The Age of Miracles (5 page)

At the bottom of the hill, Mr. Jensen was yelling from the doorway of the science lab. He was waving his hand. I could not hear him over the screams of the crowd, but I could see that he was frantic. If even Mr. Jensen was panicked, what chance was there for the rest of us to stay calm?

Seth reached for my hand, our fingers interlaced. I’d never held hands with a boy this way. I almost couldn’t breathe.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I hoped it might be Hanna, but when I saw that it was my mother, I ignored it.

“What if this is how we die?” whispered Seth. He sounded serious. He did not seem afraid.

We all grew quieter as the seconds passed, hushed by the darkness and the chill in the air. I became aware that dozens of dogs were barking, howling, from their yards. Minutes passed. The temperature continued to drop.

A vague prayer slipped out of my mouth:
Please, please let us be okay.

We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.

We know now that the darkness lasted four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, but it seemed to stretch much longer. Time moved differently in those first few days. If it weren’t for the records—hundreds of people filmed the event—I’d still swear that at least an hour passed before the first glint of light reappeared in the sky.

“Look,” I heard Seth saying. “Look. Look.”

A bleed of brightness was spreading directly overhead, a sliver of sun returned to us, as if by miracle. Now we could see the outline of the whole thing, a thin circle of light with a blinding bulge on one side, like a diamond on a ring.

I saw Mr. Jensen hurrying through the crowd. When he reached us, we finally heard what he’d been shouting.

“Listen to me,” he said. “This is just an eclipse. It’s harmless. It’s just the moon’s shadow passing in front of the sun.”

As we would learn in the coming hours, Mr. Jensen was right: A total solar eclipse had been anticipated for the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was to be visible only from the decks of passing ships and from a handful of thinly populated islands. But the slowing had shifted the coordinates of all predicted eclipses—they used to have them all figured out, every future eclipse charted to the minute and the decade. This one had caught us by surprise. The eclipse was seen from a thick swath of the western United States.

Relief passed through my whole body. We were fine. And there I was, lying on a hill with Seth Moreno.

Seth seemed disappointed by the news.

“That’s it?” he said. “It was just an eclipse?”

We remained on the hill together, watching the sun reemerge. We squinted side by side, our backs on the grass. I was so close to him I could see the hairs on his forearm.

“Do you ever wish you could be a hero?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I want to save someone’s life someday.”

I thought of his mother. My father had explained to me once how cancer worked, how it almost never gave up, how you had to kill every single cell of it. And you were never completely sure that you had won. It could always come back, and mostly, it
did
come back.

“I might want to be a doctor,” I offered. This was only half true. I didn’t really know then if I could do what my father did. I didn’t know then if I could stomach all that blood and sadness.

“Whenever I’m in a bank,” said Seth, “I kind of hope that a robber will come running in with a gun and that I’ll be the one who tackles him and saves everyone else.”

From a distance, it had seemed that Seth’s mother was not going to die of her disease. The year before, she was still bringing brownies for bake sales and raising money for Mrs. Sanderson’s Christmas gift. She’d remained so active that it had looked like her cancer would be merely a trait she lived with, like being overweight or going gray. But I hadn’t seen her in a while.

The color was returning to the sky, slowly but surely, the way a person’s face recovers after fainting.

“I’m going to be an Army Ranger when I’m older,” he said. “That’s the most elite branch of the military.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

People were climbing back into their cars. Horns were honking. Dogs continued to bark. Some kids were heading back to their classrooms. Others were drifting away, off campus and into the world, too jittery to obey any rules or routine.

Seth and I stayed where we were on the hill. A silence stretched between us, but it was an easy silence. We were alike, I thought, the quiet, thinking kind.

I watched him watching the sky. A frail-looking cirrus was gliding in from the west, the first and only cloud of the day. I wanted to say something important and true.

“I’m really sorry about your mom,” I said.

“What?” he said. He turned toward me. He looked surprised.

