The Dream Life of Astronauts (22 page)

“Why would you want to talk to rats?” Becca asked.

“Because they're experts on escape and survival. And because they're our ancestors.”

“No they're not.”

“They are. They were brought here by the inhabitants of Delfar, in the Libra Quadrant, and some of them stayed rats, but some of them turned into monkeys, who turned into us.”

“I think it's a very nice drawing,” said Mrs. Kerrigan, paging through a catalogue on the other side of the table. “Becca, would you like to draw something? Frankie has lots of paper.”

“No, thank you,” Becca said. She pushed a Vienna Finger into her mouth. “In Paris, we don't have to draw. Everyone draws for us.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Kerrigan. “And in Paris, do they chew with their mouths open?”

Becca brought her lips together.

“You're from France?” the bird man asked.

She swallowed. “Where are you from?”

“Earth, mostly.”

“Why don't we play a game?” Mrs. Kerrigan suggested, closing the catalogue. She got up from the table and told them she'd be right back.

There was a saucer next to the bird man's elbow holding pills of different shapes and colors. Becca counted the pills—there were nine—and ate another Vienna Finger. The bird man sharpened his pencil with a tiny, silver sharpener. He selected two of the pills and washed them down with soda. Then, for what felt like a long time, he just sketched, darkening lines he'd already drawn.

“What do you mean, Earth
mostly
?”

“I spent some time on Delfar when I was twenty-seven. The Delfarians came and got me, and I lived with them for half a year as part of their species-exchange program. They're coming back soon and collecting a whole bunch of us to colonize one of their outer territories. It's different from any place on Earth. It's better, because they don't have any disease and they don't wage wars. The trees are blue and the sky is orange. Not
orange
orange; more like—”

“A Circus Peanut?” Becca offered.

“Exactly. You have big eyebrows.”

No one had ever mentioned Becca's eyebrows before.

“And their moon is a kind of silver and purple paisley, a lot more interesting than ours, which is just gray. I have a fragment of
our
moon, by the way, if you want to see it. An astronaut gave it to me.”

Mrs. Kerrigan came back into the dining room carrying a stack of long, flat boxes. The boxes were scuffed, their corners broken open. “These used to belong to Karen, Frankie's sister,” she said, setting them on the table. “Becca, you're probably too old for Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, but what about Monopoly?”

Monopoly
,
Becca knew from experience, took hours to play and ended in crying. The money wasn't real, the jail had no walls, and the pieces looked like charm-bracelet pendants. “What else is there?” she asked.

Mrs. Kerrigan slid the bottom box from the stack. “Mystery Date
.
Karen used to love this when she was your age
.
” She searched for the directions, but they were nowhere to be found, so she opened the board and began to fiddle with the white, plastic door fixed to its center. “The gist, if I remember right, is you roll the dice to find out how many times to turn the knob, and whoever's behind the door is your date. Sometimes you get the hobo. But sometimes”—she turned the knob and opened and closed the door over and over until it revealed a picture of a young man dressed in a white blazer and a black bow tie, holding a corsage box—“you get the man of your dreams!”

“I don't like his tie,” the bird man said.

Becca didn't mind the tie, but she didn't like the man's blond hair. Her mother had dyed her hair blond the day before she'd left for California. “He's ugly,” she said.

Mrs. Kerrigan sighed and closed the door. “Then you try.”

Becca turned the knob and opened the door to find another young man, this one wearing torn jeans, a leather vest, and a headband with a peace symbol on it.

“There you go,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “The hippie's your date. Or is that the hobo?”

“He's the one I like,” the bird man said.

“You can have him,” Becca said, and then came to a momentary full stop. Why would he want him?

“Frankie,” Mrs. Kerrigan said, “would you like to take a turn?”

“Not if I've already got the hippie.”

“Too bad the directions have gone missing,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “What about Jenga?”

Becca was on the verge of saying she wasn't really interested in unstacking wooden blocks when the bird man declared that Earth games were far inferior to those on Delfar.

