Mirror in the Sky (6 page)

His fur was damp and hot, and when I lifted my hand, it was covered with blood. I tore off my cardigan, wrapping it around the dog's body, but within seconds it was soaked through. Everything was happening too fast. I needed time to slow down so I could think, so I could figure out what to do. I looked at the dog's collar. “Mario,” it said.

“Mario. It's okay. You're going to be fine,” I cried into his eyes. He whimpered, trying to move his paw, but it was trembling as though he had no control of it. I reached for it, holding it tight in my fist.

“I know you're scared,” I whispered to him. “It's going to be okay. We're going to take care of you.” I had never before felt such a desperate instinct to go back in time, to undo what had already been done. A few seconds, a loose grip on a collar, the light turning green instead of yellow—if only I had thought quicker, moved faster . . .
Stop it, Tara
, I told myself.
Focus on now
. Mario whimpered in my lap, squirming in pain.

“Oh my God, that's Halle's dog!” I heard a panicked voice. It was Nick's. He had left his car—a green Jeep—in the middle of the road, and he was crouching next to me now. “I saw who did it. I think it was Sarah Hoffstedt. She was in that red Porsche, just sped off, I can't believe it!” His voice was strained,
and his face was florid. He placed a hand on my back. “Are you okay?”

“We need to get help!” I cried.

“I don't think he's . . .”

“He's breathing! We need to call a vet, or 911, someone, something!” I said. Tears were beginning to stream down my face. Already, my cardigan matched the color of Nick's rust-colored bag.

“Okay. I'm calling right now.”

I looked at Mario's eyes. They were glassy.

“Let's get you out of this intersection,” I said to him, but when I tried to move him, he yelped in pain.

“You're going to be okay,” I said, trying to comfort him, but my words came out garbled, my tone high. I couldn't bring myself to let go of Mario, like he was some sort of extension of me.

I could hear Nick on the phone behind me, his voice frantic.

“Hello? Please! We need help!

“I'm at the intersection of Hillside and the Post Road.

“No! No, it's not a person, it's a dog! Just a dog!”

Nick sat down beside me on the road, cars circling around us.

Eventually, the ASPCA came in a white van. A young vet, clean-shaven, looking not too much older than us, jumped out and nervously took notes on a clipboard.

“Is it your pet, sir?”

“No, he's my girlfriend's dog! Can't you do something?”

The vet crouched down next to me. By now, Mario's
breathing was shallow. His eyes kept closing, and I felt the need to gently shake him awake.

“It's okay. I'm here, don't go,” I said, but his body was becoming more and more still. “
Please, please
don't go,” I begged.

The vet placed an oxygen mask around Mario's face, pressing down repeatedly on his chest. There was a jarring violence to it, and it filled me with terror.

“What are you doing? You're hurting him!” I screamed.

“I'm sorry, but I have to.”

It went on for what felt like an eternity. “I'm going to try the paddles now. You have to move aside,” he said.

I shook my head like I couldn't comprehend what he was saying.

“Come on, Tara,” Nick said gently, pulling me away from Mario. The moment he did, my knees buckled underneath my legs and I fell to the ground again, my eyes still on Mario.

I watched his body twitch and jolt with the current of the electric paddles, one time, then two, then five.

Mario remained still. The vet pulled a syringe from his bag. “I'm sorry, but he's in pain,” he said. “I don't think we can bring him back. We have to do this.”

“No!” I cried. “Stop!” But it was too late. I watched as he injected the poison into Mario's body. I pulled him back into my lap and stroked his head, letting my tears fall. I don't know how long I was sitting like that in the middle of the intersection.

“I'm sorry, ma'am. We have to take him away now, get in
touch with the owners and . . . take care of the body.” I heard the vet's apologetic voice. I looked up. I had forgotten he was there. Tentatively, I loosened my grip on Mario's paw.

Nick put an arm around me. “It's okay,” he said, over and over again, but I still couldn't stop crying. He sat with me for a few minutes before he pulled away. “Listen, I have to call her,” he said. He got up, slowly walking toward his car. I watched him, the muscles in his back tensing.

