Shine Shine Shine (31 page)

In her mind, she was standing at a roadside vegetable stand in Pennsylvania. She was picking over tomatoes, wondering if they could really be local, because they looked so perfect. There was a kid there operating the stand, the same age as Sunny and from the same 4-H club. A car swished down the highway, disturbing the air around the vegetables, a thrush whirred somewhere in the woods back away from the road. She could hear the locusts at their songs in between passing cars. It was late summer, late afternoon, and the warm last rays of the sun slanted across the valley.

The kid was looking at her. She said, “Mrs. Butcher?” Emma remembered clearly the electrified feeling in her body when the kid said, “Do you know where Sunny is right now?”

“Where is Sunny?” Emma said, setting one of her tomatoes back into the bin.

“Um, I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”

“Well, is she in danger?” Emma’s finger pressed a hole into a tomato, then another hole into the same tomato, giving the tomato a little girdle of holes.

“Hmm,” said the kid, sucking her braces. “Yeah, probably.”

Emma in the hospital, static under the blankets, unable to move her arms or make a fist, remembered the desire to throttle this pimply, damp child in her denim short-shorts, to strangle her with her own straggly braid.

“Maggie,” said Emma. “You need to tell me right now where Sunny is. Otherwise I am going to be very angry, and tell your father.”

“Well,” said Maggie, drawing out the word. “I guess it is in Sunny’s best interest if I tell you.”

“Tell me.”

Emma’s teeth ground together, in the hospital bed, by the roadside stand.
Where is my child? What is going to happen to her? Fix it, fix it, fix it.

“Uh, Mrs. Butcher, you know the Belmar bridge?”

Emma was gone. She ran to the car, slammed herself into it, and gunned out of the little roadside area, spraying gravel behind her. She knew the Belmar bridge. For three generations, the youth of Yates County had been daring each other to jump off it, and infrequently dying under it. A railroad trestle over the Allegheny River, the Belmar bridge was legendary, its stone pylons driving down thickly into the river, its rusted and inflexible beams rising high above. The kids would climb out to the center pylon, reaching it by means of the rusted rungs of a service ladder, and lie in the sun there, high above the water. The bravest of them would leap off the platform and into the water, almost forty feet below. The Allegheny is a shallow river, but the construction of the bridge and the current in that spot had left a deep eddy just downstream of that huge middle pylon, so if you held your body just right, and hit the water correctly, you could dive down safely, and not get hurt. Or, like several kids over the years, you could kill yourself trying.

Okay,
she told herself.
To be fair. To be truthful. Those kids were drunk. Sunny wouldn’t drink. Those kids were stupid. Sunny is smart. Probably she won’t even climb out there. She would know how mad I’d be if I found out. She would have some sense. She would not do this. She would not jump off this bridge.
It was a rite of passage, the neighbors had told them over dinner one night, for the local youths. The neighbors’ children had not done it, though. The sensible, smart neighbors’ children had grown up and gone and had not jumped off that bridge at all. The most impressive railroad trestle in three counties. Emma could just picture it. Her skin burned.

She sped down the two-lane highway with no regard for traffic, drifting into the opposite lane on curves to the right, drifting onto the shoulder on curves to the left. The beautiful late-afternoon sun on the countryside had become the fires of hell burning her. She knew that Sunny could not die, and she knew that she could stop her. She could say, “Sunny, STOP.” The bald head would whip around, the girl would wave, turn, and she would sheepishly shrug, let some other kid do it, let some other kid jump off that platform for her.

If only she were with some more sensible boy. Maxon would just let her go, just let her do it, whatever she wanted. He was enslaved to her, and he was hopeless, too damaged, she could not trust him with Sunny’s life. She could not believe that he could keep her safe, not just by thinking about it. Why could she not love some optimistic clod who would tell her the truth, keep her out of trouble, and become a banker? That type of kid would never let her break her neck on a river rock. Never.

