The Space Between

by Dete Meserve

  What we’d done could’ve jeopardized everything. If they ever found out about my momentary indiscretion, the higher-ups at CIT would certainly not approve, especially when I’m competing against presumably “less complicated” men for the top job overseeing the space telescope mission. Women had come a long way since the Rocket Girls who worked as “computers” in the fifties, but there are still unspoken rules of conduct for female bosses. Affairs aren’t on the list.

  And it wasn’t just my work that would be compromised, Aaron’s would, too. Even someone with rare talent like Aaron might find himself locked out of key assignments because of whispers of what happened between us.

  Aaron crosses the room and unlocks the drawer in his desk, which has been harboring the DVR.

  “I ran the utility my friend wrote and was able to recover another three hours of data,” he says. “I . . . didn’t watch any of it, but it’s on this flash drive in a folder that I named Final Recovery.”

  I rise and take the DVR and flash drive from him. “I don’t know how to thank you for everything . . . ,” I say, letting my voice drift.

  “You don’t have to thank me. I’d do anything to help you.”

  I meet his warm gaze. “I’m sorry for bringing you into all this.” I’m apologizing for more than that and I think he knows it.

  But even as he smiles at me, I see his eyes cloud over.

  He knows he’s watching me go.

  I make the decision to go as if I imagine it will be easy. As if it is simply a kind of research I am abandoning. An investigation that has gone awry that I am putting back on course.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A yellow moon is just cresting the horizon, and the first constellation I see in the night sky is Gemini. I point it out to Zack, but of course he’s already spotted it. We’ve stargazed together since he was two—we’d spread blankets out on the lawn well past his bedtime and peer through binoculars while feasting on popcorn and M&Ms.

  Tonight we are trying to regain our bearings—lounging on the back lawn together, high-powered binoculars in hand, scanning the skies for stars and calling out the constellations. Now he’s taller than I am, with Ben’s sturdy jawline and thick hair, but not even popcorn and M&Ms can soothe the ache of our loss.

  At least we have the illusion of safety, as Brad is a few yards away, leaving only periodically to patrol the grounds. A month ago I would not have imagined that I’d be stargazing with Zack. He’d rejected our ritual, along with other things from his childhood, on his way to figuring out his young-adult self. But tonight I sense that the stars settle him in the familiar. When he calls out the constellations, I hear a slight lift in his voice—a tiny bit of joy—that I haven’t heard in a long while.

  In so many ways, we had become strangers over the last year or so. But here beneath the glittery stars—watching their movements and their own life cycles of nearly incomprehensible scale—we are reunited.

  “Remember when we used to play dot-to-dot with the constellations?” I ask.

  Zack keeps his binoculars trained on the sky. “Yeah . . . and, here we go, there’s the Big Dipper,” he says, his lips lifting in the beginnings of a smile. “And yes, Mom, I know that the Big Dipper isn’t a constellation. It’s an asterism that’s part of the constellation Ursa Major.”

  I look at him and smile. Proud.

  “Also known as the Big Bear constellation,” he continues.

  Then my eyes meet his in the starlight, and for a moment he is no longer a young teen struggling to find his way in the world, but again my little boy, his brown eyes wide with wonder.

  I reach out to hug him, and he hugs me back. And doesn’t let go. Then suddenly I’m holding him, just like I once used to, and the tears spill out of my eyes.

  “See, I’ve been listening,” he says softly.

  I stroke his hair. What is to become of us without Ben? How will either of us ever make sense of what happened to him? I don’t dare think death, even though everyone else is, because the concept feels too heavy and final.

  Moments later, he lets go and points back to the stars. “Remember when I named my hamsters Mizar and Alcor after the stars in the Big Dipper?”

  I smile. “We were all impressed. Especially your kindergarten teacher.”

  My eyes follow his hand across the sky as he traces the Big Dipper, an asterism I’ve seen thousands of times. With six second-magnitude stars, the constellation is bright enough to see no matter where you are north of the Equator.

