Chapter Six
Dolphins, photograph by Thomas Nebbia: Pictures of Earth
Frank wasn’t really all that wild. It was mostly the doorbell and cats and the arrival of the mail, an understandable thrill.
And yeah, he jumped up for a minute on my knees when we went to the kitchen, but you just needed to notice him, and he was fine after that.
He just needed to be seen, like any reasonable person.
You cracked a few bubbly waters, and we took our pizza on paper plates out to the deck.
Frank sat up like a gentleman beside us, on his best behavior in hopes of a dropped crust. It was so fun out there.
I’d delivered to the houseboats before, but I never got to hang out.
It was like a busy little village, all charming shingled shacks and odd-shaped houses mixed with elegant, modern two-stories, all jammed together on that dock that swayed and creaked.
You called out a Hi! to a woman watering her plants, and you waved to another guy coming home with groceries.
You gave a thumbs-up to another man climbing into a kayak, and he gave one back.
Another woman opened her front door for air, propping it ajar with a flowerpot.
“Hey, Mars!” she called. “Hey, Mars’s friend!”
“Hey, Adelaide!” you answered, and I just smiled. “Beautiful day!”
“This is so great out here,” I said.
“I love it.” You took a drink from your can. “It’s my favorite place we’ve lived so far. We’ve actually only been in this place for a few months.”
“You’ve moved around a lot, right?”
“Every two years or so? Lots of places in California, and back here again, where my mom’s from. She, uh, tends to meet some guy? And then our plans are his plans. But hey. I can pack a truck like a pro so shit doesn’t fall out the back.”
Oh, God. That sounded like a maroon flag for sure.
“Wow. Is that hard? We’ve always lived in the same house.
Near Green Lake. How do you keep changing schools and stuff?
I can’t imagine. I’ve been going to school with the same people for as long as I can remember.
” It was a way to find out how old you were, I admit.
Aside from a vague idea from that photo in the North Bend Herald, I had no clue.
I knew so little about you, but I kept having the strange feeling that I’d known you forever.
Or even way past forever. Going back in time or something. It’s hard to explain.
“I just…try to be open, you know. Meet people. See what might happen. If it’s horrible, I won’t be there long, right? But I’m done with all that now.”
“You graduated?”
“Nah. I’ll be a senior next year, but I’m at Seattle Central College?
I’ve been doing my AP classes over there this year, and next year, too.
When we first moved back and lived with Sandrine and Aunt Gwen, I went to North Bend High.
But now that we’re here, it takes, like, an hour to get to school.
” You shook your pizza slice to make a definite point.
“There’s no way I’m moving again. UW has a great astrophysics and astronomy program I’m applying to.
Okay, major confession, my biggest dream would be to blast off into space, but astronomy is a lot more practical.
Lily is a professor emeritus at UW? She still teaches occasionally.
Usually in the area of interstellar, intergalactic, and circumgalactic medium. ”
“I have no idea what that is, but it’s so great that you have a plan. I’m going to apply to UW, too, but I have no idea what major. I wish I had a thing like you have a thing.”
A confession: I worried for a second that you might start to explain interstellar galactic-whatever.
I already liked you a lot, but that could shift, you know, if you insisted on instructing me, the way Arthur did whenever we got on the subject of car engines, or the way my dad did whenever we got on the subject of pretty much anything.
I loved the wonder of all that stuff, planets and the universe and all, but I didn’t need to know the factual details.
You didn’t do that, though. Instead, you just tilted your head in a question. “You’re not studying business?”
I made a face.
“Well, you’ve got all of senior year, too. You never know what might just spark some passion,” you said. And then you blushed.
There was a lot to blush about. Not just the spark some passion line, but the fact that you knew how old I was.
You looked me up! Haha, you did. You probably saw that DECA competition we did last year, the Virtual Business Challenge-Entrepreneurship, where me and my partner, Hannah Chen, simulated opening a new restaurant.
“We’re the exact same age, hmm,” I said.
“It seems like…we’re the exact same a lot of things.
