The Great Good Summer (16 page)

I turn my head and look up. All the summer camp kids do too, even though it's daytime and we're inside. You just can't help it. And I don't know what Paul is thinking—unless he's wishing that he'd gotten to come to a camp like this when he was a little kid—but what
I'm
thinking is this:

Looking up at the sky and wondering is what science people like Paul do.

And it's what God people like Mama do too.

If that's not the craziest thing.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A
fter looking at some cool displays and seeing a very 3-D IMAX movie (that makes me dizzier than the launch simulator did), Paul and I eat lunch in the cafeteria. We have to hurry because we have tickets to take a bus tour at one o'clock, which you must admit is kind of ridiculous, us getting back on a bus voluntarily after our Greyhound adventure. I think it officially qualifies us as good sports.

Lunch is expensive, so we split a kind of measly chicken sandwich to keep within Mama's emergency budget. I have a feeling that when we get home to Loomer, I may do nothing but eat for a whole week. Paul must be starving too, but he doesn't mention it, so neither do I.

“Y'know that thing we were talking about earlier, about hypotheses?” says Paul, passing me our small shared soda.

“No. What thing?” I look at the clock over Paul's head. I'm actually starting to worry a little bit about Mama. I may be mad at her for a whole list of reasons, but she is
still my mama, and she is sitting out in the hot sun just one day after getting out of the hospital, for goodness' sake. Then I realize Paul is talking, and I shake my way back to him.

“Y'know, how you said you're just an ‘if' person. I was thinking about that, and here's the thing. That's the part that scientists like too. That's the idea part. I'm pretty sure everybody likes the ‘if' better than the ‘then.' I mean, at least people who're adventurous—like us.”

I look across the table at Paul with his sorry-looking sandwich and his bus tour wristband. He really is
so
happy, it's almost as if we got to come for a real launch. I don't have the heart to tell him that I'm just plain old Ivy Blank Green. I'm not really adventurous at all. Or at least, I'm only adventurous inside my head, not out of it.

When we get onto the bus, it turns out our summer camp friends are with us, but the counselor is sitting quietly because the bus driver is in charge now. He introduces himself as a “communicator,” which is very sci-fi, don't you think?

When we make the first stop at the launch pad, lots of people get off.

“You wanna?” I ask Paul, since we've been told that
there are giant platforms out there and wild lights and other cool stuff.

“Nope,” says Paul, kind of whispering under the communicator's instructions. “I'm good. I can get the idea from here. I'm holding out for
Atlantis
.”

Because here's the thing. We are going to the Vehicle Assembly Building next, and guess what's in there waiting for us? Space Shuttle
Atlantis
. A real honest-to-goodness space shuttle, in person. It might be the very one that Paul would've flown himself someday, if the people in charge hadn't messed up his plans. And here it is, on display. If that's not the luckiest.

And now here we are. The bus stops. The door opens. Paul almost trips over me, he's in such a hurry to get out. We pass people headed in the other direction to get back on the bus, and most of them are looking at photos on their phones.

“You can't capture it,” someone says as we walk by. “It's too spectacular.”

It turns out they weren't just talking about the space shuttle. The building
itself
is spectacular. It's the biggest building you've ever seen. Light pours in from everywhere. Massive metal frames stretch up high like the Eiffel Tower. Forklifts and trucks rest on the concrete floor like tiny toys. And in the middle of it all, the space shuttle—a great big blown-up version of one of Paul's remote control planes, but this one is for real. Absolutely 100 percent real.

“
Atlantis
went to space thirty-three times,” says the tour guide.

Thirty-three times! How did we not know that? Even in little Loomer, where we sometimes miss what's going on in the next town? Why wasn't it a bigger deal? Why wasn't it a big deal every single time?

“How in God's name could a person even imagine a thing like that?” I ask as we stare up at the wide white wings and American flags. “And then be brave enough to fly it? To space, of all places? I mean, is that brave or crazy?”

“Brave and crazy go together,” says Paul, smiling, answering but not looking at me. His whole body buzzes; he's almost floating. He is what Pastor Lou would call awestruck. And not that I would spread this around school or anything, but he looks this close to wanting to cry.