It was suddenly hard to look him in the eye. So I didn’t. Instead, I looked back up at the sky.

“I’m just sorry that she’s sick,” I said. “That must be really hard.”

Seth sat up and brushed his palms on the front of his jeans.

“What the hell do you know about it?” he said.

He was standing now. The sun was nearly full again, and it was too bright to look up; it was hard to see his face in the light.

“You don’t know anything about my mom,” he said. His voice cracked. “Don’t talk about her. Don’t ever talk about my mom. Never talk about her again.”

I felt each word sting a separate sting.

I tried to apologize, but Seth was already walking away, hurrying off campus and out into the world. I watched him cross the street, looking angry and reckless, dodging traffic as he walked, moving farther and farther away from me.

By then the sky had turned to its afternoon self, its boldest, bluest blue. I sat up and discovered that I was the only one left on the hill.

I began to walk slowly back toward math. I passed Michaela on the way. She was heading toward the campus gate with a group of older kids I didn’t know.

“We’re going to the beach,” she said as she passed me.

“What about next period?” I said. I regretted these words as soon as they left my mouth.

Michaela laughed. “Oh, God, Julia,” she said. “Have you ever done one bad thing in your life?”

That afternoon soccer practice was canceled. My mother picked me up from school. She was furious.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

I climbed into the passenger side of the car and slammed the door shut behind me, hushing in an instant the giddy voices ringing from the bus lines.

“It was just an eclipse,” I said. I clicked my seat belt and leaned back as my mother pulled away from the curb.

“You should have answered your phone,” she said. “You should have called me back.”

The air conditioner was blasting in the car. News about the eclipse was streaming from the car radio.

“Are you listening to me?” my mother said, her voice rising as we waited in a line of slow-moving cars, waiting for the crossing guards to wave us out of the school parking lot.

I was watching a swarm of kids through the window. They seemed suddenly distant out there on the quad. I traced my finger on the glass.

“Hanna moved to Utah,” I said. I had known for two days, but this was the first time I mentioned it to my mother.

She turned toward me. Her expression softened. A red Mercedes squeezed past our car.

“She moved?”

I nodded.

“Oh, Julia,” said my mother. She reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Really? Are you sure it’s permanent?”

“That’s what she said.”

We headed toward the freeway. I could feel my mother glancing at me as she drove. She turned the radio down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think they’ll come back.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“People are scared right now,” she said. “You know? They’re not thinking straight.”

When we got home, we discovered that the garbage cans my father had wheeled out to the curb that morning were still heaping with trash. The garbageman had not shown up to collect, but the ants and the flies were busy. The bird was still in there. We rolled the garbage back into our side yard and unloaded the groceries from the car. My mother had bought several boxes of canned food, six jugs of bottled water. She suspected that shortages were on the way—and she wasn’t the only one who thought so.

That night my father claimed he’d understood right away that the eclipse was an eclipse and nothing more.

“You’re telling me that you weren’t afraid even for a single second?” asked my mother.

“Not really,” he said. “I knew what it was.”

The nightly news was dominated by the story and featured a handful of eclipse enthusiasts who, before the slowing started, had traveled to a remote Pacific island, one of the few specks of dry land from which it was supposed to be possible to view the total solar eclipse. These people had packed expensive camera equipment in their luggage, special filters designed for capturing pictures of vanishing suns. But their tools sat unused in cushioned cases. Their special filters were unnecessary, their protective glasses remained folded in chest pockets, never used—the eclipse struck the West Coast instead.

That night the baseball playoffs went on without interruption. To play on in the face of uncertainty seemed the only American thing to do. But that night’s game was terrible. It was harder than ever to defy gravity. Seven pitchers were pulled. No one could hit. With each new hour, every bit of matter on the earth was more and more fettered by gravity.

It seemed the stock market, too, was subject to the same downward pull, having plunged to a record low. The price of oil, on the other hand, was shooting upward.

