What Goes Up

by Wen Jane Baragrey

  “There’s still a bit of time,” Mom said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That night Mom tucked me in, taking extra-special care and sitting on the edge of my bed to stroke the curls away from my eyes. Cradled in her other arm was her mason jar treasure chest. I did my best not to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself.

  She left a delicate little kiss on the tip of my nose. “I promise I shall not lie to you again.”

  I rolled my eyes, because we both knew how bad she was at promises.

  With a sad smile, she tapped the lid of the jar. “I have some things here. Things from your dad that I thought you might like to see. I have some other things too, in that suitcase I put in storage. I’ll bring it home for you soon.”

  Nodding, I sat back and waited while she unscrewed the lid and carefully took out each treasure, one at a time. I held my breath, waiting to see if she could tell that the things had been touched, but if she could, she didn’t let on.

  She showed me the notes and the card and explained the story behind each of them. I forgot the glimpses I’d seen, because they were all brand-new when Mom talked about them. Then, once the lid had been screwed back on, she took something out of the pocket of her shirt. A photo.

  My heart did a big double thump, and I couldn’t look anywhere else.

  Mom held the photo out to me. “That’s your dad and me together.”

  On the back, it read Byron and Mary. I flipped it over, biting my lip hard. At last I would know what he looked like.

  He was tall, pretty good-looking, but not as much like me as I’d hoped he would be. Not albino, but most parents of kids with albinism just carried the gene. One thing stood out, though: his tightly curled, very red hair. In fact, he looked more like Nickel than like me.

  That made me smile. “Thank you, Mom.” I wrapped my arms around her neck and hugged her tight.

  Her smile was sad. “I’m sorry I didn’t show you years ago. I know I should have. It’s not fair to you or to him. His own daughter should know about him. He would have been miserable to think I never mentioned him anymore, especially to you.”

  “It’s going to be all right now, though.”

  I looked at the picture one last time and held it out for her, but she didn’t take it. “You can keep it. I have a scan on my computer.”

  I propped the photo up on my nightstand against my treasure chest and stared at it some more. Now I had a face and a name, and it all added up to a real dad—even if everything left of him was kept in a jar under my mother’s cabinet.

  Mom stood up slowly, like her muscles ached. “Sleep well, Bob. We’ll talk more another time, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Night, Mom.”

  She turned to leave, but I stopped her. “Mom, one last thing,” I said. “Wear your wings tomorrow, okay?”

  She laughed and flitted through the door. Her face lit up with her best, most real smile, and she looked like my mom again. “Absolutely.”

  After she’d gone, I opened A Midsummer Night’s Dream and began to read it for real. My dad had practiced and read those lines, and I could read them too. Maybe an ice cream date was out of the question, but there were still things we could share. Like the play, and springy hair, and my name, which had been so perfect all along.

  I’d never have my actual dad, but I’d always have my mom, and that was pretty great, even if I didn’t like the chances of her getting me an iguana.

  But how long would I have her? Until the fourteenth of June?

  I had found my dad, but I still had to face the satellite.

  I stared up at the glowing stars on my ceiling, imagining a streak of bright light heading straight for me. It would explode in a blast of heat and splintered house, and there I would be, a pancake underneath it.

  Now I knew how the dinosaurs had felt.

  * * *

  • • •

  Every night for the next week, the news reports got worse and Calliope got a bit stranger—which was not easy, considering where it had started out. People sold commemorative coffee mugs and hard hats, and some smarty-pants spray-painted a giant bull’s-eye target in the middle of our front lawn while we slept. My heart did little flip-flops every time I saw it.

  People emptied the shelves in the supermarket. I guessed they were worried the satellite would land on the shops and they would be forced to forage in Densdale for supplies.

  Whenever I went out, people nudged each other, gave me pitying glances, or stepped a few feet away, just in case. One lady even whipped out her phone to take a selfie with me. Another had me sign her grocery receipt. I guessed it would make her a fortune online once I got squished.

