Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial2 soup full of natural gases and muddy slop andcarbon matter that somehow solidified3 into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates…which sound a lotmore like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary4 chain, in my opinion. But evenonce you get there, it’s a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.
The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a pointwhere there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.
More amazing is how even though that’s become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.
On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us doing our best to pretend thattwo days from now, my trial won’t begin. You’d think this is hard, but actually, it’s much easier than thealternative. My family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission5: if we don’t talk about it, then—presto!—there’s no more lawsuit6, no more kidney failure, no worries at all.
I’m watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunninghams, they’re not so different from us. Allthey ever seem to worry about is whether Richie’s band will be hired at Al’s place, or if Fonzie will win thekissing contest, when even I know that in the ’50s Joanie should have been having air raid drills at school andMarion was probably popping Valium and Howard would have been freaking out about commie attacks.
Maybe if you spend your life pretending you’re on a movie set, you don’t ever have to admit that the wallsare made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren’t really yours.
Kate is trying to do a crossword7 puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for vessel8?” she asks.
Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for borrowing two of her CDs withoutasking (for God’s sake, she was practically comatose9; it isn’t like she would have been able to give herpermission); she feels up to trying this crossword.
“Vat,” I suggest. “Urn.”
“Four letters.”
“Ship,” my mother offers. “Maybe they’re thinking of that kind.”
“Blood,” Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.
“That’s five letters,” Kate replies, in a tone that’s much more pleasant than the one she used with me, I mightadd.
We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our family.
“Give me a number.” He means on the pain scale. “Five?”
“Three.”
Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. “It may be a five in an hour,” he cautions. “It may be a nine.”
My mother’s face has gone the color of an eggplant. “But Kate’s feeling great right now!” she cheerleads.
“I know. But the lucid10 moments, they’re going to get briefer and further apart,” Dr. Chance explains. “Thisisn’t the APL. This is renal failure.”
“But after a transplant—” my mother says.
All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You’d be able to hear a hummingbird’s wings, that’s howquiet it gets. I want to slink out of the room like mist; I don’t want this to be my fault.
Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. “As I understand it, Sara, the availability of an organis under debate.”
“But—”
“Mom,” Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. “How long are we talking about?”
“A week, maybe.”
“Wow,” she says softly. “Wow.” She touches the edge of the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at itsedge. “Will it hurt?”
“No,” Dr. Chance promises. “I will make sure of that.”
Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. “Thanks. For the truth, I mean.”
When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. “Don’t thank me.” He gets up so heavily that I think hemust be made of stone, and leaves the room without speaking another word.
My mother, she folds into herself, that’s the only way to explain it. Like paper, when you put it deep into thefireplace, and instead of burning, it simply seems to vanish.
Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed. So I get up and walk toward mymother. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Mom,” I say. “Stop.”
She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. “No, Anna. You stop.”
It takes me a little while, but I break away. “Anna,” I murmur11.
My mother turns. “What?”
“A four-letter word for vessel,” I say, and I walk out of Kate’s room.
spaceLater that afternoon, I’m turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad’s office at the fire station, with Juliasitting across from me. On the desk are a half-dozen pictures of my family. There’s one with Kate as a baby,wearing a knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just as wide as thebluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy atthe store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling’sknees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout12 to be a phonyfamily.
Maybe it’s not so different from real photos, after all.
I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and younger than I can ever rememberthem being. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask Julia.
“No!” she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of shrugs13. “Do you?”
“There’s this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I’m not sure.” I pick up a pen and start tounscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of thesebuilt inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.
“What happened?”
“I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and we stood up he was—”I turn brightred. “Well, you know.” I wave in the general vicinity of my lap.
“Ah,” Julia says.
“He asked me whether I’d ever taken wood shop at school—I mean, God, wood shop?—and I go to tell himno and bam, I’m staring right there.” I put the decapitated pen down on my dad’s blotter. “When I see himnow around town it’s all I can think about.” I stare up at her, a thought coming at me. “Am I a pervert14?”
“No, you’re thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn’t help it happening any more than you canhelp thinking about it when you see him. My brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guycould get excited: during the day, and during the night.”
“Your brother used to talk to you about stuff like that?”
She laughs. “I guess so. Why, wouldn’t Jesse?”
I snort. “If I asked Jesse a question about sex, he’d laugh so hard he’d bust15 a rib16, and then he’d give me astash of Playboys and tell me to do research.”
“How about your parents?”
I shake my head. My dad is out of the question—because he’s my dad. My mom’s too distracted. And Kate isin the same clueless boat I’m in. “Did you and your sister ever fight over the same guy?”
“Actually, we don’t go for the same type.”
“What’s your type?”
She thinks about it. “I don’t know. Tall. Dark-haired. Breathing.”
“Do you think Campbell’s cute?”
Julia nearly falls out of her chair. “What?”
“Well, I mean, for an older guy.”
“I could see where some women…might find him attractive,” she says.
“He looks like a character on one of the soaps that Kate likes.” I run my thumbnail into the groove17 of woodon the desk. “It’s weird18. That I get to grow up and kiss someone and get married.”
And Kate doesn’t.
Julia leans forward. “What’s going to happen if your sister dies, Anna?”
One of the pictures on the desk is of me and Kate. We are little—maybe five and two. It is before her firstrelapse, but after her hair grew back. We’re standing19 on the edge of a beach, wearing matching bathing suits,playing patty-cake. You could fold this picture in half and think it was a mirror image—Kate small for herage and me tall; Kate’s hair a different color but with the same natural part and flip20 at the bottom; Kate’shands pressed up against mine. Until now, I don’t think I’ve really realized how much alike we are.
spaceThe phone rings just before ten o’clock that night, and to my surprise it’s my name that’s paged throughoutthe firehouse. I pick up the extension in the kitchen area, which has been cleaned and mopped for the night.