  Then it hits me. The Big Dipper’s familiarity can fool us. If we aim a high-powered telescope at it we’ll see that there are not just seven stars we all recognize, but thousands of stars in the space between those stars . . . and at least a dozen galaxies, including the huge and beautiful Pinwheel Galaxy.

  “There’s a lot more going on out there than what our eyes see,” I say.

  He looks at me and squirms. I think he’s worried that this is going to turn into some kind of spiritual talk about losing his father. But neither of us is ready for that.

  Instead, I wonder if I’ve been accepting the facts of Ben’s disappearance but ignoring what might be beyond them. I’ve failed to search for answers my eyes cannot see. The facts, like the stars we can see, command our attention with their bright lights. They also blind us to what else might be there.

  “If we’re going to understand what happened to your dad, we have to look beyond what we can see,” I say, “and search in the space between.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  BEN

  His body is shaking. Hard. Every thirty seconds or so. Like a jackhammer is stuck in his chest.

  It’s pitch-black. He blinks. For a moment, it feels as though he’s gone blind. Not even a speck of light anywhere.

  His eyes are bleary and crusted over with what, he isn’t sure. He pulls down his lower lid to force it open.

  His tongue is thick, caked to the bottom of his mouth.

  He pulls the blanket tighter to his body, but it’s not enough. The room is icy cold and yet he’s burning up.

  His shirt, the sheets, are soaked.

  How long has he been lying here asleep? How long since Leonard left?

  A day perhaps. Or maybe three?

  His body shakes again. This time it lasts for nearly thirty seconds.

  Please let me make it until morning.

  How many hours could it be until sunrise? Four? Six? It’s so black outside the window that it’s impossible to tell.

  His lips are parched, cracked so badly that they burn when he licks them. He reaches for the paper cup on the nightstand next to his bed. Or at least he thinks it was there before.

  He anticipates the feel of water on his dry tongue, his raw throat. Anxious for it to soothe his burning insides.

  But his teeth are chattering so hard that his hand shakes and he knocks over the cup. The room is quiet, so still, he thinks he can hear it flutter through the air as it falls to the wood-plank floor.

  He tries to move, to reach for it in the darkness, but searing pain rips like a knife through his left leg. The muscles in his back seem frozen, unmovable. He is stuck in this position, like a dead bug, pinned on his back. Wet.

  He feels the sharp draft coming from the window. The cabin was built for summer, not winter, and there are gaps between the hand-sawn windows and its frames.

  Gaps that are freezing the life out of him.

  There is firewood. And matches. But he cannot imagine how he will get his body across the room, much less complete the mechanics of starting a fire. He tries to imagine the exact sequence he will need to follow to do that. Sit up. Bend his legs. Put weight on his leg. Crawl to the fireplace. It’s what, six feet?

  Impossible. He reaches down and touches his fingers to his left thigh, knowing what he’ll find. Hard, dried blood. Sharp bolts of throbbing pain as though his skin and muscles are being ripped open by a monster within.

  It’s good that it’s dark. He
can’t see how bad it is.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Aaron’s recovery utility has unscrambled at least three more hours of video. Some of it’s mundane—shots of the front porch at night, lit only by the warm glow of the outside lanterns, and a long clip of the backyard, capturing a flock of goldfinches that played in the birdbath one early morning. The clips are a kind of time travel, a glimpse into my life and home in the past from angles I would otherwise never see.

  The house appears to go through a metamorphosis during the late night and early morning hours. Beautiful, yet eerie. I wonder why it’s easier to admire the world when I’m watching it through a lens.

  Using a laptop that Rachel loaned me, I click through endless ordinary clips of Zack returning home from school, the gardener mowing the front lawn, and Zack raiding the refrigerator late at night. Then I stumble on a shot of Ben walking through the front door on Monday, the day before he disappeared.