“Halle . . .” His voice broke. I could see that his hand on his phone was shaking. “I have bad news . . .”

I closed my eyes and pulled my knees up to my chest, burying my face in the rough fabric of my jeans.

I didn't want to go back to school, and Nick offered to drive me home. I sat in the passenger seat of his Jeep, my head against the windowpane. Nick tried to talk to me, but I couldn't even speak. I had never before thought of how hazardous it was, just being alive.

“Hey.” Nick reached for my hand again before I got out of his car. “You were there for him. That's what matters. Halle was broken up over it . . . But she was
so
grateful that you were there.”

SEVEN

“
EVEN
though Terra Nova is still trillions of miles away—about four-point-two light-years, to be exact—we have reason to believe that it is inhabited by intelligent life. Of course, it's still too early to do more than speculate.”

“But . . . are they like us, meaning, like humans? Are they . . . human-like?”

“Of course they are!” my mother exclaimed. She was in front of the TV when I returned home, and this time she didn't even look up. I could tell she hadn't showered because she was still in her pajamas.

Adam Bryson had a different answer. “We don't know if they're like us. But there has been a new development. Early this morning, NASA intercepted a new message—this one appears to be something like a bitmap. We're in the process of decoding it right at this moment. For our viewers, this is what
it looks like,” Bryson declared as a pixilated image cascaded across the screen.

“Hi, sweetie. Did they let you out early?” my mother asked. But she didn't wait for an answer. “I had to call in sick today. Have you seen this image? They don't know what it means yet, but they're trying to decode it. Crazy, huh? Wait, listen to this part . . .”

I was shell-shocked, standing by the door, covered in blood. My mother didn't even notice. I slowly turned to the TV just as Lauren Matson began to speak.

“But if Terra Nova is trillions of miles away, then how could we have received a response to our transmission in such a short amount of time?”

“One theory is that what we thought of as a
response
to our signal is not a response at all. Perhaps it was simply a transmission sent by the inhabitants of Terra Nova, independent of our own. It's possible that, like us, Terra Nova sent out a radio signal with no expectation that it would reach us—perhaps they were aiming it at an entirely different star cluster. It could be that when they sent it, they had no knowledge of us. It's
also
possible that they never received our transmission.”

“So let me get this straight—you're saying that there's
no
relationship between the two signals beyond their similarity?”

“All I'm saying is . . . it's a possibility.”

“Well then, I guess the big question is . . . why is it so similar to our own?”

Adam Bryson raised an eyebrow. “Coincidence?”

“That's the best answer you got?”

“That's the only answer I got, Lauren.”

“Isn't that exactly what I said?” declared my mother with vindication in her voice. I didn't respond. I felt as though my mother and I were miles apart, rather than just ten feet from each other. I wanted to curl up next to her, tell her what had happened, and yet, more than that, I wanted her to
know
what had just happened, to turn to me and throw her arms around me and ask me if I was okay. But she didn't. I watched her for a moment, her eyes fixed on the TV, her hair unwashed. She felt like a different person all of a sudden, but it wasn't just the obsession with the news and her slothful behavior.

“It
is
exactly what I said.”

Her certainty felt like an odd novelty, because my mother was rarely confident of anything at all. In the produce aisle of the supermarket, she often stood for several minutes, a beet in one hand, fennel in another, uncertain of the global consequences of purchasing one over the other. She was the one who had explained to me, in a slightly panicked voice, that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America could affect the weather patterns in Manhattan.

To my mother, every tiny event, every tiny decision had an impact somewhere down the road, and on most days she believed that impact was an impending nuclear bomb waiting to exterminate everything and everyone she knew rather than something welcome . . . or even nothing at all. This was the kind of thing you would never know about her if you saw her on the street, if you took dance classes with her. But I knew this about her because I lived with her day in and day out. She was
the person I knew best in the entire world. But Terra Nova was changing something in her, something that couldn't really be seen by the human eye, such an imperceptible difference that it may as well have been the flapping of a butterfly wing.

“I'm going upstairs,” I said, hoping that she would turn and look at me.