Brave and crazy. Brave and crazy. We were a little brave and crazy getting here, he and I. Never mind that Paul's afraid of dogs and I'm afraid of, gosh, almost everything
but
dogs! We were still both brave and crazy. And thank goodness, 'cause Paul has
This was worth it
written all over his kind-of-cute face.

“Right now we're looking at Space Shuttle
Atlantis
,” says our guide, “but it's important to think about what came before the shuttles and what's coming next.”

What came before, it turns out, were the Apollo rockets that flew to the moon. They were built right here.

“You could be standing in the very spot where Neil Armstrong once stood.” The guide's voice bounces around. Paul looks down at his feet.

“Neil freaking Armstrong,” Paul says.

“I know,” I say.

“And before too long,” says the guide, “our next generation of rockets will be built here. Ones that, someday, might take the next generation of astronaut explorers to Mars.”

“Paul!” My voice comes out louder than I expect it to. Some of the people standing nearby turn to look at us, but I don't care. I grab on to his shoulder to make sure I have his attention. “Did you hear what he said?” I ask, in something a little closer to an inside voice. “He said ‘next generation.' Did you hear him? That's you!”

And Paul Dobbs, astronaut-to-be, stands right there in Neil Armstrong's footprints, and starts to laugh.

“Huh,” he says. “What do you know? Maybe space won't just be for robots and the rich.” He shakes his head as the guide keeps talking about all the things they've got planned. “Maybe there's gonna be a spot for me after all, Ivy Green,” says Paul, and he laughs and makes fists out of both of his hands and kind of pumps them up and down.

It's like our whole trip has been Paul's “if” and this, right here, is his “then.” The “then” he didn't count on.

I can't think of anything to say except, “Don't give up,” but that sounds kind of cheesy, so I don't. I just swallow hard. The guide keeps talking. Space Shuttle
Atlantis
hulks over us, huge and white. Paul's hands relax and hang by his sides.

When the formal talk is over, he shakes his head again. “Oh, man, Ivy. I'm an idiot. You know what I did? I got so into the space shuttle that I kind of forgot about space.” He looks up at the shuttle, and then farther up, to the tip-top of this enormous building, like when we were with the camp kids earlier, inside. We're both just looking up and up and farther up, into the light and sky and space we know is out there.

“Wow,” he says. “Dang.” And he smiles.

And right then I see my mama in my head. This is an awful lot like what happened to her, I think, following Hallelujah Dave to Florida as if he were God or the space shuttle or something. But it turned out that God isn't a preacher with weird blue eyes and a hair bun. God is really more like space. Big, wild, mysterious space.

Which I'm pretty sure is what Mama was looking for all along.

Chapter Twenty-Three

S
o this is it. Tomorrow morning we're piling back into our rental car and heading west, straight toward home. But tonight we are on a beach at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

When we came out of the space center, Mama was waiting. She had on a new straw hat and was reading a magazine and drinking an ice tea.

“I knew you'd be in there a good long while,” she said, “so I drove around and got myself a souvenir and found us a new hotel. One right on the beach. We deserve it.”

“Can we afford it?” I asked, but honestly I was just relieved to see her smiling and not turned to a puddle on the pavement due to heatstroke.

“Baby doll, this is why we have a credit card, for these unforeseen circumstances,” Mama said. “You let me worry about the details.”

And so I do, because she
is
the mother, after all.

As we make our way toward the beach and the new hotel, Paul and I tell her about our day. I hope maybe she won't notice that I'm sort of casually talking to her again. Somehow my anger melted clean away between the time when she dropped us at the gate this morning and the time when she picked us up this afternoon, but I don't want to make a big deal out of it. I just want to enjoy this last bit of time before we have to go home and explain ourselves to everyone.

I do ask for her phone, though, so I can text Daddy as we drive. Not to explain anything, just to say hey. Because now that I'm not hiding from him, I'm missing him. And I can still see him pulled off on the side of the road in Louisiana, worrying up a storm.

R u home safe n sound, Daddy?
I type.
We'll be there soon
.

And then I send a second one:
Luv u to the moon n back
.

I've hardly pressed send when a message comes back.
I love you double that. Love, Daddy.

Isn't it funny how he signs his text like he's writing a letter, even though I obviously know who it's from? I guess he's more distinguished than Mama gives him credit for.

