that six American astronauts remained stranded on the space station, their food supplies dwindling, ten thousand miles higher than the silk of those balloons. It did not feel at that particular moment in time as though we were stranded, either.
I was in the kitchen when the phone rang. My father was upstairs. My mother turned her head toward the house at the sound of the ringing but let it go. I happened to pick up the receiver in the kitchen just after my father had answered it upstairs.
“Joel?” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Ben Harvey at St. Anthony’s.”
I curled my hand over the mouthpiece and listened.
“So?” said my father.
I held my breath and stood still, barefoot on the tile.
“It’s not what you want to hear,” said the other man.
He paused. I took a quick breath.
“The guy was dead on arrival,” said the man.
My father sighed heavily.
“Skull fracture, crushed vertebrae, subdural hematoma,” he said. “Apparently, he was some kind of transient. There’s no next of kin.”
I can’t explain how it was that we believed the pedestrian might have survived. My mother and I had seen him out on the asphalt, after all, looking lifeless, death suggested even by the way he was lying; the living don’t lie that way. And yet we did still hope.
I didn’t hear what else was said on the phone. I leaned on the kitchen counter, feeling faint. When the conversation ended, I hung up as softly as I could, and then I heard my father moving toward the stairs.
Out on the deck, my mother turned the page of her magazine and sipped her iced tea. I didn’t want to be there when he told her.
I walked down to Gabby’s house, but no one was home. I sat alone on our porch for a while, watching the fat white clouds glide eastward overhead. It was about the time when Seth sometimes had his piano lesson with Sylvia, and I thought he might be in her house. I listened for the sound of her piano but heard nothing.
At the end of the street, I saw a giant moving van blocking the Kaplans’ driveway. A mattress stood up on one end against the front door, and the family cat was howling from his carrier on the porch.
The for-sale sign had appeared in front of the Kaplans’ house three days after their electricity was cut. The two youngest Kaplans were playing with the boxes in the yard as two movers and Mr. Kaplan fed a long brown couch into the mouth of the truck. I could hear their voices in th
e distance, the arguments of men carried down to me on the breeze.
They were moving to one of the colonies, one where everyone was Jewish and everyone agreed on the Sabbath: sundown to sundown on every seventh day. Their days were completely out of sync with ours, their Saturdays no longer falling when ours did. I’d done the calculations one white night when I couldn’t sleep: The real-timers were dozens of days behind us by then—and those days would eventually pool into years.
From across the street came the click and creak of a door swinging open. I looked up, hoping it might be Seth, but it was only Sylvia, in sun hat and clogs, a trowel dangling from one hand.
She waved. “Lovely day,” she called to me from her garden. She asked me how I was.
“Fine,” I said.
I no longer felt sorry for her. Now she made me nervous, as if I were the one with something to hide.
She knelt near her roses, which had begun to wither in recent weeks. Sylvia, on the other hand, seemed to be thriving. Most of us walked around with sleepy eyes and slow minds—my mother claimed she hadn’t dreamed in months—but Sylvia looked rested and peaceful and alert. It was hard not to see that she was beautiful, so much more so in those days than my mother. I began to hope that Sylvia would move away, like the Kaplans, and like so many of the other real-timers were doing at that time.
Or maybe I wished that we would move far away. I wondered about the colonies that were forming in the desert. I liked thinking that time really did pass less quickly there than it did where we lived. And if so, if every event took a little longer to transpire, then were the consequences of those events also less swift?
When I went back inside, I found my parents together out on the back deck. Through the kitchen window, they did not look the way I had expected. My mother was laughing and shaking her head. My father pressed one hand on her knee. My mother spotted me through the window and waved me out to join them. I could tell even before I opened the French door that my father had not delivered the news.
“Guess what,” said my mother as I closed the door behind me, the cold brass handle locking into place.
“What?” I said.
She was shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. She turned to my father.
“Tell Julia,” she said. She was sitting up in her chair, her knees pressed to her chin like a teenager. “Tell her.”
My father looked me right in the eye. “You know the man from the accident?”
Behind him, a faint breeze shook the honeysuckle, now desiccated.
“Yeah?” I said.
And here came the lie, crisp and smooth and clear: “I found out today that he survived.”
“They released him from the hospital,” my mother said. She kept rearranging herself in her chair. “He just had a few broken bones,” she went on. “That’s all. Can you believe it?”
I felt a flash of anger at my father. She deserved to know the truth.
But my mother looked better than she had in months. Her posture relaxed. Her laugh lines resurfaced. Her whole face looked different—eyes half squinting, cheeks bulging, lips spread apart to show teeth: a smile.
All I wanted to do in that moment was smile right back at her.
It didn’t feel right at first. I felt guilty. And I hope my father did, too. But the shift in mood was impossible to resist.
The lie improved everything.
My mother took down the nice crystal glasses and uncorked one of the special bottles of red wine they saved in a rack above the liquor cabinet. She cooked linguini with the sun-dried tomatoes my parents had brought back from Italy a few years earlier, cut from the vine and packed in olive oil long before the slowing started. For dessert we ate canned pineapples. They were the last pineapples we’d ever eat in our lives. We sat on the deck in the sunshine, food filling our bellies. I wish I recalled more nights like that one. The sun was high. The air was warm. The earth continued turning. But for once, it was not our concern. My mother was happy, her conscience clear and I knew I’d never tell.
