Chapter Twenty-Six #2
I had offered, and it was coming back to me, just like Sandrine had said.
Each comment was a little present. We miss Mars so bad, and I think of him every day, and This is a beautiful tribute to your friend, and Thank you for this.
I lost a loved one, too. On the photo of the Sarafina, someone wrote: Couldn’t get through a Friday night without one of these for the kid, heart emoji, pizza emoji.
Your Voyager poster—The Grand Tour and Beyond…
It had somehow been discovered by sixty-five people and counting.
Love it! I did a report on that when I was a kid, a guy about my dad’s age wrote.
Man, there must have been a lot of those reports in those days.
My photo of that dent in the wall a week after the Mount Si one—it looked like nothing.
If you didn’t know better, you might think it was a smeary image from a satellite, a faraway crater on a distant planet.
But it got ninety-five likes. Connect, connect, connect, and it was okay.
I was okay. Okay, and a little less alone. I can’t believe I’m saying that.
This makes my heart ache, said LittleByrd466.
I know someone at NASA. You should blast this up to space for real, said Roketguy2027.
Heart emoji, crying emoji, heart emoji, heart emoji, wrote Aunt Gwen, and Chester, and Mars’s baseball coach, Hal Jericho, and someone named CosmicRayS32, who’d been showing up regularly.
My brother used to do that. I miss him so bad, wrote MaiseyDayseee. We have that exact same hole.
“If you’d stop giggling, we could get this,” Bao said.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m nervous.” Amelia pulled her T-shirt over her nose to half hide and sober up. She popped out again. “Bao! Remember when—”
“I was just thinking it.” Now Bao was giggling.
I put my phone down. “What, you guys?” I barely knew Amelia and Bao. Driving over there, my stomach was a knot of nerves, but here I was. Oh, Mars. I liked being here with them.
“One time, Mars—”
“Oh, jeez.” Bao was losing it.
“He took this couple out. For a test, and—” Amelia snort-snickers.
“The boat starts to totally heel! Like, bad! And Mars starts giggling, you know, the way he did when he’d get nervous?”
I did know. I wasn’t going to tell them about that time with the condom, though. How you kept on giggling, even when you finally got the thing on. I thought you were back into our serious kissing when you laughed right in my mouth.
“The boat was—” Amelia waggled her hand.
“I’ve never seen one look like it was actually going over, I swear. And you could hear his high-pitched cackling coming over the water, and he was kind of hunched, and—”
“How’d they even make it back in?” Amelia shook her head.
“And when they did?” Bao continued. “The test wasn’t finished. The couple asked for a new instructor. Chester went with them. He wasn’t exactly pleased.”
“He wasn’t exactly pissed, either, though,” Amelia said. “Look at him. Big softy.”
We stood at the end of the Center for Wooden Boats dock and took in the wide view of the lake with its Richard Scarry–like busyness: boats and canoes, kayaks and seaplanes.
Looking back toward the shingled shed and the center’s main building, we could see Chester on his knees beside Pelican, dunking a big sponge into a bucket and mopping the bottom.
“I never heard that story,” I said. “He didn’t tell me.”
“Would you tell anyone that? He was probably embarrassed,” Bao said.
Sucks to be gone, Mars. I was learning all your secrets. (Sorry.)
“Okay. I got the giggles out. Let’s do this.” Amelia wiggled her shoulders and stood straight.
Bao nodded. “Go.”
I pushed the record button.
“Sending you huge love from the southernmost point of Lake Union to wherever you are now,” they said in unison.
“Perfect,” I said.
I clapped my hands over my ears as a seaplane landed.
From where we stood, I could see Mrs. Fosmire’s houseboat, marking the end of your dock.
She belonged on the record, too, but I didn’t think I could go back there.
I was doing lots of things I didn’t think I could, but still.
George had even made sure to reroute my deliveries to avoid it.
I’d said goodbye that day. I could revisit all these people and all these memories, but laying eyes on that house again was too much.
We passed Chester on the way back up. “Someone spilled a latte.” He rolled his eyes but didn’t really look mad.
He wrung out the sponge. “Winston, the new kid, is coming in at ten,” he told Bao, and she nodded.
Your replacement. Ouch. Necessary, now that the center was getting busy again.
Chester shook his head, as if trying to dislodge something unpleasant.
“Ack,” he said, at the wrongness, all wrongness.
“Hey, Margaret…When are you bringing that up the mountain?” He nodded his chin toward my phone.
“A bunch of astronomers want in. Or on.”
“Soon!”
“You said that last time I asked.”