“Why?” Becca asked.

“Because on Delfar they've learned how to neutralize sub-windows of gravity. Their version of Jenga—even checkers—involves miniature ionic-propulsion engines. Every piece is like a miniature rocket.”

“Frankie, please,” Mrs. Kerrigan said.

Becca wiped her mouth with her hand. She wiped her hand on her jumper. “I wish we could play one of
those
games.”

G
ail saw no sign of the white Mustang as she pulled into the lot of the Denny's in Titusville. She parked away from the restaurant, left the engine running so she could listen to the radio, checked her hair in the rearview mirror. The digital clock on the dashboard blipped from 2:59 to 3:00. Another minute passed. Then another five. What an idiot she was to think he'd come—but why have her drive all the way to Titusville just to stand her up?

While it would have been hard for her to imagine the right song for her agitated state, it certainly wasn't “It's All Coming Back to Me Now,” which only made her think of her ex-husbands, her ex-boyfriends who had preceded them, all the touching and cuddling that had occurred so long ago, it might as well have happened to another person. She turned the dial, found something more upbeat. Intense, familiar. A TV opener, she thought, then realized it was a new, jazzed-up version of the theme song from
Mission: Impossible.
As the music filled the inside of the car, the white Mustang appeared: gliding toward her across the parking lot, so suddenly and stealthily present, it might have climbed out of an underground passage.

Billy came to a stop next to her with his car facing the opposite direction. His window was down. She brought hers down and turned off the radio.

“Well, hello there,” she said.

He pushed himself up in his seat a few inches and peered at her. “You look nice.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.” Then, not wanting to sound starved for compliments, “Now I guess I'm supposed to tell you that you look nice, too. You do, by the way.”

“Let's go somewhere that isn't here,” he said.

“In your car?”

He shook his head and told her to follow him.

Because she wasn't feeling entirely foolhardy, Gail fished a pen and a deposit slip out of her purse while she drove and wrote down his license plate number. They were headed to another high school, she assumed, or maybe to a mall parking lot, some place where they could at least pretend for a little while longer that this was about a driving lesson. But what if he had someplace truly desolate in mind? Would she continue to follow him mile after mile, until she had no idea where she was and no one to hear her scream if things got dangerous? She would, she decided. And wouldn't she look pathetic, left for dead in the woods with a pair of jumper cables around her neck, after having followed a virtual stranger to the place of her own demise? As they waited to turn onto Route 9, she wrote beneath the license plate number,
I, Gail Nicholson, am spending time with Mr. William Burgher of the Brevard County DMV. If I fall into harm's way, he is the person the police should question.

She folded the note and left it sticking out of the mouth of the ashtray for whoever might happen upon her car. But the note was a bit grandiose, wasn't it? She wasn't the sort of person who warranted a scandalous story or a headline-making crime. This wasn't
Diagnosis: Murder.
Truth be told, when you got him alone, Billy Burgher was probably as boring as a textbook. He was probably so charged up about driver safety that this was how he enjoyed spending his Saturday: teaching someone he thought was a road risk the finer nuances of hydroplaning, the two-second rule, all that hoopla. And right on time, she spotted a school up ahead, with a parking lot spread out beside it wide enough to land the space shuttle. How many years had she wasted trying to make a connection with someone who might find her just the slightest bit desirable? How many conversations had she struck up with retirees on boardwalks, in grocery store lines, at the Blockbuster? And yet here she was, dressed to the nines and feeling like a fool.

But they passed the school with its massive parking lot. They passed acre after acre of asphalt connected to superstores and office parks and boarded-up businesses. They continued north, and she grew so irritable that when he finally put on his turn signal at the entrance to a purple-bricked motel called The Juniper Inn
,
she assumed he'd overshot wherever they were headed and was just turning around.

AIR CONDIT ING, the marquee read. POOL. HBO. And on a hand-painted sign hanging from a post,
By the Week, By the Night, or By the Hour.
The Mustang came to a stop in front of the building. Its brakelights went dark.