By the time I climbed into bed that night, we’d gained another thirty minutes. All the television stations had added perpetual crawls to their screens, which reported, instead of stock prices, the changing length of a day on earth: twenty-six hours, seven minutes, and growing.

6

The days passed. More and more people drained away from our suburb. They fled to wherever they were from, and this was California—almost everyone had migrated here from someplace else. But my family stayed. We were natives. We were home.

On the third day, my mother and I drove out to my grandfather’s house after school.

“He says he’s okay,” my mother said as she drove. “But I want to make sure.”

He was my father’s father, but it was my mother who worried over him most. I had begun to worry about him, too—he lived all alone out east.

We stopped at a gas station on the way and discovered a long line of cars, waiting for the pumps. Dozens of minivans and SUVs formed a chain that overflowed the parking lot and wrapped around the street corner.

“Jesus,” said my mother. “This line looks like something out of a war zone.”

A woman in a pink-floral-print dress hurried between the cars, slipping orange flyers beneath windshield wiper blades as passengers looked away:
The end is now! Repent and save yourself!

I avoided her eyes as she passed, so frantic and so sure, but she sought out mine and paused at my window to shout through the glass: “And the Lord God said, ‘On that day, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.’ ”

My mother flicked the lock on the doors.

“Is that from the Bible?” I asked.

“I can’t remember,” my mother said.

We inched forward slightly. I’d counted nineteen cars ahead of ours.

“Where is everyone going?” asked my mother. She rubbed her forehead and exhaled. “Where is there to go?”

My grandfather lived in the middle of a luxury housing development. His old house was a holdout against the new. Once off the freeway, we drove through a network of fresh black streets, sliced at every corner by a shimmering white crosswalk. The stop signs were new. The speed bumps were new. Everything here was new. Curbs remained sharp and unscuffed. Fire hydrants stood gleaming and rust-free. Rows of saplings grew at evenly spaced intervals along the sidewalks, and the sidewalks literally sparkled. All the houses had lawns like thick heads of hair.

Amid all this newness, my grandfather’s dusty acre persisted, invisible, like a patch of dark matter: You could tell it existed from the way the roads curved around it, but you couldn’t see it from the outside. You only sensed it. The developer of the neighboring community had planted thick pine trees on every side of my grandfather’s lot, so the neighbors could avoid looking at it.

We drove through my grandfather’s open wooden gate, where the smooth asphalt turned to chunky gravel beneath our tires and the carefully planned green spaces of the development gave way to the region’s natural landscape: scraggly and dry, barren and brown and unlovely. My father had grown up on this land in an age when there were chickens and horses here. But the last horse had long since died, and now the stable stood like a relic of an ancient era. The wooden fence posts and crosspieces lay bleaching in the sun. The chicken coop was empty of chickens. My grandfather was eighty-six years old. All his old friends were dead. His wife was dead. He had grown bitter about his own longevity.

“Just hope you didn’t inherent my genes, Julia,” he said to me often. “It’s a curse to live too long.” I liked the way he always said exactly what he thought.

Years earlier, the developers had tried to buy my grandfather’s property. But he refused to sell. “Dammit,” he said, “I got things buried in this land.” I knew that at least two cats had been interred out behind the woodpile, and I suspected he had also buried certain other valuables over the years. The developers went ahead without him, laying roads and foundations around him, erecting houses and street signs on every side of his property. The new neighborhood rose up around my grandfather’s land like floodwater surrounding high ground.

My mother and I walked into the kitchen without knocking. When you moved around in this house, the shelves rattled slightly, knickknacks teetering on every surface. My grandfather was sitting at the table in a red sweatshirt, the newspaper and a magnifying glass in front of him.

“Hi, Gene,” my mother said. “How are you doing?”

“I told you on the phone I’m fine,” he said without looking up. “Chip’s been here.”

Chip was a neighbor of his, a teenager who helped keep the house going. Chip wore black T-shirts and black jeans every day, and a lip ring was responsible for the slight drooping of his lower lip. They were an unlikely pair, but I think Chip hated the development as much as my grandfather did, though he lived with his parents in one of the new houses.

