by Lydia Netzer
She was outside the plane and falling, falling into the city of Toledo. It was lit up and alive, cars buzzing along, boats motoring up and down the river, little clumps of people on the sidewalks, crossing streets, running to meet each other in the dark. And when she turned her head up, looking into the night sky, and all its distant perfection, all the majesty of its timelessness, its immeasurable depth, she knew. This is the difference between gods and humans. This is the difference between divinity and what exists on earth: Toledo is moving. It’s alive and changing. The myths, the stars, the fixed stories—these are static, measured only by math and memory. The men, the science they make, the roads they travel—these move, they change and grow, they cannot be mapped. It moves, she wanted to say to George. That’s the difference between Toledo and the night sky. It moves.
I love it, thought Irene. Her heart froze with happiness. Her arms spread out, as she fell down through the air, her body the shape of a star, plummeting, sailing downward into Toledo. I love what I am, this human, even if this is where I cross over, bleed, and die. This is where I become human. This polluted, human town, this love, this is what I am, more than the stars, even though they are so big, and so vast, and so perfect. They’re just so far away.
Irene fell down into the orange constellation that was Toledo, that shape that was moving, dirty, changing, alive. She closed her eyes, and passed through.
26
Irene’s eyes were closed, and her head was on George’s stomach. She could hear his stomach noises, gurgling and popping. That made her feel a little bit better about his prognosis. His face was still, completely still, and his whole body seemed dormant and strange. From the side of his head, a drainage tube emerged from the bandage on his wound and looped around into a small reservoir. There was also a tube coming out of his nose that ended in a bag, and there was a tube taped to a needle in his arm, where they were dripping things into him. His head was neatly shaved.
Irene had been sitting here for hours, leaning against him. The nurses had come in to check him, to take readings from his body, measuring his pulse and looking at the readings on different machines around his bed. He was in the ICU. This meant to Irene that he was going to be fine. The care he was getting was intensive. His life, at Toledo General, had meaning and was being intensely cared for. There had been no discussion of throwing Irene out, even though in the ICU there were severely limited visiting hours. No one would have thought to make her go. She was so sad and serious, so deeply attached to him. It was as if they hadn’t noticed she was there.
The important thing to her was that she stayed focused on him, so that any little movement in his eyelids, of his lips, would not escape her, and she could shout for the nurses, shout for the doctors, alert the authorities that he was back. What he was back for, they would not know. If he was back for starting over fresh from the beginning of his life, if he was back for stepping in exactly where he had left off, or if he was back for being a pants-wetting vegetable from now on, no one knew. Irene hoped, and Irene imagined, that George would open his eyes, look up at her, and say, “You came back.” This would mean that he knew her, that he remembered everything, that he forgave her, and that he was going to get better. Or maybe he would just say, “Irene.” Or maybe he would say “Ouch” and then vomit. Really, Irene had started to believe that anything he said was better than him just lying here silently, retreated into his own head.
The nurses coming in and out seemed progressively less cheerful. The doctor had come around and had checked George several times. He did not respond to having his feet scratched sharply. He did not respond to having light shined in his eyes. He was unresponsive. Irene wished the doctor would pat her on the shoulder and say, “He’s going to be fine. The tumor is gone. I think he will make a full recovery.” But the doctor said nothing to her. No one said anything. She was invisible. So much sadness, concentrated into one person, can make a darkness no one wants to touch. So it was with Irene, miserably pressed against George, believing so much that he could come back to her.
The doctors and nurses waited to see whether his brain was ruined. Whether he would be himself, or wake a total stranger. Irene lay across him, holding his hand, stroking the sleeve of his hospital gown, and crying a little bit now and then. She did not eat or drink. She didn’t answer phone calls from her lab. She stayed and waited, and George’s mother came and went but did not disturb them. His father came and went and did not say a word. The ICU was bright and quiet. It seemed to go on forever.
Then Irene felt George take a big breath in, like a man coming up from deep underwater takes a gasp of air that fills his lungs with life.
“Curvature,” said George. He said it loudly, urgently. Irene sat upright, still clutching his hand.
“What?” she said. But George said nothing else, and when she examined his face, she noticed no change. Then his brow wrinkled up, his hand grabbed hers tight, and he said, again, “Curvature.”
“Curvature?” she said. His eyes were still not opened.
“It’s curvature!” Now he was smiling, and his chest was shaking with laughter, as if he was having a beautiful dream.
“George, what’s curvature! Be still! You have tubes all over you!”
He opened his eyes. He looked at her and their eyes met, and he said, “It’s curvature. That’s why I can’t find the plane of symmetry.”
“OK,” said Irene. She was beginning to laugh, too. She didn’t know if he recognized her or if he knew his name, but his brain was clearly working, and he was trying to sit up. “Lie down, George,” she said. “Lie down. You have to rest.”
