by Neil Clarke
She lowered the phone. Her thumb tapped play again, and she allowed a few seconds of the solemn hmm before she stopped it. She could listen a dozen times and she wouldn’t hear anything her team at mission control hadn’t already picked out and analyzed. She couldn’t do anything here, with the walls of her mother’s bedroom pressing around her, breathing with the silence of a house that had been abandoned for months. There were books on the nightstand and a sweater draped over the foot of the bed, as though Mom had stepped out moments ago, but she had been in the hospital since January.
Charlie stalked to the closet to strip clothes from hangers. With every garment a familiar scent drifted on the air, danced, and faded: the stuffy university library in cardigans with holes in the sleeves, pine trees and campfires in colorful scarves, fertilizer and garden soil in soft elastic-waist jeans. Never the most dedicated housekeeper, Mom had grown even more neglectful after retirement; piles of laundry expanded, stacks of dishes grew. Cath lived only an hour away, compared to Charlie’s half a continent, and she made the drive once a week to fret and scold, to coax Mom from the house for brunch, check her medications, shop for groceries.
“Your sister thinks I’m going to turn into one of those hoarders who gets buried beneath her own junk,” Mom had said cheerfully, one afternoon in the fall. She had been planting bulbs all morning and had called Charlie to tell her what flowers she would have in the spring. Daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, and tulips, of course, although she had overdone tulips the previous year and could barely abide their smug sturdy posture and gaping mouths anymore. “But it just doesn’t seem so important anymore, fussing over clothes and cleaning and all those boring things. I’d rather be outside in the sun. Housework can wait.”
“She’s just worried,” Charlie had replied. She had been at work on a Saturday, and her attention was on Intrepid. That was before they lost contact, when the Mars mission had still been a string of unprecedented successes.
“You’d think an old lady taking up gardening wouldn’t make anybody worry, but that’s your sister for you,” Mom had said. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I spent my whole life digging up dead things, but now all I want is something alive all around me. You know, I never really understood why you were so obsessed with everything out there.” She always referred to space as out there. “Not when there are so many problems here. But then I remind myself that all those cold, dead places won’t be so cold and dead after you’ve sent your people there.”
And Charlie had said, “I guess that’s one way of thinking about it. Look, I have to go.”
She had spent half her life telling her mother she had to go: back to school, back to work, back to Houston, back to the people and projects that needed her. Mom had teased her about working too hard. She had never objected.
When the clothes were packed away, Charlie stood on her toes to pull boxes from the shelf. Jammed in with old shoes with the soles worn flat, apartment lease paperwork from twenty years ago, student theses in flimsy bindings, the collected detritus of a lifetime, she found a framed photograph of Mom’s parents. Grandma in a gold gown, Grandpa in a tux, standing before a flower-draped railing with glasses of wine, the ocean a deep twilight blue behind them.
Charlie barely remembered her grandparents. She had impressions of perfume-scented hugs, bleach-bright afternoons on the beach, sandwiches with too much mayonnaise, and listening from another room as they scolded Mom for not visiting more often, for not having a husband, for treating her daughters like friends rather than children, for dragging them all over the world like nomads.
They had died in a car accident the summer Charlie was nine, Cath eleven. At the funeral home, a woman Charlie didn’t know had pressed that photograph into Mom’s hands and said, “Take it. You may not think so now, but you’ll want to remember them someday.” It was the first time Charlie had glimpsed what her mother looked like to the family she had left behind.
Later, after the service and the cemetery, they had gone to the beach, Mom and Charlie and Cath. Charlie had pulled off her pinching new shoes and lace-cuffed socks to run barefoot at the edge of the water. A wave caught her by surprise and soaked the hem of her dress. She had walked up the sand, wringing out the fabric, to where her mother was watching with a handful of seashells in her palm.
“I want to go home,” Charlie said. Her nose was sunburned, the part of her hair hot to the touch.
