Midnight at the Electric

  “You’re here now,” I said.

  She looked away and shook her head. “I hadn’t gotten the letters from the ship, you know, before Lenore arrived. So when she showed up on my doorstep, her pregnancy just beginning to show, it was a complete shock. It was May, but she was shivering from head to toe. You could have knocked me over with a feather.” Her smile grew, and a tear ran down the side of her nose.

  “She didn’t even ask me for reasons. She just said, ‘Let’s start over.’ And we did.”

  She folded her hands and made a triangle with her thumbs.

  “I don’t think you get to pick who your soul mate turns out to be. I was in love with your daddy,” Mama went on. “But the person who knew me best—without glamour, without sparkle, who saw the best in me despite myself—that was Lenore. She loved us, you and me.”

  “She died when she gave birth to me,” I said, though it made me afraid to say it.

  Mama waited a while, and then just said simply, “Yes she did.”

  “When do you go back to Canaan?” I asked after a moment. I didn’t notice until after I said it that I hadn’t said we.

  Mama swallowed. “Well, this is the big news I’m nervous to tell you.” She paused, then began again with difficulty. “I kept the house and twenty acres for us, if we want to go back. The rest . . .” She looked at me. “I’ve sold to the Resettlement people, to replant. I was in the paper,” she went on sheepishly. “I brought the clipping.”

  She showed it to me, a wrinkled square of paper she pulled from her bag.

  “It says here Beezie and I are dead,” I pointed out, amused.

  Mama looked apologetic. “I told the reporter you were gone because of dust pneumonia. I think he thought I meant you were gone. People came out of the woodwork to offer condolences, and I had to explain over and over that it wasn’t true.”

  I reread the article. Twenty acres was still a farm and a home. But I had a strange, sad, weightless feeling.

  “What are we going to do with the money?”

  She looked at me searchingly. “I used twenty-five dollars to get here. The rest, we have to decide.”

  I tried to think of what I wanted to say, but Mama went on.

  “Do you want to go back home?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” she said. “Even if there ends up being something to go back to, I really don’t know at all.” She looked at me. “Maybe it’s not too late for me to be someone who is brave.”

  This brings me to my second big news, Ellis. And what is hardest to say.

  A few days after Mama and I talked, Sofia and I took our usual walk. Beezie pinged around us this way and that as we made our way to the river (now that she’s well she is uncontrollable, a bolt of lightning ricocheting off the walls).

  We walked past fruit sellers and stands hawking meat and flour, watching the seagulls over the water and the boats float past.

  I’d never felt, that day, less like I belonged anywhere at all: no longer sure about going home, but not at home in the city either. On the edge of something even more unknown than leaving Canaan.

  Sofia and I leaned on a railing to watch the boats. Manhattan can be beautiful, Ellis, if you are willing to see it and not compare it to what you loved before.

  She turned to look at me. “I’m getting so many customers at the stables. I think they’d follow me if I left. So I’m thinking of starting my own,” she said. “I already found a space to rent, and I just have to put down a deposit.”

  I listened, thinking how brave she was to try.

  “I was thinking . . . there will be too much work for just me.”

  “You’re offering me a job?” I asked, surprised. I felt, at that moment, as if the dust had jumped from Beezie’s lungs to mine, and my chest squeezed. I guess this is the way some moments that decide our future happen; with a few little words on a walk.

  “It’s not much, it’s not our dream, but we could make the best of things here. You and Beezie and your mother could get your own place, and I could too. We could be those people who can afford a taxi someday,” she teased, and then turned serious. “To be honest, I feel like, with Beezie here, it’s like having a piece of my dad. I couldn’t save him, but I helped to save her. And every time I look at her, it reminds me of that. It feels like I can say to him, ‘Look, I’m doing things right.’”

  Sofia watched me nervously. I think she could already see that I was going to say no, because she became more solemn as she looked at me.

  I said finally, “I have a proposal too.”

  Not a day goes by when I don’t see home in my mind. The pond and the garden, always faltering under our hands, and the dust whirls—when they were small—lifting across the Chiltons’ fields and whirring toward us like ghosts. I even miss the sight of that, Ellis—can you believe it? How is it that home invades you like that? How can I ever get over the loss of it? Especially now, when it’s slowly coming back to life and I’m not there to see it?

  I know I’ll miss it forever, but I also know that I can’t give into that. As much as I’ve always loved Canaan and loved you, I want my life to go forward even if it hurts. And I’ve decided I have to reach for what I want even if my hands are trembling from fear. I’m sorry, Ellis, but I’m not coming home.

  We’ve come halfway across the country and now we only have to get across the sea. Now that New York’s gotten easier, I am leaving it for something I’ve only dreamt about. I want to soak the drizzly English rain into my skin and see green wherever I go, and visit the Cave of the Cup, and walk the paths Mama and Lenore used to walk. I want to see where they were born, and see what they saw.

  We leave tomorrow. We’ve written to the Allstocks that we’re coming—well, and that I exist at all—and we hope they’ll welcome us once we’re there.

