Mirror in the Sky (14 page)

My mother had booked her ticket for California for the day before Halloween, and it made me think about how carefully (and yet poorly) she would sew all my Halloween costumes when I was little, how we would spend weeks deciding what candy we were gong to distribute, how we would open up fun-size packs of M&M'S and she would eat all the reds and browns and I would eat the oranges and greens. We would split the blues and yellows.

I stopped at home to drop off my books, knowing that I would run into my mother, intending to behave as though I didn't care. The kitchen lights were on when I arrived, and she was standing over the counter, an apron around her waist, her hair tied in a loose bun on top of her head. She was making dinner.

“It's a red-eye. I don't have to leave home till about nine. I thought we'd have a last meal together before I take off. Tara . . . please talk to me,” she said, and when I heard her voice crack, I broke, but only slightly.

“I can't,” I told her, coolly. “I have to go to Nick's. We're working on a project together for AP physics.”

She didn't argue. She was wearing a red dress, a dress I had seen her wear only once before, years ago when we lived in New York.

“I know we've never been away from each other for more than a day,” she said.

“I don't want to talk about it,” I cut her off.

“I just need you to know that I'll miss you and love you. I wish there were another way, but I have to . . .”

“You
wish
there were another way?” I yelled. “There is another way. It involves you staying home!”

“I think I used to dance to escape it all. I loved that feeling of dancing without abandon, no thoughts in my head except where my feet were, the line of my body. But now I can't stop thinking . . . about all the possibilities, everything that happened, everything that could have happened. I don't know how to make it stop. Lately I wonder if I spent all these years trying not to think about the past, trying not to look back. I need to . . . unpack everything that's happened to me over the course of my life,” she said. “And I need to do that alone.” The way she looked at me, I knew I wasn't going to change her mind.

I felt something for her then, some precursor to the longing for her that I knew would beset me when she left. I wanted her to be my mother again, for just a minute. I sat down on the counter before her and picked at the slivers of radish and carrot she was chopping for a salad.

“I can't stay for long. I should head out in half an hour or so.”

She nodded. “How was swim practice?”

“Good. Swimming always makes me feel better,” I lied. Usually I did feel at home in a pool. The familiar humidified scent of chlorine, the cool splash of water underneath my arms, the echo of whistles and voices in the distance—there was nothing like it. But today, it wasn't enough. Nothing was enough to make me feel better today.

“I birthed you in a pool, you know. Because you're a Pisces.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“It means you're a sensitive soul. An old soul,” she said, looking at me with tears in her eyes. “I'm sorry I'm going to miss your birthday this year,” she added.

I looked away. “What else does it mean?” I asked.

“It's not just your sun in Pisces, but your Venus and your Mercury too. It makes your Mercury debilitated.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, not that I cared about my Piscean Venus or my debilitated Mercury. I felt debilitated as it was without the planets mocking me. I just wanted to talk to my mother again. It would be nearly the end of the school year the next time I saw her. I would be a year older. Green leaves would be sprouting on trees.

“It means that you sometimes struggle to express yourself, to say the things you really want to say,” she said. “But I suppose we all do.”

I had been wondering more and more how my parents had ever ended up together. My father lived in a world of questions and answers. Obstacles could be scaled. Problems could be unpacked. My mother was different. She lived in a world of spirits and tarot cards, moons and suns and Piscean debilitations. It wasn't entirely a surprise that she was capable of leaving home because of the discovery of a planet in a distant solar system.

“And your moon, it's in the twelfth house,” she added. By now, the tears were streaming down her face. “It means you feel separate from me, always at a distance.”

This, I wanted to disagree with, and vehemently. I had never felt separate from her till now, and the feeling ripped through me, searing me in half.

I couldn't tell her how much I missed her and loved her, how badly I wanted her to stay. If she said no, if she refused to stay, I knew I would never recover from the rejection of it, of my own mother telling me she had better things to do than be with me. And so I left it alone, uncertain of what untangling that ball of yarn would bring.

She was right that I was sensitive. It didn't have anything to do with houses or planets or moons. It was because my mother didn't seem to want to be my mother anymore. And what could I say to her about that on the eve of her departure? It was a moment where I felt terrified of what the stars could reveal if I looked too closely at them.

SEVENTEEN

I stopped on the curb a block away from Nick's house so I could lean against an old sycamore tree and cry. The days were getting shorter now, and it was almost dark. I had always hated daylight savings, especially in the fall, when the days felt trimmed in half and there was less time to actually do things, but somehow more time to think about all the things you had done wrong.

Was there anything I could have done to make her stay? If I had been nicer to her, instead of not speaking to her after she announced that she was leaving, would she have changed her mind? But it was the last question, the one that I had to arrive at slowly, that made me cry the hardest, the kind of crying that reverberates through your entire body.
Why didn't my mother love me enough to stay?

