Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Husky Fever,” sung by Gwen Laurent: Music of Mars
“Sending you huge love from the southernmost point of Lake Union to wherever you are now.” —Greeting from Amelia Weintraub and Bao Zhang
“Greetings from an old broad on planet Earth. I fucking miss you, kid.” —Greeting from Ilene Fosmire
Frosted Flakes box, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
The post of Mrs. Fosmire’s greeting got nearly four hundred likes and comments.
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what was going on here, but something was.
I thought it was because of Sandrine, mostly, how she shared stuff with her own large number of fans.
But it wasn’t just Sandrine. HarveyWanderer0077 shared it with the Voyager 1 and 2 fan club on Snapshot and other sites.
Remember OortCloud8? he wrote. To the stars, young dude!
What? When I looked it up online, there you were!
You were part of the online Voyager fan club—of course you were!
Your name: OortCloud8. You commented on other people’s posts, mostly, but I got to hear you say things, new things I hadn’t seen before.
The wonder of it! Looking like a golf ball when you peel off the white!
you replied when someone posted Voyager’s first images of Uranus, taken in 1986.
Gas giant—that’s what my aunt calls me, you wrote after someone else shared an article on the Jovian planets, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter, the gas planets.
Another older neighbor from the dock, Mae Donnelly, shared Mrs. Fosmire’s greeting with her bake club.
That’s where I got the espresso brownie recipe!
she wrote. That boy made them for me once.
Incredible, but don’t expect to sleep after you eat them, which you already know if you tried it.
Mrs. Fosmire’s nephew Austin shared it on the Intuitive Machines page, the company building the next lunar explorers for NASA.
Your auntie is cool, drLizEngr wrote. That kid was cool, RIP, wrote RashmonSCI2026.
A week later, My Voyager had over twelve hundred followers.
It was unnerving and astonishing, but I could do it. Those strangers were…distant, if that makes sense. It was easy, to press a little heart next to their comments.
But then a DM arrived. Of course one would. Why hadn’t I foreseen this? The way the project would grow, would push me farther and farther beyond the fire wall? Mars was my good friend, if you ever want to talk.
It was Ella. She left her phone number.
Oh, God. My anxiety rushed around, trying to rapidly rebuild the barricade that had been slowly crumbling. I mean, your friends here, Aunt Gwen, the people I already sort of knew myself were one thing. But Ella was a stranger. A real, in-person one. Your stranger, but still!
Carl Sagan in his turtleneck gazed at me from his frame.
His eyes were full of compassion and understanding.
You’d told me about the obstacles he’d encountered making the record, the technological problems, and impossible debates, and public pressure, but his need to send a message of humanity and hope, a message that might never be heard, was larger than any of that.
And my need to send my own message was larger, too.
Shit. It just was.
My fingers were suddenly pressing those numbers in the same way my car had turned around in that parking lot to see Mrs. Fosmire. A part of me made me, is all I can say. A part of me looked after my greater good, the way I ate the banana instead of the chips I really wanted.
And, Mars…Ella and I talked so long, I was almost late for work.
The anxiety that had filled me loosened like a knot and became a new thing entirely, something good.
Oh, God—I almost said, You would have died, but what I mean is, you wouldn’t have believed it, and would have loved it.
We laughed so hard at the story of your flip-flop dropping when you rode the Sky Glider, and how you spit right into Ella’s dad’s face when he was teaching you to swim.
Before then, I guess you could only dog-paddle.
You never told me you only recently learned to swim!
I get it, but I would have understood. Imagining you with your chin up in the pool, your hands cupped and scooping water to stay afloat, my heart broke, and I loved you so big.
We both kept saying, Can you imagine how happy Mars would be if he saw us talking?
I’d thought Ella was a maroon flag, but I was so wrong.
You wouldn’t believe this, either (honestly, I barely did), but I told her it was okay to share my phone number.
Soon, I heard from your other friends in California, and one of your teachers, Mr. Ramirez, percussion ensemble (percussion ensemble?
!), and the grocery-store lady from the market where you did the shopping for you and your mom, and your track coach, Shannon Unsler, who’d awarded you Most Inspirational.
She told me the story about you coming in last, very last, all the teams, nearly every meet, practically throwing up after the four hundred meter.
