“It’s just a community of seekers—young and old. They’re from all over the country, all over the world, really. And they all have questions about Terra Nova. They’re all trying to resolve something in their lives. I feel so lucky to be living in this time of spiritual awakening,” she said, just before I left the room.
Later that day, I did an Internet search on the organization. The people photographed for the website looked unusually cheerful and tan and appeared to spend their hours painting and hiking through the Santa Monica Mountains. I hadn’t decided yet whether it was a cult or not. All I knew was that the fact they weren’t in uniforms had given me a sense of relief, but now I was beginning to wonder if I was deluding myself about who or what they really were.
“Hey, I was wondering . . . what are you reading right now?” Halle changed the subject.
“In class, you mean? Anna Karenina.”
“No, I mean, that thing you do.” Halle giggled.
“What thing?” I asked.
“You’re always sitting in class reading a novel under your desk, on your lap—I’ve seen you doing it for years. How do you even know what’s going on when teachers call on you? You always have an answer.” I had no idea that anyone else knew I did this. I had tried to be discreet, but Halle had noticed. Still, she was wrong on one count.
“Not always. Sometimes I have no idea what the class discussion is about.”
“You’re not missing out. But I’ve always wondered . . . why do you think you do that? Read all through class?”
I shrugged. “I just like to read, I guess.”
Halle squinted at me. “No, that’s not it,” she said. And she was right. It wasn’t. Books were like a shield. They protected me, kept me safely invisible. When I had a book in my hand, people left me alone. It was as though I could observe them at my own discretion, at a distance, but they couldn’t see me. But I didn’t say this to her.
“I mean, it’s not like it’s affected my grades or anything . . .”
She laughed now. “Yeah, that part I know. Treem keeps rubbing it in my face. The fact that you have the highest GPA in our class.”
“Me? She told me you had the highest GPA in our class.”
“Yeah, well, Treem’s a moron.” Halle smiled.
“That’s putting it lightly . . . I’m reading Cat’s Cradle,” I told her.
“Isn’t that on the AP English syllabus for later this semester?”
“Yeah, but sometimes I feel like class discussions ruin books for me. So I read them myself first.”
Halle grinned at me. “You’re amazing, Krishnan,” she said. “And I love Cat’s Cradle. My parents are like a karass. No, wait . . . a duprass. They’re attached at the hip—they’re, like, in Venice right now. What are your parents like?”
I hesitated, unsure of what I could say. “I don’t know . . . They’re just . . . parents, I guess,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. I thought about that day in the student center when Halle had mentioned my hairy legs, the way she was with Sarah Hoffstedt. There were things I would never divulge to Halle, that I would never say to her. I still didn’t trust her—or anyone in that crowd, for that matter.
“Yeah. I know what you mean,” she responded, looking away before she pulled her gym bag into her arms and rummaged through it. I wondered in that moment if she was hiding behind a shield too.
For the next couple of weeks, I walked around with a hollow in the pit of my stomach. I watched my mother make piles of things she was going to take to California. I watched her pack.
“Hey, wanna come keep me company?” she called from her bedroom whenever she saw me in the hallway. I ignored her, still believing that maybe it would all just go away. In the mornings, I left home without saying goodbye, and when I came home late, sometimes she was waiting up for me, a sad smile on her face.
“Looks like you’re having fun with your new friends,” she’d say, or “I missed you today. How was school?” I looked at her blankly before I went to my room and fumed at her.
“She’s delusional, Dad. You have to stop her,” I said to my father, but he just shook his head.
“I’m trying everything I can, Tara,” he told me. There was a sadness in his eyes I had never seen before.
And then a couple of days before Halloween, I realized that I was the one who was delusional. My mother had made up her mind. She was leaving to go to California.
The day of my mother’s flight, I intentionally made plans to go to Nick’s house after school to work on our egg-drop project. By now, late October leaves were accumulating on sidewalks, patchwork pieces of red and orange waiting to be swept away by the wind.
My mother had booked her ticket for California for the day before Halloween, and it made me think about how carefully (and yet poorly) she would sew all my Halloween costumes when I was little, how we would spend weeks deciding what candy we were gong to distribute, how we would open up fun-size packs of M&M’S and she would eat all the reds and browns and I would eat the oranges and greens. We would split the blues and yellows.
I stopped at home to drop off my books, knowing that I would run into my mother, intending to behave as though I didn’t care. The kitchen lights were on when I arrived, and she was standing over the counter, an apron around her waist, her hair tied in a loose bun on top of her head. She was making dinner.
“It’s a red-eye. I don’t have to leave home till about nine. I thought we’d have a last meal together before I take off. Tara . . . please talk to me,” she said, and when I heard her voice crack, I broke, but only slightly.
“I can’t,” I told her, coolly. “I have to go to Nick’s. We’re working on a project together for AP physics.”
She didn’t argue. She was wearing a red dress, a dress I had seen her wear only once before, years ago when we lived in New York.
