19
At school, we dissected frogs, we ran the mile, our spines were checked for scoliosis. Soccer season stretched into January because of all the games we’d canceled in the fall. But I’d lost interest in the sport. What was the point anymore? What did it matter?
“But you like soccer, don’t you?” said my father as I sulked in the car on the way to practice one day. After my mother got sick he had changed his schedule so that he could drive me.
“How do you know if I like it or not?” I said.
He turned toward me. I never talked to him that way, and he looked surprised. Outside, the sky was a fiery orange, a sunrise in the late afternoon.
“What’s going on with you lately?” he asked.
He looked tired. His hair, a pale brown, was beginning to thin at the edges. A layer of stubble had grown on his chin since the morning. I wondered if he sensed that I knew what he’d been doing with Sylvia.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just don’t want to do this anymore.”
My father didn’t answer. We continued driving toward the soccer field.
The main thing I remember about those afternoons at the field were the moments when the boys’ team would come jogging past our practice. We could hear the boys panting as they got close, the syncronized click of their cleats on the asphalt. We could smell the sweat of their jerseys as they passed. I’d always search the pack for Seth, who ran at the edge of the group near the front and never looked in our direction. The eyes of all the other boys usually fell on Michaela as they passed—and she received their attention with a wide-open smile. I never understood how she knew what they wanted. I avoided looking at the boys as they approached, until the sound of their footfalls faded and then went mute as they hit the dirt path at the edge of the field. That was when I’d take one last look at Seth before he and all the other boys disappeared into the eucalyptus trees dividing their field from ours.
We reached the parking lot, and my father pulled up to the curb.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not quitting soccer.”
I stepped out of the car, my soccer bag swinging on my shoulder. I slammed the door.
The parking lot was a long way from the field, and I walked as slowly as possible. I could see Hanna’s skinny outline in the distance on the field. I hated the way our old closeness hung over us like a stink, unacknowledged but forever wafting in the air.
An idea flickered in my mind: I didn’t have to go to practice—I could walk away.
My father had already driven off. No one else was nearby.
Maybe the slowing was affecting
my
emotions, too: I felt brave and impulsive that day. I began to move away from the field, first slowly and then faster, until soon I was rushing down the steep slope of a landscaped hill, ice plant crunching beneath my cleats.
I landed in the shopping-center parking lot that neighbored the field.
The first thing I saw was a health food store that catered to real-timers. It was late afternoon, but the store was opening its doors for the day, revealing its rows of vitamins, dried kale, and herbal sleep remedies.
Next door, people were pushing carts in and out of the giant drugstore I sometimes visited with my mother. They were running a special on survival gear: A giant stack of canned goods stood out front beneath a sign that read, is your family prepared?
I wandered inside, conscious of the sound of my cleats on the linoleum, as if they might give me away, but no one seemed to notice. I could hear the buzz of fluorescent lights, the watery classical music flowing from the speakers in the ceiling.
Whenever I came here with my mother, certain aisles felt a little ilicit to me, and I was eager to explore them on my own. In the cosmetics aisle, fifty feet of shelving displayed in glittering packages all the powders and the polishes and the creams, the shimmer sticks and eyebrow pens, the tweezers and clippers and razors that, I had begun to suspect, if applied in the correct combinations, might begin to transform me into a girl more lovely and more loved.
At the far end of the cosmetics aisle, an older girl with perfectly straight black hair and car keys jingling in her hand was twisting open nail polishes and testing the colors on her nails. I remember the satisfying clink of the bottles against one another. I envied the casual way that she dropped the ones she liked into her basket.
Behind her, hanging from a circular rack, was a small selection of bras.
I was too embarrassed to approach the rack while she was there, so I wandered up and down the aisle for a while, picking up lipsticks and then dropping them back into place. When she was gone, I drifted toward the rack of bras. They had only five or six styles, and one seemed much nicer than the rest. I remember the way it looked hanging on the rack, a crisp bright white with blue polka dots and straps made of blue satin ribbon and tiny bows where the straps met the cups. When I was certain that no one was around, I held the bra up to my chest.
The tag said $8.99. I had my grandfather’s ten-dollar bill in my soccer bag.
When my father pulled up to the soccer field, I was sitting on the curb as usual, my soccer bag in my lap, the bra radiating from deep inside it. The other girls on my team were beginning to move toward the parking lot, small figures in the distance, pausing to stretch their legs or adjust their ponytails, sweaty from the drills I had missed.
I climbed quickly into the car.
“How was practice?” my father asked.
I was taking big gulps from my water bottle. Deception, like algebra, was a newly learned skill.
“Fine,” I said.
“What did you guys do?”
I worried that he knew. “We always do the exact same thing, Dad,” I said. “That’s why it’s so boring.”
This was the most amazing thing about it: He believed me.
As soon as we were home, I closed myself in my bathroom. I had a fluttery feeling that something might be finally starting for me, that this might be a beginning. I felt all my worries—all the more important things—sliding swiftly away. I could already picture how the strap would look on my shoulder, poking out from under my shirt the way Michaela’s always did at school.
