The Crossing Read online

  Maggie talked off and on through the president’s speech. Neither Tommy nor I interrupted her, even though her talking made it difficult to keep up with what was going on. The president mentioned “escalation.” The president mentioned “armaments.” The president mentioned “necessary force.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Maggie said. “It’s terrible... I always knew it was going to happen...”

  On and on the conversation continued as he piled on the horrors of the world and the war. The president told Maggie that there would be a need for even more soldiers. Maggie told the president to go to hell. The president told Maggie that there would be an executive order coming soon to reduce the age of the draft by another year. Maggie told the president to go to hell. The president told Maggie that extreme measures had become necessary in the face of further escalation. Maggie turned the president off, making him disappear into a pool of blackness.

  After she sighed, her hand, maybe of its own volition, reached out and turned the TV on again.

  The troops were mobilizing. The ships were engaged. The planes were flying. The drones had never left the air. Tommy watched and listened and believed, in spite of himself, that it would all be okay. It was something in the way the president stood there in that perfect suit with his perfect hair and his perfect skin and his perfect elocution that could do nothing to disguise the fatigue in his voice and the rings of sleeplessness carved around his eyes. All of it told Tommy that, even if things were getting worse, someone was in charge. The ship was being steered. It would not go running over the edge of the waterfall.

  It meant that, when it was finally Tommy’s turn, when the Europa shuttle had launched and Gannon had caught up to us and turned Tommy in and sent him off to the war, there was a chance that he would be fine. The president would get him through. It would be the way it was in stories. He would leave home and return a hero. Changed, certainly, but unharmed overall. Finally, for the first time in his life, he would be lucky. He was overdue for his share of luck. And what better place to use all of your good luck than in a war?

  “It’ll all be okay,” Tommy whispered.

  “Everyone’s going to die,” Maggie said.

  After the president was done, Maggie switched the television off again. The house felt small and tight all of a sudden.

  “Does she really remember everything?” she asked, turning to Tommy. “I ask you because I feel like she could put one over on me if she wanted to. But you seem like...well, like you wouldn’t lie, even if you could.”

  “It’s true,” Tommy said.

  Maggie nodded, confirming something to herself. “Okay.”

  After a moment, she got up and walked over to an old record player standing in the corner of the room. Sorting through a small stack of vinyl, she plucked out a selection and eased it delicately from its sleeve. She stared at it, as though remembering something.

  She placed the record into the player but didn’t switch it on. She turned to us, then cleared her throat and slowly removed her gas mask. The face beneath it was beautiful: aged but firm, filled with years that had given her thick, deep laugh lines around her face so that she looked as though she was perpetually smiling. She looked like the type of woman I wished our mother had gotten the chance to become.

  “I ain’t done this in years,” Maggie said. Her face flushed and her mouth trembled. “But since everything’s going to sod and...and since you’ll never forget it, maybe it’ll mean something.” She looked, all of a sudden, like some small and delicate bird, trying to remember its way home. “Okay,” she said finally. Then she switched on the record player.

  An orchestra billowed out of the record player speakers. The sound was low and grainy, like wood given form. After a handful of measures Maggie took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then began to sing.

  Tommy had never heard opera before. Not really. He knew what it was. He knew the general idea of it. The rise and fall of the voice, the sustained notes, that loud, thunderous presence. But he knew as much about it as he probably knew about computer programming: just theories and the occasional piece of pop culture reference that one inevitably comes across. He’d never met an opera singer before.

  Now that he had, he didn’t know how he could live for the rest of his life if he never met another one. Maggie’s voice was louder than he could have imagined. It swelled out of her mouth like a tidal wave, shoving him back down inside himself. He was overcome by that familiar feeling of smallness—like he felt when he tried to compare himself to me. But there was something else too. A sense of calm that came over him. He closed his eyes and the sound of her voice became a thing he could fall into. Every note, every tremble, all of it consumed him. The world washed away and, before he knew what was happening, the song was over.

  The silence lingered for a moment, before it was swallowed up by reality.

  Tommy kept his eyes closed, still feeling the heft and sweep of Maggie’s voice shake his bones. The echo of her song reverberated around the inside of his skull and, for once in his life, he felt that he truly and fully understood something about the world. Exactly what that something was he couldn’t say. But it was a big, grand thing, like understanding that everything in life was cruel and beautiful and that neither was any better than the other. Tommy understood, for one lightning-strike moment, what he was supposed to do with his life.

  And then the flash was gone and he was just Tommy again.

  The sound of Maggie’s voice inside his head—now only a memory, like closing your eyes and still seeing the sun burning—was something that would disappear soon. He knew that and he didn’t want it to happen. Because that was the way it always happened and he hated himself for it. He would forget this feeling just like he had forgotten a thousand—a hundred thousand—other things in his life.

  Tommy closed his hand into a fist and rubbed his thumb against his forefinger, concentrating, concentrating so hard it hurt. But still Maggie’s voice slipped away and no matter how tightly he clutched at it with his mind, the light that she had lit inside of him grew dimmer and dimmer, second by second.