  Mr. Parker, our other neighbor, worked in his front yard during the evenings, bending over an old-fashioned shovel or using a pickax to dig out rocks. He had barely made a dent in the stony earth. He wiped a heavy work glove over his forehead and glared at us as I helped Mom hang paper fairies from the porch beams. Mom had decided to go over the top on fairy stuff until things felt right again.

  “Laying in a new garden, Mr. Parker?” Mom asked, teetering on the third step of Grandma’s ancient stepladder.

  He scuffed the dirt and dried grass with his shovel. “Nah. I figured living next to you, I better dig a bomb shelter. Didn’t make it to seventy-nine years old without thinking ahead.”

  Mom gritted her teeth until they squeaked. “Good luck with that.”

  He grunted and went back to hammering the ground.

  “Silly old coot,” Mom muttered. “And don’t even think of telling anyone I said that.”

  “I won’t,” I promised over the box filled with paper fairies in my arms. I might have crossed my fingers if I could have moved them under my load.

  Mr. Parker probably had the right idea, even if he’d left it until too late. I would have dug a shelter myself if I hadn’t wasted so much time chasing a father who didn’t exist. Now the satellite was almost here, and all I could do was wait for it and keep my mother close.

  “If I survive the satellite, I don’t s’pose there’s any chance of me getting that iguana we talked about?” I asked, passing another fairy to Mom.

  I didn’t hear her answer, because things suddenly got very loud.

  A bone-rattling boom crashed through the sky high above our heads.

  Panicked birds flapped into the air, where there was a screech.

  We both looked upward.

  A tiny sun sped through the sky toward us, faster than anything I had ever seen.

  Mom jumped from the stepladder and threw herself on top of me.

  The very good thing about having a mother who was basically 90 percent fairy was that she didn’t weigh much. She covered my body with hers while hollering something I couldn’t hear over the whistle-shriek in the sky.

  Boom! The ground shuddered. A car alarm went off. Someone screamed—Mrs. Cuthbert? Choking dirt filled the air.

  Then nothing moved. I held my breath, trying to feel Mom’s heartbeat or her breathing. Anything to tell me she had survived.

  “Momma?” I moaned.

  Way too slowly, Mom eased herself off me. “Are you okay, Bob?”

  I whispered, “I’m not dead, am I?”

  Mom looked us both up and down, checking for broken bones and missing parts. “No, you’re fine. I think that was the satellite.” She wrapped her arms around me and kissed the top of my head—poofy ponytail and all. “NASA couldn’t predict their way out of a wet paper bag.”

  Through the dust came the sounds of slamming doors and running feet as our neighbors poured out into the street. Someone shouted, “It’s Shirley and Mary’s place. Look!”

  All I could see from the porch was a gritty haze.

  I looked up.

  A cloud of dust and
debris rose into the sky, hovering over our house like an angry monster. Grandma burst through the front door and grabbed us both in her arms. “You’re okay. Oh, you’re both okay!” We let her hug us just as tight as she wanted.

  Officer Bugden’s siren blared in the distance.

  “It actually hit our house,” Mom said. “You were right, Bob.”

  A crowd gathered at our gate, and they all stared at us through the powdered earth that billowed up around us. Mrs. Cuthbert screamed and pointed to Mr. Parker’s front lawn. Something rose out of the dirt, shaking off clods of what used to be our yard.

  “An alien!”

  “The satellite had a passenger!”

  Mom grabbed me tight, but only for a second. Even through the messy air, we could see it was only Mr. Parker. He must have tried to lie down in the shallow scrapes he’d made in his front lawn and had gotten covered with flying bits of debris.

  “What you all starin’ at? Ain’t you never seen a man exit his temporary bomb shelter?”

  When someone in the crowd let out a chuckle, he cussed at them.

  Mom, Grandma, and I looked up at our roof. There it was, glowing a dull red from the smothered sunlight, but in one piece.

  “Wait, so it didn’t hit us after all?” Mom asked, coughing a bit and shaking her hair out.