  I’m not taking all that much with me. I have this journal, and Beezie and Mama, a few clothes, and a photo of Mama and Lenore she gave to me the other night. They’re holding each other’s waists; Lenore is pregnant enough to pop. But they look so happy, hugging for dear life.

  Mama says God will show us the way forward. Her faith never changes, while mine does all the time—blinking out at times, flaring up at others. For the moment, I think maybe there is a God but a different one than she says. I think God might be the dust and the jackrabbits and the rain, that God might be Teddy and the bullet that killed him, the beautiful and exquisite moon and the terrible zeppelins, all spread out and everywhere. I’ve begun to think that maybe we are God’s fingers rubbing against each other to see how it feels. Do you think that is a sacrilegious thought—that God might be everything and its opposite?

  A farm is a very small thing to offer in return for a sister’s life. But it’s all I have to give. I’ve told Sofia what’s left of our land is hers . . . if she can bring herself to leave the city and take another big chance. I know it’s just a dried-up piece of nothing for now. But I think someone like her, with everything she knows and everything she’d be willing to give, might be able to pull it back from the brink. I want the farm to stay in our family if I can, and that’s what Sofia is now. It belongs to her already, I think, according to something written under the surface of things that I can’t claim to understand but only feel. I think she might even be a match for Galapagos.

  Ellis, you once said you could save us, and I couldn’t afford to believe it. As tempting as it is to pin myself to anyone else’s strength—Mama’s or Sofia’s or yours—I have to navigate my life myself.

  I don’t think you can leave a person you love without leaving your skeleton behind. But I also think that sometimes you can’t stay.

  Mama said once that dreams can only keep their sparkle when they stay far away. It makes me think about her and Lenore and the Cave of the Cup and looking for things that may or may not exist. Maybe the important thing isn’t the Grail, but that people looked for it in the first place.

  I need to go out and see wha
t I can see. I think the rest of the world is not as cold and lonely a place as you think. At least I have to hope.

  I’m enclosing fifty dollars, to pay back what I owe you, plus inflation. It adds up to the cost of passage on a ship to Southampton, should you ever decide to use it. It’s another of my far-fetched desires, I suppose, to think you might let me save you instead.

  I hope you get this letter. I hope one day you change your mind and find your way to Forest Row. I hope you miss me still. I hope you’ll meet me there.

  Love, Catherine

  ADRI

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 11

  Lily and Adri sat on the couch, the pile of letters in Adri’s lap. Adri had just finished reading them out loud to Lily while she fiddled with the buttons on her sweater and stared into the fire.

  “Do you think he went after her?” Lily asked, as if it were a romance novel they’d just finished reading.

  “I think he buried her letters in a wooden box and married Lyla Pearl,” Adri said.

  Lily looked at her, exasperated, her eyes filling with tears. “You have no soul,” she said.

  “I think he went after her,” Adri said more seriously. “And left everything behind. I’d bet anything.”

  “I don’t know,” Lily said.

  Adri leaned back, spent. “Catherine lived. She saved Beezie. That’s enough for now. It’s more than I hoped.”

  Lily tapped her nails together, turning serious.

  “It’s nice,” Lily said. “To get these pieces of my mother—from when she was young. I always knew she was a firecracker.” She paused. “But she wasn’t related to them. I guess we’re the last in the family after all.”

  “I hope you don’t need any perfect match transplants anytime soon.”

  “Just the brain,” Lily said.

  Adri still felt the pinch of grief, but she wasn’t disappointed. They were the last of a family line that had wound its way through a woman who cut her hair because it was in the way, and saved someone who’d needed saving, and brought a dead farm back to life.

  It felt like a good history to own. Something to be proud of. And still it left something dangling—one piece still in need of tending to.

  After a while, she said, “I think there’s something I want to ask Lamont for. But it’s really up to you.”

  The aircraft they were to fly in, Lamont had said, would be a small Hover Freight, the size of a van. A biologist would come to meet them.

  Lily kept swiveling around in the passenger seat the whole way to the airport, talking to Galapagos, whom they’d loaded into the folded-down back seat using a dolly and some ropes.

  “I think she’s carsick,” she kept saying, but Galapagos’s face in Adri’s rearview mirror was the same as it always was—a little disapproving and a little curious. She did appear to be looking out the window.

  The Hover Freight, the pilot, and the scientist who had come to meet them—Trevor—were already there when they arrived.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Adri,” he shouted as the pilot helped her and Lily on board, and two others lowered a stretcher to lift Galapagos.

  “Thank you for doing this,” Adri said, shaking his hand before taking a seat beside him.

  “We’re thrilled to have her,” Trevor said.

  Lily, in the seat ahead of them, looked around the cabin, nervous. “Well put flying on this thing on the list of stuff I could have died happily without ever doing,” she said.

  She gasped as they lifted off and pressed her hands to the window.

  “It’s laying season right now,” Trevor explained, “so we’re very selective about when and how we come in and out. We like to give the animals their peace. This girl,” he nodded toward the back of the compartment, where Galapagos lay strapped to a pallet, hissing at them, “will be happy there, I think.”