  And then the light went out, never to burn in his mind again.

  To My Children,

  The first miscarriage took our legs out from under us. She was asleep and then there was blood in the bed and then we’d lost our first child. The horoscope she read that day had offered no warning. I think that was what hurt her the most. She felt like she had let tragedy blindside us. For a while after it happened she gave up reading only the good fortunes to me. She still read them over breakfast, but if the stars called for me to be cautious, she let me know.

  We went to the movies a lot after that. We watched the heroes save the world. Heroes always have their powers. Even when they’re taken away, they’re never really gone. They still serve as symbols. So we fed on that. We made it our gospel. And when the movies let out we shuffled wordlessly into the night and came home and she would read a book until she drifted off to sleep—which was fitful now, though it had never been before—and then I would take her book and read the same pages she read, as if doing so could tell me what she was thinking, how she felt.

  It was a full year before we decided to try again. She was back to reading me good fortunes in the mornings and her sleep wasn’t fitful anymore. Then we lost the second child too.

  We fought a lot after that. We’d never been the type to fight. We had to learn how to do it. She said I didn’t tell her often enough that I loved her. She said I didn’t “see” her anymore.

  I said she’d forgotten what love was. I said she’d cursed us with astrology.

  We went back and forth this way, neither of us willing to tell the truth: we hated each other because we knew that the loss of this second child hadn’t hurt us as deeply as the loss of the first.

  When we found out we were pregnant with the second, we tied our emotions down and kept
them there. We wore masks—laughter and grins and pleasant surprise—but underneath the surface there was only stone. And, sure enough, when the second child failed to come into the world, the stones that we had built around our hearts held. We cried. We trembled with grief. We hurt. But not like we had before. And we refused to forgive ourselves for that.

  It only took us six months to get pregnant again—something else we wouldn’t forgive ourselves for. In those six months of wandering through the haze of self-hatred, I survived by getting lost in Europa.

  I fell in love with it back when I was a kid. Galileo sent back all those beautiful, grainy images that started people studying, thinking, learning. This was how we learned about the possible ocean beneath Europa’s surface.

  It was a good time for science. All the ways we developed to spy on ourselves and kill each other had given us new and exciting ways to look outward, to see the rest of the universe. Yeah, we still spent most of our time taking cosmological selfies, but every now and then it was possible to see beyond ourselves.

  Tidal flux had been discovered on Europa. The ice covering the surface showed signs of distress, signs of change. It wasn’t a static, flat rock. There was heat beneath it. From the looks of things, that heat melted enough ice to create an ocean beneath the surface. There were fissures and bulges on the face of the moon as Jupiter and Io pushed and pulled at it, making Europa’s core hotter, making the ocean—and therefore life—more likely.

  Late at night, after your mother had fallen asleep, I would find articles on Europa and read them aloud. Whether I was reading them to her or to the child it was hard to say. I just knew that I wanted to pass on the possibility that there might be something wonderful happening out there. Something that I would probably never live long enough to see for myself, but perhaps my children could.

  Every night I read of Europa to you. Stats, figures, math, theories. And on and on. Where there were gaps of information, I filled them in with my imagination. I put a playground in the Argadnel Regio. In Falga, I placed a dog that grew larger every year but still was ever a puppy. I created a forest in which the trees always bloomed in red and gold and their leaves tasted like cold pineapple. The sky was always a thousand different colors. I placed these made-up things on Europa and I poured them all into your mother’s sleeping ear, letting them drain down into that world inside her.

  I wanted to convince you that there was something out here—in the meat grinder of existence—that was worth your time. Something that you could be excited about. Something that you could tie yourself to and love, the way I wanted to tie myself to you and love you.

  I wanted to say to you, “Good fortune awaits you.” I wanted to say, “Don’t fear the adventure.” I wanted to say, “Don’t leave us again.” I wanted to say, “I promise I’ll break the stone around my heart and love you this time.” I wanted to say, “Please.”

  Imagine the joy when the two of you answered our prayers in unison.

  SEVEN

  It is the middle of spring and my father is behind the wheel and my mother is in the passenger seat reading and, now and again, singing along with the radio. She has a high voice and is rarely on key, but she sings with energy and vibrancy that makes it not only acceptable, but pleasurable.

  The sun is high and my parents have the windows down, letting in sweet, wet air. It is not long after sunrise and the air is still as thick as a down pillow. My father brims with pride for reasons only fathers know and plays a game of calling out the names of cars on the highway and then calling out the names of cities that begin with the same letter. Sometimes my mother plays along but, mostly, it is a game the man enjoys on his own.

  Around noon we stop off at a small diner in a small town because Tommy is hungry and his hunger has made him fussy. Hunger gnaws at my stomach too but I’m not the fussy type.

  The diner has a long, chrome-lined counter in a 1950s style with chrome-plate stools growing up out of black-and-white tiles covering the floor, and along the wall of the restaurant burgundy booths made of faux leather huddle around sticky wooden tables, waiting.

