The Age of Miracles (2 page)

“Come on, Helen,” he said. “You know I can’t stay.”

He stood up and patted his front pocket. I heard the muted jingle of keys.

“We need you here,” my mother said. She rested her head sideways against my father’s chest—he was over a foot taller. “We really don’t want you to go, right, Julia?”

I wanted him to stay, too, but I’d grown expert at diplomacy as only an only child can.

“I wish he didn’t have to go,” I said carefully. “But I guess if he
has
to go.”

My mother turned away from me and said to him more softly, “Please. We don’t even know what’s happening.”

“Come on, Helen,” he said, smoothing her hair. “Don’t be so dramatic. Nothing’s going to happen between now and tomorrow morning. I’m betting this whole thing will blow over.”

“How?” she said. “How could it?”

He kissed her on the cheek and waved to me from the entry hall. Then he stepped outside and shut the door. Soon we heard his car starting up in the driveway.

My mother flopped down next to me on the couch. “At least
you’re
not abandoning me,” she said. “We’ll have to take care of each other.”

I felt like escaping to Hanna’s house right then, but I knew it would upset my mother if I left.

From outside, the voices of children floated into the living room. Through the blinds, I could see the Kaplan family walking down the sidewalk. Saturday was their Sabbath day, which meant they didn’t drive all day. There were six of them now: Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan, Jacob, Beth, Aaron, and the baby in the stroller. The kids went to the Jewish day school up north, and they dressed mostly in black, in a way that reminded me of characters in old movies, a flutter of long skirts and black pants. Beth Kaplan was my age, but I didn’t know her well. She kept to herself. She wore a long-sleeve shirt and a long rectangular black skirt with stylish red patent-leather shoes. I figured that footwear was her one place to shine. As the Kaplans glided past our house, the littlest one picking dandelions from the edge of our lawn, I realized that they might not yet know about the slowing.

I found out much later from Jacob that I was right: The Kaplans did not discover until sundown—when their Sabbath was over and their religion once again allowed them to flip light switches and watch TV—that this world was any different from the one they’d been born into. If you didn’t hear the news, the landscape looked unchanged. This was not true later, of course, but for now, on this first day, the earth still seemed itself.

We lived on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood of tract houses built in the 1970s on quarter-acre lots with stucco exteriors and asbestos in the ceilings and the walls. An olive tree twisted up from every front yard unless it had been torn out and replaced with some trendier, thirstier tree. The yards on our street were well kept but not obsessively so. Daisies and dandelions were scattered amid the thinning grass. Pink bougainvillea bushes clung to the sides of almost all the houses, shaking and shimmering in the wind.

In satellite maps from that era, our row of cul-de-sacs looks neat and parallel, each with a fat bulb at the end, like ten thermometers hanging from a string. Ours was one in a web of modest streets carved into the less expensive side of a coastal California hill whose pricier slope faced the ocean.

Our mornings were bright back then. Our kitchens faced east. Sun streamed through windows as coffeepots gurgled and showers ran, as I brushed my teeth or chose an outfit for school. Our afternoons were shady and cool because each evening, the sun dropped behind the nicer houses at the top of the hill a full hour before it slipped into the ocean on the other side. On this day, we waited for sunset with new suspense.

“I think it moved a little,” I said, squinting. “I mean, it’s definitely going down.”

All along the street, garage doors eased open on electric tracks. Station wagons and SUVs emerged, loaded with kids and clothes and dogs. A few neighbors stood clustered, arms crossed, on their lawns. Everyone was watching the sky as if waiting for a fireworks show to begin.

“Don’t look directly at the sun,” said my mother, who was sitting beside me on the porch. “It’ll ruin your eyes.”

She was peeling open a package of double-A batteries she’d found in a drawer. Three flashlights lay on the cement beside her, a mini arsenal of light. The sun remained high in the sky, but she had grown obsessed already with the possibilities of an extra-long night.

In the distance at the end of the street, I spotted my old friend Gabby, sitting alone on her roof. I hadn’t seen her much since her parents had transferred her to a private school in the next town over from ours. As usual, she was dressed in all black. Her dyed black hair stood out against the sky.

