Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  As spring melted toward summer, an answer to that prayer arrived. Life next door to Frank went back to some semblance of what it had been before. The woman went to work and came home. The boy went to school and then, as June rolled around and the summer break took hold, he and his friends often hung around the house, tossing a football in the yard or playing basketball in the driveway. Frank caught snippets of these things through the window. He would watch and sip his coffee, and then he would return to her.

  Frank’s other prayer, that Lucy’s pain would subside, was a tougher sell with God. She barely moved some days, and Frank would have to pick her up and carry her to the bathroom. The small act of sitting on the toilet would aggravate the cancer that had metastasized in her bones, and in her agony she could barely make a sound, depleted as her lungs were. Frank would hold her close, careful not to hurt her further, and blink back the tears.

  When he found the compression sores, he gave in and called for help from hospice, finally admitting that he couldn’t tend to her alone anymore. The nurses came in, and there wasn’t much they could do, either. They dressed her wounds and tried to make her comfortable.

  Lucy died in the early hours of a Wednesday in late July. Nobody left flowers in her yard.

  The first week of November brought a prodigious snowfall to Billings, the biggest one in eighty years, according to the TV weatherman. Frank, unshaven for a week, wearing clothes he’d put on two days earlier, stood at his kitchen sink and watched as the boy next door fought with a snowblower. The old man caught his reflection in the glass. His thinning hair had gone fully gray in two years of fighting with Lucy against her cancer, and deep lines dug into his gaunt face. He could smell his own stink. He didn’t bathe or shower much these days. He didn’t see the point.

  His thoughts migrated, again, to the day in 1948 when he married Lucy Andriesen. Till death do us part were words that came by rote back then, when he was twenty-one and she was nineteen and they were invincible. Utterly devoted to one another, they never brought children into the world, never imagining that one day, one of them might have to soldier on alone. At eighty-three years old, Frank had drawn that sad duty. He still couldn’t believe it, and he surprised himself sometimes when he realized how angry it left him.

  The lanky child next door—Frank figured him for twelve, maybe thirteen—was having trouble keeping the machine on a line and keeping the blower chute lined up to send the snow in the proper direction. Hurtled powder hit the boy’s house, then Frank’s house. And then it hit the window Frank peered through, cracking the thin pane of glass.

  “Dammit,” Frank said, hustling into the living room in his long johns and jamming his feet into slippers. He ran out the front door and high-stepped through his blanketed front lawn, shouting at the boy. The kid couldn’t hear him above the din of the motor, and just as Frank drew near, the boy turned the machine and sent a blast of snow into Frank’s face.

  Stung by the barrage, Frank drew back a hand and struck the boy, catching him in the left ear and dropping him.

  The boy looked at Frank, wide-eyed and chin trembling. Frank stared back in disbelief at what he’d done.

  Both ran for their respective front doors.

  Frank spent a half-hour walking the floor, castigating himself. He talked to Lucy and told her how stupid he was, how positively idiotic. He said she should be happy she didn’t see it. Immediately, he felt bad about saying that, and he apologized to her.

  He knew the knock would be coming, and when it did, he still jumped. The rapid beat of his heart moved into his neck and throat, which he cleared again and again as he approached the door and opened it to find the boy’s mother, her anger bubbling under her lip.

  “You hit my son,” she said.

  “Please come in,” Frank said. “Let’s talk.”

  She stomped past him into the house, and he led her to the living room.

  “I’d be happy to pour you some tea,” he said.

  She stopped. “This isn’t a social call, Mr. —”

  “Abrams. Frank Abrams.”

  “This isn’t a social call, Mr. Abrams.”

  “No, of course it’s not,” Frank said. He gestured to the sofa. “Please, won’t you sit down?”

  Her eyes never leaving him, she lowered herself to the couch. Frank sat in a chair opposite her. In a different set of circumstances, he might have been impressed by her bearing. A small woman, she filled the room with her intensity and focus. Now, she intimidated him, and he wasn’t a man who was easily cowed.

  “How’s the boy?” he asked.

  “Andy. His name is Andy. He’ll be fine. He’s scared. He’s confused. He doesn’t know why a grown man would come out and hit him, and frankly, I don’t, either. Can you explain that, or should I just call the police and let them sort it out?”

  Frank, who had looked at his feet as the woman’s words grew sharper, glanced upward and met her eyes. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’m appalled, absolutely appalled, at what I did. I ran out to stop him because all the snow he was blowing around out there, it shot right up and cracked my window. So I went down there and that snow, it comes out of the machine so fast and hard, you know? It hurts like hell when it smacks you in the face. I just snapped. Honestly, it just happened so fast, I couldn’t believe what I’d done.”

  She stared at him and said nothing.

  “Obviously, if you wish to call the police, I will tell them exactly what I did. And of course I apologize to you, and I hope you’ll let me apologize to Andy. I’m just sick about this.”

  The hard lines of her face fell away slightly, and she chewed on her bottom lip.

  “You say your window broke. Can I see it?”