  “Oh no, it hit you, all right,” Mr. Humphries said, pointing at our still neatly trimmed front lawn. There, surrounded by sprays of dried grass and stones, was a hole big enough to make a much better bomb shelter than Mr. Parker’s temporary one. It had missed the bull’s-eye by at least ten feet but had taken out one of Grandma’s poor rosebushes.

  “Holy moly.” I ran over and flopped onto my belly to peer down into the hole. It was wide enough across that I could have climbed inside. Mom hollered something about being careful, but it was a bit late.

  “I see it,” I called. Half buried at the bottom of the hole was something hard and metal, about the size of a shoe box—probably the top part of the satellite. The rest would be buried underneath.

  Mrs. Cuthbert gave me a pair of oven mitts to wear for protection, and Mr. Humphries held my ankles while I reached in and grabbed the metal. It came free in my hands. Not only that, but there wasn’t anything else buried underneath. They hoisted me to my feet, and I held up my prize.

  It was a scorched and twisted metal thing the size of a small toaster.

  “That’s the satellite?”

  “It must have burned up on reentry. NASA couldn’t have been worried about a toaster!”

  “What a lot of fuss over nothing.”

  The crowd turned and shuffled away through the orange glow of settling space dust.

  A tingly feeling worked its way up from my toes and burst onto my face as a huge smile. The part of me that believed in genetic destiny could hardly believe my luck. We were all alive. Mom, Grandma, me, and our house.

  I held up the toaster-sized satellite remains, triumphant, as someone took a picture.

  The second time I made an appearance on What’s Current, I was the lead story. It got picked up nationwide, which was a pretty big deal for someone whose greatest achievement was plucking a tiny bit of mangled metal out of the ground. My photo made the front page of every newspaper in the country. Seeing my full name in print didn’t bother me a bit anymore, because it was my dad’s name too. Sort of.

  It wasn’t a bad photo either.

  Me, surrounded by a dust cloud, holding a lump of nothing much in my hand, with headlines like NASA APOLOGIZES FOR INCONVENIENCE, and NASA CONFIRMS GRAVITY GIRL NABBED LARGEST PIECE OF XR-26, and my personal favorite, NASA FLIES GIRL AND MOM TO COLLECT COMPENSATION CHECK.

  A fifty-thousand-dollar apology to make up for the stress and the hole in our lawn.

  Sure, the satellite had landed on our property, but the hole only took a few minutes to fill in. Fifty thousand smackeroos could buy a lot of natural food dye and sugar substitutes, though, and at least one cute, if rather bitey, pet iguana. I called him Hugo—because the name had absolutely nothing to do with space.

  We got the only compensation check, even though a tiny bit of satellite broke a window in Mrs. Cuthbert’s house, and another smashed Dameon Swenson’s new bike, which his parents had bought him for his twelfth birthday. Apparently satellites have a keen sense of justice.

  So did Mom. She paid for the window and bought Dameon a new bike, even though she didn’t have to. Mrs. Cuthbert would probably still make our lives miserable, but like Grandma always said, “It’s better to have the moral high ground and a healthy dose of good karma.”

  Grandma sure talked big for someone who’d sprayed her neighbor with a hose.

  Dameon, though, smiled at me a couple of times after he got his new bike. At first, I thought it was a snarl, because of the bared teeth and all, but he kept doing it. Eventually, I realized he wasn’t in pain or anything. It might have even been gratitude.

  Mom and I stepped out of Mr. Bones’s rickshaw after he drove us home from the library, where we had picked up books on raising iguanas. It took some getting used to, worrying about ordinary things like preventing unprovoked lizard attacks instead of falling space debris.

  Mom gave me the biggest hug when she led me inside the house. “I think satellites are good luck, like falling stars,” she said.

  “And raccoons living under your store,” I said.

  “Huh?” Mom asked.

  “Never mind.”