“Hello?”
“Anna,” my mother says.
Immediately, I assume she’s calling about Kate. There isn’t much else for her to say to me, given the way weleft things earlier at the hospital. “Is everything okay?”
“Kate’s asleep.”
“That’s good,” I reply, and then wonder if it really is.
“I called for two reasons. The first is to say that I’m sorry about this morning.”
I feel very small. “Me too,” I admit. In that minute, I remember how she used to tuck me in at night. She’d goto Kate’s bed first, and lean down, and announce that she was kissing Anna. And then she’d come to my bedand say she’d come to hug Kate. Every time, it cracked us up. She’d turn off the light, and for long momentsafter she left, the room still smelled of the lotion21 she used on her skin to keep it as soft as the inside of aflannel pillowcase.
“The second reason I called,” my mother says, “was just to say good night.”
“That’s all?”
In her voice, I can hear a smile. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Sure,” I tell her, although it isn’t.
Because I can’t fall asleep, I slip out of my bed at the fire station, past my father, who’s snoring. I steal theGuinness Book of World Records from the men’s room and lie down on the roof of the station to read bymoonlight. An eighteen-month-old baby named Alejandro fell 65 feet 7 inches from the window of hisparents’ apartment in Murcia, Spain, and became the infant to survive the longest fall. Roy Sullivan, ofVirginia, survived seven lightning strikes, only to commit suicide after being spurned22 by a lover. A cat wasfound in rubble23 eighty days after a Taiwanese earthquake that killed 2,000, and made a full recovery. I findmyself reading and rereading the section called “Survivors and Lifesavers,” adding listings in my head.
Longest surviving APL patient, it would read. Most ecstatic sister.
My father finds me when I have put the book aside and started searching for Vega. “Can’t see much tonight,huh?” he asks, taking a seat beside me. It is a night wrapped in clouds; even the moon seems covered withcotton.
“Nope,” I say. “Everything’s fuzzy.”
“You try the telescope?”
I watch him fiddle24 with the scope for a while, and then decide that it’s just not worth it tonight. I suddenlyremember being about seven, riding beside him in the car, and asking him how grown-ups found their way toplaces. After all, I had never seen him pull out a map.
“I guess we just get used to taking the same turns,” he said, but I wasn’t satisfied.
“Then what about the first time you go somewhere?”
“Well,” he said, “we get directions.”
But what I want to know is who got them the very first time? What if no one’s ever been where you’regoing? “Dad?” I ask, “is it true that you can use stars like a map?”
“Yeah, if you understand celestial25 navigation.”
“Is it hard?” I’m thinking maybe I should learn. A backup plan, for all those times I feel like I’m justwandering in circles.
“It’s pretty jazzy math—you have to measure the altitude of a star, figure out its position using a nauticalalmanac, figure out what you think the altitude should be and what direction the star should be in based onwhere you think you are, and compare the altitude you measured with the one you calculated. Then you plotthis on a chart, as a line of position. You get several lines of position to cross, and that’s where you go.” Myfather takes one look at my face and smiles. “Exactly,” he laughs. “Never leave home without your GPS.”
But I bet I could figure it out; it isn’t really all that confusing. You head toward the place where all thosedifferent positions cross, and you hope for the best.
If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would golike this: in the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to comeout during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moongrew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife.
By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked26 a hole in the night and out spilled amillion stars, like a fountain of tears.
Horrified27, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter androunder. But mostly it didn’t, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made thesky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright.
What he didn’t tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they’d never be seen. So the stupid ones leapedfrom the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.
The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the restof her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn’t fall. She spent the rest of her time holding on towhatever scraps28 she had left.
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1
tornado
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| n.飓风，龙卷风 | |
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primordial
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| adj.原始的；最初的 | |
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solidified
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| （使）成为固体，（使）变硬，（使）变得坚固( solidify的过去式和过去分词 )； 使团结一致； 充实，巩固； 具体化 | |
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evolutionary
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| adj.进化的；演化的，演变的；[生]进化论的 | |
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5
omission
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| n.省略，删节；遗漏或省略的事物，冗长 | |
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6
lawsuit
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| n.诉讼，控诉 | |
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7
crossword
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| n.纵横字谜，纵横填字游戏 | |
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8
vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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comatose
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| adj.昏睡的，昏迷不醒的 | |
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10
lucid
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| adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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12
scout
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| n.童子军，侦察员；v.侦察，搜索 | |
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13
shrugs
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| n.耸肩（以表示冷淡，怀疑等）( shrug的名词复数 ) | |
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14
pervert
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| n.堕落者，反常者；vt.误用，滥用；使人堕落，使入邪路 | |
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bust
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| vt.打破；vi.爆裂；n.半身像；胸部 | |
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rib
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| n.肋骨，肋状物 | |
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groove
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| n.沟，槽；凹线，（刻出的）线条，习惯 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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flip
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| vt.快速翻动；轻抛；轻拍；n.轻抛；adj.轻浮的 | |
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21
lotion
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| n.洗剂 | |
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spurned
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| v.一脚踢开，拒绝接受( spurn的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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23
rubble
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| n.（一堆）碎石，瓦砾 | |
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fiddle
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| n.小提琴；vi.拉提琴；不停拨弄，乱动 | |
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celestial
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| adj.天体的；天上的 | |
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poked
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| v.伸出( poke的过去式和过去分词 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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27
horrified
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| a.(表现出)恐惧的 | |
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scraps
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| 油渣 | |
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