The hotel restaurant has round, red-glass candles on every table, and we eat shrimp cocktail and snapper for dinner because Mama says, “Far be it from me, kids, to give you something like pizza when we're sitting nearly smack dab in the center of the ocean. Far be it from me.”

And then when we're done, we walk across the patio and kick off our shoes and step onto the beach. Which is where we are now, right down near the waves, the tiny foamy waves. We're lying with our knees bent and our backs against the sand, and the tiny foamy waves say
hush, hush, hush
.

On one side of me is my runaway Mama, who accidentally and unexpectedly brought us here.

And on the other side of me is certified science guy Paul Dobbs, who did too.

It's gotten dark and the stars have come up, and just a small, funny chunk of the moon.

We talked a lot over dinner, all three of us, and laughed about how I got all banged around in the launch simulator and am not—repeat,
not
—cut out for space.

And then Paul told Mama that there's totally gonna be a future for him in the space program after all. “I'm still a little bummed,” he said, “but I think I got too obsessed with the space shuttle when it's just a machine.”

As we finished eating, we kept talking like that, on and on. It was fun. We were finally not hungry and not tired and not mad at one another, and it seemed like there was so much to say.

But now, here on the beach? We're quiet as mice, until Mama says, “Darling Ivy. I'm so sorry, baby. I really truly am.”

I can tell she means it, but it's so nice right here and now. I don't want to hash everything out—and I know that's what Mama's gonna say any minute now: “Let's hash this out.”

So I just say, “It's okay, Mama. Really. Everything's fine. I get it.”

“But I never should have left Loomer, honey. I never should've followed that ridiculous man to his fake church or forgotten my blood pressure meds or left you and your daddy behind. None of that ever, ever should have happened, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry to you and to your daddy, and to Paul, too.”

“But, Mama,” I say, pushing myself up to sitting, “if you hadn't done any of those things, then we wouldn't be here right now, lying on the beach and looking at the stars shine. Maybe sometimes the wrong things have to happen so the right things can.”

“Oh, honey. You've always been good at making the right things happen. You didn't need me to go off half-dumb and crazy for that.”

“But see, that's just it. I did! I did need it. I'm always full of ideas, but that's only the first step. You can have all the ideas in the world and still spend your life just stuck in one place.”

Mama sits up too, but she doesn't answer. She just looks out at the water and the sky like I do.

Then after a while she says, “Y'know, Ivy, you were right. I forsook you and Max and my own heart and home. I lost faith in everything that was good. But, baby,
you
never gave up on anyone or anything. You stuck by your daddy all the way through this hot, hard summer, and by me when you decided to come all the way to Florida to find me, and by Paul, making sure he got this part of the trip, no matter what. I may have blown it, but you were steady, Ivy. All the way along.”

Was I? Steady?

Steady like Ruth?

Is Mama right, about that and about me?

What if I love
people
like Paul loves space?

Before I have a chance to answer, she says, “And, Paul, I'm sorry you didn't get a full moon tonight. Or even much of a moon at all. That hardly seems fair to a sky guy like you.”

There is no answer, and for a second I think Paul may have fallen asleep. I lean over to check, and realize he's fine. Wide awake. Stargazing. He smiles a tiny quiet secret smile. At me. Ivy Ruth Green. I try this out on myself—this new name. This new middle name that means I'm complete. Steady. Loyal. Faithful. Maybe not in quite the way Pastor Lou would recommend, but in my own deep, true way.

Ivy Ruth Green.

My whole name, even though I didn't know it till today.

I hear it in my head, clear as a bell, just like Mrs. Murray said I would.

“Oh, don't worry about it, Mrs. Green,” says Paul. “The moon's pretty, but it can get so big and bright that it drowns out everything else. Sometimes it's more interesting to stargaze when it's dark like this.”

So that's what we do. We lie back and look at the stars—hundreds of thousands of stars, including that baby bear and his mother. After a while, Paul reaches over with his left hand and gives my right hand a squeeze, and then he just holds it and I hold back. It doesn't feel romantic; it just feels nice. And somehow I know that if Mama notices, she'll understand.

She'll understand that sometimes when you're looking up in wonder at the great-good heavens above, you are so full up with mystery and surprise that it feels nice to hold on to something that you really know.