“Not yet,” said Mom. “We’re going to Avalon.”
Charlie hadn’t thought about that summer in years, but the salt smell of the ocean came back to her now. She remembered how Mom had tossed the photograph of her parents into the back seat, where it slid to the floor between sleeping bags and backpacks. Mom had been planning the long drive to Newfoundland before they even left home. She was always planning another trip, another expedition, another escape. Her brittle silence hadn’t softened until they were heading north, crossing the border, heading north again through a long day and a long night. They had finally arrived at Mistaken Point just before dawn. Cath had stayed in the car while Charlie scuffed after their mother on the gray rocks beneath a vast dawn sky, shivering in the whipping sea wind.
She dropped the photograph and picked up her phone.
Hum, silence, words that were not words. She had no doubt now: it was Brian’s voice in the foreground, Lisa’s in the background.
She played it a third time. It didn’t sound like they were alarmed or panicking, but that was as frustrating as it was reassuring. A plea for help would tell her something new.
A fourth. Again she heard what might be everyone, might be everything. Again the sounds that followed rose to the edge of comprehensibility before swerving into musical gibberish like a child’s song run through a vocal distorter. Maybe it was a song. Rivers was always singing, he was known for it, they had come to expect it, and when she got home Lisa would be so relieved to hear from him—
A jumbling discordance filled Charlie’s mind, halting that thought with car-crash suddenness.
She started the message over before it reached the end.
She was letting Sandeep’s fussing and Hatt’s stupidity get to her. It didn’t even sound like Rivers. Who was with his family in Atlanta. She played the message to the end and missed Lisa so much it was a physical thing, a clinging vine of spines and thorns, tightening.
Her thumb hovered over the screen for another repetition, but the sound of footsteps in the hall stopped her.
Cath appeared in the doorway. “I’m making coffee. Want some?”
It took a moment for the words to penetrate the shimmering echo of the Intrepid’s message. “Yeah. Sure.”
“You okay?”
Charlie rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m fine.”
Cath gave her a level look, unconvinced, but only asked, “Was all of this junk in the closet?”
“There was a lot jammed back there.” Charlie passed the photograph to her. “Remember this?”
“Hey, that’s Grandpa when he still had hair.”
Charlie’s most vivid memory of the man was of a waxy-pale husk in a coffin lined with blue silk, but Cath was looking at the picture with a fond smile, and as her words quivered through the air between them Charlie remembered: Alice. The woman who had given the photograph to Mom was named Alice, and she had been Grandma’s best friend since childhood. She had taken Charlie and Cath to the aquarium in Baltimore once when they were children. Charlie didn’t know how she could have forgotten. They had watched the jellyfish together for a long time, quiet in a dark room as the creatures drifted in restful blue.
“Do you remember after the funeral?” Charlie asked.
Cath glanced up. “Was that when Mom dragged us up to Canada and spent the entire drive lecturing us about those frond things she liked so much?”
“Yes. Same trip.”
Charlie didn’t remember Mom talking much during the drive, only long hours of tense silence. She remembered Cath saying, “God, Mom, I don’t
care,” when they reached their destination, putting her headphones on and refusing to get out of the car. She remembered Mom taking her hand and leading her toward the shore in the cold bright morning, her professorial instinct taking over: half a billion years ago, the oldest complex lifeforms on Earth, before the beginning, before, before. The memory of her mother’s words melted into the singsong meter of the ship’s message.
She looked down, half expecting to find it playing again, but her phone was silent.
“Is that from Intrepid?” Cath asked. “Can I listen?”
Charlie clicked the screen off, feeling like she had been caught playing when there were chores to be done. “It’ll be released to the public later.”
“So play it for me. What are they saying?” Cath didn’t wait for an answer before turning away. “Come on. Coffee first, then you can tell me.”
Charlie hesitated only a moment before following her to the kitchen. She sat at the table while Cath plucked mugs from a half-packed box.
