Hagen’s smile softened. “I will not be abandoning it,” he said.
She had heard rumors that Hagen intended to stay on Earth when the rest of them left, but it was different hearing him confirm it himself. There was nothing melancholy about the way he said it; in fact, he sounded almost fond of the idea, like it was an old stray cat that he put out food for.
She thought of the Naomi, held fast by her bowline knot, bobbing on the waves.
“Well,” she said, “I guess it’s good we’re fixing it, then.”
Early estimates suggested that the asteroid, calculated to be at least five miles in diameter, would flatten an area the size of the United States when it struck. The resulting debris and dust in the atmosphere would block out the sun, and that would be what wiped out all life on the rest of the planet. So, Samantha figured, a person would be able to live for some time, depending on their existing food stores, if the asteroid didn’t strike anywhere near them.
“Everybody’s family is dead around here, you know.”
He put the new bracket in place and began screwing it in. As the bracket took hold, less of her strength was required, until she was able to release the shelf and start arranging the pots on top of it.
“Would you mind if I asked why?” she said.
“You wouldn’t be the first,” Hagen said, dusting off his hands. He took off his glasses and set them on his desk. His eyes creased at the corners, she noticed, like he was always smiling, even when he wasn’t.
“I don’t mind being unoriginal,” she replied.
The answer seemed to charm him. He chuckled a little.
“There are many reasons,” he said, “but there is also just one: I can’t bear to leave my home.”
Samantha nodded. She picked up the bag that said “Hagen” on it and set it on his desk, next to the homemade mug.
“Have a good lunch,” she said.
“If you want to learn more about orchids,” he said, “you might consider bringing lunch for yourself next time you come.” He tilted his head. “If you love them as your mother did, I mean.”
She gave a wave and went into the entryway to put her gloves back on.
The “orchid hospital,” as Samantha’s mother had called it, was in her bedroom, along the back window. After the shriveled blooms dropped, her mother took the plant up to the windowsill and left it in the indirect light until it bloomed again. She put ice cubes in the pots once a week, so water would melt into the soil.
Why, she had once asked her mother, do you bother to keep anything alive when it’ll all be wiped out by Finis?
Her mother had shrugged. Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not yet.
Samantha had gone to the orchid hospital every day as a child, standing in the bathroom doorway as her mother did her makeup and leaving before the roar of the hair dryer could make her heart race. If she was lucky, Naomi would dust Samantha’s cheeks with blush or let her blink her eyelashes into the mascara wand after she was finished. Once she had even tied one of her scarves—the silky one with the violets on it—around Samantha’s head like a headband.
When she grew older—old enough to put on Barbie-pink lip gloss and to smear glitter on her eyelids—she didn’t watch the morning ritual any longer, but she still went to the bedroom to feel the orchid soil to make sure it was moist, to open the scarf drawer and breathe in the scent of her mother’s perfume, to try on her shoes as her feet grew bigger, inch by inch, big enough to fill them. And later, when she was home from college, to run her hands over the oxygen tank, to try on the mask her mother wore to breathe as her body broke down.
Her first dance was in eighth grade, when she was thirteen, and her mother took her shopping for a dress. She was self-conscious about the sharp points of her breasts without a bra to give them shape, so they moved away from the halters and toward something with thick straps. A black shift that fell to the middle of her calves was the most promising option, though she had clutched her hands tight around the rise of fat around her middle when she first put it on, only for her mother to smack them away and tell her not to be silly—it was no crime to have a body. And standing in the dressing room, looking at her reflection, she had thought that a body rippled like desert sand, swelling up into hills, dipping into valleys, the sand blowing around curves and over sharp edges.
But better than the dress had been the earrings. They had, her mother said, belonged to her grandmother, who had passed away when her mother was only twenty, from an undiagnosed heart condition. The earrings were pearl posts set into small metal leaves, and her mother had cautioned her to take care of them before sending her off with her friend Kara’s mother to the school gymnasium.
It took an hour for her terror of the dance floor to wear away, and even then she kept her movements small, hips shifting and feet shuffling. Mostly she and the other girls sang the lyrics they knew into the center of a circle, their heads bobbing, the little crystals they had pressed into their hair dropping unseen to the gymnasium floor. She had one slow dance, with Davud Shah from her choir class, who smelled like sweat but had a shy smile and a nice clear tenor.
When she got home later, the dress scratchy against her shoulders, she felt her earlobes to take out the earrings and the right one was missing.
She searched along the path she had taken down the upstairs hallway and up the stairs and into the kitchen and along the hall to the front door, but she knew that the earring was more likely lost on the gymnasium floor. She ran to her mother with tears in her eyes, holding out the single earring and confessing.
Her mother was quiet for a few seconds, plucking the earring from her daughter’s hand. Finally she offered a smile, touching Samantha’s head, and told her not to worry.
That night, Samantha got up for a glass of water, and saw her mother on her hands and knees in the hallway, wearing her white bathrobe, searching the carpet for what her daughter had lost.
On her way back to the compound in Svalbard to begin her work again, Samantha walked across a rare shaft of sunlight. It made the snow glimmer like fallen hair crystals and glitter eye shadow and pearls cradled in metal leaves.
When there was a flower in the lab, everyone gathered around.
The sample had come across Samantha’s station. It was a whole plant: flower, stem, leaves, and roots, held suspended in the clear solution that preserved all the full plant samples. Most of them came to Svalbard already labeled by the scientists in the field who had collected them years before, but sometimes the labels were lost, or the higher-ups didn’t think they were correct. There were still thousands of samples in the basement beneath them, rows upon rows of plants they would soon forget when they were coasting through space. But Samantha and her coworkers were doing their best to log as many as possible.
This particular flower was yellow and round, with dozens of frilly petals around a central point. The stem was fuzzy and light green, the leaves at the base of the plant oblong and smooth. No one said anything for a while as Samantha typed in the initial parameters of her search: yellow, height: 28.2cm, leaves: five, origin: United Kingdom.
“It looks like a dandelion,” Dan said as Samantha leaned closer to the images the database had presented to her.
“So?” Averill said. “Even dandelions need to be logged.”