Mirror in the Sky

by Aditi Khorana

  In Connecticut, we were all alone, adrift in a sea of whiteness and wealth, and it really did feel like a sea I was drowning in. I felt as though I had to paddle as hard as I could, every day, just to survive. We were different here—it was obvious from the start. My father and I looked like no one else, for one, and on a near-regular basis, tension over money hung over us, a thickly, discomfiting humidity, sticking to our skin, marking us with its heaviness. But perhaps the worst of it was that here, we had no extended family. We just had us.

  “I think this should do it,” I said, handing my father the red plastic basket containing highlighters and pens, loose-leaf sheets and spiral-bound notebooks.

  “What can we do to make you feel better?” my father asked me after he paid for the supplies. “Do you want me to talk to Mrs. Treem?”

  “Dad, ugh, no! She’s such an idiot. She’s just going to make things worse.”

  Mrs. Treem was my guidance counselor, a woman so caught up in wanting to appear to be relatable and current to the students she dispensed advice to that she came off more as a pathetic poser than as a voice of any sort of authority at school.

  I turned to my father now. He had always been the more sensitive one of my parents, the one who genuinely wanted to fix things. My mother, on the other hand, was my best friend—my other best friend besides Meg. She commiserated with me and came up with grand schemes to distract me from whatever was at hand. But my father was grounded, practical, and too naive to realize that practical solutions couldn’t solve the problems faced by an American high school student with no friends.

  Nick and Halle were standing by the newspaper stand when we walked out of the store. She was wearing cutoffs and sandals and a tight white tank top, her golden hair whipping around her face like a blaze. I walked a little faster as we passed them and tried not to make eye contact, as though speed and silence could serve as a much-needed invisibility cloak, but then I heard Nick’s slightly throaty voice.

  “Oh hey . . . Tara.”

  I was already by the car, but I forced myself to turn around. He was resting his elbow on Halle’s shoulder. Since last spring, they had been perpetually tied together in a way that made me simultaneously jealous and fascinated.

  “Getting ready for school on Monday?” He smiled at us, waving sheepishly at my father, who nodded back in acknowledgment. Halle inspected the newsstand as he talked, her hand resting in his back pocket.

  “Yeah. Just getting some supplies,” I mumbled, looking away from my father’s dusty gray Honda, trying to distance myself from a car that must have looked to Halle and Nick like garbage on wheels.

  “Crazy, this stuff with that new galaxy, huh?”

  “It’s not a galaxy, you idiot.” Halle laughed. But her eyes were fixed on him, refusing to acknowledge me.

  “A planet, whatever. My parents have been glued to the TV. Did you hear the news today about the signal?”

  “What signal?” I asked, genuinely curious now.

  “You haven’t heard yet. She hasn’t heard!” He turned to Halle. “Check your phone! It’s some seriously crazy stuff.”

  I stood there before them, tongue-tied and yet unable to look away. It was an unusually hot day, and the sidewalk was like a cement baking stone, but the heat somehow complemented them, making them sparkle even more then usual. It was hard not to notice the gleam of sweat on Nick’s upper lip, the dewy glow of Halle’s décolletage.

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I’ll see you both on Monday.”

  “Yeah. Junior year. See you there.” He smiled that electric smile that for some reason always made me think of an Anne Sexton quote I had read in freshman-year English, “being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.” I quickly got into the car and couldn’t even bring myself to roll down the window until we were well on our way down Post Road.

  “They seem nice,” my father said, turning on the radio.

  “They’re fine,” I said, rummaging through the plastic bag of school supplies to stop my hands from shaking.

  I hadn’t spoken to Nick since the eighth grade, when we were assigned to do a mock presidential debate for our social studies class. It had been almost three years since he had seemed to notice me, since we had dressed up as Barack and Michelle Obama and recited speeches together. (I had always wondered if I had been assigned this role because I was the only person of color in the entire class.)