“So what do they have to say?” Cath asked.
“We’re not sure yet. It’s hard to hear anything clearly.”
“Now I’ve really got to hear it. I’m good at figuring out gibberish. Lots of practice.”
“It’s gibberish because it’s been sent across fifty million miles of space by damaged equipment, not because it’s a secret coded love poem in medieval Polish. Not exactly your area of expertise.”
Cath stilled, hand on the faucet, and Charlie regretted her words. She didn’t mean to needle. It was a mean-spirited reflex, the same thoughtless instinct that had put years of barbed wire separation between them. Three years ago she had accused Cath of abandoning her dreams for an unfaithful man, and Cath had accused Charlie of never sacrificing anything for anyone. It should have passed, would have passed any other day, but that day years of disagreements and choices had exploded into a fight, and the fight, when it ended, whimpered meekly into a long uneasy holding pattern, the space between them littered with traps and pitfalls they both chose to avoid rather than navigate. It was true that Cath had quit graduate school when she had married, insisting it was exactly what she wanted. She had never welcomed Charlie’s observation that what Cath wanted was always precisely what Walter had wanted first, no more than she had welcomed Mom’s jokes about cosmic balance requiring their family to have at least one useless humanities scholar amongst the scientists. Charlie had known these things. She had known when they were first finding their way, and when they grew through their twenties and thirties, Cath married and Charlie more solitary than not, the choices they made as young women fading into acceptance or regret, the future ossifying into routine. She had known when Cath told her about Walter’s latest indiscretion three years ago. She had taunted Cath about it anyway.
But this time, Cath let it pass unremarked. She set the mugs on the counter; she had taken off her wedding ring.
“Maybe not,” she said, “but I want to hear it anyway.”
Charlie played the recording. She tensed through the initial rumble of noise, clenched her teeth through the seconds of silence that followed. Cath opened her mouth, but Charlie quieted her with gesture. The wordless chatter started again, high tones and low, a singsong back and forth. Brian’s voice, Lisa’s voice. She was growing more confident that Brian was saying, “Everyone’s fine.” It would be clear when the raw audio was processed.
When the recording ended, a flicker passed over Cath’s face, more shadow than flinch. “That’s . . . odd. Play it again?”
Charlie obliged.
“Are they really going to make that public?” Cath asked. She pulled out a chair to sit across from Charlie.
“Nobody will believe how hard it is to understand if we don’t,” Charlie pointed out. “You know how people are. They’ll say we’re—”
“It sounds like they’re saying, ‘Everybody’s dying.’ ”
“What?” Charlie looked at her sharply. “That’s not what they’re saying.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
“It’s not. He’s saying they’re fine. ‘Everything’s fine.’ You have to listen closely.”
“I am listening closely. Play it again,” Cath said.
“I’ve listened to it five times. I know what they’re saying.”
“Then let me hear it again.”
Charlie shook her head. “No. This is low-quality audio on a crappy speaker. If I was at my lab I could—I could—”
She stared at the phone and the scarred table beneath it. For several seconds she heard nothing but the splutter of the coffee pot and drip of the kitchen faucet. It had dripped for years. Mom had always said she was going to fix it.
“We’re cleaning it up,” Charlie said, her voice hoarse. “You can’t draw conclusions from this.”
Brian’s voice, Lisa’s voice. The conclusions were already barbed in her throat.
“Okay,” Cath said.
“We should get back to work.”
“Charlie.”
“The bedroom’s almost finished. I can—”
“I know you’d rather be there. I don’t blame you.” Cath reached across the table, hesitated before touching the back of Charlie’s hand. Charlie twitched but didn’t pull away. “I know it’s not just your job. They’re your friends, aren’t they? I can’t even imagine how scared you must be for them.”
Cath rose to pour the coffee for both of them—black, bitter, their mother’s preference passed down. A different Charlie, a sister who could meet Cath halfway, would say, “Not only friends.” She would say Lisa’s name and let the fear in her voice invite Cath’s questions. A different Charlie would have already said the words, sometime over the past three years. She would have already opened the door.
