Ethan shakes his head. “That’s just sad.”
I can hear Poppy’s voice describing these things, impassioned at the kitchen table. I think of the old man in the dark under the table in the community center, telling me about the fork. I still can’t hear my Poppy in that voice.
“So what if today, tonight, really is the fork?” Ethan says. “How is it going to change the story? Is Mona Ghali’s research that important, do you think? I doubt it will fix the fat pills.”
I’ve been thinking about that too. “Her research is energy.”
“Yeah. She’s working on capturing the energy of ocean surface waves.”
“And if it works?”
Ethan considers. “Why don’t you tell me how the story goes. Starting around now.”
I should know all this by heart. These were the cautionary tales Poppy loved to teach. “Okay, so as of now the weather patterns for growing food are still pretty stable, as they have been for a long time, and people take it for granted. You have the Gulf Stream warming up Europe, and there are rainy places and dry places. Right?”
“Right.”
“But then everything starts to change, more or less as they predict. The ice caps melting, the ice sheets collapsing, the water levels rising. It’s slow enough at first that people think they can adapt. I remember seeing the ruins of some pretty crazy sea walls people tried to build in the forties. But then it just accelerates. The whole thing changes over about fifteen years. There are droughts and floods and storms that rip the topsoil right off the earth. Once people recover from one thing, there is another. The price of basic stuff like wheat and rice skyrockets, and governments come down because they can’t feed people.” I look up. I realize I’m talking in a rush. “So there you have it: your quickie history. The decline of humankind in under one minute.”
“And then the mosquito.”
“Skipping ahead about twenty, thirty years, but yes.”
“That’s at least partly a climate issue too.”
“Definitely it is.”
“So if Mona’s figuring out a clean, cheap energy source that doesn’t release any carbon, that’s a huge deal.”
“Yes.”
“And if Mona’s the one who’s going to patent this at a US lab, then maybe it helps fix the finances of this country, not having to buy all that oil, but instead having some technology to export.”
“Would be nice if we had some other, better future to compare it to, but it does sound plausible.”
“Doesn’t help with the fat pills, though.”
“Well, we can’t ask Mona to fix everything.”
Ethan is thoughtful for a moment. “What if the future doesn’t want to be changed? What if it wants what it wants? What if it makes no difference what any of us do, whether we are heroes or cowards?”
I hate this thought. On this day of days, I am so scared of it I won’t even think it. “The future doesn’t want anything,” I say, a little too forcefully. “We’re the ones who make the future.” That’s what I want to believe, anyway.
I think of Ethan and our eighty years of questions. I think of Poppy and how much he sacrificed for this.
EIGHTEEN
Ethan insists on teaching me to play Hearts over floppy French fries and terrible hamburgers at a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway. Ethan eats his heartily. He puts down the wrapper with a sigh. I can hardly choke down a bite of mine.
“That was the worst bacon cheeseburger I ever ate,” he says, “but it was still a bacon cheeseburger.”
We’ve got six hours before our date with destiny. I am not quite the quick study at cards I was yesterday. I find myself watching Ethan’s mouth, his fingers, his forearms, his chin.
“Okay, so what would you lead this time?” he asks avidly.
The cards are a blur in my hand.
“The, um, ten?”
“Of diamonds? No! You don’t want to lose your shot at the jack of diamonds right away. Try again.”
I nod. I wish I weren’t getting an ulcer. I wish I could concentrate. “This one?” I pull out a four of clubs.
“I guess that could make it around with only three hands playing. You can try it.”
I wish I knew what he was talking about. I put down the four and he immediately slaps a seven of hearts on it.
I look at his eyelashes, which any girl would envy. “That’s bad, right?” I say.
“Yes. Hearts are points. They are bad. You don’t want to get stuck with any points.”
“No points. Got it.” I look at my hand. I look at his ear. I study the scattering of freckles over his nose.
“Hearts are bad,” he reiterates. “The queen of spades is very bad. Points are bad. You want to end each hand with as few points as possible.”
I nod dejectedly. “I think I like games where you try to win things better than the ones where you try not to win things.”
He gives me a flash of a smile. “That’s my girl,” he says. “And that’s why Hearts is the best game ever.”
I am unconvinced.
“Because the regular way to win, the way everyone tries to win Hearts, is by not getting any points, not winning any tricks, and going along as quietly and unobtrusively as you possibly can. That’s how people win ninety-nine percent of the time.”
“Okay,” I say.
He lifts his eyebrows. “But there’s another way to win, a much bigger, much bolder way that a lot of Hearts players have never even dared to try. And when you win this way, you crush everyone else and prove that you are a boss.”
I do love his smile. I try to look more enthusiastic.
“It’s called shooting the moon, and I’ll teach it to you later.”
“Why later? Why not now?”
“Maybe my devastatingly fine looks are to blame, but it’s because right now you aren’t paying any attention to the cards.”
We park outside a bakery in Teaneck, New Jersey, at 5:55. The plan is for Ethan to go in and get a cake, and I am miserable with anxiety. I advise him not to get Mona’s name in icing or anything; that would be going a bit far.