  He’s dressed in a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans. He tosses his keys into the green bowl on the foyer table, then places something next to it. The camera is too far away to see what it is.

  At first I think it’s a flash drive because it’s small and black. I enlarge the photo on the computer, but when the image becomes too grainy, I zoom back a little and see what it is. A velvet jewelry box.

  Why is Ben carrying around a jewelry box, and what happened to it since then?

  My mind takes one of those detours, and I wonder if the box belonged to Rebecca. I replay the clip and home in on Ben’s face. It’s only five seconds, so it’s hard to discern much, but he doesn’t look suspicious or nervous. He appears . . . happy. Or perhaps it only seems that way because of the delicate afternoon light playing through the foyer windows.

  Another clip was shot on Saturday afternoon, an hour after I left for the airport. Ben is on the front porch, his back to the camera, and he’s talking with Shane.

  “I’ve thought about what you asked me to do,” Shane says. His face is puffy, and there are dark circles under his eyes. “And I did it. No one ever has to know.”

  No one ever has to know.

  What did Ben ask Shane to do just hours after Rebecca Stanton was murdered?

  “Hi, Sarah?” Shane sounds hopeful. I can guess what news he’s anticipating I’ll share, and I’m disappointed to let him down. “I’m in a meeting with a client. Everything okay?”

  “There’s something important I have to ask you,” I say. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course.” His voice is strained. I hear footsteps on concrete, like he’s walking out of his meeting.

  My mouth suddenly goes dry. “I’m looking through the home-security recordings, and there’s a clip on the Saturday afternoon before Ben went missing where you tell Ben that you took care of something he asked you to do. Then you say, ‘No one has to know.’ What was that about?”

  There’s a long silence on the phone. “I have no idea. Are you sure it’s the Saturday before he went missing and not some other conversation earlier?”

  “The time stamp says Saturday afternoon. The day after you both returned from New York. The day Rebecca Stanton was murdered.”

  “I remember coming over then. I guess you had already left for DC, maybe? Ben had asked me to rework some of the numbers for the Paragon deal, and I did.”

  “That’s odd, don’t you think?” I ask. “I mean, if Ben killed Rebecca Stanton—as the FBI said he did—early that morning, why would he ask you that afternoon to rework the numbers to resurrect the deal with her?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” He draws a deep breath. “How are you even looking through the security recordings? I thought they had been erased?”

  “I’ve finally figured out how to recover the data. All of it.”

  “Why, though?” He switches his tone to sympathetic. “Do you really think you’re going to get a different answer about Ben by looking through that security footage than what the police and FBI have already discovered?”

  I run my fingers through my hair, trying to get this discussion back on track. “Look, all I’m asking is what you did for him that ‘no one has to know.’ Are you sure it was about reworking the numbers? You look kind of upset in the video.”

  “I was a bit hungover, that’s all. The whole conversation was just finance talk, Sarah.”

  Finance talk. His tone is annoyed, making it clear that he thinks I’m wasting my time, focusing on all the wrong things. My frustration mounts. I sense that he’s not being honest with me, but I don’t know if he’s covering for Ben or if something else transpired between them that he won’t talk about.

  “I can’t imagine what finance talk would have you saying, ‘No one has to know.’”

  “Ben had asked me to rework the numbers, and he didn’t want me to share them with anyone yet. That’s all it was.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  BEN

  He wonders if he imagined him. Leonard. Was he a hallucination of his fever-soaked delirium, or did the tall, wiry man with tufts of white hair actually exist?

  He runs the memory through his mind, but it weighs as much as any of his troubled dreams.

  “Get help,” he’d told Leonard. “Take my car and drive to the nearest phone. Call my wife.”

  He remembers scrawling her number on a scrap of dirty paper, sweat pouring from his brow, stinging his eyes and smudging the ink. But where did he get the paper? The pen? Was that proof that it was a dream?

