The Crossing
Page 27
I’d been walking slowly, taking in the crowd. But at hearing that name I couldn’t help but walk faster. My legs burned and felt full up, ready to burst from my skin. I wanted to break into a run. But still, everywhere around me, the party continued, oblivious to me and, seemingly, everything else in the world. The cars were all empty and the headlights still burned and everyone was out and talking and cluttering up the street and the policeman stood among a crowd drinking a beer and, now and again, looking down at his watch and then looking up at the sky in the direction of the launch pad.
People called out to me as I made my way along. “Come and have a beer,” some of them said. “Party’s over here,” some young man yelled as I passed. I only kept my head up and looked down the long stretch of road and I thought I saw my parents ahead of me, walking in the distance, heading to the launch pad.
So I walked faster. The crowd was growing more and more excited as the countdown came crackling in over radios and through cell phones. People swirled about, cheering and full of revelry as I swerved through and around them. I was still bleeding. And maybe I had lost too much blood, because I began to know that, if I could be fast enough, I could catch up to my parents. And if I could catch up to them, I could grab their hands and hold them and never let them go and, once again, we would all be a family again. All I had to do was catch up to them. Follow the path undistracted just as I had done since leaving Oklahoma, since leaving Tommy.
There was only the path ahead.
My arms and legs rose faster, taking me from a fast walk into a slow run. And then, up ahead, I saw my parents again. This time they were farther away, rising up a tall drawbridge that sat in the middle of the water. They smiled and my father carried five-year-old me on his shoulders and, for an instant, I was both versions of me. I was the seventeen-year-old chasing the ghosts of my parents and, simultaneously, I was the child riding atop my father’s shoulders, looking out over the water from atop the bridge, seeing the glimmering lights of the city on the far shore and the flat surface of the water.
“Dad!” I called out suddenly.
And still I ran and still my parents were always ahead of me, beyond the length of my reach. When I reached the far side of the bridge my parents were far down the road, farther than they had ever been. My body was beginning to tire. The blood still poured, but I continued to ignore it.
My heart was a drum pounding against the thin walls of my chest. My lungs pushed and pulled and gave a little less with each breath. My legs were filling with sand. But still I ran. People began to clear a path for me, not really knowing why, only knowing that I was desperate. And then, for reasons I would never know, some people began to cheer as I raced past them. Perhaps it was the party atmosphere that did it. Too much alcohol and beer and food, too much celebration of the launch of the Europa mission, too many good vibes and too much humanity. Whatever the reason, the cheers began small and grew like a storm rising up out of the west until, all of a sudden, the crowd was parted and there was a line of people on both sides, applauding me as I passed and calling ahead for people to clear the way. I was like a runner at the end of a marathon, carried not by my body but by the crowd around me, being willed to the finish line when I wanted nothing more than to give up, to stop and stand and let the pain of fatigue recede, to get my breath back, to breathe and laugh and do anything else.
But there was no time.
I lost sight of my parents and, eventually, even the crowd of people around me receded. There was only me and the earth and the rocket sitting on the launch pad at some distance ahead of me. On and on and on I went, losing more of myself with each stride. But then the pain went away. Suddenly and without warning, there was Tommy, waiting for me.
TWENTY
Tommy knew the time was always going to come when they would catch up to me. He had hoped it would be after the launch, though he didn’t know why. Maybe that would be easier. Maybe then everything would make sense. Maybe after the launch I could simply keep going, Tommy thought, disappear and avoid the war.
But suddenly, he and Gannon had reached the road to Canaveral. It hadn’t taken Gannon long to get another car. Not a police car, just a cheap rental, but he wouldn’t be stopped. The line of cars stretching over the long waterway to Cape Canaveral had come to a full stop miles before the Cape itself. There would be only walking from there on out.
“Let’s go,” Gannon said. He’d pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched it off.
“We won’t find her,” Tommy said.
“You wouldn’t have come if you believed that.”
He stepped out of the car and shut the door. After a moment, Tommy followed. He jogged up alongside Gannon, scanning the crowd as they walked, not sure if he hoped to see her or not. “What are you going to do when you find her?”
“Take her back,” Gannon said. “She’s got a responsibility.”
“She won’t go,” Tommy said.
“I’ll make her,” Gannon replied. His pace was even and heavy, like the heartbeat of an elephant, like time itself.
* * *
The audience of humanity was everywhere. Partiers, revelers, cars filled with children and old souls, picnics spaced here and there along the edge of road, small boats floating in the water along the road, decorated with all manner of colors and lights and symbols. There were dancers and the smell of food cooking on grills. There was the smell of beer and marijuana and a thousand other scents. Children raced around dressed like astronauts carrying toy rockets powered by sparklers and imagination. Music spilled out from inside cars and rolled into the thick, warm air of Florida in January.