“This is bullshit, anyway,” said my grandfather.

“What is?” asked my mother.

“I figure it’s all a trick to take our minds off the Middle East.”

He had the palest blue eyes, like my father’s but lighter, and they seemed to be fading as he aged, like fabric left too long in the sun. A few wisps of white hair fell now and then on his forehead.

“Come on, Gene,” said my mother. “How could someone rig all this?”

“I’m just saying, how do you know it’s true? Have you measured it? They can do anything these days.”

“Gene—”

“You just wait. They’ve got something cooked up. That’s all I know. They’re messing with the clocks or some damn thing. I’m just saying I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a second.”

My mother’s cell phone buzzed, and I could tell from the way shw answered that it was my father on the other end. She stepped outside to talk to him. I sat down at the table—this was the same table where my grandfather and I used to play hours of Old Maid together, but his eyesight had grown too poor to see what kind of cards he held. I missed how he used to be.

“So, Julia,” said my grandfather. “You see anything around here you want?”

He waved at his shelves of antique glass, his rows of weathered hundred-year-old Coke bottles, my grandmother’s silver tea service, her collections of decorative thimbles and tiny silver spoons, the pewter and porcelain figurines she had arranged on lace doilies in some different, better decade.

“I can’t take it with me, you know,” he went on. It was sad to hear him talk this way. “You should take what you want now, because when I’m dead, Ruth is going to try to get her hands on everything.”

Ruth was my grandmother’s younger sister. She lived on the East Coast.

“No, thanks, Grandpa,” I said. I hoped he wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing my gold nugget necklace. “You should keep your stuff.”

Before the arthritis, he used to spend his mornings at the beach running a metal detector over the sand, hunting for coins and treasure in the dunes. But now he’d grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth and, by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

He stood up from his chair and shuffled to the counter for another cup of coffee. He stood at the window. My mother was pacing out there, making hand motions while she talked on the phone. The wind was blowing her hair all to one side, and she kept brushing it out of her face.

“Did I ever tell you that I seen a guy killed out there in that yard once?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“He wasn’t more than seventeen,” he said, shaking his head. “A horse trampled right over top of him.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“It sure was.”

My grandfather nodded slightly as if to underline the thought. He had a vast memory for awful things. Somewhere farther back in the house, I could hear a faucet dripping.

“This whole thing reminds me of when I worked in Alaska,” he said. Alaska was one of his favorite subjects. “We had sun all day and all night in the summer. We had sun at two in the morning. The sun never went down. Not for weeks. And then in the winter, it was pitch-dark all day every day for two or three months.… ”

He trailed off. I noticed a television satellite wobbling on a nearby roof, barely visible through the pine trees. I could smell a hint of smoke in the air.

“This whole thing is bullshit, believe me,” he said. “I just can’t figure how.”

“You really think so?”

He looked at me with a serious, steady gaze.

“Do you know that in 1958 the United States government began running a secret nuclear test program right here in this county?” he said. “They were testing the effects of nuclear substances on regular people. They were putting uranium in the water and then monitoring the cancer rates. Have you ever heard that?”

I shook my head. Somewhere under his backyard, a bomb shelter lay abandoned. My grandfather had built it himself in the sixties.

“Of course you haven’t,” he said. “That’s the way they like it. That’s exactly how they like it.”

A gust of wind whooshed past the back of the house, carrying a paper bag past the window.

“Have your mother and dad been taking you to church?” he asked.

“We go sometimes,” I said.

“You should go every week,” he said. He picked up a pair of tiny boots encased in a skin of tarnished silver. “You want these?”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“These were my shoes when I was four years old. Don’t you want anything around here?”

I could hear the labor of his lungs as he breathed, the sound of his air whistling through narrowing passageways.

“Wait a minute. I know what you’d like.” He pointed to a low cupboard on the far side of the kitchen and instructed me to kneel down on the floor. “Now reach all the way inside,” he directed. “Feel that?”