” You looked into my eyes again. We weren’t, in a lot of ways.
I mean, beyond your friends and the sports, there was your whole hardcore astronomy interest, your single mom, where you lived, how you guys moved around, pretty much everything I learned about you so far.
I would never, not in a million years, want to blast off into space.
Still, I knew what you meant. There was some sense that we were the same, or at least really, really similar, down deep where it mattered.
This might sound weird, but…like a twin or something.
Not in a biological way, but like someone who was once a part of me who I was reconnecting with.
I looked into your eyes, too. And Frank stared at both of us, still wanting pizza, or maybe just watching Human TV.
Your eyes and mine—it was like falling into something, a world or a universe, a cosmos where only the two of us walked around.
It was intense. Too intense, really. I mean, that universe might have a beautiful sea to swim in, but it might also have volcanoes and earthquakes, deserts and mirages.
Maybe that’s what love always felt like.
I never experienced it before, so who knew, but it seemed suddenly very dangerous.
I was crossing over into some vast and unsafe space, and all at once I felt the way I did when I thought about getting drunk or having sex or driving a car.
Or going to college or moving out or traveling, or a hundred other things.
Only worse, because it was big, scary stuff plus my heart.
I was the one who broke it, the gaze. I was overwhelmed. I’d never been that close to anybody.
“Moving so much and all…Is that part of why you go to Dr. Quentin Baleaf?” Nothing like a little mental-health talk to kill a romantic vibe. It’s like I did it intentionally.
When my eyes broke from yours, you looked out toward the lake and shrugged.
“Yeah, no.” I wasn’t sure which of those was the answer.
“I saw him back when I was, like, ten? Aunt Gwen made me go. She thought it’d be a good idea to see him again now.
Just preventative, like? I got really, really depressed back then. ”
“When you were only ten?”
“My mom was getting divorced from Leon, her third husband. There was my dad, then Oscar Maltez, then Leon Johnson. He was a real creep. I hated him. He was always demeaning her, and she cried all the time, but when they broke up, she, uh, made an attempt. To, uh…”
“Oh, man.” It was okay. You didn’t have to say it.
“Right. And I uh, had to call, you know.”
“Oh, God.” You didn’t have to say anything you didn’t want to.
“Right. And we ended up at Aunt Gwen’s, and I was just sad all the time.
I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds.
My aunt dragged me in there, and Dr. QB really helped.
Him, plus Sandrine, and…This is going to sound silly, and we don’t have to talk about it every second, but that’s when I learned about Voyager and the Golden Record.
Sandrine already had her first telescope.
Telescope and a guitar, the coolest person ever.
But…thinking of this thing out there, this record of humanity that would last beyond all of us, just so far out there…
It was comforting. It was, like, uplifting.
Connection. The hope of it—it seemed like a clue to survival, almost. So when my mom and Alan broke up—he was the last guy, in Palo Alto?
—Aunt Gwen thought I should go back to counseling. What about you?”
“Winnifred Evans? I started getting all…” I put my hand against my chest. “Anxious and stuff, before I started my job? All of my brothers did delivery first, too, but way younger than me. My dad and mom said it was too dangerous for me, a girl, driving in traffic and ringing strangers’ doorbells and stuff.
They wouldn’t allow it. So I fought for my right to be treated equally, but when they finally gave in, when I won… Panic.”
“That makes sense.”
“It does?” Now I was the one who was full of disbelief.
“I don’t even know why I fought for it. Just because it was unfair, I guess.
Anyway, I was scared, am scared, to do a lot of things.
Like that. And that. And that.” I pointed to a woman kayaking.
To a sailboat. To an airplane. If I told you I was anxious to even say hi to the neighbors, you might flee, and I wouldn’t blame you.
“Sure, but now you deliver pizzas like a boss.”
I laughed. “I got used to it after a while. Oh! Poor Frank. He’s given up.” Frank was lying on the dock, chin on paws. His ear twitched at his name.
“I love him, but I’m not sharing my pizza.” You peeked under the lid of the box. Whoa. It was a small, but we polished it off.