  Upstairs, I looked for something to wear that night to the first toddler-free party we’d held at our house in as long as I could remember. There was nothing like a huge check and being alive to make a family want to celebrate. While I searched my limited wardrobe, I let Hugo play on my bed.

  I learned one lesson about pet parenting right away: lizards poop like any other pet, only they don’t care if they are standing on your bed when they do it. I carried my pillow to the window to shake it out before taking it to the laundry room, but a loud banging from our backyard distracted me. Was Mrs. Cuthbert revenge-tidying the backyard now?

  “You stay here, Hugo,” I said, setting him on a towel. “Guard the place, and don’t you dare poop on anything.” I knew he wouldn’t listen—he hadn’t even learned his name yet—but it was responsible pet ownership to try.

  I sped downstairs and into the backyard. The noise was coming from my headquarters. When I looked up, I saw a wall where things used to be way too open-air. “Hey! What’s going on? Who’s up there?”

  Some muffled laughter came from inside, but no one answered. I went for the ladder—and stopped to stare. Now it was wooden and attached firmly to the trunk of the old elm. No rope, no fraying.

  “What the…?” I asked as my head popped through the floor hole.

  Smiling down at me were Nickel and his dad, Officer Bugden. Grandma was crouched in the corner, fitting a window frame into the brand-new wall, with her tool belt around her waist. They had hammers, building supplies, and proud expressions.

  “You got back a bit early,” said Grandma.

  “Who knew Mr. Bones could pedal so fast?” Officer Bugden pulled off his work gloves and tucked them into the back of his jeans. “I’ll have to keep an eye on him.”

  “Mom wanted to get here before the party guests,” I said, unable to concentrate on anything but the totally un-see-through wall situation. The thing about monumental surprises was that you could never think of something important enough to say in return.

  I glanced up at the list of headquarters rules taped to the wall and saw Nickel had crossed No Boys off the list.

  “We worked all day today,” Nickel said, still grinning. He held out a hand to help me the rest of the way into my rebuilt HQ.

  I gazed around at the best thing anyone had ever done for me. Turned out dads were fine things to have, but friends, grandmothers, and brand-new he
adquarters were pretty good too.

  Nickel’s dad squeezed himself onto the ladder through the hole in the floor. If I’d be entertaining him in the future, that hole would need widening.

  “Thank you,” I said, even though they were far too tiny words for something that big.

  Grandma passed the tools to Nickel’s dad and climbed down after him. “You two better come inside soon. You don’t want to miss the party.”

  I certainly didn’t, even if the theme was guaranteed to be smothered in fairy dust. We didn’t go right away, though. With satellite cleanup, father revelations, massive checks, and iguanas, we hadn’t had a lot of time to catch up.

  “So Benjamin O’Malley isn’t even a distant relative. How about that?” Nickel said, fidgeting with a bent nail like he’d forgotten how to talk to me. “Sorry about your real dad, though.”

  I shrugged. “Me too. At least I know.”

  “And you’re not related to Michael. So, yay.”

  We both giggled at that. Once we laughed, things got almost normal again, but not quite, because Nickel gave me a hug. It wasn’t a kiss, but it was his idea, at least. Finally, he was catching on.

  Laughing to myself, I swung my legs down to the ladder.

  In front of the house, the grill and tables were set up over the spot where the bull’s-eye used to be before the grass started to grow. Nickel’s dad and Grandma were jostling for grilling rights, while a few people stood around nibbling fairy cakes and dainty sandwiches. Mr. Bones was flopped in a fold-out chair, swigging on a large iced tea. Mrs. Cuthbert and Mr. Parker sat right by the grill, arguing about the steaks. Mrs. Gilbert, the Humphries family, and a couple of other neighbors sat around too. They had probably just come so they could see if we all glowed in the dark now.

  Come to think of it, I needed to check that out myself.

  I looked around for Mom, but she was nowhere to be seen. Her touch was everywhere, though. Paper fairies hung around the porch. Glitter twinkled on the tablecloths—but that was probably left over from the hundreds of sparkle-party tables they’d covered.