He lay back obediently, but turned his head to face her, and with a very George-like twinkle in his eye, he told her, “The reason I can’t find the plane of symmetry is because it’s not a plane; it’s a lens. Babe, it’s a lens. A lens! Why did you not see this? Why did I not see this? If we’re so smart, why in the hell did we not see that it is a lens! A LENS!”
He was getting loud. The nurses were coming in. The machines around were beeping and blaring. Doors flew open and doctors barked orders. But George was past all that. He had his hand behind her head now, and he was pulling her in for a kiss, and when she kissed him she knew that he knew her, and that he remembered everything, and that it was all going to be fine.
*
Spring had wakened up Toledo with flowering trees like lanterns and lights across the city. On a beautiful morning in April, George and Irene were taking a walk through the quad, as they habitually did for George’s health, once a day. Irene did not allow him to bury himself in calculations and models, imaging and sketching, nor did she let him work himself to death on the satellite telescope that he was still pouring his time into. She forced him out into the air, because this is what she knew that he should do, to rest his brain periodically, like a man who’d had a thousand concussions waits in the dark, in the quiet and calm for his mind to heal before he can try on something new. George wasn’t waiting, but he was taking breaks, following Irene’s orders.
They walked together hand in hand around the quad, looking at the tulips that were emerging from their bulbs, bulbs that had been planted last fall. They were trying to talk about nothing. Taxing his brain was the opposite of what they were supposed to do during his rest periods. So sometimes they recited poetry they both knew well, or hummed songs they both had memorized, or just walked in silence.
Irene’s work in the collider was just beginning to take off. Construction was nearly finished on her experiment site, and when the other teams were up and running and the collider was set in motion, the world of astronomy could expect big things of her and her detector.
“I’m so glad you had your surgery,” she said to him. “This day wouldn’t be as beautiful if you were still doped up on opium nasal spray.”
“I’m glad, too,” said George. “Because now I get to constantly laugh at you for doing things like appreciating a beautiful day.”
“I’m a new woman,
” said Irene. “Now I do things like that. Why not?”
“Why not is right.” George squeezed her hand. “I’ve never loved you more.”
“What was it that your father said to you that made you decide to do it?” She had asked him this before, many times, as if she thought she could trick him into a different answer. But he always came up with the same one.
“I can’t remember,” said George. “I can’t honestly remember much that he said to me at all.”
“Would you tell me?” she asked him. “Would you tell me what he said, and what else you forgot? It seems like that’s the only thing that you forgot.”
“I don’t have any secrets from you, Irene,” he said. “I do recall him saying that if I agreed to it that he would try to be a better dad. And he has been. He really has been.”
They walked on in comfortable silence for a while. Then Irene spoke up.
“You know what I just now noticed, George?”
“What?” George wanted to know.
“This is stupid, but it’s going to annoy the piss out of me now.”
“What is it?” he said. “Nothing mathematical now—you know my synapses are in rest mode.”
“It’s nothing mathematical. In fact, it’s the opposite of mathematical. These tulips are all so randomly planted, there are clumps of red and white all scattered around this quad, in no apparent order.”
George looked at the tulips and nodded. There was a ring of them, all around the quad, and the arrangement of white to red was neither symmetrical nor a regular repeating pattern. It appeared to be random.
“Wow, that is true,” he said slowly.
“What idiot did this? I mean, obviously, whatever. It doesn’t matter, right? They couldn’t have known. But really they’re going to be there for years now, all clumped and irregular. What the hell? I’m tempted to just tear them up.”
“Strange,” said George.
Irene kept walking, her arm through George’s arm, but now her pace was more brisk.
“Maybe we should walk over in the ruins from now on,” she said. “Avoid this mess.”
“Maybe it’s Fibonacci,” said George, looking at the tulips. Irene stopped in her tracks and frowned, glaring at the tulips. She put her hand up as if she was counting, arranging them differently in her mind.
“No, it’s not a Fibonacci sequence,” she said. “Look at it—come on, that’s not even a good guess. Go back to sleep, synapses.”
She began to walk again, dragging him along, but then she stopped again and said, “Wait a minute.”
She looked at the tulips, all around the ring, moving her finger up and down as the color changed from red to white and back.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “It’s not some random dumbass gardener; it’s a very specific dumbass coder. I know what it is now.”
“What is it?” said George.
“It’s Belion!” she told him. “That foolish, stupid oaf must have been trying to work out a way to propose to Kate Oakenshield, the girl who was raised mute, for months now. And I think he has finally done it. Or he did it last fall.”
“What are you talking about?” George asked.