“Don't you want to watch with me? You know what I think this means? It means they're just like us. Maybe they
are
us.”

“They can't be us.
We're
us,” I said. I could hear the frustrated edge in my voice, but she didn't pick up on it.

“Has anyone ever explained Schrödinger's cat to you?” she called after me.

I shook my head, but my mother didn't see me. “Ask your dad about it. I can't explain it.”

No one could really explain any of it—an alien planet, a dead dog, Meg leaving home, my mother acting weird. It was as though over the past twenty-four hours, my entire life had become a story that broke constantly and iteratively, like waves crashing into the sand again and again and again, the questions outpacing any answers that were likely to survive.

I climbed up the stairs to take a shower. I felt a momentary wave of anger that my clothes were blood-soaked and she hadn't even noticed. Then I realized: It was the anniversary of my grandparents' death, and she didn't even seem to remember.

EIGHT

I
T
was still early evening when I woke up, the first glimmer of twilight revealing itself in pink and purple streaks of light across the sky. Despite the events of the afternoon, the sky insisted on proudly unfurling its beauty at us, a matador taunting us with his lack of interest in the particulars of any individual life.

When I came down the stairs, my mother was still there, planted before the bright blue screen. But this time, she turned and looked at me, her eyes wide with alarm. I was relieved. She looked like my mother again.

“Listen, Linda called me. Why didn't you tell me what happened?” she asked, looking me up and down. “It sounds just awful! Are you all right, babe? You should have said something the moment you came in the door! You're supposed to tell me these kinds of things.”

Linda was Nick's mother. She was on the PTA and had short gray hair cut in a bob and always wore Hermès scarves. She was the kind of mother who seemed to know what to do in an emergency.

“She called Mrs. Treem and told her what happened. The phone's been ringing constantly the past half hour—Linda, then Treem, then the vet called—they had your contact info and wanted to get some information from you.”

“Great, now Treem's going to want to talk about it. God, I hate her.”

“I know. She's so false! You can just hear it in her voice.”

“She drips falseness.”

“You should switch guidance counselors . . .”

“You don't even know the whole of it. She makes such annoying comments and she's like this consummate alarmist, and now she's going to want to have, like, a long discussion dissecting the ‘incident' and my ‘feelings' about it tomorrow. But it's not going to help anyone, because she's kind of an idiot.”

“You should just lay it all out. Tell her to leave you alone. You don't need her help,” my mother said as I retrieved a jar of peanut butter from the cabinet and began to eat it straight with a spoon.

“I can't do that.”

“You totally can.”

“I told her once that the cement walls on the new campus make me melancholy, and she asked me what I meant by that. And then I realized that she didn't know what the word ‘melancholy' actually meant.”

My mother laughed. “That's not true!”

“No, seriously, it is. Ever since then, I totally feel like I can't trust her. And she has an actual say in my future! And then another time, freshman year, she complimented my English,” I said, suddenly remembering that awkward conversation.

“Why would your English be bad?” my mother asked.

I pointed to my face.

“Because you're . . .”

“Yeah. She basically looked at me and pegged me for an ESL student.”

“You never told me about that! I would have set her straight.”

I shrugged. “I just worry that's what the whole world is like outside of Brierly. Just a few idiots who've somehow been assigned the role of gatekeepers.”

My mother shook her head. “It's not like that,” she said. I slumped down on the couch next to her, and she stroked my hair. “Well, sometimes it is . . . I know it's been tough for you. God, what a crap first day of school! Anyway, you don't have to do your homework today. Mrs. Treem's orders.”

“Awesome.” I rolled my eyes, as though that was any sort of consolation prize for watching a dog die in your arms.

“Look at this,” she said, turning her attention back to the TV. “People are really responding to this stuff.”

She pointed to the footage of masses of people gathering in the woods, in the mountains and deserts, performing odd rituals at sunset and sunrise, chanting melodic chants, standing in the streets, holding signs that said:
WE
ARE
NOT
ALONE
,
and
THEY
AR
E
WATCHING
US
, and
WHAT
D
O THEY KNOW
? The ambiguity of this last question seemed intentional. What did it matter what they knew when we barely knew or understood anything ourselves?