“I know we’ve never been away from each other for more than a day,” she said.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I cut her off.
“I just need you to know that I’ll miss you and love you. I wish there were another way, but I have to . . .”
“You wish there were another way?” I yelled. “There is another way. It involves you staying home!”
“I think I used to dance to escape it all. I loved that feeling of dancing without abandon, no thoughts in my head except where my feet were, the line of my body. But now I can’t stop thinking . . . about all the possibilities, everything that happened, everything that could have happened. I don’t know how to make it stop. Lately I wonder if I spent all these years trying not to think about the past, trying not to look back. I need to . . . unpack everything that’s happened to me over the course of my life,” she said. “And I need to do that alone.” The way she looked at me, I knew I wasn’t going to change her mind.
I felt something for her then, some precursor to the longing for her that I knew would beset me when she left. I wanted her to be my mother again, for just a minute. I sat down on the counter before her and picked at the slivers of radish and carrot she was chopping for a salad.
“I can’t stay for long. I should head out in half an hour or so.”
She nodded. “How was swim practice?”
“Good. Swimming always makes me feel better,” I lied. Usually I did feel at home in a pool. The familiar humidified scent of chlorine, the cool splash of water underneath my arms, the echo of whistles and voices in the distance—there was nothing like it. But today, it wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough to make me feel better today.
“I birthed you in a pool, you know. Because you’re a Pisces.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re a sensitive soul. An old soul,” she said, looking at me with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m going to miss your birthday this year,” she added.
I looked away
. “What else does it mean?” I asked.
“It’s not just your sun in Pisces, but your Venus and your Mercury too. It makes your Mercury debilitated.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, not that I cared about my Piscean Venus or my debilitated Mercury. I felt debilitated as it was without the planets mocking me. I just wanted to talk to my mother again. It would be nearly the end of the school year the next time I saw her. I would be a year older. Green leaves would be sprouting on trees.
“It means that you sometimes struggle to express yourself, to say the things you really want to say,” she said. “But I suppose we all do.”
I had been wondering more and more how my parents had ever ended up together. My father lived in a world of questions and answers. Obstacles could be scaled. Problems could be unpacked. My mother was different. She lived in a world of spirits and tarot cards, moons and suns and Piscean debilitations. It wasn’t entirely a surprise that she was capable of leaving home because of the discovery of a planet in a distant solar system.
“And your moon, it’s in the twelfth house,” she added. By now, the tears were streaming down her face. “It means you feel separate from me, always at a distance.”
This, I wanted to disagree with, and vehemently. I had never felt separate from her till now, and the feeling ripped through me, searing me in half.
I couldn’t tell her how much I missed her and loved her, how badly I wanted her to stay. If she said no, if she refused to stay, I knew I would never recover from the rejection of it, of my own mother telling me she had better things to do than be with me. And so I left it alone, uncertain of what untangling that ball of yarn would bring.
She was right that I was sensitive. It didn’t have anything to do with houses or planets or moons. It was because my mother didn’t seem to want to be my mother anymore. And what could I say to her about that on the eve of her departure? It was a moment where I felt terrified of what the stars could reveal if I looked too closely at them.
SEVENTEEN
I stopped on the curb a block away from Nick’s house so I could lean against an old sycamore tree and cry. The days were getting shorter now, and it was almost dark. I had always hated daylight savings, especially in the fall, when the days felt trimmed in half and there was less time to actually do things, but somehow more time to think about all the things you had done wrong.
Was there anything I could have done to make her stay? If I had been nicer to her, instead of not speaking to her after she announced that she was leaving, would she have changed her mind? But it was the last question, the one that I had to arrive at slowly, that made me cry the hardest, the kind of crying that reverberates through your entire body. Why didn’t my mother love me enough to stay?
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. What would the Other Tara do? I asked myself. What would she tell me to do? I imagined her as just like me, but better in almost every way. Smarter, wiser, all-knowing. Pull it together, she would maybe say. You just need to get through today, okay? Go to Nick’s, work on your project, get through this evening. There’s nothing you can do to change your mother’s mind. I wiped my tears away with my hand.
I had to pull it together. There was no one I could talk to about what was going on with my family. I couldn’t imagine sitting down with Nick and Halle and telling them that Terra Nova had somehow forced my mother to pack her bags and move to California. I thought about what Halle had said that day at Pizza Post. How damaged would you have to be to leave your family? I didn’t even want to imagine what they might think of me if they knew.
I remembered my father’s words to my mother about me when they were arguing: “This is going to have an impact on her for the rest of her life. It’ll change her.” It made me wonder if a seed of impending struggle had been planted within me—just as it had been planted in my mother. Would it grow and grow and take half the rest of my life to uproot? Had the damage already been done? Was I going to be fucked up forever, no matter how much things changed on the outside? These were the kinds of thoughts that plagued me in those days. It never occurred to me that I might be worried about all the wrong things.