  “This is just perfect,” my father says as he lifts me out of my car seat. His arms are massive and protective to my five-year-old self and I rest my head on his shoulder, and for a moment, The Memory Gospel quiets inside me...and I am finally able to separate myself from the memory.

  My mother took Tommy by the hand and helped him out of the car. He rubbed his eyes and tried to pull away. “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “I know,” our mother replied. Then she lifted him into her arms.

  The diner served breakfast all day and Tommy and I had always been partial to pancakes. The pancakes were flavored with a hint of cinnamon. It was the first time I had ever had cinnamon.

  Our parents sat on the outside of the booth. Our father had brought along an actual paper map, saying that his father “never needed GPS.” He unfolded the map in front of him, taking up half of the table, and stared down at it. He placed his finger on the highway lines and traced down the long path ahead.

  “We’re making good time,” he said. “Perfect time, actually.”

  “Watch the syrup,” Mom said, removing the corner of the map from Tommy’s plate.

  “Virginia?” he called. “Virginia, how many moons does Jupiter have?”

  “Sixty-two,” I answered. “But they keep finding more, so who knows how many there will be a few years from now.”

  “And which one is the largest?”

  “Ganymede.”

  “What about Titan?”

  “One of Saturn’s moons. And not as large.”

  “And where does the word titan come from?”

  “Greek gods,” I answered while reaching over and stealing pancakes from Tommy’s plate as he stared out the window at a man fixing the chain on his bicycle.

  “Are you sure about that?” my father asked.

  I swallowed Tommy’s pancakes. “They were the parents of the Greek gods.”

  “Excellent!” my father barked. He slapped his hands together and laughed. “You’re an amazing kid,” he said to me. “Do you know that?”

  “Don’t do that,” my mother said.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “That,” she replied. “Don’t treat her like she’s different.”

  “But she is different,” he replied.

  “Exactly,” she replied. “And she’s going to be known for that for her whole life. She should at least be treated like a normal person by her family.”

  My father chuckled. “You make it sound like she’s got some kind of defect or something. She’s a genius. That’s a good kind of special.”

  My mother sighed. “And what about Tommy?”

  “What about Tommy?” my father asked. Then he reached over and tousled Tommy’s hair. Tommy, for his part, was still staring out of the window, watching the man wrestle with the chain on his bicycle. If he heard or understood what our parents were saying, he gave no indication. “Tommy’s perfectly happy,” my father said.

  “I want my children to know that they’re equal in our eyes,” my mother said.

  My father gave another laugh. But this one was nervous, stiff. The laugh was a lie. “Of course they are,” he said. Then he returned his attention to his map. “Where are we headed, Virginia?”

  “Cape Canaveral,” I replied.

  “And what did I tell you about Cape Canaveral?”

  Before I answered I reached over to Tommy’s plate and stole another portion of his pancakes and, without hesitation, threw it across the table and hit him square in the forehead.

  “Daaaaaaad!” Tommy yowled.

  Mom laughed. It was an embarrassed, unintentional laugh, as though she’d not meant for her children to see it. “Virginia, don’t hit your brother with pancakes.” Then she reached down to her plate and picked up a piece of ba
con and flung it across and hit me in the forehead.

  An hour later we were in the car and the car slid off the road and tumbled down the side of a mountain and both of our parents were dead and only Tommy and I were left and every second of that final hour—full of wind and laughter and bad singing and the hum of the engine and the squeal of the tires and the crunch of the metal and the slow way my mother stopped asking, “Are you okay?”—has never left me.

  Tommy was able to forget and I hated him for it.

  * * *

  I had always known that Tommy wanted to be a soldier. It wasn’t even his fault when you got right down to it. Tommy, like so many Embers being charmed off to the war, was a victim of marketing.

  The military had long ago seen the way the war was going. They knew that there was little chance of this ending well and, maybe because war has always been this way, they did everything they could to ensure that the next generation was willing and eager to join.

  The propaganda started with the television shows and movies, like so much of everything else. On television the heroes were always soldiers, either coming home from the war or going off to it. A good military background was the secret method by which heroes became heroic.

  So every day after school Tommy would come home to whatever foster parent we happened to be living with and he would drop his backpack in his room and sit down in front of the television and watch the old reruns of cartoons about soldiers or robots or, sometimes, robot soldiers, and they all shouted orders and obeyed orders and there was always a well-defined chain of command. Tommy or any other child never saw the soldiers question authority.

  The military had no qualms about inserting themselves into commercial breaks either. They made joining up seem like some great Homeric pastime. There was one commercial that featured a man in a white T-shirt, climbing a mountain on which the faces of stern-looking soldiers were superimposed. And when he had climbed the faces of enough soldiers from every era of military service, he reached the top of the mountain. But living atop the mountain was a great hell beast armed with a large whip, waiting for the sweaty, grime-covered man.