She was laughing about it, and then her voice got all wobbly with tears.
Ella wasn’t a flag. She, and all of them—your coaches, your neighbors, your old friends, your family, your coworkers, the individuals you shared a joke with online—were something else, I was beginning to understand.
I looked it up, information about tethers, the straps that keep the astronaut fixed to her spaceship so she doesn’t fly off into some distant forever orbit all alone in the universe.
Some sites said they were sixty feet in length, some said twenty-five, some said fifty-five, the exact number of greetings on the Golden Record.
Once described by Smithsonian Magazine as “not a terribly exciting piece of equipment” in an article about astronaut essentials, they were also said to be made of nylon, or heat-resistant webbing, or simple rope.
In photos, they look like the sort of nondescript strap that you yourself might have used to keep the shit in the truck when you and your mom were moving.
Plain old tan or gray, with hooks on either end.
It didn’t look like enough, important enough, to keep that space traveler safe, but it was.
All of those people had kept you anchored to the ship, and now they were keeping me from spinning out into darkness, too.
The thing about nylon, or webbing, or rope—it looks like a single entity, but it isn’t. It’s made of a bunch of strands, all woven together. That’s what gives it its strength.
“I thought you were through with this shit!” my father shouted.
It might have been my imagination, but I swear, the water glass on my desk…
It was like that scene in Jurassic Park, concentric circles forming, ripples from the footsteps of the monster approaching.
Did you think he was gone from this story?
Changed forever after getting a gut-punch of perspective after what happened to you?
Nope, nope, nope. If a person allows his monster to stomp around like that, he’ll never be gone.
Believe me, you’ll see him again, even if he’s been lying low.
“How is this a surprise?” Maurice said. “I told you we signed the deal.”
“You didn’t say you were going to quit.”
It was Monday, and I had the night off. Maurice told me he was going to come over to do the deed.
Dad had him on the schedule into next spring.
It was the beginning of June. They were supposed to start recording on Wednesday.
He’d waited until the last possible moment, which was understandable, but, God.
They were in the kitchen. I heard the drawers opening and shutting. Pans rattling. I couldn’t imagine one of them cooking right now, so maybe Mom was down there. I hoped so. Neither of them should’ve been holding a knife right then.
“I can’t exactly spend weeks in the studio and then months on tour, I can’t build a career, while doing front-of-house for your business.”
“Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? My business? This family’s business? You think I built all this for myself? I did it for you.”
“You did it for me. But you never asked me if this is what I want.”
“What you want?” I heard the sizzle of oil in a pan. In moments, the heavenly scent of garlic wafted up. “Do you want to be able to pay your bills? Do you want to have enough money to raise a family? Do you want one shred of security? What do you think, you’re going to be John Stewart?”
“Rod Stewart?” I had no clue who he was, but he must have been a really famous music guy. Even from upstairs, I could hear Maurice snort.
“No, smart-ass. John Stewart. Never heard of him? One-hit wonder, you know-it-all. ‘People out there turning music into gold.’ ”
Okay, that was it. The smart-ass, the know-it-all…It didn’t matter how brave you were going into a talk like that. He could pierce your armor, quick.
I shoved aside the last of my homework. There were two more weeks left of school.
Prom was on Saturday, and in three weeks, we’d graduate.
The shiny gown and that silly flat hat for the ceremony would be arriving any day now.
I didn’t even want to go, but Mom had insisted.
Sitting in maroon satin with a tassel tickling my temple seemed absurd in regular times, and cruel when a chair was empty somewhere.
It was a celebration of life moving forward, so what would the cheering feel like?
That particular moving forward didn’t matter to me, but this one did. Maurice’s did.
What could I do but stand beside him? If that’s all I had, I’d give it. I didn’t look all that strong, in my old, ragged tank top and pj shorts. I tossed on your blue flannel. Over the past months I had learned one thing for sure: You were someone who showed up for people.
I was halfway down the stairs when I heard her: “You don’t have to be an any-hit wonder, Maurice. As long as you’re doing what you love,” my mom said.
I stopped. It was shocking. A small moment, the smallest, up against him. Yet still, she’d used her voice. I felt a tiny curl of anger, too, I admit. A finally! But larger was the thrill of her standing up to him.
