In the Quick

by Kate Hope Day

  In the Quick is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Kate Hope Day

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780525511250

  Ebook ISBN 9780525511267

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Alexis Capitini, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover art: Jeremy Geddes

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part II

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part III

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part IV

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Kate Hope Day

  About the Author

  QUICK, adj.

  Moving at a high speed: as quick as lightning

  Fast in understanding, thinking, or learning. Mentally agile: a quick mind

  Reacting to stimuli immediately and intensely: quick-tempered

  QUICK, n.

  Characterized by the presence of life. Living persons: the quick and the dead

  The tender flesh of the living body, esp. under the nails: nails bitten down to the quick

  Informally, as by astronauts: the final minutes of life before total oxygen deprivation: in the quick

  I

  1

  Space is cruel to the human body. We aren’t machines, rockets with metal skin and polymer bones, rovers with microchips for guts. Our bodies are full of fluid and soft tissue. We aren’t built for space. Our thoughts, the things we know, are sturdier in zero gravity, but they originate in gray matter. They change shape, even disappear in the face of disorientation, dehydration, oxygen deprivation. Because ideas require bodies too, hands, lips, a tongue, ears. Otherwise they’re about as useful as dust motes drifting in the air.

  When I was twelve years old and watched test rockets spark through the sky outside my aunt Regina’s house, I imagined their destinations—perfectly round planets colored red and pink and white. I pictured spacesuits, puffy and bright against a black expanse. It didn’t occur to me to think about the bodies inside those suits, the brains inside those helmets.

  Not until a frozen day in November when the news came that the Inquiry explorer was in trouble. It was on a six-year mission, the first of its kind, to travel farther in our solar system than any manned mission had gone before. Inquiry was special; more than a decade of research at the National Space Program had gone into building the explorer, and it was manned by four of the most talented astronauts in the world.

  It was a Saturday, late morning. I sat in the window seat in the living room with a book on my lap: New History of Energy. A chapter was devoted to my uncle and his famous fuel cell. The book smelled like him—like metal shavings and pen ink. Since he’d died I’d read the chapter at least twenty times.

  I turned a page. Outside, rockets launched from the NSP campus lit up the hard gray sky. The sound of the TV came from the living room; a man was talking about Inquiry. I went into the hallway to listen and my limbs went cold. The explorer had lost all propulsion control just as it was beginning its orbit around Saturn.

  The newscaster lowered his voice and began talking about the minutes leading up to when the explorer lost power. He said its fuel cells were suspected. But that couldn’t be right because my uncle had invented those cells. I moved closer, my stomach a heavy weight. He didn’t say anything more about the cells. Instead he talked about the Inquiry crew, and I grew impatient because I already knew everything about them, where they grew up, how old they were, what they had studied in school. If they had siblings and how many. Their hobbies and what they liked to read—I could tell you every detail.

  The newscaster began reading from a statement issued from NSP. They were in constant communication with Inquiry, it said, and were working around the clock to troubleshoot the suspected fuel cell malfunction. Inquiry had recently received an unmanned supply capsule, the second of twelve scheduled to reach it at six-month intervals, and had ample food and water and an open line of communication with Earth. NSP was confident a solution was imminent. The crew were not in any immediate danger and had been in contact with their families. Then the man stopped talking about Inquiry and the weather report came on.

  I returned to my spot in the window and called the dogs, Reacher and Duster, to come sit with me, but neither came. I felt chilled and stiff, and pulled my sweater to my chin. The words in New History of Energy swam on the page. I got up, went into the kitchen, and opened the closet door.

  Inside was my aunt’s new vacuum, a sleek silver machine with a nozzle like a two-headed snake. I used a knife to disconnect the nozzle, take out the screws, and remove the plates and filters. When I lifted the motor’s cover the smell of dust and paper filled my nose. The fan inside was a perfect plastic flower, with curved gray petals and a small red center that made a soft clicking sound when I turned it with my finger. Clockwise, and then counterclockwise. I imagined that when the flower moved forward I was turning time, that night was falling around me. Everyone was asleep and there was no rush. I could look at all the parts of the vacuum and think about how they could be put together differently, combined with other things and made into something new.

