The Dream Life of Astronauts Read online

  “Come on,” I said, and started walking.

  We crossed the yard. I hopped the fence and watched Ike climb up one side of it and down the other. Then we made our way out into the field. He walked with his hands in his pockets, taking extra steps to keep up with me. What would it be like, I wondered, to have friends who weren’t half-pints, or half-wits, or old people? What would it be like, at seventeen, to know other girls—just one other girl—who would want to spend time together without having to talk about every stupid thing under the sun? I had to remind myself sometimes that I’d once lived in a town a whole county away, in an apartment down the street from a school my mom would send me off to and tell me to behave at, and I had friends in that town, and we made dollhouses out of Saltine boxes and stole Cokes from the drugstore and changed the secret password every week for the club we’d formed that we didn’t want anyone else to join (not that anyone else even knew about it, since the club was secret). I had to remind myself sometimes that I’d had that life. That I’d had almost seven years of schooling, in a real school. That if my dad hadn’t taken off and my mom hadn’t gotten sick, I wouldn’t be here at all.

  When we got to the pond, Ike climbed right up on the lightning-struck tree that was sunk down into the water. He said, “You catch fish in here?”

  I leaned against the trunk. “There aren’t any fish. Mosquitoes, but no fish.”

  He was peering down at the water like he was trying to spot fish, never mind what I’d told him, and he had his fingers on some kind of pendant hanging from his neck. I asked what it was.

  “My mom gave it to me.”

  I asked if I could see it.

  Without hesitating, he pulled the chain over his head and reached down to hand it to me.

  The pendant had one round edge and one jagged edge and was stamped with words. The Lord between thee we are one another. “It doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “Her half’s got the other words,” he said. “It’s a prayer.”

  I let the necklace pool in my hand and bounced it up and down a little. I knew that with a toss I could have it out in the middle of the pond. With a toss, I could ruin his day.

  I handed it back to him and started walking. “That’s the pond,” I said.

  He followed me, and by the time I reached the garden he was already starting up the porch steps, calling for Gary.

  —

  Mr. Merrick took his time sending the feed sacks over. I carried buckets of water out to the troughs for the cows, and worked in the garden, and watched Gary and Ike playing in the yard. They’d hide from each other and find each other. They’d sit in Mr. Beal’s Nova and steer and make noises. I pulled every weed I could find, but the garden still looked ragged.

  At dinner, Mrs. Beal would ask us how our day had been, and Gary would tell her everything he and Ike had done together. Then she’d ask what I’d done and I’d say I’d worked and waited for the feed. On the fourth night, while Mrs. Beal was in the kitchen cutting up dessert, Mr. Beal mentioned how he’d met Ike’s father once and how he was a respectable man. “He had an eye for chickens,” he said. “He could always pick the winners at a 4-H fair.”

  I half-suspected he was making this up and had, in fact, never met Ike’s dad. “That’s not so hard,” I said. “A fat chicken looks like a fat chicken.”

  For a moment, the only sound was what was coming through the windows: field crickets and frogs.

  Ike looked at me with half his face scrunched up. “Where’s your dad?”

  “Somewhere else. Like your mom.”

  “Hannah.” Mr. Beal shifted in his chair. “Why don’t you go see if Mother needs any help?”

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Beal was sinking a big knife into a pound cake, making slices for the plates she’d laid out. I leaned against the wall by the back door. The kitchen was painted yellow and it made the one lightbulb seem brighter than it really was. I watched her wipe the knife on a dish towel between slices. With her back to me, she said, “You know he’s just getting used to everything.”

  “What’s to get used to?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, she said, “It seems like you two would get along fine. Just seems like you naturally would.”

  I heard the blade connecting with the plate. “We’re not family.”

  “But you could be. You’ve both lost people, and you’re both here now.” She set the knife down in the sink.

  “Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Well, it should.” She gathered up two plates in each hand and motioned for me to get the remaining one.