“Doing what you love? That’s gonna keep your cupboards full of food?” my father said. “That’s gonna pay your insurance?”
“Your happiness is the thing that matters, Maurice. Not our plan for your happiness.” Mom’s voice was quiet. But it didn’t have to be loud. It didn’t have to shake a water glass for us to know she meant it.
Now I was in the kitchen, too. Her strength gave me strength, the strand and the strand. I wished I’d always had a cord, her cord, but here we were now, and she was trying. “You’ll work it out, Maurice,” I said. “No matter what.”
Maurice didn’t even have a chance to respond. My father opened his mouth and then banged it closed, like an unhinged shutter during a storm, because we were interrupted by the ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong of our doorbell, the noisy, unignorable arrival of Arthur and gang.
“Hello, Vittorios!” Arthur shouted as Maya, Max, and Millie ran inside, with the galloping feet and shoves of baby goats racing toward their pen. Max spotted me and jumped straight up into my arms.
“Hey, Bunny,” I said.
“I saw you yestaday!” Well, he saw me a week or so ago, but every day was yesterday to him, and to me, too, to be honest. He took my cheeks in his hands and kissed me hard on the mouth.
“So, we’re here to celebrate the great news,” Arthur said, and I realized it—it was a plan. That woman wearing the oven mitt decorated with teakettles had arranged this. “We’re sure proud of you, Maurice.”
“I brought a salad,” Maeve said.
Now another voice joined the mix. “Is this where the party is?” George called as he came in with Cora behind him.
He was wearing his Papa Angelo’s T-shirt and was carrying a cake.
He lifted the foil in a flourish for Maurice.
I could see the icing from there, blue on chocolate, looped in letters that read, Happy Retirement, Maurice.
Maurice laughed. “Thanks, asshole.”
“Fuck you, dude.”
It meant: I love you, and I love you, too.
My father—he’d gotten quiet. A-bucket-of-water-on-a-fire quiet. The doorbell rang again. A subdued one ring, a person who would wait on the other side of the door rather than barge in like my noisy brothers.
“Can you get that?” Mom asked. Was that a…lasagna coming out of the oven? A giant, family-sized pan, burbling sauce, melty cheese, heaven? Well, Dad could make pizzas, but Mom could make everything.
I opened the front door. There was Sandrine, in her Solar Flare T-shirt, and next to her was Dre, in his. New merch from the shop now on their website. “Your mom asked us to come over for dinner. Is Maurice…?”
“Alive and well,” I said. “SWAT team save?”
“Sarah team save.” Sandrine smiled. My mom…I guess it was step one, reaching out. It took courage to do that.
“Come on, everyone! George, would you get the extra chair in the living room?” Mom asked.
I’d be the one to sit on that—the chair that put me an inch or two lower than was right for the table, chin too close to the plate.
It was my designated spot, and I wanted it, and the teasing that went along with it, the pointing and calling me Mini M.
When we were all seated, after Arthur trotted back to the kitchen to get the Parmesan and returned again, and then Max got up to pee and ran back fast, no sound of the toilet flushing, Sandrine lifted her glass.
“I just want to thank the entire Vittorio family—Angelo, Sarah, Arthur, George, Margaret…”
“Maya,” Maya reminded. The five fingers of her left hand now sported little olive hats.
“Maya. For your support. We couldn’t do this without you.”
“Well, yeah, you could, but we’re here,” Arthur said.
I looked down the table at my father, seated with Cora on one side of him and Baby Millie on the other.
The fire had not only gone out; it had stopped sizzling.
It was just the idea of a fire now, what was left, the never mind of stuff singed but not destroyed.
He closed his eyes for a second, rubbed one with his fingertips.
It was defeat or exhaustion or maybe a prayer.
“To Solar Flare,” Mom said, and lifted her glass. She was at the head of the table. She’d always been there, but I hadn’t noticed before. She might not have, either.
“Do the cheers, Grandpa,” Max said to Papa Angelo, and he lifted his, too.
Maurice was blinking hard. His wineglass was still in the air, even after we—his nylon, his webbing, his rope—clinked our glasses and drank.