But when I tried it on, after struggling for many minutes with the clasp, I discovered that a terrible transformation had taken place between the drugstore and home: I had brought home a cheap and girlish bra. The satin ribbons were too blue and too shiny. One of the seams was already coming loose. Even worse was the way the cups rippled unsexily across my chest, like two empty water balloons waiting to be filled.
I heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
“What are you doing in there?” she asked through the door.
Just her nearness in the hall made me nervous.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you sick?” she called. She had begun to worry that I would develop the syndrome, too. “Your father says you’ve been in there for almost half an hour.”
I could feel her wanting to open the door. I could feel her hand reaching for the knob. I unhooked the bra and threw on my shirt.
“I’m fine,” I called. “I’ll be out in a second.”
Later, when she was asleep and my father was at work, I buried the bra deep inside one of the trash cans in our side yard, so that no one would ever discover how little I understood what seemed so obvious to the other girls I knew.
20
February: The dark hours seemed somehow darker than before and the light ones more radiant than ever. The heat was so extreme you could see it, rising from the asphalt in waves. As the days grew longer and longer, I found it harder than ever to sleep.
My mother’s illness fluctuated wildly. Some days she was fine: She’d go to work, run errands, make dinner. Other times we’d lose her to the force of some new symptom. I came home from school one day to find her wrapped in three blankets but shivering, her teeth knocking. It was the eighteenth hour of daylight. It was eighty-five degrees outside.
“Don’t worry,” she said, shaking as she spoke. “It’ll pass.”
But I did worry. I watched her whenever I could.
In those days, some suspected the syndrome was psychological in nature, that the effects might be caused not by a shift in gravity but by an even more powerful force: fear.
“Maybe it’s just anxiety,” said my father when he got home from work that night.
My mother took a deep breath. “You think I’m making this up?”
“That’s not what I said, Helen.”
My father slid a frozen pizza into the microwave for dinner. When my mother was sick, he did whatever needed to be done. But I sensed that there was something hollow about him during that time, that his mind and soul were elsewhere even as his hands poured me a glass of milk, even as his mouth spoke the appropriate words:
How was school? Have you finished your homework?
“I’m just saying,” he continued, “you’re under a lot of stress.”
My mother shook her head. “No,” she said. “This is real.”
“Yeah, Dad,” I said. “It’s real.”
I always took my mother’s side these days, but secretly, his theory appealed to me. You can’t die from worry.
The next night we heard the first shimmer of good news in months: We had gained just six minutes the day before, fewer than on any day since the start of the slowing.
“That’s good,” I said. My parents said nothing. “Right?”
“It might be too late,” said my mother. Her hair looked flat. I realized she hadn’t washed it in a while.
“Helen, come on,” said my father. Then he looked at me. “Of course it’s good news.”
A cold breeze rattled the blinds behind us.
“Denial doesn’t help,” said my mother.
I wasn’t sure my father necessarily agreed. He had different ideas about truth.
“It’s good news,” he repeated. He stood and squeezed my shoulder.
My mother turned off the television.
“You might as well know the truth, Julia,” she said. “Everything is going to shit.”
A string of tense days followed. My parents spoke less and less. After hours of spying with my telescope, I finally caught my father with Sylvia again. It was in the morning this time, after he’d left for work and while my mother was dozing on the couch. He’d left in his car but came back down the street on foot. He kept turning his head toward our house, once, twice, and once again, before disappearing through the side gate to Sylvia’s. I had little sense of how these dramas worked. I worried more and more that my father would one day leave us for good.
And then, one night my father told a new lie. This was not the first lie I ever heard him tell, and it would not be the last. It was just the boldest and the best. Simple and succinct. An elegant, outlandish fiction. One untrue sentence.
It happened on a Saturday, a daylight day: The sun rose in the morning and shone all afternoon. A salty breeze rustled the eucalyptus trees while the twins splashed in the neighbor’s pool. My mother, feeling better than usual, was reading a magazine out back, a glass of iced tea sweating beside her, as a fleet of hot air balloons drifted across the open sky. The passengers were waving from the balloon baskets as they floated over our roof. It was seventy-six degrees. You might never have guessed from that scene that six American astronauts remained stranded on the space station, their food supplies dwindling, ten thousand miles higher than the silk of those balloons. It did not feel at that particular moment in time as though we were stranded, either.
I was in the kitchen when the phone rang. My father was upstairs. My mother turned her head toward the house at the sound of the ringing but let it go. I happened to pick up the receiver in the kitchen just after my father had answered it upstairs.
“Joel?” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Ben Harvey at St. Anthony’s.”
I curled my hand over the mouthpiece and listened.
“So?” said my father.
I held my breath and stood still, barefoot on the tile.
“It’s not what you want to hear,” said the other man.
He paused. I took a quick breath.
