The Age of Miracles

28

Three days passed. There was no word from my grandfather.

And it felt as if Seth Moreno had gone missing from my life as well. He arrived later and later at the bus stop each morning. In math, he stared straight ahead, always rushing from the classroom as soon as the bell rang. We had not exchanged a single word since the day we saw the whales. I did not know what I’d done wrong.

Meanwhile, the days kept growing, the nights kept spreading. There was talk of tipping points, feedback loops, points of no return.

Later that week, NASA announced that the astronauts were coming back, in spite of the risk. No one knew exactly how the slowing would affect reentry, but they had run out of food in the space station. A thousand calculations were made, some necessary guesses. We’d been told that the Orion would streak across the southern California sky at three minutes past four o’clock on its way to Edwards Air Force Base.

I planned to watch it through my telescope, alone.

It was bright and hot outside as I stepped off the bus that afternoon. The sun had been shining for twenty-something hours. The asphalt was glittering. A warm breeze was blowing leaves and litter through the neighborhood.

As I walked toward home, I was thinking of the astronauts. They’d been away for ten months, the last humans left who had not yet experienced a day longer than twenty-four hours.

As I cut across a vacant lot, I was surprised to see Seth on his skateboard. He had disappeared from the bus stop right away but had paused here and was using the curb to do jumps near a fire hydrant.

I resisted the urge to look in his direction as I walked. I could hear the clean clip of his board striking the curb again and again. I kept walking.

But when I turned in the direction of my street, the noise stopped. In its place, I heard the most unbelievable sound: the three syllables of my name shouted on the wind.

“Yeah?” I said.

A sudden lump formed in my throat.

The other kids had scattered. It was just the two of us and the dust from the dirt lot blowing across the street.

“Are you gonna watch the rocket?” he said. He shielded his eyes from the sun with one hand. Our shadows mingled on the sidewalk.

“Maybe,” I said. I was skittish and shy.

“I’m gonna watch it from my roof,” he said. A breeze blew. Seconds passed. “Come on.”

Maybe I should have been angry about the way he’d acted before, but all I remember is the wave of his hand as he motioned for me to follow him, the way he pronounced the exact words that my ears most wanted to hear.

From his cluttered garage, we dragged two rusty beach chairs into the house and then up the ladder through the attic and out. We arranged them side by side on a flat section of roof, lined with black tar paper and wiring, mounds of ancient bird poop. Seth brought us two Cokes and some pretzels, and then we leaned back and waited for the Orion to zoom over our heads. The sky was clear. The air was warm. The chairs smelled like sunscreen and salt. I could feel Seth sitting next to me. I could hear him breathing near me. We didn’t talk for a long time.

Seth broke the quiet.

“Why were you being like that the other day?” he said.

I felt a rush of panic.

“Being like what?” I said.

He didn’t look at me. He sipped his Coke and set it down on the tar paper. We could hear cars whooshing past on the freeway in the distance.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You were being kind of weird at the bus stop last week.”

I felt a tightening in my chest. I gripped the metal arm of my chair.

“I wasn’t being weird,” I said. “You were.”

He was careful not to look in my direction. I was aware of his nose in profile, the left line of his jaw, one ear, one eye, as he stared straight ahead toward the mountains that rose to our east. He looked better than ever.

He cleared his throat and added: “It kind of seemed like you didn’t want anyone to talk to you.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not true at all.”

They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.

“And you were all dressed up and stuff,” he went on. “Why were you so dressed up?”

I could hardly breathe, but I felt a tiny thrill. Here was proof that he’d given me some thought.

“You were the one being weird,” I said. “You didn’t even say hi.”

He turned and looked at me for the first time in several minutes. He had dark brown eyes, a thick fringe of lashes, no freckles.

“You didn’t say anything, either,” he said.

And then his mouth opened into a wide and sudden smile. I saw his front teeth were a little bit crooked.

“It was my birthday that day,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, happy birthday.”

Who knew what would happen next, but we were together for now, sipping our Cokes and looking at the sky.

“Wait,” said Seth, sitting up in his beach chair. “What time is it?”

He was the first to realize it: The Orion was overdue.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

His dark eyes, squinting, searched the open sky.

We waited a few more long minutes, but the sky remained a perfect blue, ominously empty of aircraft and contrails.

It was as if we knew even then what had happened.

We learned from Seth’s television the details of the Orion’s final fate. It disintegrated two hundred miles off the coast of California, cause unknown. All six astronauts on board were killed.

Seth and I sat stiffly on opposite sides of his couch, watching the stream of news reports flow into his living room.

Already, the networks were flashing photos of the astronauts from the day they’d left the earth ten months earlier, their faces fresh and happy, their white suits so crisp and bright in the sunshine, their gigantic helmets gleaming beneath their arms as they waved—so different from the way they looked in the recent video transmissions, after they’d grown so thin and frail in space that it seemed almost natural the way they floated, weightless, while they spoke to Houston via satellite link.

We said nothing for a while. I shifted in my seat. The couch squeaked beneath me. There were holes in the leather.

Seth was the first to speak.

“Would you rather die in an explosion?” he asked. “Or of a disease?”

I let the question hang. His mother had died here. I didn’t want to say the wrong words.

“The thing about an explosion,” he said, “is that it only takes a second.”