My father was pleased, too. I watched him watching my mother. Maybe he loved her. Maybe he really did. He must have saved hundreds of lives at the hospital over the course of his career, but never before and never again did he bring a dead man back to life.
21
Cynodon dactylon, also known as Bermuda grass, the main variety of which is Arizona common: a hardy breed of grass resistant to heat and drought and thus popular at one time for lawns and golf courses throughout the southwestern United States. But Cynodon dactylon requires abundant sunshine. It cannot thrive in shade or endure prolonged periods of darkness. And thus, when the days grew beyond fifty hours, thousands of yards, including ours and seven others on the street, began to suffer. The grass thinned, browned, and then died.
Mr. Valencia replaced his lawn with lava rocks. I woke one morning to a great clattering of stones as two workers poured them into the shallow bed where the grass once lived. Blankets of artificial turf soon landed in front of some houses. Giant sunlamps sprouted in the yards of others.
While my parents debated what to do about our yard, the whole lawn went bald. The dirt turned to mud. Earthworms wiggled to the surface, some lighting out for better territory only to crisp on the cement of our driveway, baked by the sun, then flattened by the tires of our cars.
Our honeysuckle withered, too. The bougainvillea quit producing flowers.
All across America, giant greenhouses were swallowing up the open-air fields of our farms. Acres and acres were put under glass. Thousands of sodium lamps were giving light to our tomato plants and our orange trees, our strawberries and our potatoes and our corn.
“The developing countries are going to be the hardest hit,” said the head of the Red Cross on one of the morning shows. Famines were predicted for Africa and parts of Asia. “These countries simply lack the financial resources to adapt.”
Even for us, the solutions were temporary. Industrial farms were guzzling up electricity at an impossible rate. The twenty thousand lights that hung from the ceiling of just one greenhouse could eat up in half an hour as much power as most families used in a whole year. Grazing pastures quickly became too expensive to maintain—beef would soon become a delicacy.
“We need to be moving in the exact opposite direction,” said the head of a large environmental group interviewed on the nightly news. “We need to be reducing, not prolonging, our dependence on crops that require so much light.”
Bananas and other tropical fruits had already vanished from the grocery stores. Bananas! How strange a word can sound when you haven’t heard it said aloud in ages.
Scientists raced for a cure. There was hope in genetic engineering. There was talk of a miracle rice. Some researchers turned their attention to the mossy floors of rain forests and the sunless depths of the oceans, where certain plants had long survived on very little light; they hoped to splice the genes of these hardy species with those of the world’s food supply.
We were nervous sometimes, other times not. Anxiety rolled over us in waves. The national mood was contagious and quick to change. Weeks sometimes passed in relative calm. But any bit of bad news provoked runs on canned goods and bottled water. My mother’s collection of emergency supplies continued to grow. I’d find candles stuffed in the coat closet, boxes of canned tuna in the garage. Fifty jars of peanut butter stood in rows beneath my parents’ bed.
Still the slowing went on and on. The days stretched. One by one, the minutes poured in—and even a trickle, as we have come to understand, can eventually add up to a flood.
22
But no force on earth could slow the forward march of sixth grade. And so, in spite of everything, that year was also the year of the dance party.
Whenever the birthday of one of my classmates rolled around, invitations were emailed to a select list of boys as well as girls. Gone were the days of single-sex parties. Now D.J.s were hired and dance floors rented. Strobe lights and disco balls were strung from the ce
ilings of basements or from backyard fences or, in the case of Amanda Cohen, from the eaves of a cavernous hotel ballroom. Michaela used to describe these festivities to me while we waited for the school bus on certain mornings. But sometimes I didn’t need to be told: On one particular Monday, all the prettiest girls showed up at school zipped snugly into matching pink sweatshirts with Justine Valero’s name and birth date spelled out in rhinestones on the back, favors from the previous Saturday’s party.
I know that it was considered good fortune for a birthday to land on a dark night, the romance upped considerably by the moonlight and the stars. But as for the precise goings-on of these events, I couldn’t say. I was never invited.
“I’m sure Justine just forgot to invite you,” said Michaela. A brand-new set of feathery red bangs dangled above Michaela’s eyelids. “She probably just forgot.”
Hanna was leaning against the fence nearby in a mint-green sweater set and a blond French braid. She laughed into her cell phone. We hadn’t spoken in weeks.
“Besides,” Michaela added, “you wouldn’t have fun anyway. You’re too shy. I bet you’d just stand in the corner.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I would dance.”
My own birthday was only a few weeks away. There would be no party. There would be no dancing.
“You’d dance?” said Michaela. “Really?”
It was dark that morning, the air wet with fog, which glowed in the streetlights as it rolled up over the lip of the canyon, where, like everywhere else, dozens of native plant species were slowly dying from insufficient light.
“I danced with Seth Moreno on Saturday for like an hour,” Michaela continued.
Seth’s name flared in my head.
“He was there?” I asked.
“He’s super-hot up close,” she said. She shivered in her miniskirt. “I could feel his thing.”
Right then Seth pulled up to the bus stop on his skateboard, and Michaela stopped talking.
The Age of Miracles Page 14