The plan is for me to do some more research, to make a couple of calls, but I don’t want to lose sight of him for even this long. What if something happens to him in there? A bakery-related fatality? Would fortune be that nasty?
I hate not telling Ethan about what I read. I hate having any division between us. But I can’t put it into the air either. My new ulcer is acting up. My spirits are low and I am having trouble keeping myself steady.
Ethan looks at me as he turns off the engine. “You okay, Pren?”
“Oh.” I shrug. “I was just thinking about … you know.”
“About poor Mona Ghali.”
I nod.
“And the fact that she has no idea what’s coming.”
Aghast, I look at Ethan. I can’t help it. “Do you think we need to tell her?” I ask.
“If you think that’s the best way to protect her.”
“I don’t know, maybe not. But I hate knowing something about her that she doesn’t know about herself. Maybe she could say important things to the people she loves. Just in case.”
Ethan agrees. “I would want that, I guess.”
“Would you?”
“Yes. But I hesitate because I don’t think she’d believe it. It would take too long to convince her even if we could, and if we couldn’t, she probably wouldn’t trust us enough to let us help her after that. She’d probably file for a restraining order or something.”
I hold my hands together so he won’t see them shaking. I swallow and try to even out my voice. “What would you want to do, if it were you?”
“If it were me?” He is tempted to say something clever, I think, but then he looks at my stricken face and changes his mind. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“If I knew I was supposed to die?”
“Yes.”
He thinks for a while and levels me with a look. “Are you sure y
ou want me to tell you the truth?”
I nod, pressing my lips together.
He seems to gauge my tolerance for sincerity. “Okay, well, since you insist. If I were going to die, there would be nothing to keep me from you—from all of you, from everything with you—and there’s no reason you could give me why we shouldn’t.”
I stare at him without moving.
“So yeah. That’s it. If I could spend another night like last night with you, but with nothing forbidden to us, I think I’d die happy.”
Tears fill my eyes and warm blood rushes to my head.
“In fact, it would really suck to have to die without getting to do that.” He shrugs. “I’ve imagined it so many times it would be a downright tragedy.” He smiles. “But lucky for you, it’s not the end yet for me.”
At 6:10 Ethan is safely back in the car with a chocolate cake in a box, and I am losing my mind.
“Hey, Ethan?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you teach me how to shoot the moon?”
“Right now?” He checks the time on his phone.
“Yes. I promise I’ll concentrate.”
He sits up and finds the deck in his duffel bag. “All right.” He starts dealing cards. “The time has come.”
I pick up my pile and he picks up his.
“Okay, so you remember the regular strategy of Hearts?”
I nod. “Pick up no tricks, win no points, and try not to bring attention to yourself,” I say flatly. It’s a strategy I am familiar with.
“Well, shooting the moon is the opposite. You can only do it if you have a truly terrible Hearts hand—lots of aces and face cards, preferably most of them hearts. So instead of going for no points, you go for every single point in the game. You try to take every trick and win every point, including the dreaded Queen of Spades. You go for the whole thing.”
“Got it.” I try to match my enthusiasm to his.
“Of course you have to be sneaky about it. You have to moan and groan and complain about taking each and every heart.”
“I can moan and groan and complain,” I offer.
“Good. And your opponents will be happy to feed you all their hearts until they finally realize what you are trying to do.”
“And then they’ll try to stop you?”
“If they can. Hopefully, it’ll be too late by then.”
“And if you lose?”
“You mean if you almost shoot the moon? If you get all the points but one or two?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s a pretty spectacular loss. You’re stuck with, like, twenty-five points. You are through.”
“But if you make it?”
“Pure glory. And you stick every other player with twenty-six points apiece.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“I thought you would.”
“You don’t just break some of the rules, you break all of them.”
“Exactly. Fortune favors the bold.”
“Does she?”
Ethan leans toward me and puts his lips on the bare place where my neck curves down into my clavicle. I feel a shiver run down my spine and up my neck into my scalp.
He sits up again. “I hope so.”
Now it is 6:40. Ethan is outside the car, calling his mother and then his sister, making sure all his lies are holding up. It’s nice the way he looks talking to his mom, a lot less guarded than I do.
In a nervous burst of inspiration, I take up my own phone. I find the numbers I’d entered earlier but doubted I would use. My first call is to a home of strangers in Montclair, New Jersey. A message machine picks up, and I pretend to be calling from the office of the county fire inspector. I tell them someone will be stopping by between five o’clock and seven that evening to check that their fire alarms are in working order and make sure they have fire extinguishers on every floor.
“You can look on the county website for the schedule of fines in case our inspector finds any of them to be disabled or faulty,” I say somewhat odiously. I’m not really going to get an inspector over there, but maybe I can scare them into checking their equipment. “Thank you for participating in fire safety week!” I finish brightly.