I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. What would the
Other Tara do? I asked myself. What would she tell me to do? I imagined her as just like me, but better in almost every way. Smarter, wiser, all-knowing.
Pull it together
, she would maybe say.
You just need to get through today, okay? Go to Nick's, work on your project, get through this evening. There's nothing you can do to change your mother's mind
. I wiped my tears away with my hand.

I had to pull it together. There was no one I could talk to about what was going on with my family. I couldn't imagine sitting down with Nick and Halle and telling them that Terra Nova had somehow forced my mother to pack her bags and move to California. I thought about what Halle had said that day at Pizza Post.
How damaged would you have to be to leave your family?
I didn't even want to imagine what they might think of me if they knew.

I remembered my father's words to my mother about me when they were arguing: “This is going to have an impact on her for the rest of her life. It'll change her.” It made me wonder if a seed of impending struggle had been planted within me—just as it had been planted in my mother. Would it grow and grow and take half the rest of my life to uproot? Had the damage already been done? Was I going to be fucked up forever, no matter how much things changed on the outside? These were the kinds of thoughts that plagued me in those days. It never occurred to me that I might be worried about all the wrong things.

Mrs. Osterman opened the door when I rang the doorbell. Her gray bob was freshly cut, and she was wearing a red cardigan and black slacks.

“Hello, dear. Halle and Nick are already in the kitchen. I put out some snacks for the three of you. An egg-drop competition! Can't believe they still do those kinds of things in school.”

I followed her into the kitchen, wondering if she could tell that I had been crying, but she seemed not to notice, or knew better than to say something.

“Look who it is!” she announced to Halle and Nick as we walked into a large country kitchen.

“Tara Krishnan! We missed you.” Halle smiled.

“Ta-ra. Do you know what your name means?” Nick asked. I had always loved the way he said my name. “
Hey, Tara
.” “
Ask Tara what she thinks
.” “
Hey, Tara, can you . . .”

Halle cut him off immediately. “Obviously she knows.” They both looked at me from the large wooden table in the center of the room. They were seated next to each other, and I settled into a space across from them on a large bench.

“Yeah. It means ‘star,'” I said, pulling my book from my satchel.

“See, she knows,” Halle told Nick. “Linda was just telling us that she studied Sanskrit in college,” Halle said.

“You did?” I turned to Mrs. Osterman.

“Well, linguistics. Did you know that Veronica's mother was my roommate at Smith?”

“I heard,” I told her.

“The two of us . . . we visited India . . . God, probably six times together in our twenties. We trekked through all of Asia the summer after we graduated. Have you ever been to India?”

I shook my head, feeling strangely exposed, even ashamed.

“Well, you must at some point. Most amazing experience of my life! Anyway, I baked some cookies, and there's hummus and muhammara and veggies, and Cokes in the fridge. I'm going to go play tennis with Hester. Nicky, if there's a problem, call your dad.”

“Oh, Mrs. Osterman?” I asked.

“Yes, dear?”

“Since you studied linguistics . . . what do you think about these radio broadcasts that are coming out of Terra Nova? About the linguists studying speech patterns?”

But it wasn't what I really wanted to ask her. I wanted to know, what did a normal, regular adult think of Terra Nova? Did she wonder about another version of herself on another planet? “I heard about that!” she exclaimed. “Well, who hasn't? Who could have ever thought their
language
, of all things, would be so similar to ours! You know, Noam Chomsky has this quote about when he was a college student—something about how he thought linguistics was a lot of fun, but after we've done . . . I think he said ‘a structural analysis of every language in the world, what's left?' It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.”

“This is a serious puzzle,” Nick said, reaching for a celery stick and mashing it into the red-pepper dip before him.

“Exactly! I think that's one of the best things about the discovery of Terra Nova. We go about our lives assuming we know essentially everything we need to know, but there's no end to the mystery of the world. It's brought back a feeling of sheer wonder. By the time all of you are my age, well, who knows how much we'll know about these . . . people? Maybe we'll even have a chance to talk to them ourselves.”

I looked at Mrs. Osterman now, wishing she were my mother, someone who could feel wonder and excitement without turning her entire life upside down. I didn't even want to think those words, the horrific ones that reverberated through me like a heartbeat since my father had mentioned it during one of my parents' arguments.
My mother's gone and joined a cult.

“Have fun at tennis, Mom,” Nick called out after Mrs. Osterman.

“Have fun . . . dropping eggs, I suppose,” Mrs. Osterman tossed over her shoulder.

“Screw that,” Nick whispered once she was out of earshot. “It's not due till next week, and Adam Schulman did it last year and he said to just pack an egg in peanuts and tie a parachute on and it should be fine.”

“Peanuts?” Halle asked.

“Yeah, like packing peanuts.”

I shrugged. “That's what I was going to suggest. Or, like, puffed rice. Or grapes.”

“See? Tara knows what's up. Anyway, my dad just bought a telescope, and you can see Terra Nova's sun. Wanna look?” he asked.

Halle glanced at me. “Sure.” I shrugged.

We followed Nick to the deck behind his house. The sky was dark now, an endless black tarp with a million tears of light.