 
I imagined that when the flower moved backward time reversed, to before the news about Inquiry. To before my uncle died, when he held me in his lap as he typed on his computer or pored over sheets of paper with faint blue pictures on them. I tried to imagine before that, further back than I could actually remember, to before I came to live with my aunt and uncle. Back to when my parents were alive, but the flower didn’t go that far.

  I let go of the fan and began to untangle the wires coiled underneath. I wanted to understand how the suction mechanism worked, to see if it could be reversed. But I should have pulled the vacuum into my room because my cousin John found me before I had finished looking at everything. He called to my aunt, Look what June’s done! And I had to push all the parts into the closet and shut the door.

  I went back to the window seat, opened my book, and pretended I’d never left. But after only a few minutes my aunt Regina came into the room. She was wearing a red wool dress with sleeves like upside-down tulips, and her hair was dark and shining.

  June? Her voice was sharp.

  She pulled the curtains back and saw New History of Energy in my lap. She’d told me to leave my uncle’s books alone.

  There’s no point staying in here all day, she said. Go outside with your airplane—

  It’s too cold.

  —or finish your Monopoly game.

  John cheats.

  Her brown eyes were flat, unyielding.

  You know he does, I said.

  She pressed her hair back. Well, it’s hard to win against you, isn’t it?

  I didn’t care about Monopoly. I wanted to ask her about Inquiry.

  I’m going to have to pay to have that vacuum serviced, she said.

  I can put it back together.

  I tried, but—

  It’s easy.

  No, June. It’s not.

  The window rattled; the spark of a rocket lit up the sky.

  It would have been easy for him, I said.

  She sighed. She came closer, sat down. Her shoulders bent in her red dress.

  What’s wrong with Inquiry? I tried to ask in an adult way so she would answer.

  I don’t know.

  They say it’s Uncle’s fault.

  But we know that’s not true.

  Yes.

  Because he didn’t make mistakes, did he? she said.

  She was very close and I could see her charcoal-colored eyelashes, could smell her bright perfume. She studied me like she was looking for something. My eyes, nose, lips. She reached to tug at a knot in my hair, but I pulled my head away.

  Your hair’s tangled, she said, and stood up. Go get your brush.

  2

  When my uncle was alive I used to bring him pieces of things, screws and safety pins and button batteries, wires pulled from a broken stereo, tiny white tiles I loosened from the bathroom floor. He would look at them with a serious face and turn them over in his hands. Once I brought him the inside part of a doorknob and he asked me, What does it do? His voice was soft and precise.

  I imagined turning a doorknob and then the door swinging open. It moves a small thing so you’re able to move a large thing, I said.

  Who moves it?

  I do. With my hand.

  You’re providing the energy, and the doorknob the mechanism?

  You have to have both, I said.

  He smiled. Or it won’t work.

  Exactly.

  Then he opened his desk drawer, brought out some papers, and said, I’ll show you something now. The papers had pictures of a box with wires and tubes inside.

  These are schematics for a new kind of fuel cell, he said. One that will power an explorer to the edge of our solar system. He spread them out and explained how to read them, how to understand the markings for the cell’s dimensions and functions, and decipher the schematics’ key.

  As he talked the box with the wires and tubes transformed in my mind. It became something solid that worked. I could see its moving parts, could see how it turned one kind of energy into another. How it could power something small, like a light bulb or a fan, and also—with many cells working together—something large like an explorer.

  There are only two people in the world who have seen these plans, he said, and winked. You’re the third.

  * * *

  —

  Inquiry was the start of NSP’s Explorer program and the first of many missions that would travel to the farthest reaches of our solar system—and maybe even beyond it, my uncle said. This trip would take six years, and it would be powered by his fuel cells. But on the day of Inquiry’s launch he wasn’t there to see it. He was lying in a cold white room on the sixth floor of the veterans’ hospital. Everyone was crowded around him. My aunt, my cousin John, my aunt’s sister. I stood near the window and craned my neck to the sky.