  In no time they were crossing the crisp line of the coast below, and then they were out over open water. It only took five hours to reach the crystal-blue water of the Eastern Pacific and for the Galapagos Islands to come into view—green grassy humps of land rising out from the water, verdant and pristine, no signs of human life anywhere in sight.

  “It looks like mold,” Lily said. “But pretty.”

  Adri surveyed the unspoiled landscape, the exotic, unimaginable beauty of it, and tried to picture James’s parents arriving here all those years ago. After sailing for months, it must have looked to them like they’d reached a paradise at the edge of the world.

  “We’ve built a living barrier around the perimeter. We’re trying to keep it protected, along with its inhabitants. We’ll be checking in on her regularly,” Trevor said. “We’ll give her any help she’ll need to transition—food as she learns to forage on her own, things like that. We have a fair amount of experience rewilding tortoises that have been domesticated.”

  They landed quietly on a beach, in a puff of white sand. “We can’t stay long,” their guide said. “We can’t disturb the laying mothers.”

  Their helpers lowered the stretcher out of the back and carried it about a hundred yards down the beach, to a rolling dune that looked down on a gathering of tortoises, digging in the sand to lay eggs. Galapagos hissed as she was lowered onto the ground and released from the latex belt. She looked around at everything, and Adri tried to read her: was she scared? Did she remember the smell of the ocean?

  They slid her off the stretcher onto the sand.

  Everyone stood back but Lily, who stepped closer and knelt, with some effort, in the sand.

  “Hey, old friend, do you remember the wild?” she asked. Galapagos just stared around. “Do you remember this is where you belong?”

  “Would you like a minute alone?” Trevor asked.

  Lily looked uncertain, like she was breaking a rule. “If I could . . . ,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  At first Adri thought it would be the three of them left alone, but then, looking at Lily, she realized she, too, was expected to back away. She walked back to the Hover Freight, and while the guys climbed inside, Adri stood and leaned against a rock, watching Lily and Galapagos in the distance.

  Lily was rubbing the tortoise’s head and talking to her.

  Finally, she stood, dusted off her knees, wiped at her face, and walked toward them.

  Their eyes traveled to Galapagos, still poised on her dune, not moving yet, just looking around, like she’d landed on an alien world.

  They climbed into the aircraft, Adri helping Lily and then climbing in herself.

  Nobody spoke as they lifted off; there was no small talk like there had been flying in. Their companions seemed to realize what the moment meant to them.

  “What did you say?” Adri asked. “Do you mind if I ask?”

  Lily smiled though tears were running over the corners of her lips. “I said, ‘Be brave. The other tortoises aren’t that bad.’” She paused to breathe, and gazed out the window, not meeting Adri’s eyes. “I told her, ‘You’ll realize how to be free if you just give it a little while. It can hurt a little bit, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right. I’ll be praying for you. I love you.’” Lily sniffed. “‘You’re my best friend.’”

  Adri didn’t trust herself to say anything for a while. “That’s good,” she said after a few moments. “You said the right things.”

  At first they could see the tortoise—the shape of her, her lopsidedly round outline in the sand, her neck craned in curiosity. Not looking in their direction but away, out toward the rest of the island. And then she was a dot, and then—as the island retreated into the shape of green curves on the water—they couldn’t make her out at all, and Adri could only picture her and what she wanted for her—that she would make her goofy, lopsided way down the dune toward the others. That she would remember she was home after all. That it would all come back to her.

  On their drive back from Wichita, Lily insisted on listening to the entire collection of Phil Collins’s greatest hits.

&nbsp
; “This is my soundtrack for when I feel melancholy,” she said.

  “Well it’s awful,” Adri said.

  “That’s only because you have no soul,” Lily said.

  Adri shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I need to know you’re going to be all right,” Lily said abruptly.

  Adri shook her head. “I need to know that about you.”

  Lily looked over at her. “Oh, Adri, I’ll be fine.” She glanced up at the sky. “My angels are looking after me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Lily shrugged. “You don’t know they’re not.”

  There was nothing more to say about it. Nobody knew anything for sure.

  “It’s your last night,” Lily offered. “What do you want to do?”

  “Watch TV, I guess,” Adri said.

  Lily cooked her a pitiful dinner—spaghetti and jarred sauce. They watched Bot Wars, where people repurposed old androids and fought them in glow-in-the-dark arenas. “This is trash,” Lily said, popping popcorn in her mouth. And at eleven, they went to bed.

  It was like any other night, but it was the last night.

  The darkness had fallen fast, and Adri kept looking up at the moon through the window. She thought about how almost everyone who came and went on Earth from the cavemen on had touched their eyes on the moon, but only a few people had ever been lucky enough to make their way past it. And she was going to be one of them. And that felt like breaking away from something in good and bad ways.

  One last time, she read Lenore and Catherine’s letters. And then she went to sleep that night using her old positive visualization trick, but this time she visualized something she knew for sure could never happen. She saw Lily walking to the edge of the farm and finding a cave. In it was a Cup that made you live forever. In her vision, her cousin drank from it, and did.