The boys were already clustered by the pool at the back of the house—that spot where Hunter and Jimmy had played beer pong, where Halle had set up a turntable.
Halle’s father, Walter, was standing with them. I had never seen him before. He was a large man, over six feet. His face was a perpetual red, and he dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.
I thought about my first time on the Lightfoots’ estate, the way we had laid in the grass, Halle with a sarong around her waist, playing hostess. The way Veronica and I had laughed in that bathroom with a million first editions.
Walter silently guided us inside to where Bitsy sat on a sofa, talking to two police officers. She looked at us without acknowledging us, turning back to the officers.
“They’re here now. You should speak to them. Do you suggest Walter and I go up there? Wait for her?”
“I think it might be best for you to stay here for now, ma’am, but we’ll let you know if things change.”
“Have you heard anything else? Is there any new news?” Alexa asked the room.
“They can’t find her anywhere,” Bitsy responded. “They can’t find my Halle anywhere,” she said. “I don’t understand. She told me you were going to have a fun week on the Cape. Why was she there alone? What did you say to her? How could you have left her up there?” There was anger in her eyes, but it dissipated quickly. “I just want to know where she is!” Bitsy cried, and she began to sob. I thought about my mother, all those days I didn’t hear from her, all those minutes and hours, waiting to learn how she was, whether she was even still alive. I looked away from Bitsy, swallowing the knot in my throat.
Veronica glanced at Nick and then at me. “It’s what I told you on the phone, Mrs. Lightfoot.” Veronica’s voice was a whisper. “We did go up there for a fun week. To celebrate Tara’s birthday . . . and we got into a fight. It was a bad one, and we . . .”
I watched Veronica try to explain to Bitsy and Walter and the police what had happened, but none of it made sense to me. That’s to say: It didn’t make sense to me that just a week ago, we were all together, up in a house in Cape Cod, and now we were here, and Halle was somehow gone.
FORTY-FOUR
THERE were rumors, most of them resembling conspiracy theories. That she took out her trust fund and that she’s traveling the world. That the Lightfoots secretly know about it. But if you saw the state the Lightfoots were in that day we went over, you’d know that one isn’t true. That she ran off to join one of those cults. But I know how she felt about those organizations. That she was the sole person on our planet who managed to commune with Terra Nova. That she was somehow beamed up there. And then there are the more sinister ones. That she was kidnapped. That she was murdered. That she drowned. Or that she drowned herself. That one makes me shudder. I remember how she hated pools. She hated water. I don’t want to believe it. It can’t be, I tell myself. It can’t be.
April 4—the Day of Prayer—came, and there was still no word of Halle.
“We need to somehow subvert this, mark it, instead of ignoring it,” my mother said. She took my father and me out to our front yard.
“I don’t want to pray to commune with people on Terra Nova,” she said. “I want to pray for people on this planet.” And so we held hands and watched the sun set. We did it our way. I thought about Halle. I prayed that she was still somewhere on this planet, that she was safe. I prayed that she was happy. I prayed that she felt loved. I prayed for her to come back.
In the end, the Day of Prayer was peaceful. And apparently, many people did still gather at various energy vortices to look up at the sky, sending out prayer and goodwill. I wondered if anyone else bothered to look here, at us, at our little planet, our pale blue dot.
We don’t really see things when they’re right here in front of us.
Summer came and went, a long and sweltering one. Each day, I woke hoping for news. Good news. It never came. We checked in with one another, hoping that someone had heard something. There was a national campaign, her face on the news every day for a while. Whenever I saw Amit at the restaurant, he asked me about Halle—if I had heard from her, if I knew anything he didn’t, and when I told him no, he nodded wistfully and walked away.
School started. We were seniors now. They held an assembly on the first day. People spoke of how talented Halle was, how exceptional, how brilliant, what a bright future she would have had ahead of her. She had been missing for close to six months. They talked about her as though they were sure she was dead. But to me she was still alive, she was still the Halle we knew—vibrant and pretty and brilliant and cool.
As people spoke at the podium, I thought about it again, the way I had nearly every day since she disappeared, what I could have said, what I could have done, those tiny little details that, we now know, can change the outcome of the whole. I could have stayed home instead of going to the Cape, I could have asked her, begged her to come home with us, and maybe none of it would have happened. I could have said no when I was invited to that party at her house, spent my junior year hiding in the library, and I wouldn’t have played a role in our group dynamic. Maybe I could have trusted her more, treated her like a real friend. I could have chosen to stay home on Christmas. I could have said no to Nick. Maybe I could have stopped that fight.
“You can’t blame yourself for this,” my mother kept telling me, but I couldn’t help it.
I thought about Halle’s greatest fear—the one that superseded even her fear of water—that people didn’t really love her, didn’t truly want to be around her. That was the thing that I knew she felt on the last day we left her at the Cape, and I thought about how I was partially responsible for that.
She wasn’t perfect. She could be patronizing, maybe she was strategic, maybe she did maneuver people. She definitely kept secrets. But she wasn’t a bad person. She thought of us as family, perhaps the only family she really had.
I just wanted her to come back. We all did.