“Mom would want you to be there,” Cath said. “She always told everybody you were changing the fate of the human race. Somebody’s got to do it, she said, and she knew it was going to be you. She had them all trained to turn on the news for mission updates.”
“I didn’t mean,” Charlie began, but she stopped, unsure where that sentence led.
“She’d say, ‘Let’s hear about Charlie’s astronauts. Let’s see what they’re up to today.’ The nurses got sick of it, but she never got tired of bragging about you. And when the ship lost contact . . . . ” Cath was looking at the table, her eyes unfocused. “That’s what she told them to explain why you didn’t visit much. She never wanted me to tell you to come.”
“I would have said I was too busy anyway,” Charlie said. Her guilt was a bright stinging thing, sunlight on a mirror.
“You should see if you can get an earlier flight. They need you, don’t they?” Cath gestured toward the window with her coffee mug, as though all of time and space were waiting in the trees outside. “It’s important. I understand.”
Cath’s voice was even, but Charlie still felt she was prodding at her with the question, looking for her soft fleshy underside. She remembered, in a flash like light through a prism, Mom once saying, “Funerals aren’t for the dead, honey. They’re for the living.” The same could be said of fossils, or starlight, remnants of a dead past rippling through the present.
“They can manage for a few hours,” Charlie said.
“But they need you. Go. I can handle this. Jeff will be over soon to help anyway.”
“Jeff? Who’s Jeff?” Charlie asked, confused.
“You met him at the funeral yesterday, remember? After you’ve been pestering me about him for months.”
Cath had been alone at the funeral. Head held high, black dress and pearls making her look so much like Mom, and alone. There had been nobody at her side. Charlie pressed her lips together, swallowing back an acid churn of nausea. Cath wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. They hadn’t spoken about anything so intimate as friends or lovers in three years, but she wouldn’t have missed a separation or divorce. She wouldn’t have missed a whole person standing beside her sister at their mother’s funeral.
“You
talked to him for at least twenty minutes?” Cath went on, voice lifting uncertainly. “And you told me afterward that you approved? Because he didn’t try to play the conspiracy theory guessing game with you, he just said that hearing from Intrepid after so long must be—”
“Better than silence,” Charlie said.
Cath’s smile was watery, relieved. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t tell you how serious it was, but I don’t think I really knew, not until—well. He showed up. He stayed. He’s coming over to help, which is something that asshole we don’t talk about anymore never would have done.”
Three years ago, before their conversation had devolved into an argument, when Cath’s voice was still wet with hurt and Charlie had not yet loosed the careless words she would later regret, she had asked, “Are you going to leave him?” Cath had hesitated—knowing silence vibrated between them—and Charlie had held her breath, thought, say yes, and finally, and please, hopes formed with the strength of commands but never spoken, waiting for the second it took for Cath to answer one way, or the other.
“Yeah. Yeah. That’s—good. That’s.” Charlie gulped her coffee and pushed back her chair. “I’ll finish the bedroom. I can—I’ll do that before I go.”
She fled down the hall again. The guest room door was still open, but there was no sign of Cath’s bag or funeral dress. The bed had been stripped, the closet cleared. Charlie took a few slow breaths. Dust motes danced in sunlight. There was a pressure building behind her eyes, a dull pain reminding her how little she had slept all week. She didn’t need to ask. She had only glanced through the door before. There was no reason for Cath to stay here anyway.
In her mother’s room she played the message again. She breathed through the hum and the silence, and when the voices picked up—two of them, entwined—she closed her eyes. Thought about Cath at the funeral, black dress, pearls, alone. The space beside her wavered, like lake water disturbed from below, and by the time the message rolled through everything, stuttered over fine, there was a man where there had been emptiness. He had always been there. She had forgotten. She had only forgotten.