“Fools,” Gannon said, almost at a growl. He spat on the ground as they walked. His eyes swung back and forth like those of a wolf on the hunt.
“I think it’s nice,” Tommy replied.
“Nobody wants to be a part of the world they were born into. Everybody wants to be in some other place at some other time, as if that’ll fix the way their lives turned out. Pop told me that once. Did I ever tell you that?” His voice wavered.
“No,” Tommy said.
He shook his head as a group of children passed carrying a toy rocket ship. “And then they teach it to their children. They teach them to live in a world that doesn’t exist, to think of things that aren’t the way they are.” He spat again. “No wonder everything’s falling apart.”
“Virginia won’t come with you,” Tommy said.
“I’m not going to ask her,” Gannon replied. “I’ll take her back with me and she’ll go and enlist like everyone else. Or she’ll wind up in jail. Those are the only two options for her.”
“I’ll take her place,” Tommy said.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Gannon replied. He stopped for a moment, catching sight of a girl who looked more than a little like me. She was the right height and her hair looked the same, but then the girl turned to face Tommy and Gannon and they both saw that it wasn’t me. “We’ve all got to walk into our own destinies,” Gannon said. “You should know that by now.”
He continued walking forward.
It was then that Tommy slipped away into the crowd.
* * *
His heart drummed in his ears as he made his way through the crowd. “Virginia?” he called out. “Virginia!” Sometimes people turned and looked at him, trying to decide why he had come this far and what he could be searching for, but they inevitably turned back. Over and over and over again he found everyone except me.
When I found him, Tommy was standing on the edge of the waterway looking off in the direction of the shuttle, waiting patiently as the last minutes until the countdown slid away. He looked different than I remembered him. As if he was no longer the brother I had known for all of my seventeen years, as if, in the small time away, he had decided to be something other than the other half of me. And I think that was when I realize
d, truly understood, that Tommy and I would never be able to make things work between us. After a lifetime of sharing the world, we had grown apart. Little by little. Day by day. Him carving out his own slice of the world and me folding in on my own, buried in my memories. The both of us had always been walking away from one another, even as we walked together for all those years. All that chasing, all that trying to stay together, it had only ever been a type of stalling, just a way to try to cling to sand that was destined to slip between our fingers.
But that’s the way it is with siblings, with family. We live together even as we grow apart. Babies become children, children become teenagers, teenagers become adults, and all the while we build worlds of memory and thought and imagination inside ourselves. We build oceans of life under the surface of ourselves. And those around us only get to see what they choose to see, never what we are.
But just then, I saw my brother for who he was. And I knew that we would not stay together. We couldn’t stay together. In fact, we had left one another ages ago. No matter how much I remembered the way things were, things can simply be the way they are.
Tommy and I had spent our time together. Now it was all going to end.
Tommy continued watching in the direction of the rocket. I knew what he was trying to do, just like I knew everything else about my brother. He tried to remember our father’s letters: all the dreaming the man had done about Europa and the space program and the importance of imagining beyond the bonds of the earth, but all Tommy could come up with were his own small thoughts on things.
“You made it,” I said, walking up beside him.
“You knew I would,” Tommy replied, still staring forward, watching the crowds, the bustling night, the uncertain future. “You’re hurt,” Tommy said, looking at my bloody clothes.
“We all are,” I said. Then, “It’s going to be beautiful. Those rockets...they light up like nothing else. First there’s that flash of light. Then the smoke just kind of billows out like a cloud. It’s like—”
“Stop,” Tommy replied. He was cold all of a sudden. He folded his arms across his chest and made his hands into fists and, finally, he turned and looked at me.
For a moment he seemed surprised, as if he had expected me to look like someone else, as if he had expected to look on me and see something other than a reflection of himself. Or perhaps that was simply my own feelings reflected back at me in Tommy’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry for what?” Tommy replied. “I need to hear you say it.”
“Tommy...”
“Say it, Virginia.”
Nearby a family of five stood together and cheered at something coming in over the radio. Whether it was news of the launch or news of the war or news about The Disease, it was hard to say. They were simply a family, and here, at what was sure to be the end of everything, they were somehow happy.
“I’m sorry for sending you the fake letter,” I finally said. “But you have to understand that it was the only way I could get you to come down here. Mom and Dad would have been here.”
“But they’re not here! They’re dead! They’ve always been dead. Don’t you understand that?” His voice was louder than he had ever heard it. So loud that it almost rose up over the sound of the crowd around us as the countdown to the rocket launch began in earnest. There were only moments left before it all came to pass. “They’re not here anymore. We’re not their children anymore. We’re no one’s children. All we have is each other. That’s all we’ve ever had. But you’ve never been able to believe that. You’ve never been able to understand that. You’ve spent your whole life looking for them, remembering those letters over and over and over again, as if reading them would somehow change the fact that everything is the way it is.” He spread his arms wide, as if taking in the whole world. “But nothing can change the way it is. This is the world, Virginia! This is what the world is always going to be!”