  Pound cake was a far shot better than no-surprise orange pie, but I was done being around all of them for the night. I told her I’d have mine tomorrow.

  Then I was down the hall and outside, crossing the gravel, crawling up the ladder to my loft in the barn. I’d never talked to the Beals about my dad, and they’d never really asked—at least, not a question as direct as Ike’s. I always assumed Mr. Merrick had given the Beals the story on both my parents, which meant that at some point my mom must have given Mr. Merrick the story on my dad. That was enough for anyone to know, wasn’t it? It should have been, if it wasn’t.

  —

  When I walked out of the barn the next afternoon, there were at least a dozen cows milling around the house. A few of them were sitting in the shade of the oak tree. One of them had its face up to the dining room window.

  I ran toward the gate that separated the driveway from the field and before I got there I could see it was wide open. A cow on the other side tried her footing on the cattle guard, jumped over it, and walked toward the house like she had a bone to pick with someone inside. Ike was sitting cross-legged in the grass next to the fence.

  “Did you open this gate?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “The old man left it open when he drove his car into town.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you close it?”

  He pointed at the metal grill set into the trench across the driveway. “Gary told me those things are supposed to keep them from getting across.”

  I grabbed the gate and shoved it closed. “Any moron can see they don’t work. You could have closed the gate and saved us a lot of trouble. It’s going to take hours to get these cows back out to the field.”

  I was angrier than I needed to be, but I couldn’t help it. He stood up and looked toward the house, then started running.

  “Get back here, you jackass!” I hollered.

  The screen door slammed behind him.

  When you have a dozen cows in one open area and you need to get them to another open area, it’s not exactly a breeze. Not without a dog, or another person. You clap at two cows, and one of them walks in the opposite direction you want it to. You get three lined up to move and two of them drift away, like canoes. It didn’t take all afternoon to get them back out to the field, but it took a chunk of it. By the time I went in for lunch there wasn’t any, just the stale slice of pound cake from the night before. I waved a fly off of it and carried it out to the barn.

  The stall I’d cleared for Mr. Merrick’s feed was empty, but looked like the dirtiest thing I’d ever seen. I swept it, then swept it again. There was always more dirt. By the time I had it in somewhat better shape, my nose and eyes felt clogged with grit. I was heading out to wash up at the hose when Gary walked in. I started past him, but he stepped in front of me.

  “Don’t call him any more names,” he said.

  I told him to get out of the way, but he took hold of my forearm.

  “Leave him alone.”

  “I’m in a bad mood, so you ought to just watch it.”

  “Sh-shit,” he said—the first time I’d ever heard him swear. “You’ve been in a b-bad mood since the day I met you.”

  I stared hard into his eyes, put my hand on top of his and squeezed it, then lifted it off my arm. “Go to hell,” I said. “Both of you.”

  I pushed past him and walked outside.

  —

>   The rest of the day I spent walking along the edge of the grove, as far away from the house and the barn as I could get and still be on the property. The workers were up and down their ladders, picking oranges as fast as their hands could move. Some had burlap sacks hanging from their shoulders, some had baskets with leather straps. They filled whatever they had, climbed down, found the truck they were assigned to, and dumped their oranges into it while a foreman on a folding chair kept track. There were all kinds of day workers—white ones, black ones, in-between ones (Cubans, I guess), some who looked almost as young as Ike and some who looked even older than the Beals. The ones I was watching on my walk around the perimeter didn’t talk to one another much and didn’t stop moving. I thought it might not be so bad, picking oranges for Mr. Merrick. You’d get shade when you were up in the trees, have plenty to do, wouldn’t have to talk to other people too much. I was standing next to the furthest fence from the house, with the grove on one side and the swamp on the other, when one of the day workers noticed me looking at him. He was tanned red from the sun, had deep creases in his face, and looked like he could have been somebody’s grandfather. He was halfway up a ladder, his fedora pushed back on his head. I was about to say hi when he said, “Keep walking, you green-moneyed bitch.”