At the bottom of the hill, she opened the door and began to run, leaving the car open behind her. Her long skirt beat against her legs and her feet kicked up gravel behind her. Her mind demanded she stay alive. She took a shuddering gasp and let it out, shifting the blankets just a little. She felt the crushing weight of her own ribs, felt that no more breath would come in. Maybe that was her last breath. Maybe it was over. She was done. But it couldn’t be. She had to run, she had to find out. So she dragged another breath in, her pulse jumping up in her neck, one gulping swallow of air as her throat collapsed, enough to keep her alive until she could see her child safe, until she could see Sunny and tell her “Don’t jump off that fucking bridge.”

Her legs carried her like the wind, over the gravel road and then onto the railroad ties, leaping from plank to plank between the place where the rails used to be. She felt no pain, she felt only suffocation. She felt her blood, incapable of doing its job. She felt her mind shutting her off.
Don’t tell the feet,
she thought.
Let them keep running.
At last she turned the corner and saw the bridge, its dark brown trapezoids rising against that bright blue sky.

“Sunny,” she tried to cry, but there was no air. Her lungs were finished. They could not do it, not even one more time. Her chest contracted. Her cells struggled. She hung on the nearest beam, clung to it, thrusting her head out over the water, straining to see. There were the kids. Was Sunny alone? No, Maxon was already in the water. Bastard. He had probably worked out all the angles and trajectories. He had probably told her just the right way to jump. It wasn’t fair. She had probably demanded it. She would, she was always trying to be like the other children. How much this would mean to her, poor bald Sunny, with her awful baldness, to jump off the Belmar bridge just like the other kids did, to talk about it later, over sodas at the Jolly Milk, sitting on the roof of someone’s car, a gang of kids, a group of friends, and Maxon hanging back, driving for her, working out the math for her, silent when she told him to be silent, letting her kill herself to fit in.

Sunny was there, poised. The mother tried to gasp out a warning, gasp out a final endearment.
Sunny, I love you.
But there was no air, and there was no blood, and the blackness came down from on top of her head and shut her down. In the reverie, she hung there, her body limp and crumpled against a beam. In reality, she died there, in the hospital bed, and went into the dark. Her brain stopped working and that was it, just at the wrong moment. One minute there were electrochemical processes inside the skull. The next minute there were not. No one shared it, no one eased it to its end, and no one could have prevented it. It just happened. A death happened at 3:12 in the morning. A private death between the mother and herself, before she could finish her one last dream. This is what it means to die: You do not finish.

*   *   *

T
HE ROAD TO
L
ANGLEY
Research Center leads back through the swampy area of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. In the middle of the night, it is a dark and quiet place. Ditches on each side of the road drain the water, and herons stand, their heads tucked into their wings. It’s like a seedier, smaller version of the road to the Kennedy Space Center, over miles of swampy Florida coastal marsh. There you can see rows of palm trees swaying in the wind, in the morning, on the day of a bright and optimistic launch. Here she saw kudzu in the headlights, mile markers, and she could barely remember where to turn.

At 3:30 a.m. Sunny showed her ID at the gate. Off to the right was the hangar, huge and white, full of rocket parts, airplanes, and all kinds of apparatuses. Behind her was the wind tunnel. The base was like a college campus, but instead of stacked rectangles for office buildings and classrooms, the architecture was all outsized and strange, not built for human habitation, but for the convenience of science. This facility, like its geographical context, was a dingy, underfunded sister of the Kennedy Space Center. But he worked here because he didn’t want to move to Florida. And ultimately, it didn’t matter. He had his trade right between his ears. There were labs, and there were lab workers everywhere.

She drove past the huge round buildings they jokingly called the brain tanks, and past the new accelerator. She drove past the building where Maxon had his materials tested, full of giant machines whose only job is to break things to make sure they’re strong. Many of the buildings at Langley were shoddy and brown, built in the seventies and never refurbished. It was always a surprise to step into the buildings and find everything so high-tech.

Sunny parked, gently eased Bubber out of the backseat. He cried a little bit, and blinked, and then, standing in the car still, said, “Where are we?”

“What a great question,” said Sunny. “We are at Daddy’s work. We are going to talk to Daddy.”