“He looks so sad.”
“He’s not the same since Jesse James died.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Frank,” I said, and meant it.
“His grief was real. Did you know that lots of animals grieve? Dogs and elephants and crows and monkeys and giraffes and dolphins…” You knew a lot about a lot of things.
“That’s amazing.”
“It’s…universal.”
“An elephant would use a lot of Kleenex. Wait. What time is it, even?” I checked my phone. Only George knew where I was, and it was getting late. Mom or Dad might worry, and worried people are always making sure no one else has to go through that. “I better go.”
“Noooo,” you groaned. “I haven’t even kissed you yet.”
I loved the way you just said stuff straight-out. No games. If the universe of love was risky, maybe you were a good planet. I took your hand. Our fingers intertwined, and electricity zipped through my body.
“MARSDEN ZEVON RIVERS!” a woman shouted. “I could use some help, please.”
It was your mom. She was carrying a large…No idea. It was purple, glittery. A giant rock of some kind.
“Just a sec!” Mars dropped my fingers, pushed his chair back. “My mom,” you said to me. “She’s been working at this woo-woo metaphysics shop, with crystals and stuff. Sacred Stones or something? Why do I always forget the name?”
“Oh! Mystic Minerals. Right off Green Lake Way, probably.” Crystals, incense, classes on finding your inner goddess.
“That’s it! When she gets involved in something, it’s a hundred percent.”
You hurried over to help. “This fucker is heavy,” your mom said. “Put it right there.” She indicated the little table where we sat. I stood and removed the pizza box so you could set the enormous rock down. It took over the whole thing.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s a half-raw ametrine tower.” That day, your mom’s blond hair was in braids, same as mine.
Her eyes were a startling blue shade. Piercing and beautiful.
“It’s supposed to be a shield from negative energy, while bringing serenity, and enhancing the ability to take control over your own life, and… I forget the rest. Protective.”
“Mom, this is Margaret. Margaret, my mom, Janet.”
“Janite. Glad to meet you,” she said.
But I’d never seen anyone less glad to meet me in all my life.
“Can you get the groceries out of the car?” she said to you.
When we walked back up the dock, I felt a horrible shame crawl up my spine, like I’d done something terribly wrong. I wondered if this, she, was a maroon flag. In her car, an old Ford Taurus, there was a single grocery bag on the passenger seat.
We stood next to my car. Someone had put an old athletic sock on the smiling pizza’s head, and I yanked it off and tossed it into the dock’s dumpster.
You didn’t seem bothered by what had just happened back there.
I couldn’t even really describe it myself.
How would I explain it to Addison? Nothing had happened. I was being all weird.
The groceries waited in the car. You hugged me again. You looked at me, blinking with what seemed like happiness.
“I just can’t believe…” You shook your head.
I couldn’t believe it, either. You and me.
“I feel like…”
“What?”
“Okay, I’m going to bring it up again,” you warned.
“Do it.”
“On the Golden Record, there’s this image.
Number 54. Three dolphins, leaping in the air.
It’s retro-looking, right? Well, it wasn’t in 1977, but it is now.
I mean, think of it: It seemed important to show alien life this other weird alien life in our oceans.
Sagan said he thought it would be courteous to show the dolphins, after including the whale songs.
But the dolphins are all leaping in air, and water droplets are pouring down, and they’re set against this beautiful beach backdrop.
An ‘exuberant creature,’ Sagan said, and it’s just joy, right?
Like, look, our planet has joy. And, right now… ” You tapped your chest.
Okay, you…No one, absolutely no guy in my entire school, would talk like this. Their eyes wouldn’t shine like this. And I felt it, too, the leaping dolphins. I raised my two hands, arced them in the air, a goofy dance move, a joy hand-rainbow.
“Yep,” you said. “Yes, yes.” Like you loved it. Just loved it.
We didn’t say goodbye. You just moved toward the groceries, and I got in my car, and you still hadn’t kissed me.
But this is what I really remember: My hands, arcing in the air. You, beaming. You, all light.