  Frank stood and led her into the kitchen. He pointed at the pane, which was crossed by a jagged crack.

  “How much do you think it will cost to replace?” she asked.

  “Not much. It’s not a big job.”

  “Let me know.”

  “Mrs. Elam,” he said, “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to pay for it. I owe you and your son amends, not the other way around.”

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s talk about that.”

  Back in the living room, she said, “I’m not going to involve the police.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m going to send Andy over here tomorrow. He broke your window, and if you won’t accept payment for that, he can do something else for you.”

  “That’s quite unnecessary.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s important that he learn responsibility. Besides, you’re going to do something for him, too.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t decided. But I’ll let you know. He’s a good kid, Mr. Abrams. He’s had an awful year—we both have—and he doesn’t deserve what happened to him today, and you’re going to make it right.”

  “I’m sorry about your husband,” Frank said, words that didn’t come close to capturing what he had intended to say months earlier.

  “Thank you.” She stood up. “I’ll send Andy over in the morning. Put him to work.”

  “I don’t have anything for the boy to do here,” Frank said.

  She glanced around the living room, at the piled-up mail and dirty clothes and half-filled glasses of water and said, “I’m sure you can find something.”

  The boy was prompt. Frank gave him that. At nine a.m. sharp, Frank heard the rap of knuckles against the oaken door. He opened it to find the tow-headed young man standing on his stoop in an old pullover sweater and a pair of faded jeans.

  “My mom said I have to come over here,” he said, casting a wary glance at Frank.

  “Well, come on in, then,” Frank said. “I’m not sure what to do with you.”

  Andy stepped inside. “I’d say let me go home, but she’d just send me back over here. So you better find something.”

  “You’re a mouthy kid, aren’t you?”

  “So what? You’re an old man who hits kids.”


  “Okay, that’s enough. Sit down.”

  Andy stared at him.

  “I said sit down!”

  Andy obeyed.

  Frank sank into the chair across from the boy and rubbed his mouth and chin, considering his next move. Having no children of his own, he’d never had to learn how to deal with insolence.

  “Is it okay if I call you by your name?”

  Andy looked surprised. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Okay, look, Andy. I’m sorry for what I did yesterday. There is no excuse for it, and you have every right to be angry with me for it. So I’m putting that out there for you. If we’re going to spend the day together, I’d like to put this behind us. Can we do that?”

  Andy looked at the carpet. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “That’s not good enough. Let’s try again. Andy, I’m sorry for hitting you yesterday. Can you please forgive me?”

  The boy looked up and bit off the words. “I accept your apology, Mr. Abrams.”

  With Andy’s help, Frank toted two dozen bags of garbage to the alley for pickup. They folded clothes, vacuumed the house, dusted, cleaned windows, sorted mail and brought the place to a level of cleanliness that Frank hadn’t seen since before Lucy got sick, when together they ran a tight ship, everything in its place.

  In the kitchen, Frank poured the boy a second cup of hot chocolate. They had moved around each other stealthily for the first hour or so, but soon enough, the defenses had fallen away and the boy had begun chattering. Frank marveled at what constituted a young man’s world these days—computers and text messages and a whole system of language that Frank couldn’t begin to comprehend—but he also noted that the two primary concerns were the same as they had been when he was a twelve-year-old boy: girls, and the competitive challenges posed by other boys. From what Frank could gather, Andy was on high alert for the former and continually addled by the latter.

  “You’re a good worker,” Frank said. “That’s something to be proud of.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Abrams.”

  Andy pointed at a picture on the dining-room wall, a group photo of the Mission Command engineers in front of the space shuttle Columbia. “Are you in that picture?”

  Frank turned and looked at the photo. “Yep, that’s me and some of my co-workers after the first space shuttle went up and came home. It was taken in 1982.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “I’m at the far left there, in the white shirt.”

  “They all have on white shirts.”

  “That’s a joke, kid. Go on. Get up and take a closer look.”

  Andy walked around to the other side of the table and got close to the frame. Frank peered over his shoulder. It had been a long time since he’d looked closely at the photograph, and he was a little surprised by what he saw. He was so young then, yet ancient by NASA standards. He was well into middle age, fifty-five years old—a decade or more older than most of the men in the picture with him—and yet he was struck by how quickly the years had gone by and how much they had taken.

  “What was your job?” Andy asked.

  “I was a flight engineer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Different things on different missions. I was one of the guys on the ground helping get the shuttle into space, communicating with the crew and helping them get home safely. When this picture was taken, I was getting close to the end of my career. I actually started with NASA in the beginning, more than fifty years ago. I saw all of it—Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the first moon landing, the space shuttle.”

  “Cool.”

  Frank considered the boy’s one-word summation of a long career. He hadn’t thought about those days in a while. But Andy was right. If there were a single word for it, “cool” would do the job.

  The next morning, as Frank headed up the sidewalk with his morning paper, he waved to Andy and one of the neighbor kids. They were rolling up snow boulders.

  “Mr. Abrams,” Andy called to him. “Do you want to help us build a snowman?”

