“Yes,” she said without taking her eyes off him. “I have to tell you something: I’m pregnant.”
There was the sound of bottles being placed on the serving cart, the last caterer walking across the room.
“Oh,” he said, thinking. “How long have you been back?”
She pulled the sleeve of the parka to see her watch. “Ten days. I think. I lost track.”
“That was fast,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes and waited for him to think.
“Oh,” he said. “Up there?”
She nodded.
“Is that why you came back down?”
“It played a part in my decision, yes.”
They left the auditorium, walking through the sculpture garden, “The Gates of Hell” illuminated by spotlights.
They walked through the dry lakebed toward home, Van Raye with two beers in his sweater’s pockets stretching the fabric, bottles tapping against his thighs. Above the trees was a dome of light pollution cast from the university golf course’s arc lights.
“Let’s see,” Ruth said counting the brighter stars with her finger. “Now where is it?”
“Don’t point,” he said.
“There are the twins. There’s Capella,” she said, her hand held straight out, “so I’d follow it east. It would be about. . there, third star down. There’s a planet there full of life. Chava Norma!”
“Don’t say it out loud, please,” he said.
They were on a small pedestrian bridge. Van Raye glanced to see only a student walking through the grass using her open laptop like a flashlight, illuminating the ground before her.
“Please don’t be flippant about this,” he said. “I’m not ready for anyone to know.”
“Why not?” she said.
“Soon,” he said. “But I have things to do first.”
Moonlight highlighted the lakebed’s grass. He took a breath. “Sometimes I don’t believe it’s real,” he said. “What if I made it all up in my mind?”
“You’re forgetting I heard it too,” she said. “I’m not crazy.”
She stopped and put the radio on the railing of the bridge. She unhooked the gold latch on the front of the radio and lifted the front cover to reveal the old radio dial. She extended the antenna and turned it on, illuminating the eight bands on the dial.
“You don’t think you can. .” he started. “That’s not possible.”
Big band music played until she pushed the button for the dial labeled NIGHTS & EVENINGS and then there was the whining of white noise. She dialed through voices, Spanish and more Spanish, an Australian calling out numbers, then more music, and she fine-tuned to a silence among the chaos and then a humming interlaced with a pattern of clicks like a needle stuck at the end of a record.
“My God,” he said sitting back on the railing. “How?”
“The space station’s high gain is still trained on it. When I fell to Earth, I made sure it would keep tracking. It’s broadcasting down to old Cold War repeaters, which in turn broadcasts it over Earth.”
“We shouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Why? It’s hidden in plain sight. Do you think anyone knows what this is? The telemetry of your signal isn’t there, only the sound. Does it sound a little like a didgeridoo to you?”
“No,” he said.
She took out a plastic lighter, lit the cigarette.
“Should you be doing that?” he asked, pointing to the cigarette. “If you are pregnant.”
She fanned the smoke away from her face to see him better and said, “Every expectant mother has her cravings.” She rolled her neck to loosen it, then quickly switched the radio off, shut the radio, pushed the antenna down.
He thought: Her problem is not my problem, and he grabbed her and kissed her on the bridge over the dry lakebed. She enjoyed the kiss, but opened her eyes to look at the sky while she did it.
CHAPTER 20
While the Van Raye/Ruth reunion went on in California, I was paralyzed in a hospital bed, living through nights while my roommate incessantly snored and the old woman in the next room shouted her name: “This. . is. . Rose. . Epstein. I want to go home!”
Wouldn’t I have focused on that date the hacker, “Randolph,” gave me for my release: December 12? I don’t remember remembering. It’s a classic paradox.
Nurses came into my room all night long, green phosphorescent ID glowing as they took our vital signs in the near darkness. I’d gotten to a point where I barely woke when they slid the pressure cuff on my arm, pressed the thermometer to my ear, or stuck a small gauge needle into my abdomen, though I felt the cold shot of heparin spreading beneath the layers of my dead nerves, medicine that kept my blood thin so I wouldn’t get clots.
The 11:00 PM shift was good at reading my face, and one of them would get out the tablet Elizabeth had loaded with The Universe Is a Pair of Pants. The nurse put the headphones over my ears and moved in my line of sight to see if the volume was okay. I blinked once to signal yes, my father’s voice announcing, “Chapter 19, ‘Elements from the Tiger’s Tail,’” and began the essay about the most dangerous elements on the periodic table. I had no choice but to drift off while he spoke, my ears sweaty in the headphones.
When I woke, still the middle of the night, there was a reprise of light but the hydraulic door was closing, and I had enough time to see Ursula standing in the darkness. There is always an awkward moment when people step into your darkness because you see them better than they see you: her uniform was sloppy, her captain’s hat crooked on her head.
She let her eyes adjust to see me and then let her bag plop on the floor. My roommate’s snoring continued.
Ursula took off her cap and stepped to my bed, patted the cap twice against her leg as she looked down at me. She’d never seen me like this, only heard stories about the episodes when I was younger.
She tossed her hat in a chair and then removed my headphones and listened to them for a second and said, “Seriously? You’ll get brainwashed.” Then she leaned over the rail and kissed my forehead, not at all scared I was contagious.
She smelled like a cockpit — sweat and electronics and a showerless winter day. At the spot her lips touched my skin, the chaos of tingling nerves stilled as if they tried to decipher the touch. When she took them away, the tingling swarmed back in like a hive of bees.
“Do you think your mama calls me and tells me what’s going on?” She stood in silhouette against the window and tried to smooth strands of her hair that had escaped from the barrette and floated away from her head. “Hell no. I couldn’t get you, and so I finally called her.” She walked around inspecting things in the dark, the network of the hexagons in the safety-glass window cast a shadowy net over her body. She went to my sleeping roommate, his mouth wide open. I had no idea what was wrong with him, though his name on his computer monitor was JAMES LEGGETT and had a green cartoon heart beating just like mine. The room was filled with his breath and the bitter metabolized morphine stench of it.
“I can’t find Dubourg,” she said. “He’s probably going through one of those times he keeps his phone off.” She wiggled out of her uniform jacket, carefully folded it on the chair, and then rummaged through her duffle and came out with tiny bottles of Jack Daniel’s. She lined them up on the tray table, got two cups from the wall dispenser.
“Want some?”
I heard the seal break, and I blinked deliberately when she looked at me. She turned her head sideways, eyes scanning my face. She swigged from the tiny bottle and said, “That’s it, then? Blinking?”