  He hadn’t had the ability to explore the cabin but knew from his previous visits that there was no pen or paper or telephone or lights. Or heat, except whatever fire he might start in the fireplace. He shivers in the cold.

  After he pressed his way through an unlocked window, the room had spun like he was stuck on a forever merry-go-round. He’d circled around and around and around until he drifted off. Then some unknown quantity of liquid time had passed and he opened his eyes. Leonard was standing over him.

  “Your car door is open,” he’d said.

  Afternoon sunlight made the shadows appear longer, sharper. Made Leonard look tall and skinny with a tiny head. Impossible. He can’t remember much else about his features, but he remembers the way he talked. Slowly. Or was that just how it seemed, sprawled on the floor, burning up with fever, with the taste of vomit in his mouth.

  Then he remembers the way he says his “r” in “car.” Like an accent, maybe? Or a speech impediment.

  “Take my keys,” he remembers telling him and thrusting his leaden arms in the air, pointing to somewhere in the room where he’d guessed the keys had fallen, as the room began to orbit around him. Spinning.

  But did Leonard take his keys? Or was Leonard as real as the thirty-foot lizards, black as night, he’d seen at the mouth of a cave? Turning from side to side, like the keel of a canoe. Those were surely of a dream.

  “Once I used to,” he remembers Leonard saying. Once I used to what? He searches for the memory, but he cannot remember what happened before or after those words. Was that proof of a dream?

  Water. That would prove that Leonard had been here. Not a dream. He remembers Leonard brought in buckets of water. Maybe it came from the well fed by a natural spring a few hundred yards down the trail. He thinks he remembers Leonard pouring several paper cups and lining them up in a perfect row on the nightstand.

  He had a memory that Leonard gave him a handful of pills—“Leftover antibiotics,” he’d said—and Ben had gulped them down.

  If Leonard was real, there would be paper cups on the nightstand. Pills.

  In the blackness of the night, he reaches out. Gingerly feels the air with his fingertips. Touches a paper cup. His body shakes with chills again, but this time he controls it. Bears down hard on the trembling and wills it to stop. He grasps the cup in his hand and brings it to his lips.

  Water.

  Then he remembers saying, “You know how to drive a car, Leonard?”

  Leonard rubs his chin. “Once I used to.�
��

  Once I used to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ben is wearing a white button-down, untucked, and a pair of dark jeans. He’s sitting on the couch in my office, and in this minute-long clip from the Final Recovery folder, I see myself walk over and stiffly sit beside him, my posture slumped as though I’m trying to make myself smaller. The words I say are so quiet that the microphone barely picks them up.

  “I think we’re broken . . .”

  I seem relaxed, as though I’ve rehearsed it, even though I hadn’t. As though I’m only telling him about the amount of caffeine I consumed in order to complete the NASA presentation by three that morning.

  I seem certain about it, but inside I’m a bundle of nerves, riddled with uneasiness. Hoping he’ll resist. Or protest. Make me change my mind.

  He looks like someone has just knocked the wind out of him. There’s confusion in his eyes, like maybe he thinks I’m kidding. Then it registers and his jaw slackens.

  “What do you want to do?”

  I didn’t know how to answer because I never considered divorce. Until I did. I can’t pinpoint when things shifted. A year ago, maybe. It would be easy if it were one thing—an argument, a fight, or an unreasonable decision he made—but there wasn’t any one thing. Things were good, then okay. Then bad for so many months I didn’t even notice we weren’t limping along anymore. We were broken.

  “Neither of us has been happy in a long time,” I say.

  The words seem to crush him, yet his voice is tender. “I know.”

  “When was the last time we spent any time together? Or we were happy when we did?”

  He draws a deep breath. “It’s been a while. But we’re both at a place in our lives and careers where things are stressful . . . we’re building things.”

  “And when we are together, we can’t ever seem to agree anymore. Everything is a battle.”