I was walking home from school later that week when Nick pulled up at the intersection of Hillside and the Post Road. In the aftermath of Halle’s disappearance, Nick had been inconsolable. He couldn’t stop crying, not just at the police department and at the various meetings at the Lightfoots’ but for days and weeks afterward. I would see him in class, looking at her empty seat, his eyes permanently rimmed with red.
I watched him now as he pulled up beside me and rolled down his window, his face blank.
“Hey, I want to talk to you,” he said. He had lost that perpetual smile, that cheer I assumed would never go away. Now his eyes had constant dark circles under them; his lips were permanently pressed into a straight line.
I hesitated before I got into the car with him. I glanced at him, but he continued to look straight ahead at the windshield. I expected him to drive us somewhere, but he stayed parked on the side of the road and pointed to that spot, that spot in the road where we had sat waiting for the ASPCA.
“That dog . . . Sarah didn’t hit him.”
“What? I don’t know what you’re . . .”
“Listen to me, Tara . . .” He banged his fist in frustration on his steering wheel. “I hit that dog. I didn’t want her to know, so I just let everyone think it was Sarah. But it was me. I hit that dog. And then I didn’t tell anyone, not her, not you, not anyone.”
He burst out crying, leaning on his steering wheel. I sat next to him, watching him for some time before I reached over and stroked his hair.
“I knew,” I said, unearthing another buried truth, one I had kept even from myself. I sat with him for a little while before I opened the door to his car and walked out. I knew I wouldn’t speak to Nick again for a long time.
Love has its own strange velocity. The longer she was gone, the more he loved her. My love for him stayed the same, but Halle was an even stronger force in our lives now than when she was here with us. The differ
ence was, I had come to accept it. I understood by now how fallible we are, the mistakes we make, the judgments we pass. I had watched her for so many years with a mixture of awe and envy, and I had formed a perception of her as a perfect ice queen. But she wasn’t the cold one.
I was.
It had taken so long and so much to chip away at my own frozen heart. I was the one who held tight to my perception of Halle; I was the one who kept everything close to my own chest. And yet, she had always tried. She had become my friend, and just when our friendship became real, at least to me, I screwed things up. Not her.
Halle had asked me once what I was most afraid of, and I didn’t want to tell her, but I was just as afraid of belonging as I was of not belonging. I hid behind books, didn’t talk much, never had. I told myself I was a pariah; I had wished that I was someone else for so long. But even though I was lonely, I have to admit, most of the time, I preferred it that way. I was afraid of the messiness that closeness brings, afraid of friendships that turn to something else, afraid of my own petty jealousies and the monstrous things that can come of them. Afraid of letting people in. It was easy for me to distance myself from Meg after she had left. And it was just as easy keeping all my secrets to myself, never completely letting in Halle or Alexa or Veronica or even Nick either.
The irony was that I had spent all those months feeling like I couldn’t reveal my entire self to these people because they would judge me for my difference, for my imperfections, and yet they were all flawed, just like me. It was easier believing that there was someone else out there, a mirror version of me on another planet who would understand me completely, but the friendship that Alexa and Veronica and Halle had offered me was real. I had just been too scared to take it.
Once senior year started, I never saw Bitsy Lightfoot around town. Rumor was that over the summer, the Lightfoots had packed up the estate and sold it, moved to a smaller house or permanently to one of their other homes abroad.
I remembered that thing Halle had said to me about her parents, I don’t know if they even . . . wanted kids. Was it possible that now they didn’t have any?
Then one day in October, after school had ended, I saw Bitsy walking around the rim of Tod’s Point. She was still wearing black, even all these months later. She had on the same sunglasses, the ones she always wore, the large ones that covered half her face. She was walking fast, trying to make it to the tip of Tod’s Point, the clearing beyond the sailboat dock where there’s a perfect view of the sunset.
She made it just in time. The entire sky was a luminescent orange that evening, one of those hazy and brilliant sunsets you sometimes get in New England.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I followed her in my father’s Honda, parking it on a small bluff overlooking the Long Island Sound. I got out and stood about ten feet away from her. We were the only two people there.
She turned to look at me right away. She was out of breath, and she put her hand to her hips in a way that I remember Halle sometimes used to do.
“My daughter loved sunsets on the Sound,” she said.
I smiled at her, nodded.
“I wish she had been able to see more of them,” she added.
I often wondered if the Lightfoots looked up into the heavens with a hope that there was another Halle somewhere out there. And what if there wasn’t? Would their grief be redoubled?
Symmetry is something that’s always fascinated me, but lately, I find that it haunts me, keeps me up late at night. Is Halle still alive? And if she isn’t, did we kill her? And if we were responsible for Halle’s death, or if I was partially the reason she died, is it possible that we killed her twice? Once here on Earth, leaving her in that house on Cape Cod, and again on Terra Nova, in some alternate sleepy town? Or is it possible that she’s still alive up there, some version of her living the life she was always meant to live? Is it possible she’s still alive somewhere here, that maybe one day she’ll come back?
Just as the sun dipped under the ocean, Bitsy turned to me again. “I wish I had watched more sunsets with her,” she said.