  I kept walking, and walked faster once I was out of his sight. I followed the chain-link fence because I didn’t want to cut through the grove, and I was all but running when I got to the end of it. My heart was pounding in my ears. I started toward the field, and just as I cleared the grove, I spotted Ike in the distance. He was back at the pond, sitting up on the fallen tree.

  I would have walked in another direction, but he had already seen me, had maybe even seen how fast I was going, so I made myself slow down. Pushed my hands into my pockets. Wandered toward him.

  “Hey,” I said when I got to the edge of the pond.

  “Who’s chasing you?”

  I glanced behind me. I kicked at a chunk of mud and sent it into the water. “Does it look like someone’s chasing me?”

  He shrugged.

  “Sorry I called you names, but you could always just call me names back, you know?” It wasn’t much of an apology, but still it tasted bad, saying it.

  He was straddling the log the way you’d sit on a horse. “How come Mrs. Beal’s not your mom now, if your mom’s dead?” he asked.

  And that made me angry all over again. Loose-cow angry. Life angry. “Because I had a mom, and now I don’t. Why’d you go crying to Gary?”

  He looked down at the water, staring into it like he had when he was waiting for a fish to jump. “Gary’s my best friend. And he’s my brother now.”

  “He’s not your brother. You just met him. You don’t even know him.”

  He kept his head down. “He can be my brother.”

  I took a step toward him, but then stopped and kicked at the mud again.

  He was holding on to the log with both hands. “Why can’t he be your brother?”

  “Why isn’t Mr. Beal your dad?” I asked, caught up in what felt like a question loop, my voice starting to tremble. “Because someone else is your dad, only he’s dead, that’s why. He was hit by a train.”

  His face darkened. I saw two of him, above the water and reflected down in it, the trunks pulling away like a giant, open beak.

  “Hit by a train,” I said. “Gone.”

  “But my mom’s coming back, once she gets better.”

  “Ha!” I said. “Not in a thousand years. Trust me, that won’t happen.”

  Part of me felt awful, telling him that, but part of me wanted to tell him everything again—that the Beals weren’t his parents, that Gary wasn’t his brother, that his mom was crazy in a hospital and the sooner he swallowed that, the better.

  He wouldn’t look at me. Only down, at the water.

  —

  Up early the next morning, I sat by the south window paging through one of the magazines that had come in the box of comic books. Today’s Teens, it was called. There were picture spreads of The Beatles, Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits. Articles with names like “What Fellows Say About Girls,” and “Too Shy to Be His Steady.” There was something called a “Self Quiz” for rating your personality—ten multiple-choice questions designed to tell you what kind of person you were. The heat swarmed under the metal roof and I could feel the sweat running down my back, inside my shirt. I circled my answers. Added up my score. A horn sounded in the distance, and through the window I saw a few of the cows moving and dust clouding up from the gravel road. I was “tempestuous,” according to the quiz, but I didn’t know what “tempestuous” meant.

  There were eighteen sacks of feed. The driver helped me unload them onto the ground near the front of the barn, but said he didn’t have time to help move them inside. He was in a hurry. People were waiting. I thought this was how Mr. Beal must have spent his years as one of Mr. Merrick’s drivers: always in a hurry, always with people waiting.

  The sacks were fifty pounds apiece. To lift them, I had to bend down and work my arms under them, leverage them up and shift my footing around. When the first one landed in the stall, all the dirt I thought I’d swept out came clouding up. After that, they just got heavier. The gravel sounded like it was powdering under my boots.

  I was lifting the last sack, and I was trembling with the weight of it, thinking about Ike and his mother and what I’d said. I was thinking about my dad, and wondering for the first time if Mr. Merrick knew where he was—dead or alive—and wasn’t telling. Because Mr. Merrick seemed to know everything about us, but when it came down to the spit and chaw of it, he didn’t do a whole lot to help, did he? I imagined I could stay in Cassandra Grove for the rest of my life, quiz myself once a year and be “tempestuous” every time, and never see an improvement in my situation or anybody else’s. Just more orphans trickling in.

