Chapter 14
Rafe
I’m up before the sun, which is standard for me.
Neri is still sleeping, nestled in the tiny bed under the wool blankets. I have no intention of disrupting her rest. As for me, sleep has been eluding me since the sky turned a deep blue, at what I guess is about four a.m.
Because it’s Sunday.
I’ve been keeping count on the cottage doorframe, one small scratch each morning with a nail. Very maritime, very authentic. Neri says all I’m missing is scurvy and a parrot.
Seven scratches last night. Which makes today the eighth day. Which makes today inauguration day for the AETHER telescope. An inauguration that will come and go without me.
Life goes on, I guess.
I keep turning that sentence over, looking for the pun. There’s supposed to be one. There’s always a pun; the worse it gets, the faster they come. My grad students used to gauge exam season by them. I’ve been sitting on this log for an hour and I haven’t found a single one.
Ten years. All those sleepless nights working on grants, too busy to build a life of my own or to maintain a relationship.
The winter the funding died and I flew to four capitals in nine days because if I could just get everyone back into the same room, smiling, maybe nobody would notice how close the whole thing was to collapsing.
Every panel. Every hearing. Every version of “Rafael will handle it.”
And Rafael handled it.
Again and again. Being the affable, reliable one is a skill. Somewhere along the way, it became a job.
And the finish line was today, and I’m not even there to witness it happening.
The part that hurts most isn’t the speeches. I can miss a ribbon cutting. It’s first light. The dome slit opening. The mirror taking its first real photons. Every monitor in the control room filling with the sky.
I used to picture that moment as I fell asleep at my desk: photons that left some other world before the pyramids, ending their journey tonight on a surface that exists because a nine-year-old in Boston got handed a department-store telescope by his father and never recovered.
The sun clears the horizon, painting a shimmering wonder of light across the cove. I don’t hear her come down the path.
The first thing I know is the wool blanket settling around my shoulders, and then Neri sits next to me, her face sleep-creased, her hair a teal catastrophe. She rests her head on my shoulder, her gaze on the water.
“You’ve been sitting here for over an hour,” she says. “The fish can’t be that interesting.”
“Two mackerel and a seagull with a bad attitude had an argument. It was riveting.”
The joke comes out automatically. Right shape, right timing. The familiar little reflex of making the room lighter, even when I don’t feel like joking. Or laughing.
She doesn’t smile. She stays pressed to my side and doesn’t ask what’s wrong.
She waits. The waves come in their eternal dance over the shore. Way out, a gannet folds and hits the water, fast as a thrown knife.
“It’s Sunday,” I finally say.
I feel her go still. She takes this in, then, quietly: “I’m so sorry.”
I take a deep breath.
“It’s fine. It’s a party. I’ve been to a thousand.”
“Of course, it’s not fine. This is your project.”
“It’s fine.” My tone is sharp and I immediately regret it. None of this is Neri’s fault. Then, quietly, like it’s no bother at all. Like all this didn’t cost me a decade of my life. “It’s just work, after all. It will be there when we go back.”
My thumb finds the scar on the back of my right hand and worries at it. I shake my head, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see her staring at me.
“I used to think, when it’s done, then I’ll settle down. Then I’ll figure out whatever the hell comes after spending ten years trying to get one impossible thing up a mountain. Whatever the sentence was going to be after ‘then,’ I never finished it. There was always another wobble.”
I look down at my hands.
“And now it’s done.”
I gesture at myself. The beard. The salt-stiff fleece.
“The worst part, the genuinely embarrassing part, is that I watched all my friends get married, have children, build lives for themselves and I always thought that my project was worth the sacrifice. I always thought that AETHER was worth putting my life on the sidelines. I’m not so sure anymore.”
There.
I wait for her to tell me it’s ridiculous. That of course it was worth it. She doesn’t.
Neri pulls her feet onto the log and wraps her arms around her knees. For a moment she watches the water instead of me.
“When I finally shifted three nights ago,” she says slowly, “the thing I felt first wasn’t joy. Joy came after. The first thing was relief.”
She rubs her thumb over one knee.
“And for about five seconds, I hated myself for it. Like being relieved meant I hadn’t wanted the sea badly enough.”
She turns her head and looks at me.
“Maybe you’re allowed to love something and still be tired from carrying it.”
That’s all.
I look back at the horizon while a part of me sits here breathing easier than it has in years.
“When did mermaids get so wise?” I manage.
“I’ve always been wise. You were distracted by the hair.”
Then she shifts closer until her hip presses into mine. I put my arm around her beneath the blanket. Her body is warm from sleep, her hair cool where it brushes my jaw.
She’s right. I’ve been carrying the AETHER telescope project for so long, I’ve forgotten how heavy it was. I’ve never taken a moment to consider how much it cost me. But as much as it cost me, I would do it all over again.
So I let myself miss it.
The ceremony is happening without me. The sentence sits there, and it hurts, and the pain doesn’t drown me.
Because of Neri.
“For what it’s worth,” she murmurs into my collarbone, “when we get back, I’ll crack a bottle of champagne and give my presentation to an empty room if I have to.”
“It won’t be an empty room. I wouldn’t miss it for all the mussels in the world.”
“That’s totally unfair. I bet neither of us will ever eat another mussel for the rest of our lives after we leave this island.”
And the laugh finally comes, rusty and real, dragged up out of me sideways, and I press my face into her salt-and-coconut hair.
That’s when she goes rigid.
“Rafe.” Her voice has changed key entirely. She’s off my shoulder, up straight, eyes locked down the shore to the south where the headland ledges run out black into the water. “Do you see that?”
I follow her gaze. The morning sun is fully up now, hammering the wet rock gold and white, and for a second I see nothing but glare and weed.
Then I see it.
Orange. Safety orange, the color that exists to be found, a hard-cornered case the size of a small suitcase, wedged in the rocks at the tide line where the ledges shelve into the sea. It’s rocking. Every wave that comes in shoulders it, lifts one end, sets it down.
We both know what sits in that orange safety box. Our survival. Our saving grace. Our way back.
We’re both already running.