  Since that last contact, I went to school, swim practice, yearbook club. I talked to Meg on the phone, and I watched the lives of those whom I considered charmed unfold from a safe distance. In particular, I watched Nick. I observed him day after day, joking around with Jimmy Kaminsky and Hunter Caraway in the student center, listened eagerly to the speeches he gave during student council elections, smiled as he dazzled our teachers, and despaired at the way he endlessly flirted with Halle. I knew that his eyes were hazel, with yellow flecks. That when he was concentrating on something, he bit his lip and drummed his fingers on any available surface. That he liked soft pretzels with yellow mustard and practical jokes and soccer. I knew all this not because he had told me, but because I had studied him as though I were getting a Ph.D. in Nick Osterman studies. What I didn’t know till that day was that he actually remembered my name.

  The sound blaring through my father’s lo-fi car speakers brought me back to the moment. On NPR, Oliver Spiegel was interviewing a NASA scientist.

  “For our listeners tuning in now, explain to us what the Arecibo message is.”

  “Certainly. The Arecibo message was a radio broadcast that we sent into space a good forty years ago. We aimed it at the globular star cluster M13. We calculated that it would take twenty-five thousand light-years to reach its destination, but it would seem that the message was intercepted by the inhabitants of our newly discovered planet. B612 is what astronomers have named it, Terra Nova is what most laypeople are calling it, and within twenty-four hours of discovering it, we’re seemingly getting a communication signal from there.”

  “And how can we be sure that it was intercepted?”

  “Because of the response transmission we received this morning.”

  “And explain to us what the response was.”

  “Well, interestingly, it’s a radio signal that’s almost identical to the Arecibo message.”

  “The exact same signal?”

  “Well, no. And this is the important thing to note. It’s very close, but with a couple of tiny variations. So tiny that they wouldn’t even be discernible if we weren’t paying close attention, but different enough. It’s almost as though it’s been replicated for our benefit, but slightly modified in order to let us know that yes, we received your message, and here is our response to it.”

  “And we’re certain that Terra Nova is where that response signal is coming from?”

  “Once we were able to pinpoint the exact location of Terra Nova—which we recently learned is similar in size and scope to Earth, we aimed the Allen Telescope Array at the SETI Institute—that stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—toward the planet. As you may or may not know, we’ve been monitoring radio signals in the universe for some time now, but since the discovery of Terra Nova, we knew exactly where to look for a possible transmission. So yes, the radio signal is coming to us from Terra Nova.”

  “What does this radio transmission tell us?”

  “It tells us there is a strong possibility that intelligent life exists on that planet. They managed to intercept the Arecibo signal—we’re not quite sure when or how—but this is perhaps their way of letting us know they’re here. It could be their way of saying hello. B612 is still too far away for us to travel to—at least for now, given our limited technology—but continued communication with them will allow us to learn more about the planet and its inhabitants, and that’s incredibly exciting.”

  “Terra Nova—the newly dis
covered Earth-like planet that we’ve received a radio transmission from. Back with more after this break.”

  We pulled into our driveway just as the broadcast cut to a promo for the weekend lineup. We lived in a tiny yellow Cape Cod–style house across the street from Riverside Station. A lone tree draped the front porch in a curtain of pepper berries. While many of my classmates lived on sprawling estates with driveways that unspooled like black grosgrain ribbons, my daily journey from the main street to our front door was a mere few steps.

  “It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” I asked my father, feeling a grin spreading over my face for the first time in days.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gently removed the key from the ignition and turned his head to inspect the edges of our lawn, embroidered with my mother’s pink azalea. The expression on his face scared me. He looked around without a glint of recognition in his eyes, as though it was the first time he had ever encountered this particular lawn, this very driveway, as though the home before him wasn’t his own.

  He turned to look at the bay window of our living room, and slowly, the recognition of where we were returned to his eyes. “Your mother’s probably sitting in front of the TV watching all of this right now,” he commented wryly. I followed his gaze, noticing that the television was indeed on and that my mother was sitting on the sofa before it, her knees drawn up to her chest.

