Chapter 31 #2
Stella sat on newspaper covering the wooden floor, where sunlight lay in beams like extra planks.
She was painting a small cardboard rectangle while Connor did his homework at the kitchen table and Emily leafed through her notebook.
The living room was peaceful. The only sounds were the scratch of Emily’s pencil and the musical plop of Stella’s brush in a cup of water.
Emily was reworking an earlier section of the manuscript.
Writing made her feel like an inchworm, a blind thing that lifted almost its whole self into the air, sensed where to come down next, then pulled forward the part of itself that it had left behind.
She forgot her lawyer and the empty Williamsburg street. She forgot Jack.
Stella set the rectangle down to dry and returned her attention to the large cardboard structure she had assembled with packing tape.
“What’s that?” said Connor.
“A fairy museum.”
“There’s no such thing.”
Stella shrugged. “So?”
“Mom, Stella said I was stupid.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“She did,” Connor said, “with her voice.”
They ignored him. Stella painted a purple door onto the museum, which was an impressive structure for a six-year-old.
The building had two stories, the bottom story accessed through the top one, whose floor opened like a book to reveal, below, a gallery of a royal fairy family.
The bottom level of the museum was for art and the top one was for “arti facts ” (Stella liked finding small words hidden inside larger ones).
The upper level had aluminum foil wands and a Play-Doh sculpture of a black cat (fairies loved black cats, Stella claimed, and scoffed when Connor said that witches did).
In the quiet, Emily reread what she had written.
Earlier that day, a copy of the divorce filing had arrived in the mail.
Emily had read it, feeling again that surge of buoyant relief, even pride.
Then she imagined Jack’s reaction. Dread crept over her skin.
She hid the manila envelope in her closet.
Jack had been served the papers, but she hadn’t heard from him. His lawyer hadn’t responded to hers.
“Where do visitors to the fairy museum go to the bathroom?” said Connor.
Stella cut him an annoyed look but drew a wobbly toilet on the wall of the second level. She brushed the toilet seat with rubber cement and sprinkled it with glitter. “That’s fairy pee.” She glued shiny bugle beads in the toilet bowl. “That’s fairy poop.”
“Mom?” said Connor.
Emily brushed bits of eraser from her notebook.
“Do you think there are aliens?” Connor said.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“The universe is a big place.”
“What if aliens have super hearing, and they can hear us talking from far away?”
“With technology, or with something like ears?”
“With ears.”
“They might not have ears. They might listen with their bodies differently. But they couldn’t hear us from far away, because sound has to travel through a medium, like water or the atmosphere.
If they have super hearing, they could hear everything on their planet up to the limit of its atmosphere, but nothing beyond that, because sound can’t travel in outer space, where there is nothing. ”
“So if I were on a spaceship and I crashed into an asteroid, it wouldn’t make a sound?”
“Inside the spaceship, yes, because there would be oxygen inside it. That air would be a medium for sound. But if you saw another spaceship in the fleet explode, you would hear nothing.”
“Okay, but—”
“Connor, I’m working.”
“You are?”
“I’m writing.”
“That’s not working.”
“Writing is a job.”
“But you don’t get paid.”
“Work is work whether you get paid or not. Some people get paid for doing nothing.”
“No one gets paid for nothing.”
“When you inherit money, it grows in your bank account even if you do nothing.” Emily closed her notebook and looked at it. “Maybe I could get paid. If I sold this. If someone wanted to read it.”
“Lots of people will want to read it.”
“Why do you think that? You don’t know what it’s about.”
“You tell good stories.”
“Maybe,” she said, “there’s an entirely different kind of sound that we don’t know about, that doesn’t move in waves and doesn’t need a medium. Maybe aliens do hear us with their something-like-ears. Even through outer space, from really far away.”
“I think so, too.”
Emily’s phone buzzed.
We can get pizza again soon, Jack said. Or get a sitter and go to Per Se, just the two of us
Or wherever you want
I can’t sleep. Or eat. I cook big meals and stare at the plate and can’t even try to be hungry
I miss you
I miss being a family
Think of what your doing to the kids
Your ruining their lives
Do you know how lonely I am
Give me another chance
Can’t you see how hard I’m working for you to forgive me
Emily hadn’t intended to respond, but her phone kept erupting with texts, and as she read them, her incredulity grew. Although the texts were full of blame and anguish, they pretended as if nothing had changed. She wrote, I know your lawyer received the papers filing for divorce.
For a moment, her phone was silent, then he said, We’re not getting a divorce. That’s crazy. I love you and you love me
Stella painted. Connor read. Emily felt like an explosion in space, unheard: all that fire against all that black.