For a long time, I didn’t hear anything.
But then, from far below me, I heard something stamping back, a pounding from the other side of the earth. Then a murmuring. I scratched harder with my hands, shoveling dirt away from the top of the volcano.
A light went on in Mr. Loury’s kitchen, and his screen door opened.
“Hey!” he shouted, but I was gone, sprinting up Palomar, because whatever was in that volcano, I’d heard a sound, a ragged gasp of welcome as I moved the dirt away. And something else had happened too.
I had a piggy bank with thirteen dollars in it. I had three missing mothers. I dodged into the trees, and ran uphill, off the side of the road where he couldn’t follow me. This was my territory. I knew how to run in the woods. He didn’t even try, because he was a grown-up, and he had a car. I heard it start.
Trees leaning in, a no-stars, no-moon night and I thought maybe the sky had been swallowed by the observatory draining the stars into its mouth, sucking the darkness dry. There it was, in front of me, its glowing white snowcone looming against the horizon.
I scraped my hands on my jeans, once, twice, three times, until my palms stung, because from inside Mr. Loury’s volcano, someone’s fingers had reached up and touched mine.
I wasn’t sure about breathing. I could hardly see. One of my knees was skinned. Maybe I was crying. I wanted my dad and I didn’t. I wanted my mothers, even the one I never knew.
There was a set of headlights speeding up the spiral road and the observatory was full of astronomers without wives. Funerals sometimes. Car-crashes and cancer. Other times the wives just went away and no one ever saw them again. This was the way the world worked, I’d imagined, but now I wondered if it really was.
My third mother, I thought and my brain got stuck on it. Katharine, called Kit, who sometimes called me Kit too, and sometimes called me Tool, for toolkit, as in a smaller, more equipped version of herself. But my real name was something else entirely. My dad called me Aulax, after a star. “The Furrow,” that star name meant, and he’d stuck a Mary in as my middle name to make me more human.
The door was unlocked. I skidded in on my heels, and felt along the edge of the room. I knew my way around Palomar. The inside was like nothing, no sky on view, just the telescope stabbing through the sphere, but as I stood there, not hidden, uncertain, the shutters began to open to let the telescope look at the sky.
Mr. Loury’s story was horrible all over my brain. Look down, he said in my head, look underground, and as I thought it, I felt those cold fingers again, touching my own, gripping my own, and I heard a car stop outside.
No one was visible inside the observatory. I wanted to look toward the center of the Earth. I wanted to find my mothers. I didn’t want to think about Alaska. I didn’t want to think about Pele. I didn’t want to think about who was underneath that dirt in Mr. Loury’s backyard, nor about how far down the dirt went.
I ran to the telescope and slung myself up into its workings. The shutters were open and the sky was there, black. I held my breath and climbed.
Mr. Loury was in the building. I could feel him, making his way around the edge of the circle. The telescope was moving, and I was slipping.
“Kid,” he called. “Hey, buddy. Where’re you at?”
I twisted my knees over the beam at the base of the telescope. I’d always wanted to climb the Hale. It was the biggest telescope in the world. Not in the dark.
“This isn’t a place for little girls,” he said, and his voice was closer than I’d thought he was. “They’re going to look at the roots of the world tonight.”
Where were the rest of the astronomers? Where was my dad, for that matter? He was supposed to be here. Nobody was in charge, I reminded myself.
I tied my shirtsleeves to the beam, because I felt the telescope moving. There was a sound, a squealing shudder, which I took for the roof shutters opening further, but when I arched my neck to try to look around the side of the telescope, I couldn’t see anything.
I looked down. There was light below me, and the telescope rotated toward it, my fingers slipping on the metal as we tilted backward. I was not inside the telescope, could not see whatever it was they were seeing there in the cage, but whatever they were looking at, whatever it was they were trying to see, it was in the wrong direction.
“You aren’t here,” Mr. Loury said, from directly below me, and I could tell he was looking up at me, trying to reach me, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
“I belong here. My dad works here, and you’re trespassing. You got fired,” I told him, clinging to the beam. I didn’t care about quiet any more. I wanted someone to hear me, and yet, somehow, I didn’t scream for help.
“I tried to tell you,” Mr. Loury said. “The stars are gone and all of them are gone with them. They want boys, and that’s all. She doesn’t want me anymore.”
The telescope completed its tilt, flipping me so that I faced down, and I saw what the open shutters looked into, what I was dangling over.
There was lava below us, a crater full of it, glowing orange and red, and in the lava there were women, stretching their fingers to touch the metal of the telescope, pressing their nails into it.
I saw the incandescent roots of the world, and the way the women were tangled in them, their mouths open, a deafening murmur like wind tearing trees. I saw Mr. Loury’s wife, the Kodachrome version of her, her white skin and bright hair, her eyes big and black-rimmed with fake lashes. The sunglasses she always wore were missing. She was naked, her long arms savaged and blistered, her ribs skinny and her hipbones sticking out. Come here, she mouthed, and her lipstick was perfect. Other mothers were there too, and I knew them.
I’d been to their funerals and gone to school with their abandoned children. I’d seen the X’s where they weren’t. I saw all the dead women in the center of the earth, and then I saw them reach up toward where I dangled.
I saw my third mother, and she saw me.
Somewhere I heard a door slam, a shout, and Mr. Loury, just for an instant, was silhouetted against all that light and fire.
Then, like the Krakatoans, the astronomer’s wives were gone, and my mother was gone, and all that was left were black skeletons, ashes floating on rafts of darkness, lists of dead stars. I heard myself screaming.
The asbestos-tiled floor of the observatory appeared beneath my cheek, and my head appeared on top of my body, sharp pain and dull ache at once, and there was my dad, kneeling beside me, his eyes still bloodshot.
“Can you move?” he asked me. “Is anything broken?”
I could move. Nothing was broken. The roof rotated and where the sky had been dark, it was now all stars and Milky Way. I stood up, bruised, and tried to figure out where my feet were. My dad had me by the arm, and he was moving me out of there, faster than I wanted to move. I looked back at the telescope, and I could feel everything getting taken away from me, forever, and all at once.
My dad carried me to the car, fastened my seatbelt, and drove me down the spiral road, and to the hospital. He told the nurses I’d fallen from something high, and they looked into my eyes and agreed that I was looking out at the world through a concussion. They showed me my pupils in a handmirror, one big, one tiny, Martian moons in an eclipse, or the sun trying to shine through a sky full of ash.
I put my face into a crisp white shoulder and cried there, but when I lifted my head, I was done, and no one asked.