Well, then.

I
n general, Becca wasn't what her grandmother would call a “people person.” She liked a few of the children at her new school, but she didn't like any of her teachers, or the principal, or the janitor (who was constantly whistling songs like the ones Mrs. Kerrigan played on her stereo). She didn't like Danny Desouka, the son of her grandmother's next-door neighbor (who'd told her she was pretty, but then had asked if she wanted to touch his “baby-maker”). She didn't like the man with the gold tooth at the post office, or the woman with the sunken chin at the Hallmark store, or the pale lady at the movies who always made a point of telling her there were no free refills on popcorn (which Becca had never once asked for). She didn't like either of the two priests at Divine Mercy, or any of the people who sat through Mass repeating mush-mouthed sentences and wailing hymns. She hadn't liked her previous babysitter, and she didn't much care for Mrs. Kerrigan.

But she was starting to like the bird man. He had pretty blue eyes and he seemed smart, even if it was about things like talking to rats and playing Jenga on another planet. She could no longer imagine stealing Mrs. Kerrigan's food and sneaking off to Paris alone, because the food would have also belonged to the bird man and she would never steal from him.

When the phone rang and Mrs. Kerrigan went into the kitchen to get it, the bird man asked Becca if she wanted to lie down with him on the living room floor.

“I'm too old for naps,” she told him.

“Not to take a nap. To look up.”

They could look up from where they were sitting, but she didn't say this; she walked into the living room and spread flat out beside him on the carpet between the coffee table and the television.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“The ceiling. What do you see?”

“It depends on the time of day. Right now, I see a ship breaking through particle clouds. Sometimes I see seahorses pulling giant ice statues on sleds.”

She understood then that he was talking about the swirls in the plaster—the same way you could look at a cloud and see a face or an animal. She let her hand flop sideways until her fingers brushed his. “If I go to Paris,” she said, “do you want to come with me?”

“I've got stuff to do.”

“Well, maybe we could go to that place you were talking about.”

He made a little humming sound that may have been a yes but may have just been a hum.

“That planet,” she said, in case he didn't understand. “We could go there together and get away from all these crappy people. We could leave and never have to see any of them again.”

Done with her phone call, Mrs. Kerrigan leaned into the pass-through. “You know what?” she said. “I don't think we need to hear any more about other planets today, or about rats, or about how crappy everyone is. I told your grandmother we were going to have fun, Becca, and we're going to do it. Did you bring anything fun in your bag?”

“She brought Safari Suzie,” the bird man said. “And Safari Steve.” How he knew this, Becca had no idea. He'd looked in the bag, maybe. Or had X-ray vision.

“Well, then, let's have a safari,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “Chop-chop. No arguments.”

They followed her out to the backyard, where she chose a spot near the cumquat tree, plopped down with her legs folded beneath her, and upended the bag. The bird man squatted on his knees and began picking through the miniature equipment, while Becca sat Indian-style and tried not to sneer. All she wanted was to be alone with the bird man. All she wanted was to be lying next to him, holding hands, the two of them talking about how they might run away together. But that wasn't going to happen with this horse-haired woman insisting they play with dolls.

Mrs. Kerrigan handed Safari Suzie to her. She tried to hand Safari Steve to the bird man, but he said he'd rather be the elephant with the double saddle strapped to its back. “I guess I'll be Steve,” Mrs. Kerrigan said.

They pretended to ride the elephant around, Mrs. Kerrigan holding Steve at the reins and Becca rolling her eyes as she wagged the Suzie doll nearby. After they'd done this for a while, Mrs. Kerrigan suggested they dismount and set up camp. She unfastened the tent, which sprang into shape, and laid out the pots and pans, the little ice cooler, the shotgun no bigger than a pretzel stick. The bird man used the elephant's head to butt the tent away from the plastic fire, and he used the elephant's trunk to pound pretend stakes into the ground, even though the tent didn't need any stakes.