“Why did she dye it like that?” said my mother.

“I don’t know,” I said. Not visible from this distance were the three tiers of earrings that hung from both of Gabby’s ears. “She just felt like it, I guess.”

A portable radio chattered and buzzed beside us. We were gaining more minutes with every hour. Already, they were arguing about the wheat point—I’ve never understood if this was a term that had been buried for decades in the glossaries of textbooks, or if it was coined on that day, a new answer to a new question: How long can major crops survive without the light of the sun?

My mother switched the flashlights on and off, one by one, testing their beams in the cup of her hand. She dumped the old batteries out of each barrel and replaced them with new ones, as if arranging ammunition in a set of guns.

“I don’t know why your father hasn’t called me back,” she said.

She’d brought the cordless phone out to the porch, where it sat silent beside her. She took quick soundless sips of her drink. I remember her the way she was then, the sound of the ice clinking in the glass, the way the water dripped down the sides, leaving intersecting rings on the cement.

Not everyone panicked. Sylvia, my piano teacher, who lived across the street, went right on tending her garden as if nothing at all had happened. I watched her kneeling calmly in the dirt, a pair of shiny shears in one hand. Later, she took a slow walk around the block, her clogs tapping the sidewalk as she went, her red hair falling from a hasty braid.

“Hi, Julia,” she said when she reached our yard. She smiled at my mother but did not say her name. They were about the same age, but Sylvia still seemed girlish somehow, and my mother did not.

“You don’t seem very worried,” said my mother.

“Que será, será,” said Sylvia. Her words were one long sigh. “That’s what I always say. Whatever will be, will be.”

I liked Sylvia, but I knew my mother didn’t. Sylvia was cool and wispy and she smelled like lotion. Her limbs were lanky, like the branches of eucalyptus trees, and were often encircled in chunky turquoise jewelry, which she removed at the beginning of each of my piano lessons in order to commune more closely with the keys. She always played piano barefoot.

“Or maybe I’m just not thinking straight,” Sylvia said. “I’m in the middle of doing a cleanse.”

“What’s a cleanse?” I said.

“It’s a fast,” said Sylvia.

She bent toward me to explain, and I heard my mother slide her flashlights behind her back. I think she was suddenly embarrassed by her fear.

“No food, no alcohol, just water. For three days. I’m sure your mother has done one before.”

My mother shook her head. “Not me,” she said. I was aware of my mother’s drink, sweating on the pavement beside her. For a moment nothing else was said.

“Anyway,” said Sylvia, beginning to walk away, “don’t let this stop you from practicing, Julia. See you Wednesday.”

Sylvia would spend the next few afternoons pruning roses in a sun hat and casually pulling up weeds.

“You know, it’s not healthy to be that skinny,” said my mother after Sylvia had gone back to her gardening. (My mother kept a closet full of dresses one size too small, all waiting in plastic, for the day when she lost the ten pounds she’d been complaining about for years.) “You can see her bones,” said my mother. And it was true: You could.

“Look,” I said. “The streetlights came on.”

Those lights were set to a timer, designed to ignite at dusk. But the sun continued to shine.

I imagined people on the other side of the world, in China and in India, huddling now in the darkness, waiting, like us—but for dawn.

“He should let us know he got to work safely, at least,” said my mother. She dialed again, waited, set the phone down.

I’d gone with my father to work once. Not much had happened while I was there. Pregnant women watched television and ate snacks in bed. My father asked questions and checked charts. Husbands milled around.

“Didn’t I ask him to call?” she said.

She was making me nervous. I tried to keep her calm.

“He’s probably just busy,” I said.

In the distance, I noticed that Tom and Carlotta, the old couple who lived at the end of the street, were sitting outside, too, he in a faded tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans, she in Birkenstocks, a long gray braid resting on her shoulder. But they were always out there at this time of night, beach chairs in the driveway, margaritas and cigarettes in their hands. Their garage door stood open behind them, Tom’s model train tracks exposed like guts. Most of the houses on our street had been remodeled by then, or fixed up, at least, given fresh veneers like old teeth, but Tom and Carlotta’s house remained untouched, and I knew from selling Girl Scout cookies that the original burgundy shag still lined their floors.