“There are all these . . . groups forming. All over the world, like newfound religions. They think this new planet is our ‘celestial twin.'”

“It's kind of premature for that, isn't it?” The formation of something, anything new that allowed one to look outward, upward, and still beyond had always been a refuge for the lost. I always wondered about people who voluntarily joined groups with some sort of enthusiasm or willingness. Don't get me wrong—I was on yearbook and swim team and Amnesty International, but only so I'd have those things on my transcript. I didn't actually feel like I was part of anything. No matter what, I felt separate from everything at school, like I was there to observe people rather than to actually interact with them.

But my mother felt differently. “It
is
comforting, the idea that we're not alone,” she mused. “I guess I just find it all meaningful. Your dad thinks it's a big joke or something.”

I looked at my mother. She was eating a granola bar. The discarded wrappers of her granola-bar meal plan littered the coffee table.

“Mom, I think you're getting kind of obsessed,” I said to her.

“It's just so . . . mesmerizing!” she exclaimed. “I know, I know. I promise I'll go back to work, but I just needed this. It feels like an infusion of vitamins or something.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

But she didn't answer, and I could tell she wasn't listening to me anymore. Her eyes returned to the screen, and her hand reached for the remote to switch to another news network.

I got up. “I think I'm going to go visit Dad,” I told her. She didn't protest, so I took my bike out from the garage, and by seven thirty I was crossing the threshold of my father's restaurant, the clang of bells overhead, a vertical thread of seven chilis and a lime hanging in the doorway to ward off the evil eye. A small waitstaff tended to a bustling dining room, steel plates of puri and naan and chana masala and chicken tikka floating by in deft hands.

I was greeted by the smoky smell of the incense by the door, which always made me sneeze. This functioned as a greeting, and Amit, the head server, gave me a nod.

“Is my dad in the kitchen?” I asked him.

“He's in the pantry, taking inventory.”

“
Now?
During the evening rush?”

Amit shrugged. “Maybe he thinks we have it all handled.”

This was the longest conversation I had ever had with Amit. He was a sophomore at Trinity College, working a few nights a week at the restaurant for the extra money. Our interactions were minimal, mostly just “hi” and “bye” and “Do you need any help?”

The one time I saw him outside of work, coming out of a bar on Greenwich Avenue with a group of friends, it shocked me that he had a life outside the restaurant. He was dressed in torn jeans and a T-shirt instead of his uniform of black slacks
and a black button-down shirt. His hair was rumpled, and he was holding hands with a tall brunette with an obnoxious laugh. We made eye contact for a brief second, but I ducked into a pet store, hiding behind a wall of aquariums to avoid an awkward interaction, and by the time I emerged, he was gone. Neither of us brought it up afterward.

“You should go say hi to him.”

“How come it's so busy today?”

Amit shrugged. “Maybe the last book club selection was
Orientalism
.” I took this as a cue to find my father, threading my way through the narrow corridor past the restrooms and the kitchen.

Occasionally I helped out at the restaurant. I liked the organized chaos of the place. Tickets coming in, mounds of ginger, onion, garlic, and tomatoes waiting to be thrown into sizzling pans, rolls of dough tossed into the tandoor transforming into chewy rounds of naan, blackened and crispy at the edges. It was this metamorphosis that delighted me—there was something satisfying about it, starting with something and ending with something else entirely.

Sometimes, on early summer mornings, I would watch my father steep tamarind with jaggery, chili, and ginger to make chutney, observing it bubble and thicken on the stove. Or I would inspect the glass jars of pickles that lined the windowsill of the kitchen—orbs of preserved lemon suspended in sugar syrup, slivers of raw mango salted and blended with mustard and cumin seeds.

My father had made those pickles. He loved the precision
of cooking, believed in “correct” measurements and cleaning up workstations as you go. These things seemed to bring him a sense of satisfaction.

“Dad?” I called out as I entered the storage room. “How come you're in here?”

He had his back to me and was stacking large industrial-sized cans of whole tomatoes.