Mrs. Osterman opened the door when I rang the doorbell. Her gray bob was freshly cut, and she was wearing a red cardigan and black slacks.
“Hello, dear. Halle and Nick are already in the kitchen. I put out some snacks for the three of you. An egg-drop competition! Can’t believe they still do those kinds of things in school.”
I followed her into the kitchen, wondering if she could tell that I had been crying, but she seemed not to notice, or knew better than to say something.
“Look who it is!” she announced to Halle and Nick as we walked into a large country kitchen.
“Tara Krishnan! We missed you.” Halle smiled.
“Ta-ra. Do you know what your name means?” Nick asked. I had always loved the way he said my name. “Hey, Tara.” “Ask Tara what she thinks.” “Hey, Tara, can you . . .”
Halle cut him off immediately. “Obviously she knows.” They both looked at me from the large wooden table in the center of the room. They were seated next to each other, and I settled into a space across from them on a large bench.
“Yeah. It means ‘star,’” I said, pulling my book from my satchel.
“See, she knows,” Halle told Nick. “Linda was just telling us that she studied Sanskrit in college,” Halle said.
“You did?” I turned to Mrs. Osterman.
“Well, linguistics. Did you know that Veronica’s mother was my roommate at Smith?”
“I heard,” I told her.
“The two of us . . . we visited India . . . God, probably six times together in our twenties. We trekked through all of Asia the summer after we graduated. Have you ever been to India?”
I shook my head, feeling strangely exposed, even ashamed.
“Well, you must at some point. Most amazing experience of my life! Anyway, I baked some cookies, and there’s hummus and muhammara and veggies, and Cokes in the fridge. I’m going to go play tennis with Hester. Nicky, if there’s a problem, call your dad.”
“Oh, Mrs. Osterman?” I asked.
“Yes, dear?”
“Since you studied linguistics . . . what do you think about these radio broadcasts that are coming out of Terra Nova? About the linguists studying speech patterns?”
But it wasn’t what I really wanted to ask her. I wanted to know, what did a normal, regular adult think of Terra Nova? Did she wonder about another version of herself on another planet? “I heard about that!” she exclaimed. “Well, who hasn’t? Who could have ever thought their language, of all things, would be so similar to ours! You know, Noam Chomsky has this quote about when he was a college student—something about how he thought linguistics was a lot of fun, but after we’ve done . . . I think he said ‘a structural analysis of every language in the world, what’s left?’ It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.”
“This is a serious puzzle,” Nick said, reaching for a celery stick and mashing it into the red-pepper dip before him.
“Exactly! I think that’s one of the best things about the discovery of Terra Nova. We go about our lives assuming we know essentially everything we need to know, but there’s no end to the mystery of the world. It’s brought back a feeling of sheer wonder. By the time all of you are my age, well, who knows how much we’ll know about these . . . people? Maybe we’ll even have a chance to talk to them ourselves.”
I looked at Mrs. Osterman now, wishing she were my mother, someone who could feel wonder and excitement without turning her entire life upside down. I didn’t even want to think those words, the horrific ones that reverberated through me like a heartbeat since my father had mentioned it during one of my parents’ arguments. My mother’s gone and joined a cult.
“Have fun at tennis, Mom,” Nick called out after Mrs. Osterman.
“Have fun . . . dropping eggs, I suppose,” Mrs. Osterman tossed over her shoulder.
“Screw that,” Nick whispered once she was out of earshot. “It’s not due till next week, and Adam Schulman did it last year and he said to just pack an egg in peanuts and tie a parachute on and it should be fine.”
“Peanuts?” Halle asked.
“Yeah, like packing peanuts.”
I shrugged. “That’s what I was going to suggest. Or, like, puffed rice. Or grapes.”
“See? Tara knows what’s up. Anyway, my dad just bought a telescope, and you can see Terra Nova’s sun. Wanna look?” he asked.
Halle glanced at me. “Sure.” I shrugged.
We followed Nick to the deck behind his house. The sky was dark now, an endless black tarp with a million tears of light.
“Fancy telescope,” I said, inspecting the shiny contraption before us.
“It’s all set. It’s pointed right at Terra Nova’s sun. My dad looks at it, like, every night when he comes home from work. And he’s been reading all this poetry all of a sudden.”
Halle raised an eyebrow at him, and I could feel a frown forming across my face as I tried to discern the correlation myself.
Nick sighed. “He was an English major in college. Says he wanted to become a poet, but then he had to make money. Now he’s all wistful that two paths diverged and all that.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean,” I said, but I couldn’t bring myself to say any more.
Halle shrugged. “My parents are in Belize right now. I think they couldn’t care less about Terra Nova. They’re about as terrestrial as it gets.”
“Look, you can see it right here,” Nick said, showing us an astronomy app on his phone. He held it up to the sky, arrows pointing at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Sirius, and Terra Nova’s sun—Pinder-17, named after the scientist who had discovered it.
“Is that really the space station?” I asked, pointing to a smaller light on Nick’s app.
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