  Just then, my phone rang, Meg’s name glowing on the screen.

  “Meg! When should I come over? I have to see you off, girl!”

  “Yeah . . . listen, I know we had plans to meet today, but it’s gotten really crazy with packing and stuff . . .” Her tone was flat, and at the sound of it, my heart sank.

  “Really? I can drop by for, like, ten minutes. I just want to say goodbye . . .”

  “I don’t think that’s gonna work. It’s just waaay too crazy right now. I’m not even done with all my shopping, and I’m headed to the airport tonight. So . . . just wanted to say bye.”

  “Oh. Okay,” I said. I could hear the defensiveness in my tone, and we were both quiet for a minute before Meg broke the silence.

  “I probably won’t call you right away when I get there. I’ll be busy with my host family and orientation and all that.”

  “Just send me a text to let me know you got in safe,” I told her. Then quietly I added, “I’ll miss you,” and I felt the sting of fresh tears in my eyes as I got out of the car, pausing in the drive as my father continued to the door.

  I could hear Meg take a deep breath before she went on. “Listen, I don’t want you to be upset or anything, but things are going to be different with us from now on,” she said. There was a casual flightiness in her voice that made me flinch.

  “Different how?” I asked.

  “A lot can happen in a year, Tara. And I think I might come back from Argentina a different person. I just want you to get used to that idea. We might not be the way we were when I return.”

  “Are you serious? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean . . . I’m going to be on my own, in a foreign city. And you’re going to be . . . here. I just don’t want you to be hurt, you know . . . if we grow apart.”

  “So you’re ditching me?”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way, okay?”

  “And what way am I supposed to take it, Meg?”

  Meg sighed loudly before she continued in a patronizing voice, rushing me off the phone. “I don’t want to fight, okay? And anyway, I don’t have time for drama right now. I’ve gotta go. Maybe I’ll send you a postcard,” she said before she hung up the phone.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. It was pathetic enough admitting to myself that Meg’s departure made me a nobody, but growing apart? Maybe she would send me a postcard? How could Meg, who had been my best friend since the moment I had arrived in Greenwich, be so heartless? I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to be that person—a junior, crying to myself the day before school started.

  I ran inside, wanting nothing more than to drown myself in whatever the networks were saying about Terra Nova. In that moment, it was the kind of news that sparkled like a piece of broken glass in the sand, catching the momentary light of the sun, distracting me with its infinitesimal brilliance.

  THREE

  “DID you hear?” My mother looked up at me with alarm in her bright hazel eyes as I entered the house. The soothing chime of the BBC’s opening intro played in the background. “They’re trying to tell us something. Or at least that’s what these reporters are saying . . . but . . . I’m not so sure . . .” She shook her head. “Come sit with me.” She smiled, patting the cushion next to her.

  For a moment, she glanced at me with concern in her eyes, but she quickly turned her head toward the voices on TV, as though in a trance. She looked like a child with her oversized oatmeal heather sweater pulled over her shins. My mother was always cold, even in the middle of summer. It could have been because she was preternaturally thin, with no body fat to keep her warm. Of all the mothers at Brierly, she looked as though childbearing and rearing had barely taken a toll on her, either physically or emotionally. On some days, I wasn’t sure if it really had. But she was also the youngest mom I knew. She was just barely twenty-four when she had me.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?” I asked her, curling up beside her, pressing my feet under hers.

  She turned to me for a minute and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. I thought she was going to ask me if I was okay, but instead she simply responded, “I called in sick.” Then she turned back to the TV.

  “You don’t look sick to me,” I said, but what I was really doing, if I had to be honest with myself, was trying to engage her. I wanted to tell her about Meg, about what had just happened, and it was as though she was completely oblivious to anything that didn’t have to do with the discovery of this new planet.