“It's gotten so disorganized,” he said, frustration in his voice. “Everything's a big mess! I keep telling Amit that we need a system, a process. You can't just dump things everywhere. Everything has a place, and if you don't put things in their proper place when they come in . . . this is where you end up.” He gestured to the large burlap sacks of multicolored lentils around him, to the bulging nets filled with red onions and ginger and ghostly white garlic. The pantry didn't look any more or less disorderly than usual to me. For a moment, I thought he was referring to the restaurant itself—how he had ended up within it.

He turned to me then, his voice softer now. “Shouldn't you be at home doing your homework?”

“I just felt like . . . I don't know, visiting you.” It was true. I thought about telling him about Mario, but I still wasn't ready to talk about it.

“Can you tell me about Schrödinger's cat?” I asked him.

He paused for a minute, a large plastic container of turmeric suspended in his hand.

“What made you bring that up?”

“I don't know. Mom said I should ask you about it.”

My father turned to face me, placing the container on the floor. He sat down on top of a sealed sack of basmati rice. His eyes were distant. “I haven't thought about Schrödinger's cat in years. I told your mother about it on our first date. It's . . . a thought experiment . . . the idea that two contradictory possibilities can exist simultaneously.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, think about a cat. Let's say you take this cat and you put it in a box with unstable poisonous gas in it. The gas has a fifty percent chance of poisoning the cat and killing it, and a fifty percent chance of doing nothing. It's a closed box, sealed. So we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive until we actually open the box and look at it. But the thing is, if you do the experiment enough times, the cat lives half the time, and dies half the time.”

“Okay . . .”

“So according to quantum mechanics, before we look in the box, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.” He looked at me to make sure I understood.

I nodded. “Go on.”

“The cat's reality is tied to the experiment—it either sees the radioactive poison released and it dies, or it doesn't see it released and it stays alive. But our observation of this experiment forces the outcome of it to collapse toward one reality or the other, so we're part of the experiment too now—if the cat dies, then we see it dead, but if the cat lives, we see it alive . . .”

“Yeah?”

“So if we apply this thought experiment to us, one has to
wonder: Is there someone watching us, trying to observe the outcome of our reality? We live in a world of choices too. Does life for us move in one direction or the other? Or do both possibilities exist?”

“How can they both exist?”

“In parallel within a larger multiverse. Possibly alongside many other possibilities.”

“So . . . do they all exist? All those possibilities?”

My father shrugged. “No one knows. It's the biggest question in quantum physics.”

I wanted to keep discussing Schrödinger's cat, but my father got up abruptly and rubbed his eyes. “I think I'm going to leave early today. I'll have someone else close up. Let me check the register, and I'll meet you out front in fifteen minutes. We can throw your bike in the back of the car.”

“Okay,” I told him, following him out of the storage room. I watched him duck into the kitchen as I tried to piece together everything he had just told me. I was so distracted that I didn't even notice the tall figure standing in front of me.

“Oh my God, Tara! I was hoping I'd run into you!” I looked up to see Veronica's lean frame pressed against the pink wall of the corridor, a concerned look in her eyes.

“Veronica . . . what are you doing here?”

“Just waiting for the restroom.” It took me a moment to register that she had mentioned coming to the restaurant earlier that day. It felt like ages since we had that conversation.

She turned to face me, blocking the narrow hallway, a
conspiratorial look on her face. “I heard about what happened! Nick called me.”

At first, I couldn't understand what she was talking about. My brain felt like a broken calculator, unable to add up the information before me. But the mention of Nick surprised me. I realized that he had talked to her about this afternoon, about the dog, about me.

I slowly nodded, unsure of what to say. “It was . . . yeah, it was awful.” I hoped that this was the end of the conversation, that I could just walk away, but she went on.

“Halle's pretty fucked up over it. She loved that puppy. Her housekeeper was, like, driving all over Greenwich looking for it. They didn't think it could get off the estate and make it to the main road. And Sarah . . . oh my God, I don't think she has any idea what's coming. Nick said it was definitely a red Porsche—he saw it, and Sarah's the only one in our class with a fucking red Porsche.
And
she has a free period before lunch, so she was definitely off campus.”