“Well, look at the tulips. No, don’t look at them, because that’s like counting or whatever. Rest your brain, but I’ll just tell you they’re planted in binary. Like Morse code, you know, red and white for one and zero. And it says ‘Marry Me.’ Cute. Very cute. I mean, it’s super dorky and obvious, but she’ll fall for that kind of shit like it was wine and roses, you know? Dork that she is. Sorry, but she is.”
“Irene,” said George. “You have no idea how relieved I am you finally noticed those lousy tulips.”
He reached into the pocket of his khakis.
“I’ve been carrying this thing around for weeks, hoping you would figure out that binary before the petals rotted off and I had to start over with azaleas or pansies or something.”
“What?”
He went down on one knee, there in the quad, and she put her hands on each side of his face. He smiled at her, a perfect smile.
“Irene, will you marry me?”
“You did this? You did this tulip thing?”
“I did the tulip thing. Will you marry me anyway?”
“George, yes!” she said. She threw herself into his arms. “Yes, yes, yes. I will marry you, you dork. I will marry you forever.”
“I’m so happy,” said George. He lifted her off the ground. “I’m so happy, I must be dreaming. I must be dreaming.”
All around, the people of Toledo found their own happiness, with or without parental machinations, or they made terrible mistakes and rectified them, and went to sleep and woke up. They pulled out stupid things and wise things from their wishing wells. They learned the truth and forgave each other, or they never figured out how to do that at all, and died without redemption. Sometimes they looked into the stars with rulers and wrote down evidence, and figures, and used a straight edge to measure out their lives. And sometimes they stared into crystal balls, and found true love is a miracle, one they could never understand.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thirteen years ago, I sat with my dear friend Kristen in her mom’s living room in Ohio. On the floor, my one-year-old son played with her one-year-old daughter. As we watched them, we talked jokingly about how great it would be if they got married, how we would love to be grandparents together, and how many potential problems would be averted if they had cool, evolved in-laws like us. “They’d be perfect for each other!” we joked. “We could make them be!” Obviously the idea never left me, so I thank Kristen for the inspiration and for letting me name my strange, repressed heroine after her beautiful, exuberant child.
Second novels are difficult. Without the encouragement and ass-kicking of my friends, this novel would not have been written. Joshilyn Jackson, this is your book. Thank you for loving it when I couldn’t, for sticking up for the characters, and for staking out that ending. Susannah Breslin, thank you for your relentless drive. When I whined about revisions, you said, “If one of your kids had pooped all over the floor, would you stand there complaining about it? No, you would roll up your sleeves and clean it up. So clean it up.” One would think that comparing a novel to a diaper leak would be paralytically insulting, but instead I think I should do this quote in cross-stitch.
To my brilliant agent, Caryn Karmatz Rudy: You are every author’s dream. Thank you for working so hard and so long on this book. To my brilliant editor, Hilary Teeman Rubin: I am so grateful to have you in my corner. Your insights and ideas were invaluable in creating this novel. Loving thanks to my wise and helpful publicist at St. Martin’s, Dori Weintraub.
Thank you to my writing group: Veronica Porterfield, Antonia Giordano, and Layla Denny, and to my early readers: Sherene Silverberg, Kristen DeHaan, and especially Andrea Kinnear, who told me I could write about a brain tumor. A particularly urgent thanks to Christian Kiefer for wading into an early draft and saying the true, hard things. Thank you to my friends online, especially my friends at Book Pregnant, and to my friends out in the real world: You bought my book, you invited me to your book clubs, you linked, you tweeted, you shared. You are incredible.
The booksellers I have met in the last two years are some of the most marvelous, intelligent, driven, and charming people I’ve met in my life. I’m so thankful for the work you all are doing to connect books and readers!
My wonderful children, Benny and Sadie, are a cheerful, needed balance to the darkness in my brain—more than a distraction from the work, they are my salvation from the work. My husband, Dan, is an endless source of happiness for me, as well as a good listener with a deft hand at untangling plot problems. I am grateful for my family above everything else.
ALSO BY
LYDIA NETZLER
SHINE SHINE SHINE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lydia Netzer was born in Detroit and educated in the Midwest. She spent many nights, dark and bright, in Toledo, Oh
io, but now lives in Virginia with her husband, her homeschooled children, two Boston terriers, and a Morgan horse. Her first novel, Shine Shine Shine, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
HOW TO TELL TOLEDO FROM THE NIGHT SKY. Copyright © 2014 by Lydia Netzer. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Olga Grlic
Color swatch by Apolinarias/Shutterstock.com
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Netzer, Lydia.
How to tell Toledo from the night sky: a novel / Lydia Netzer.—First edition.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-04702-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-46684779-8 (e-book)
1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3614.E528H79 2014
813’.6—dc23
2014008536
e-ISBN 9781466847798
First Edition: July 2014