“The guy was dead on arrival,” said the man.
My father sighed heavily.
“Skull fracture, crushed vertebrae, subdural hematoma,” he said. “Apparently, he was some kind of transient. There’s no next of kin.”
I can’t explain how it was that we believed the pedestrian might have survived. My mother and I had seen him out on the asphalt, after all, looking lifeless, death suggested even by the way he was lying; the living don’t lie that way. And yet we
did
still hope.
I didn’t hear what else was said on the phone. I leaned on the kitchen counter, feeling faint. When the conversation ended, I hung up as softly as I could, and then I heard my father moving toward the stairs.
Out on the deck, my mother turned the page of her magazine and sipped her iced tea. I didn’t want to be there when he told her.
I walked down to Gabby’s house, but no one was home. I sat alone on our porch for a while, watching the fat white clouds glide eastward overhead. It was about the time when Seth sometimes had his piano lesson with Sylvia, and I thought he might be in her house. I listened for the sound of her piano but heard nothing.
At the end of the street, I saw a giant moving van blocking the Kaplans’ driveway. A mattress stood up on one end against the front door, and the family cat was howling from his carrier on the porch.
The for-sale sign had appeared in front of the Kaplans’ house three days after their electricity was cut. The two youngest Kaplans were playing with the boxes in the yard as two movers and Mr. Kaplan fed a long brown couch into the mouth of the truck. I could hear their voices in the distance, the arguments of men carried down to me on the breeze.
They were moving to one of the colonies, one where everyone was Jewish and everyone agreed on the Sabbath: sundown to sundown on every seventh day. Their days were completely out of sync with ours, their Saturdays no longer falling when ours did. I’d done the calculations one white night when I couldn’t sleep: The real-timers were dozens of days behind us by then—and those days would eventually pool into years.
From across the street came the click and creak of a door swinging open. I looked up, hoping it might be Seth, but it was only Sylvia, in sun hat and clogs, a trowel dangling from one hand.
She waved. “Lovely day,” she called to me from her garden. She asked me how I was.
“Fine,” I said.
I no longer felt sorry for her. Now she made me nervous, as if I were the one with something to hide.
She knelt near her roses, which had begun to wither in recent weeks. Sylvia, on the other hand, seemed to be thriving. Most of us walked around with sleepy eyes and slow minds—my mother claimed she hadn’t dreamed in months—but Sylvia looked rested and peaceful and alert. It was hard not to see that she was beautiful, so much more so in those days than my mother. I began to hope that Sylvia would move away, like the Kaplans, and like so many of the other real-timers were doing at that time.
Or maybe I wished that
we
would move far away. I wondered about the colonies that were forming in the desert. I liked thinking that time really did pass less quickly there than it did where we lived. And if so, if every event took a little longer to transpire, then were the consequences of those events also less swift?
When I went back inside, I found my parents together out on the back deck. Through the kitchen window, they did not look the way I had expected. My mother was laughing and shaking her head. My father pressed one hand on her knee. My mother spotted me through the window and waved me out to join them. I could tell even before I opened the French door that my father had not delivered the news.
“Guess what,” said my mother as I closed the door behind me, the cold brass handle locking into place.
“What?” I said.
She was shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. She turned to my father.
“Tell Julia,” she said. She was sitting up in her chair, her knees pressed to her chin like a teenager. “Tell her.”
My father looked me right in the eye. “You know the man from the accident?”
Behind him, a faint breeze shook the honeysuckle, now desiccated.
“Yeah?” I said.
And here came the lie, crisp and smooth and clear: “I found out today that he survived.”
“They released him from the hospital,” my mother said. She kept rearranging herself in her chair. “He just had a few broken bones,” she went on. “That’s all. Can you believe it?”
I felt a flash of anger at my father. She deserved to know the truth.
But my mother looked better than she had in months. Her posture relaxed. Her laugh lines resurfaced. Her whole face looked different—eyes half squinting, cheeks bulging, lips spread apart to show teeth: a smile.
All I wanted to do in that moment was smile right back at her.
It didn’t feel right at first. I felt guilty. And I hope my father did, too. But the shift in mood was impossible to resist.
The lie improved everything.
My mother took down the nice crystal glasses and uncorked one of the special bottles of red wine they saved in a rack above the liquor cabinet. She cooked linguini with the sun-dried tomatoes my parents had brought back from Italy a few years earlier, cut from the vine and packed in olive oil long before the slowing started. For dessert we ate canned pineapples. They were the last pineapples we’d ever eat in our lives. We sat on the deck in the sunshine, food filling our bellies. I wish I recalled more nights like that one. The sun was high. The air was warm. The earth continued turning. But for once, it was not our concern. My mother was happy, her conscience clear and I knew I’d never tell.
My father was pleased, too. I watched him watching my mother. Maybe he loved her. Maybe he really did. He must have saved hundreds of lives at the hospital over the course of his career, but never before and never again did he bring a dead man back to life.