Then Bitsy turned and walked away. I never saw her again.
Crisis comes in many forms, and for us, for my entire generation, I think Terra Nova was the beginning of a crisis that might have happened anyway. Maybe we wouldn’t have felt it as intensely, and maybe we wouldn’t have questioned things quite so deeply, but part of growing up is questioning things, even ourselves. Especially ourselves.
The launch happened in late October, exactly a year after my mother left home. It was hard to believe how much had happened in just a year. Thousands of people flew down to Orlando to see Copernicus 1 soar into space. You could see them in the crowds, crying, praying, laughing.
“Orlando . . .” My father shook his head at the TV. “They’ve all forgotten what happened there last year,” he said.
And it was true. By now, people had forgotten that only a year back, Orlando was synonymous with mass suicide; they had forgotten Michiko Natori, the woman, the symbol. Most people at school had forgotten about Halle. After a while, everyone wanted to forget those patches of ugliness, that fear.
Copernicus 1 will land on Terra Nova in eighty-five years. As of now, it’s still on its way. If this mission is successful, we’ll turn our energies toward a second mission: transporting people to Terra Nova, communicating with any intelligent life on the planet directly, communicating with our Other selves. By now, we’re fairly certain that Terra Nova is our mirror planet, albeit a distorted mirror. Their radio broadcasts continue to come in, but none of us has ever met any of them.
One day, we will. Our children and their children will perhaps meet their counterparts, a strange concept to wrap our minds around, but one day, across great distances, we will meet.
I still think about it all the time—all the other possibilities that didn’t occur, all the parallel and unlived lives I’ll never know about. Occasionally, I go down to Tod’s Point and lie in the grass at Mr. Tod’s house. The house that was torn down, the art colony, the plot of land where I was with Nick that one cold Christmas. I look out into the sky and wonder about that Other Tara. About the countless Other Taras, the countless Other Nicks and Halles and Veronicas and Alexas and Megs. I think about the millions of people on this world and on those other worlds whom I’ll never meet. And then one day recently, I realized that maybe my only job here on Earth is to focus on those whom I have met, those whom I’ll meet in the future.
Even though I still think about the Other Tara, it’s not in the same way. She’s not omnipotent to me anymore, and I don’t think she has all the answers. I don’t think she’s the only person in the universe who will ever understand me. I suspect she has frailties and vulnerabilities of her own. I’m certain that she has fears, things that keep her up late at night too. Even if I were to meet her now, I don’t know that I would burden her with my questions. I would say hello. I would ask her about her life, and I would tell her about mine. Perhaps that’s where I’ll start here too, the next time I make a friend.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE of the major themes of this book is finding a place for oneself in the world, and in many ways, Mirror in the Sky’s journey from an idea to the book that it eventually became reflects that theme.
Through a serendipitous and almost magical movement of invisible hands, the manuscript for Mirror in the Sky landed on the desk of my amazing and brilliant editor, Jessica Almon. For this, I will always be eternally grateful for cosmic forces beyond my understanding. Without Jessica’s encouragement, support, friendship, and inspiration, this book would never have become this book.
In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have wished for a better home for Mirror in the Sky than Razorbill, and I am grateful and indebted to the entire team there, particularly Ben Schrank, Anna Jarzab, and Lauren Donovan.
Thank you to my fabulous agent, the indomitable Jenny B
ent, who believed in this book from the very beginning and understood it in ways that a first-time author can only dream of, and the entire team at the Bent Agency, particularly Victoria Lowes, who provided crucial support at various junctures throughout the book’s publication.
While working on the manuscript for Mirror in the Sky, Katie Robbins, Daniel Berson, Adam Chanzit, Nell Rutledge-Leverenz, and Anna Carey joined me on an unforgettable writing retreat in Palm Springs filled with laughter, long elaborate dinners, and pie-in-the-face, and I will forever be indebted to them for their friendship and excellent notes, but especially for their love and their time in the writing trenches with me.
Here, I must also offer thanks to Matthew Biancaniello for teaching me how to make the cocktails that we drank on that writing retreat.
I am extraordinarily lucky to have found an extended family in my brilliant, kind, and endlessly supportive friends. In no particular order, thanks to Jolene Pinder for always being there and being the most gracious host whenever I visit her in NOLA, Dee Montealvo for some of the most memorable dinners and conversations of my life, Payal Aggarwal-Scott for her steadfast friendship and love, Nathalie Huot, who always encourages me to keep dreaming bigger, Dan Lopez, whose steep aesthetic standards have over the years become my own, and Sam and Jen Sparks for their unyielding kindness.
Thanks to Linda Sivertsen for her excellent notes, but especially for her constant words of wisdom and her belief in me.
For their endless enthusiasm and kindness, thanks also to Veronica Ho, Jenny Rosenbluth, Julie Fulton, Meredith Hight, Kirsten Markson, Jaime Reichner, Julia Ruchman, Susanna Fogel, Stephanie Watanabe, Shelley Marks, Lizzie Prestel, Rahool Pathak, Rebecca Fishman, Krupa Desai, Priya Nambiar, Melissa Brough, and Ernesto Lechner.
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