“What?”

I was up to my shoulder in the cupboard. The linoleum was pressing its paisley pattern uncomfortably into my kneecaps. But I didn’t want to hurt him, so I kept going.

“It’s a false back, see?” he said. “Slide it to the right.”

In my grandfather’s house, a cereal box was never full of cereal; soup cans almost always contained a substance more precious than soup. It’s no wonder he believed so fiercely in forces unseen. Behind the false back of the cupboard stood a row of coffee cans, so old I didn’t recognize the labels.

“The Folgers can,” he said. “Give it here.”

He pulled at the lid, wincing. He seemed weaker than usual.

“Let me do it,” I said.

The lid came off easily in my hands, but I tried, for his sake, to make it look like a harder task than it was. The can was stuffed with layers of crumpled newspaper. At the bottom was a small silver box, inside of which, on a bed of stiff velvet, lay a tarnished gold pocket watch, its chain snaking around behind its face.

“This was my father’s,” he said. “You wind that up, and it’ll tell the time. It’ll last forever. Them gears are good quality. That’s how they used to make things, good quality, you know? I’ll bet you never even seen something as well made as that.”

I did not want the watch. I would only add it to the stack of other objects my grandfather had given me, all of them ancient and obscure: uncirculated commemorative silver dollars packed in plastic, four pairs of my grandmother’s old clip-on earrings, framed maps of our city as it was a hundred years ago. But he insisted, and I couldn’t admit to him that I had lost the one heirloom of his that I really loved. That morning I had searched the dirt for my gold nugget necklace at the bus stop, but I couldn’t find where it had flung.

“Thanks,” I said, holding the watch in my hand. “It’s pretty.”

“Be even prettier once you shine it up,” he said. He rubbed the face with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “You take good care of that, Julia.”

The screen door slammed, and my mother came into the kitchen. She noticed the pocket watch in my hand. “Oh, Gene, don’t give away all your things.”

“Let her keep it,” he said. “I can’t take it with me.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

He waved her off.

“Take this too,” he whispered to me as we were leaving. He handed me a ten-dollar bill. A quick smile flashed across my grandfather’s face, a rare and precious sight. I could see the outline of his false teeth against his gums.

“Do something fun with it,” he said.

I squeezed his hand and nodded.

“And Julia,” he said. “Don’t believe everything you hear, okay? You’re a smart girl. You can read between the lines.”

We took what we always referred to as the scenic route home, back roads with less traffic. We listened to the news on the radio as we drove. Reporters from around the world were describing local reactions. From South America streamed more reports of gravity sickness. The Centers for Disease Control were investigating.

“Jesus,” said my mother. “Tell me if you start to feel sick.”

At that moment, I did begin to feel a little dizzy.

“This disease seems to be affecting some people more than others,” said one official on the radio. “The name of this disease is paranoia.”

In our own country, according to the report, clusters of born-again Christians were making their final arrangements, hoping at any moment to be summoned from their beds, leaving behind empty houses and piles of crumpled clothing where their bodies once stood.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why wouldn’t your clothes come with you?”

“I don’t know, honey,” said my mother. “You know we don’t believe in that stuff.”

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

They were interviewing a televangelist on the radio. “The signs of the revelation have been in place for years,” he said. “We’ve known it was coming ever since the restoration of Israel.”

As the road turned, I could see a sliver of shining ocean through a gap in the hills ahead. They had evacuated all the beachfront homes by then—no one knew what might happen to the tides.

Outside, housing developments streaked past the window, the homes and the lots shrinking in size as we neared the coast. The land was so valuable near the ocean that some houses hung out over the edges of canyons, supported on one side by giant stilts.

We came to a stop sign, and as my mother turned her head from right to left to check for traffic, I noticed the skinny path of gray that sometimes ran along the part in her hair where the roots showed through the dark dye. She’d gone gray at thirty-five, and I never liked seeing it, that earliest sign of her physical decline.