  I turned around.

  Ike was standing just a couple of feet away, staring, like maybe he wanted to help, but maybe he only had something he wanted to say. And that’s when my arms gave out and the sack went down.

  Gary called his name from inside the house. The rocket was on television, he hollered. It was about to lift off across the swamp. Come see.

  Ike took a step backward. He spat onto the feed that had landed between us. Then he turned and ran.

  I wiped my sleeve across my eyes, stepped out of the barn, and blew dirt into my handkerchief. When I reached the garden, I looked north.

  The flame was about as big as my fist and was just lifting over the furthest line of palm trees when the screen door smacked open. Ike and Gary ran down the porch steps, the Beals coming after them. Ike seemed to have already forgotten what had happened in the barn, which made me wonder if it had happened at all. He was jumping up and down, saying he’d never been this close to a rocket before. Gary picked him up and hoisted him onto his shoulders.

  The flame rose on a column of gray smoke. The ground shook under my boots, and I heard a frantic twitter and a flap of wings—doves roused from the hole in the silo roof. Then the rumble, which sounded far away but grew louder until it matched the shaking in the ground. The flame climbed higher and higher, and the trail of smoke behind it began to coil.

  “For Pete’s sake, Hannah, what are you looking at?” Mrs. Beal asked.

  I was down on one knee, squinting at the lettuce. “Cabbage loopers,” I said, lifting one of the bright-green worms with my thumbnail.

  Ever since his stroke, Leo Burke felt a constant flutter in his left eye. His neurologist—perky, effeminate, bearing a brotherly resemblance to Tony Randall—had told him several times that it wasn’t the eye itself he was feeling; it was the ligaments, specifically the lateral palpebral ligament. “You’ve been traumatized,” Dr. Loudon had said. “You can’t shake the house without upsetting the china.” Some doctors believed patients drew solace from having their medical conditions expressed in everyday terms, but Leo wasn’t one of those patients. Dr. Loudon would
sit on the edge of his desk with his hands folded in his lap and listen to whatever Leo had to tell him—smiling all the while, as if he were hearing a child describe a day at the zoo—then ask if Leo liked to play Yahtzee. “Think of yourself as a cup filled with Yahtzee cubes. You got shaken up and tossed out. Things aren’t going to be exactly like they were before the stroke.” Then he’d reach into his blazer pocket, pull out that goddamn stick with the little red ball on it, and ask Leo to follow it with his eyes.

  There was a palsy, too. Dr. Loudon had said that would probably go away with time, but it had been two months since the stroke and the left side of Leo’s face still sagged. When he braved the mirror each morning, he saw a man who looked like he was trying not to laugh at something he found only half-funny. Combine that with the flutter in his eye and the pulsing of his lower lid, and he looked like a candidate for the nuthouse.

  “Think of yourself as a car,” Dr. Loudon had said. “Something got knocked loose and kept the gas from reaching the engine for a little while. It might never happen again.”

  Cold comfort. Dr. Loudon had encouraged Leo to get back to his normal routine as soon as possible, so Leo had pushed through the doors of Technicolor just a week later. He’d also resumed his part-time job at the hardware store, his deaconing at the church, his Scout meetings. But it wasn’t the same as before. He tried to hold the left side of his mouth just slightly higher than the right, and to squint his eyelid just enough to suppress the flutter, but he wasn’t successful. When people talked to him now, they talked to his left eye. And when they listened to him, which no one really did anymore, they focused on the downward sag of his mouth.

  “If the pulse and the palsy are bothering you that much,” Dr. Loudon had said, “just think of yourself as a trusty old appliance. A Westinghouse. You might have a few new rattles, but you’re still running.”

  Leo wouldn’t have minded punching Dr. Loudon in the stomach.

  He also wouldn’t have minded screaming into the faces of the people in his life who used to respect him and who now only saw him as weak. His coworkers at Technicolor. The customers at the hardware store. The congregation at First Baptist.