Tom waved at me, his hand thick with a drink. I didn’t know him well, but he was always friendly to me. I waved back.

It was October, but it felt like July: The air was summer air, the sky a summer sky, still light past seven o’clock.

“I hope the phones are working,” said my mother. “But they must be working, right?”

In the time since that night, I’ve developed many of my mother’s habits, the persistent churning of her mind on a single subject, her low tolerance for uncertainty, but like her wide hips and her high cheekbones, these were traits that would sleep dormant in me for some years to come. That night I could not relate to her.

“Just calm down,” I said. “Okay, Mom?”

Finally, the phone did ring. My mother answered it in a rush. I could tell she was disappointed by the voice she was hearing. She passed the phone to me.

It wasn’t my father. It was Hanna.

I stood up from the porch and walked out into the grass with the phone to my ear, squinting at the sun.

“I can’t really talk,” said Hanna. “But I wanted to tell you that we’re leaving.”

I could hear the voices of Hanna’s sisters echoing in the background. I could picture her standing in the bedroom she shared with them, the yellow-striped curtains her mother had sewn, the stuffed animals crowded on her bed, the hair clips spread out across the dresser. We had spent hours together in that room.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Utah,” Hanna said. She sounded scared.

“When are you coming back?” I asked.

“We’re not,” she said.

I felt a wave of panic. We’d spent so much time together that year that teachers sometimes called us by one another’s names.

As I would later learn, thousands of Mormons gathered in Salt Lake City after the slowing began. Hanna had told me once that the church had pinpointed a certain square mile in Utah as the exact location of Jesus’ next return to earth. They kept a giant grain silo out there, she said, to feed the Mormons during the end times. “I’m not supposed to tell you this stuff because you’re not in our church,” she said. “But it’s true.”

My own family’s religion was a bloodless breed of Lutheranism— we guarded no secrets, and we harbored no clear vision of the end of the world.

“Are you still there?” said Hanna.

It was hard to talk. I stood in the grass, trying not to cry.

“You’re moving away for good?” I finally said.

I heard Hanna’s mother call her name in the background.

“I have to go,” Hanna said. “I’ll call you later.”

She hung up.

“What did she say?” called my mother from the porch.

A hard lump had formed in my throat.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing?” said my mother.

Tears began to fill my eyes. My mother didn’t notice.

“I want to know why Daddy hasn’t called us,” she said. “Do you think his phone is dead?”

“God, Mom,” I said. “You’re making everything worse.”

She stopped talking and looked at me. “Don’t be a smart-aleck,” she snapped. “And don’t say
God.
”

A slight static crackled through the radio speakers, and my mother adjusted the dial until it cleared. An expert from Harvard was talking: “If this keeps up,” he said, “this could be catastrophic for crops of all kinds, for the whole world’s food supply.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

Then from inside the house, we heard a quick thud, the wet smack of something soft striking glass.

We both jumped.

“What was that?” she said.

The unimaginable had been imagined, the unbelievable believed. Now it seemed to me that dangers lurked everywhere. Threats seemed to hide in every crack.

“It didn’t sound good,” I said.

We hurried inside. We hadn’t put anything away, and the kitchen was a mess. My bagel from the morning lay half eaten on a plate, exactly where I’d left it eight hours earlier, the cream cheese crusting at the edges. A container of yogurt had been overturned by the cats, its insides licked clean. Someone had left out the milk. I noticed that Hanna had left her soccer sweatshirt on a chair.

The source of the sound turned out to be a bird. A blue jay had struck a high window in our kitchen, then dropped to the back deck, its narrow neck apparently snapped, its wings spread asymmetrically around its body.

“Maybe it’s just stunned,” said my mother.

We stood at the glass.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

The slowing, we soon came to understand, had altered gravity. Afterward, the earth held a little more sway. Bodies in motion were slightly less likely to remain in motion. We were all of us and everything a little more susceptible to the pull of the ground, and maybe it was this shift In physics that had sent that bird straight into the flat glass of our windowpane.