He was right—it was the exact response I’d given to his comment on the post of Aunt Gwen’s Husky song. I know a group of folks who got things to say on your Golden Record, he wrote. Soon! I’d answered, adding a heart emoji as a shield.
The only thing worse than going back to that dock was going up to that mountain. How to explain it? I’d seen everyone that night at Neumos, but standing on that mountain looking up at the night sky was different. I couldn’t get any closer to you than that. That was your church.
I was scared, you know. To face you like that. I’d be looking up toward those sparkling stars for forgiveness, for answers, but I just might get only an endless, dark nothingness.
“It’s the real church,” Chester said, reading my mind.
I had to drive right by the houseboat docks when I went home from South Lake Union.
They circled the lake; there was no avoiding them.
I averted my eyes past your dock, but then I reached the stop sign.
It was one of those times when your body has a different plan than your mind does.
I was suddenly turning around in a condo parking lot.
What was I doing? No, the only question again: Why?
It was a negotiation, I suppose. Guilt was a hungry bonfire, and I fed it the last log so I wouldn’t have to burn the furniture. I didn’t want to go up that mountain, so I went to see Mrs. Fosmire instead.
I walked with some determination right past your houseboat, snuck a peek.
Someone else had moved in, I could tell.
The same old welcome mat was still there, but there were new curtains in the kitchen window.
A cat sat on top of our table outside. I suddenly felt like I had swallowed something too large, and it had lodged in my body, only I couldn’t tell where—my throat, my chest, my stomach. Your home had moved on, you know.
God, I hoped Mrs. Fosmire was there, because I didn’t want to do this again.
I felt the now-familiar creeping shame—about myself, about the project itself—maybe because I could practically see your mom walking right out of that houseboat as she had so many times, coming toward you and me with her eyes fixed on you.
All those likes and comments and connections—they belonged to her, not me. Especially after what I did to you.
Thank goodness, here came Mrs. Fosmire’s footsteps stomping toward the door after I rang.
She was ready to tell someone off. Couldn’t they see the Residents only sign at the dock entrance?
The doorknob rattled aggressively, but then her whole body relaxed when she saw me.
How exhausting it must have been to be on guard like that all the time.
“Margaret! What a surprise! God, don’t look at my hair.
I look like shit.” She patted it with a resigned generosity, like you would an ugly old dog you were fond of.
But she didn’t look like shit. Her crabby old face was such a comfort.
“This is going to sound really strange,” I said. “And I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this?” The words sputtered out: Voyager and the Golden Record and you, my project. It all sounded like rusty water out of an unused faucet—I wasn’t sure I was making sense. The cat and the curtains had thrown me.
“What’s strange about that? It’s just your love, trying to find a new place to go. And of course I’ve heard of it! I did a report on Voyager in the eighth grade. Didn’t your dad do one, too?”
“Mars told you?”
“Oh, we talked about a lot of things when he’d come over to borrow my kayak.
Northwest birds, gardening…” Mrs. Fosmire had some beautiful, overflowing planters on her deck.
“He came out to look at the supermoon one night, which was sitting practically right up on the Space Needle like it was balanced there. We got chatting about eclipses, how his mom made a viewer out of a Frosted Flakes box.”
“She did?”
“Mm-hmm. And Voyager, of course. Jesus Christ, he loved that. I told him I watched it take off when I was twelve. All kids were space enthusiasts back then. My brother? He even became an actual rocket scientist. His boy, Austin, is working on the Vulcan Centaur.”
“Wow,” I said. I had no idea what the Vulcan Centaur was, but I was still stuck on that image of your mom, cutting and taping that box to show you magic.
“I think about Mars a hundred times a day. Especially when I see his bulbs popping up now. See those there?” She gestured down the dock to the planter box on your float.
I hadn’t even noticed. It was packed full of the coolest, oddest flowers.
Dandelion-like puffs, but big, really big, and purple. I wanted to pat one.
“What are those?”
“Alliums. He liked mine from last year, so I gave him some bulbs. Look how well his did. He was going to be a great gardener.”
It took a few tries, but we finally got something recorded.
“Greetings from an old broad on planet Earth. I fucking miss you, kid.”
As I walked past your houseboat again, something odd happened.
My heart didn’t clutch as much as fill. I hoped the people who lived there didn’t see me, but I took a photo of the houseboat.
I took photos of your alliums, another thing I hadn’t known about you.
I took one of our table, too, just ours again, since the cat had run off.
The welcome mat. I even hurried back to the end of the dock and took the view of the lake from there.
The swim ladder, my own feet dangling in the water as I sat on the edge.
You and you and you. The last time I was here—it hadn’t been goodbye after all.