  My aunt and cousin were talking but my uncle was silent and still. Then he said my name softly, June, and everyone drew back. I leaned over his broad, pale face.

  His eyes drifted to the window and then to the clock on the wall. The launch is in forty minutes, he said.

  I looked at my aunt. She was speaking to her sister.

  If you go now you can make it, he said.

  My aunt had already said no that morning when I’d asked to go to the launch. She had said, What’s more important? Your uncle or a piece of metal?

  But now she was occupied with her sister; she was digging in her purse for something to eat for John. I edged past her and looked back at my uncle. His face was white like the sheets but his eyes were dark and bright, and he winked as I ducked quietly into the hall.

  I hurried to the elevator and jammed my thumb on the ground-floor button. In the lobby I pushed through the heavy front doors. Outside the air was icy and the ground hard with frost. I circled around the back of the building and cut across a field so my aunt wouldn’t see.

  The NSP campus was at least a mile away so I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets and ran. My boots crunched through a layer of day-old snow, and the air stung my eyes and nose. After only a few minutes my breath grew quick and tight; a sharp pain pressed against my left rib. My nose ran and the mucus froze on my upper lip. But my uncle’s face hovered in my mind and I kept going, tripping more than running for the last quarter mile.

  I had only a few minutes to spare when the campus came into view, a cluster of buildings and hangars, dark against the flat gray sky. The airfields were just beyond. I skirted a chain-link fence and ran through a hangar where my footsteps made an echo across its smooth floor. The launch pad was framed by the hangar’s open bay door, Inquiry a tiny shining capsule atop its massive red-and-white rocket. Everything was so still I wondered for a second if I’d made a mistake. Then a rumble moved through my body; smoke billowed from the bottom of the rocket. I ran into the field—the snow was thicker here and my boots sank before they hit the shaking earth. My eyes were pinned to the small silver shape atop the rocket but I became aware that someone else was standing in the field too.

  My uncle’s student and protégé James Banovic. He was a few paces away; he wore a large coat but it wasn’t buttoned and it flapped open in the cold wind. His dark curls twisted around his angular face.

  He turned to look at me and a purple bruise marked his right eye like a half moon. Why are you here? he asked.

  Same as you, I said, and he shook his head—he couldn’t hear me over the sound. Same as you! I yelled.

  He came closer. How is he? he asked.

  I thought of my uncle’s face against the white sheets of his hospital bed and said okay, even though it wasn’t true.

  He kicked the snow hard and it seemed like he was going to walk away, but then he didn’t. The second-stage rockets fired and I saw his lips move slightly—I think he was counting. I counted too, down from one hundred, and when I reached thirty
the air seemed to vibrate against my cheeks, to buffet my body forward and backward. There was the briefest pause, and James’s lips stopped and his body went rigid. The rocket shot up and broke the horizon in half and the earth sprang back. I staggered and fell forward as the sky filled with fire and smoke and a beating roar.

  He held out a hand and pulled me up—his fingers were freezing. Then he stalked away.

  I walked back to the hospital fast with my burning hands pushed deep in my pockets. I wanted to get to a television, to hear what NSP was saying about the launch, and the rendezvous Inquiry would make with a supply station in orbit to stock it further for its six-year mission. I wanted to tell my uncle about the launch.

  But when I got there his eyes were closed; he was asleep and by the end of that day the doctors said he wasn’t going to wake up anymore.

  * * *

  —

  I still collected pieces of things, even though my uncle wasn’t there to show them to. For a while I would make little piles on his desk with the idea he might somehow know they were there. His study was the only room that stayed the same in the house. My aunt was always hanging new curtains, changing the light fixtures, rearranging her paintings and photographs on the walls. Even my bedroom had new pillows, a different rug. But my uncle’s room didn’t change. Its bookcases still bowed with the weight of books and journals. Stacks of paper still teetered on the shiny metal desk and on the floor. His computer still sat by the window, unplugged, its face blank.