“Daddy is on the moon. The moon has a lava pipe. That’s where Daddy’s going to put the robot. The lava pipe.”

“Right,” said Sunny. “Should I carry you, or can you walk?”

Please say walk,
she thought. She hadn’t had any contractions since she woke up, but she was nervous about it.

“Walk,” said Bubber.

“That’s a good baby,” said Sunny. She kissed him and kissed him all over his face. He resisted her, as stony as if she had been kissing the back of the seat.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to be kissed and hugged, Bubber,” she said as she took his hand. “I’m going to kiss and hug you anyway.”

“Fine,” said Bubber.

“Let’s go.”

Stanovich met her at the door. The lobby of Maxon’s building was dimly lit.

“The gate guard called and said you were here,” he said. “Come on, right this way.”

He took her by the arm, and she took Bubber by his arm. They went to a part of the building she had never seen before. He pushed open several sets of brown metal doors and led her up a stairwell. The concrete on the stairs was chipped, the window dusty. Sunny stopped on the landing, waved for Stanovich to give her a second.

“I’m a little pregnant, Stan,” she said. “I can’t go galloping up stairs anymore.”

“Ah, right,” he said. He stood nervously, knocking the railing with his knuckle. Stanovich was a gray-haired man, but smooth and spry, maybe old enough to be Sunny’s father, or maybe forty. He had a thick mustache and thicker glasses, sunken eyes and bushy eyebrows, big ears. He always wore short-sleeved shirts with collars, black or navy pants. He was old-school NASA, and a professional. Maxon had a lot of respect for him, so Sunny did, too. And she liked him. He had a wife and kids in Newport News.

“Okay, I think I’ve caught my breath,” said Sunny. Catching sight of herself in a windowpane, she realized that Stan had not commented on her hair, or lack of it. She wondered if he was just that distracted, or if Maxon had told him. Maybe some late night, bent over difficult problem, or pacing back and forth in front of a whiteboard full of formulas, he’d spilled the beans.
Hey, my wife is bald
, he might have said,
but let’s get back to this robot.

“Bubber, you all right?” Stan said, poised to continue up the stairs.

Bubber, staring at the concrete blocks in the walls, gave him a thumbs-up. Stan leaped up the next flight and pushed open another metal door.

“This is my domain,” said Stanovich. “Welcome. Sorry not under better circumstances.”

“But these are great circumstances, right?” said Sunny. “They’re alive, they’re talking. They’ll make it.”

Stan was silent, moving down the gray hallway more slowly now.

“Stan,” said Sunny, grabbing him by the arm and stopping dead. “It is good news, right?”

“Sunny, now I don’t want to get you upset. But you should know the truth.”

“What’s the truth?” Sunny asked.

“The truth is they might still not make it back,” said Stan. Then he coughed, put his hand on his face, and smoothed his mustache. Sunny found herself crazily trying to decode this gesture, like maybe Maxon would have done. Was he shielding the pregnant lady? Overstating the danger? Itchy?

“What?” Sunny breathed.

“The meteor did more damage than we thought, honey. Once we established the link, Houston ran some diagnostics with them, and it’s not good. I can’t see how we down here can help them up there without the navigational stuff that they need to fix their orbit, to get to the surface, to fire the rockets … it’s just too much.”

Stan sounded like he was going to cry. “Maxon did a good thing fixing the comms. That was a really great thing. But, this might be the last you get to talk to him, honey. That’s why we called you here in the middle of the night. Do you understand?”

“Did they dock with the robots? Did they get that far?”

“Yes,” said Stan. “They have now docked with the robots. I don’t know how, because they shouldn’t have been able to, but somehow they did. Unfortunately, I think that’s as far as it’s going to go.”

“No,” said Sunny. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he would go up there and get himself killed.”

Stan put his hand on a doorknob. Inside, through a pane of reinforced glass, Sunny could see people, hear voices.

“The meteor was something that no one could account for,” said Stan. “You can’t blame him. There was nothing he could have done.”

“But Maxon accounts for everything,” she said, pushing past him to throw the door open. “I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him right bloody now.”