  “No, thanks, Andy. You guys have fun.” He saluted the boys with the bundled newspaper and walked on.

  “Come on. We’ll let you choose his face.”

  Frank stopped. What possible reason is there to say no, he thought.

  “I’ll be right back, guys.”

  Up in the attic, Frank blew dust off a banker’s box that had gone yellow with age, the corrugated walls caving in from neglect.

  He began removing artifacts from another era of his life. Aviator glasses, cloth ribbons from his stint in the Air Force during the Korean War, among them a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with three oak leaves, a visor hat.

  He put everything in the hat and hustled back downstairs.

  “That looks awesome!” Andy said.

  Before them, a plump snowman—small head upon slightly larger torso upon much larger base—sported the brim hat, the medals on his icy chest, the glasses atop his carrot nose and a scarf around his neck and shoulders.

  “He looks like a real jock,” Frank said.

  “What, like a football player?” the other boy, Aaron, asked.

  “No, that’s what we pilots called each other in the Air Force.”

  “My dad was a pilot,” Andy said, and Frank winced at not thinking before he spoke.

  “He was,” Frank said. “A damned good one.”

  The three of them stared a while longer, saying nothing. Finally, Frank said, “Well, we’d better not leave that stuff in the weather. You guys can divvy it up and keep it. I don’t need it anymore.”

  The boys slapped high-fives and began stripping their snowman bare. As Frank opened the door to his house, he smiled at hearing the horse-trading taking place as Andy and Aaron weighed the worth of a pair of old sunglasses against an aviator’s hat.

  Andy’s mother visited Frank that evening.

  “I’ve figured out how you can make it up to Andy,” she said when he opened the door.

  “Come in,” he said. “It’s freezing out there.”

  For the second time, they settled into Frank’s living-room furniture. “It looks like a different place,” she said. “Did Andy do all of this?”

  “Pretty much. I helped a little. He’s faster than I am, though.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said, laughing. “I’m just glad he still obeys voice commands. I don’t know how I’ll cope when he stops doing that.”

  “He’s a polite young man. Maybe you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So you say you have a task for me?”

  “Right,” she said. “Next month, December seventh, Andy’s school is having a career day, and some of the kids are supposed to bring in a guest speaker to talk about different jobs and the schooling needed to get them. This is the kind of thing that Kevin would have done, and he would have been great at it. I’m nominating you to be Andy’s guest speaker. What do you think?”

  “Mrs. Elam, I’m flattered, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a career. I left NASA in 1987. I couldn’t even begin to speak to how things are done there now.”

  “Oh, please, Mr. Abrams,” she said. “Andy told me—”

  “Frank.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Please, call me Frank.”

  “Okay, Frank,” she said. “Andy told me what you said about helping with the moon landing and the space shuttle and all that. You’ll be the biggest hit there. Those kids won’t care when you last worked.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do. You owe Andy, and this is the payback I’ve decided on.”

  “December seventh, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  Frank considered it, as if trying to remember whether he had a competing engagement, knowing full well that his social schedule was identical for the interminable future: wide open. “As it turns out, I’m free,” he said.

  Andy’s mother stood up, walked over and hugged Frank.<
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  Frank poured a cup of tea. “Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten your first name. Old men and their memories.”

  “Laura,” she said.

  “A lovely name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Lucy, my wife, she liked to think about what our children’s names might have been, if we’d had any. She liked that name very much.”

  “Why didn’t you have kids?” Quickly, she slapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s rude to just ask like that.”

  “No, it’s quite all right,” Frank said. “We just never felt compelled. We had very full lives, even without kids. Then years go by, faster all the time, and you realize that you’re old people and the chances of doing certain things are gone forever. So it was with children.”

  “You must miss her terribly.”

  Frank nodded. “I do. I suspect you have some appreciation for what it’s like.”

  “It’s so hard,” she said. “I can still smell him in our room, and sometimes when I’m asleep, I dream that he’s there with me. It’s hard in the mornings to wake up to the fact that he’s gone.”

  She looked at Frank. A quivering smile crossed her face. He picked up a paper napkin and handed it across the table to her.

  “Are you getting along okay otherwise?” he asked.

  She dabbed at her eyes with the napkin. “We’re making it. You know, I really hated to reduce Kevin’s death to numbers, but for a while there, I wondered how we would make it work. The insurance helped. People have been very nice, but I haven’t wanted to impose. I’m getting back into the swing of things at work. I tell Andy, listen, you need to make good grades and get a scholarship. You know, to hedge our bets.”

  Frank picked up her cup and went to the kettle to refill it.

  “I have to tell you, Laura, I was a pilot once, and what your husband did was one of the most heroic things I’ve ever heard of. A disabled plane, flying faster than it should be—there’s just no way to describe what a hopeless situation that is. Pilots train for moments like that, and they hope they’ll manage to pull off the perfectly imperfect landing if that day ever comes, but the fact is, the human element—fear, indecision, clouded judgment—is powerfully difficult to overcome. He did it. I hope you’re proud.”