“Fancy telescope,” I said, inspecting the shiny contraption before us.

“It's all set. It's pointed right at Terra Nova's sun. My dad looks at it, like, every night when he comes home from work. And he's been reading all this poetry all of a sudden.”

Halle raised an eyebrow at him, and I could feel a frown forming across my face as I tried to discern the correlation myself.

Nick sighed. “He was an English major in college. Says he wanted to become a poet, but then he had to make money. Now he's all wistful that two paths diverged and all that.”

I nodded. “I know what you mean,” I said, but I couldn't bring myself to say any more.

Halle shrugged. “My parents are in Belize right now. I think they couldn't care less about Terra Nova. They're about as terrestrial as it gets.”

“Look, you can see it right here,” Nick said, showing us an astronomy app on his phone. He held it up to the sky, arrows pointing at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Sirius, and Terra Nova's sun—Pinder-17, named after the scientist who had discovered it.

“Is that really the space station?” I asked, pointing to a smaller light on Nick's app.

“Yeah, pretty cool, isn't it?”

“You guys look. I'm going to go get a snack,” Halle said.

I glanced at Nick, and he gestured to the telescope. “Go ahead,” he said. I put my hand on the side of it, my face close to the lens. “Do you see it?” Nick whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back, and we both began to laugh. He placed his hand on the small of my back then. “See it? It's right there,” he said, looking into his phone. His face was two inches from mine, but neither of us turned.

“Oh yeah. It's pretty big. I mean, it's just as big as any other star, maybe even . . . bigger. So we knew that the sun was there, just not Terra Nova? Because the light of the sun was obscuring the planet?” I could feel Nick's thumb as it trailed along the waistline of my jeans.

“Yeah, we discovered the star a while ago, but it's hard to see planets because they're so small, and the light of the stars makes them difficult to see. They get lost in the glare, so astronomers look for a transit—that's, like, when the light of the sun dims by a fraction when a planet passes it.” He was still whispering, and I could feel a trail of goose bumps on my back as he latched his finger into my belt loop. My heart was racing, and I couldn't move for fear of what might happen if I did.

“But it was out there all along.”

“Yeah. We were bound to discover it sooner or later.”

“Do you still think there's a different version of us out there?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment. “Another version of you and me standing on a deck on Terra Nova, looking for Earth . . .” he mused.

Inside the house, the TV clicked on, authoritative voices talking about something that couldn't nearly be as important as this moment.

“I like that we're on the same team together,” he said. “Here, I mean. Maybe on Terra Nova too.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Remember when we were the Obamas?”

At this, I burst out laughing, moving away from the telescope to look at him. He was grinning at me.

“You think we might have been the Obamas on Terra Nova? Honestly, I thought it was super racist that I was forced to play Michelle.”

“You were
not
forced to,” Nick laughed. His hand was resting on my waist now.

“I totally was! Mrs. Patterson made me, that horrible racist wench. You just don't remember.”

“No.
You
just don't remember. Patterson had nothing to do with it. You were Michelle because I asked you to be.”

I thought about it a moment and realized it was true. He
had
asked me. I had forgotten that part. “Why'd you ask me?”

He shrugged. “I guess I had a crush on you.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. We stood there for a moment, under an umbrella of stars, an eternity of possibilities just above us. All I could think to do was reach my hand toward him. It came to rest on his chest, and his breath quickened.

“I . . .”

“Guys, you have to come in. The interview's on . . .” announced Halle from the door.

I jumped, my mouth still ajar, my hand recoiling from the shock of Halle's words.

“Oh hey, Halle,” I said. My voice was a little too shrill, but when I looked at her, she seemed unperturbed by either the story, whatever it was, or by the fact that Nick and I were standing inches from one another in the dark.

“What interview?” Nick asked, following her in.

“You know, that Japanese lady from the picture.”

They were both halfway across the kitchen by the time I turned to join them.

I stopped at the threshold of the doorway and looked back to that spot. The spot where Nick Osterman had confessed to me that he once had a crush on me.
Had
, I reminded myself, before I followed them both to the living room, where the TV was blaring, another wave of breaking news. Halle and Nick settled on the couch together, in front of the TV. I hesitated a moment before I sank into a chair off to the side.

It was her, the lady from the bitmap image.
MICHIKO NATORI
, read the banner beneath her face.

“And when was it that you identified yourself in the image distributed by NASA?”

“My friends forwarded me the picture. E-mail after e-mail . . . text after text . . . friends and family asking, ‘What are you doing on Terra Nova?' It was like a joke, but it's not funny. She looks exactly like me, but she's not me.”

“And what do you make of that?” the reporter asked as the camera panned out.
A
N
EDWARD
COPELAND
EX
CLUSIVE
INTERVIEW
, read the banner across the screen.

“That's the guy who cried on the air,” I said, thinking about how his tears had elicited disdain from my father.

“Shhhhh . . . I want to listen,” Halle said, her voice a little too harsh.