  “I’m not. I had Christy sub for me. I can’t possibly teach toddlers ballet with all this going on!” I looked to my father, who raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Jennifer, it has nothing to do with you,” he said quietly, tentatively.

  “If you only listened closely, you would realize that it has everything to do with us!” There was an uncharacteristic edge to her voice that said, Stop bothering me. Stop asking me questions. Just stop.

  My mother taught ballet six days a week. She worked mostly at the local community center and the Y, but occasionally she taught private lessons, complaining the entire time about her students’ lack of talent.

  “It’s a real discipline, you know?” she told me once. “Practicing ten hours a day, cross-training, eating nothing but almonds and grapefruit and coffee . . . most people, they just don’t have what it takes. I mean . . . I did, but then, you know . . .” And then her voice trailed off. Something told me not to ask any questions, as though even the smallest sigh or gesture in that moment was like taunting a rattlesnake.

  I looked at my mother now, grateful that I had inherited her slim dancer’s build. Brierly was hard enough as it was—I couldn’t imagine going through four years of it like Moira Edwards, the “big girl” in our class who spent all her lunches in the library, reading. I felt a sharp stab of panic when I thought of Moira—would I spend all my lunches in the library too now that Meg was gone?

  “Doesn’t it just completely blow your mind?” my mother pressed. Her eyes didn’t leave the screen.

  “It’s pretty crazy,” I said, but in that moment, all I could think about was Meg, about the things that she said to me. I couldn’t understand the tone of her voice, her casual callousness. It was as though she had transformed into a different person overnight.

  I got up and ventured to the kitchen, opening the fridge to peruse shelves of produce. I found a Tupperware container of leftovers from the restaurant. It was filled with spinach pakoras, soggy but still appealing, and I despondently took
a bite before I rejoined my mother on the sofa, the container still in my hand.

  “Do you want me to heat those?” my father asked. I shook my head.

  “There are some carrots and hummus in the fridge too, in case either of you want a healthy snack,” my father said.

  “Did you buy my granola bars?” my mother called out.

  “Yes.” My father laughed. “As usual, I bought all your favorite snacks and stocked the pantry,” he said.

  My mother smiled at him before she turned to me. “He loves it, you know? His favorite thing in the world is running around doing errands.”

  I smiled back. She was like that sometimes—mercurial. Her moods could change on a whim, and just like that, her irritation had somehow alchemized to delight.

  “Well, if I didn’t, who would?” he teased. My mother giggled in response, but I was caught in the vortex of the news, and its medicinal effect was hard to ignore.

  “What do you think they’re like? I wonder if they’re just like us,” I said.

  “Do you want to know what I think?” my mother asked, even though we all knew that the question was rhetorical. “I think maybe they didn’t even mean to send that message to us. We certainly didn’t mean to send a message to them forty years ago. Maybe we accidentally intercepted something that was never intended for us to begin with. We act as though we’re at the center of everything, but we’re not.”

  This felt like a surprisingly insightful admission on the state of humanity from my mother, who was often so focused on her own reactions to things that she barely took note of what was going on around her.

  “Why are you so moved by this nonsense anyway, Jennifer?” My father always pronounced my mother’s name Jen-ee-fer. I think, for a time when they first met, she found it charming, but I noticed that lately she frowned every time he said it that way.

  “I don’t know why you’re not, Sudeep.” Even though their discussion was making me tense, I realized it was true. My father had been quiet since the announcement yesterday, which was surprising. His very reason for coming to this country, after all, was to study physics. He had arrived in New York seventeen years ago on a balmy summer day not dissimilar to this one, in order to complete his postdoctoral work at Columbia. But when he learned my mother was pregnant, he dropped out of school and started working in the kitchen of a restaurant in Jackson Heights, the same restaurant he would work at for a decade, until we moved to Connecticut so that he could open a place of his own. My father was practical—he believed in the things he could see, or in ideas that could be proven empirically, and he made sure to express this sentiment to my mother and me on a regular basis.