The next call is to the police precinct in Ossining. I tell an officer my mother’s car has been stolen, and I read out the license plate and description of the car that caused the fatal accident on the Taconic. I give the policewoman the names of the owner’s cross streets and say it has last been seen in that area.
“Please call my mother’s cell phone if you are able to find it,” I say, and give her a made-up name and number for my mother, using the same last name as the driver just to keep things confusing.
My heart is racing again as I hang up the phone. I feel guilty, imagining the police arriving at the man’s house and impounding his car for a night or two, but not that guilty.
Am I breaking rules? Yes. I am crushing them right and left. Am I intervening? You betcha. Am I cheating? Flagrantly. I am throwing elbows into the gut of time. I am lying like a criminal, and it feels both terrible and great.
“Well, here goes,” Ethan murmurs at 7:09 as we get out of the car parked in a lot one building away from the building with the lab. He fumbles with the door locks—up, down, up, down—before he gets them all the way he wants. He’s been trying to conceal his nerves, maybe for my benefit, but I can see them now.
We’ve discussed it, we’ve rehearsed it, but it all seems a little insufficient now that we’re doing it. We’re arriving at a murder with a chocolate cake and balloons.
“There’s going to be a gun,” I remind him, like he needs reminding.
“I know.”
I shake the balloons. “Maybe that’s what we should be bringing instead of this stuff.”
“Maybe, if either of us had a gun or knew how to shoot a gun, it would,” Ethan says. “When people like us get guns, you end up with four people dead instead of one.”
He’s so endlessly logical, so irritatingly on the mark. “Okay, fine.”
“We’ll be okay, Pren. We’ve got one huge advantage.”
“What’s that?”
“We know what’s supposed to happen.”
We hold hands across the parking lot, walking in a slow, expectant trance, as though if we could slow time down, we’d do better at changing it.
I realize we are different now. It’s hard to know exactly when it happened, but I picture the kiss on my clavicle having the infectious power of a mosquito bite, transmitting a sweet, exhilarating kind of infection, but weakening all the same. We are no longer able to play two reckless teenagers on the lam. We are bound together in a serious way. We have been for a long time, but never like this. Maybe it takes the fragility of our situation to make us see it. It isn’t so much having the bond that separates us from our old selves. It is having the bond to lose.
It was easier to think you could sacrifice everything when the old everything was so pale, so lonely compared to this.
It is time to be bold, but as I feel Ethan’s sweaty hand sweatily clutching my sweaty hand, I don’t feel bold at all. I want to take Ethan back to a safe place, an empty playground, and hold him in my arms until the fateful 51714 is over.
I am again racked with sympathy for people like my mother who don’t want to take any risks or fix the future, but just want to live out another day. Maybe it isn’t corruption or greed that makes you cowardly. Maybe it’s not weakness, suffering, or even fear. Maybe it is love.
I take a long breath. “Okay.”
“Ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“I’ll be close to you all the time. I’m not going to let the guy out of my sight.”
I nod. I’m not sure this makes me feel better.
He kisses me on the temple, another dose, before I go through the glass doors. I cast a last look over my shoulder.
“We’ll be fine,” he says. I can’t so much hear him as see his lips moving through the glass.
br /> NINETEEN
I’d learned what I could about Mona Ghali’s personal life from my research on Ethan’s computer. Mona has two sisters, one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one in Cairo, Egypt.
Her youngest sister, Maya, recently graduated from Boston University and then moved to Egypt, so she isn’t that much older than me.
I arrive on Mona’s floor a little after 7:10. The receptionist at the front desk is packing up for the day. I tell her I’m there to see Mona.
“Your name?”
“Uh, Petra.” It’s strangely hard to spit it out. “I’m a friend of her sister’s. With a delivery.” I am prepared to say more, but I see the receptionist wants to go home and she doesn’t care.
She calls Mona’s office and announces me. “Go ahead back,” the receptionist says, before Mona even responds. “Two lefts and a right, halfway down the hall.”
It isn’t exactly high security. “It’s her birthday,” I say, for no particular reason.
Mona Ghali’s name is on a plastic plate to the side of the door, and the door is open. I try to assume a different personality than my regular one as I walk into her office.
“Mona?” I say.
She is sitting at her desk. She looks up from her computer. She has long wavy black hair and large features. When she stands up, she is almost as tall as me.
“I’m Petra Jackson, a friend of Maya’s from BU.” I hold out my offerings. “She asked me to deliver these in person and wish you happy birthday.”
Mona’s face is sharp and intelligent. “Wow. That’s really nice. Thanks,” she says, taking them. She lets the balloons float to meet the low ceiling. She peers in the box at the cake. She puts it down on her desk. “Maya probably told you I’m an insane chocolate addict.”
I nod, silently thanking bold fortune for that.
“My sisters always make such a big deal about birthdays.” Her face is sardonic. “Were you in her class at school?” Mona asks.
“A year behind. I’m a senior,” I lie.
“Well, thanks for doing this,” she says.
“So listen,” I say, “is there any way I can talk you into going out and getting a glass of wine or a cup of coffee? My treat. I promised Maya I’d try.”