“Tommy...”
“They’re dead, Virginia! They’re always going to be dead!” His lip trembled as he spoke. Whether it was exhaustion, sadness or just the weight of a lifetime pouring through him, I couldn’t tell. The weight of life varies so much from person to person. For Tommy, not remembering so much, I imagine that life weighs more for him than it did for me. After all, remembering everything lets you create the world as it was, without ever losing sleep over the ways you think it could have been. The burden of forgetting the unforgettable moments of your life had to be unbearable for my brother. I understood that, there at the end of our journey together. His imagination over everything that his mind had let him lose would forever haunt him, especially as he watched me carry it all, day by day, keeping our parents inside me, with him never able to hear our father’s voice or remember the feel of our mother’s touch.
And through all that, the one thing Tommy ever had was the war, the belief that he could go off and be special the way the television commercials and Mitch the Bitch and everyone else in this world said he should be. He could never run off like the other Embers because that’s what I would have done, and even more than he wanted life, my brother wanted to be different than me. He wanted his moment in this world, and I had made him believe that he’d finally gotten it. And then I’d taken it all away.
“I didn’t do it to hurt you, Tommy.” I took a seat in the low grass overlooking the waterway. Around us the crowd grew in excitement. Someone set off fireworks. A small group of policemen went over and warned them against it, but there were too many people for anyone to make a difference. So things continued on. Fireworks lit up the sky. Music filled the air. A brother and sister couldn’t find enough space in the world to hold them both.
“What’s the longest we’ve ever been apart?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” Tommy replied.
“Exactly. You don’t remember. But I do. Three days, thirteen hours and forty-three minutes. That’s how long we’ve been apart.”
“Doesn’t seem like any time at all,” Tommy said, scratching the back of his head. His body was still tight, unwilling to let go of the anger.
“Not unless you can remember every minute of it. Every second,” I said. “You’ve never understood that, even though I’ve told it to you a dozen times.”
“No you haven’t,” Tommy said.
“Yes I have,” I replied. “Don’t make me tell you the exact dates and times.”
Tommy sighed a heavy, frustrated sigh that sounded like the whole world was sitting on his shoulders. “I get it,” Tommy said. “You’re special. I’ve always gotten that. You don’t need to remind me of it.”
“It’s not—”
“Let me finish,” Tommy said. He looked down at his hands, and then up at the sky. “Dad always talked about how special the Europa mission and everything was. At least, that’s what his letters said, right? But I don’t really remember. I have to trust that what you tell me about those letters is true. I have to have faith in you, or else I don’t have anything that I can believe. But I do. I believe in you.
“I’ve always looked out for you, always kept you safe. And I did it because I’ve always known that you were special, that there was something big waiting for you, that one day you’d go off and do something. So it was my job to protect you. My job to keep the bullies away and to make sure you didn’t go off on your own to some foster parents that we didn’t know, where I couldn’t protect you.” Tommy finally turned and looked at me. “That’s why I used to always try to get you to run away with me, because it would have been simpler. And trying to keep you safe until...well, until you could do whatever it is you’re supposed to do was all I had. But you would never come.”
“We never could have made it on our own, Tommy,” I said. I reached out and touched my brother’s hand. It felt like years had passed since the last time I did that.
He flinched and pulled his back.
“Time’s up,” a voice said before I could answer Tommy.
It was Jim Gannon.
He came out of the crowd like something old and immortal, like a force of nature that could never have been stopped even if it had wanted to stop itself. And of course, that was truth. Gannon couldn’t be anything other than what he was. “Okay,” he said, walking over to us.
“It’s fine,” Tommy said, standing up and stepping between Gannon and myself. It was more instinct than anything else. There was no plan, no intention, only action. He could have been some animal that wanted nothing more than to protect its own. “It’s fine,” Tommy said. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to turn her in.”
“You know me better than that by now, don’t you, Tommy?” Gannon said. “We all got to see things through to the end. Pop taught me that a long time ago, and I’m not about to let that fade away now. Not after all this.”
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Tommy said.
“What happened to Bill?” I asked.
“He’s gone on,” Gannon said after a hard swallow. “Wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been out here running across this country after you.”
“The Disease?”
“It don’t matter,” Gannon replied. “I did my duty. I was a...” Something caught in his throat. “I was a good son to my old man. I never put him in a home. I loved him and took care of him right up until the end. That’s what children do. That’s what this whole world has gotten wrong, but not me. I did my duty. And now you’re going to do yours.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” I said, feeling my stomach twist itself with fear. “But I’m not going to the war. And I’m not waiting around for The Disease. I’m leaving, and Tommy is coming with me.” I placed my hand inside my coat pocket again. There was blood and pain, but there was also the gun.