Another pause. We’re watching each other, hawk and mouse, mouse and hawk.
“Then take me along, please, if you can, take me there with you,” Alice says. “Maybe then we can start unwinding all the threads and figure out what we’ve got ourselves into. Maybe then there can be a committee, and you’ll be on it.”
I grit my teeth and shake my head. “No committees. We got a get out a here. I need a walk somewheres.”
She narrows one eye at the accent. “Okay.” She gets up, ready to go, but I’m still sitting.
“Yesterday, a grandma in a blue electric car gave me a ride and told me her son became a hero on Titan,” I say. “Know anything about that?”
Alice shakes her head. But the merest shift in her frown says, maybe that wasn’t good, maybe that shouldn’t have happened.
“Why would she know that, why would anybody tell her?” I ask. Then my thoughts focus. “She said she was a colonel’s secretary. At SBLM. Maybe that’s how she knew. The brass told her. A security slip, too much sympathy, but they tell her.”
Alice lifts her hand a few inches, noncommittal.
“Titan!” I say. “That’s out around Saturn. That’s out by the rings and shit, one and a half billion klicks across the vac. That’s out where a lot of the moons are covered with ice, isn’t it? Deep ice, with liquid oceans underneath—some of them?”
Alice takes a deep breath. “We both need a break,” she says, standing. “I’ll buy groceries, if you’ll let me fix something to eat.”
“There’s not much here that isn’t spoiled,” I admit. The room feels lighter. The air is sweeter. Maybe I’m okay.
Maybe we’re just putting off the rough shit for another couple of hours. But that’s good, isn’t it?
“Can I buy the groceries, Master Sergeant Venn?” she asks very softly.
“Yeah. I’ll stay here.”
She’s firm. She insists. “I’d like you to accompany me to the market. I’d like you to go shopping with me, Vinnie.”
I pretend to think that over. I’m acting like a child. To tell this story, to live as a whole man after this moment, I have to go back to being a child. Feels funny and right at the same time. All us Skyrines are children, before, during, and even inside the end. So the experienced ones tell us. The DIs and veterans.
“I went to the market soon as I got back,” I say.
“What did you buy?”
“Celery.”
“And obviously, nothing else. So… shall we go?”
I do like it at the market. There’re other children, and the old bronze pig, and toys. Doughnuts. Pastries. Jerky. Fruit and candy. I need to stand up and walk around and maybe eat more celery.
Why celery? I think I know. Ritual. As a kid, I loved celery. My mother would hand me a stalk filled with bright orange Cheez Whiz, whenever she made a salad. She’d smile at me, perfect love, tree to apple, simple, no judgment. I was just a kid and she was my mom.
Welcome home.
I don’t want to cry now or get lost in myself.
I get up. Alice takes gentle hold of my elbow.
“Let’s go to the market,” she says. “Let’s walk there and then walk back. It’s only a couple of miles. If you have the legs for it.”
MOVING FORWARD AGAIN
I have the legs.
I enjoy the air, the streets, the hill down to the market, the climb back, though it makes my knees wobble. I enjoy walking beside Alice Harper, who takes it all without breaking a sweat or one little huff, Earth girl that she is; she looks zaftig, but it’s muscle and no small determination all bundled up and concentrated.
I enjoy walking. I enjoy walking with her.
Nobody pays us much attention.
I’m starting to smell like a human being again.
At the old fish stall, where the guys and the ladies still flash naked biceps and fling salmon to each other, Alice buys whole cooked crab and clams and cod and snapper, and after, we walk down a hallway to a smaller indoor shop lined with dark wooden shelves, where she picks out herbs and spices and the clerk scoops them out of glass jars into little plastic bags; Alice is sure we don’t have such back at the apartment—we don’t—and she says she’s going to make a good fish stew, cioppino, if that’s okay, if I like fish stew. I probably do, I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve been served a home-cooked meal.
The walk back is easier. I carry the groceries.
This is nice.
But I still refuse to trust her. I just can’t. It’s far too dangerous, with what I have bottled up inside me.
I SIT ON a bar stool at the kitchen counter while Alice works. “This is a great kitchen,” she says. “You guys should use it to do more than microwave pizza.”
“We never spend a lot of time here,” I say. “After a few days, after we stop stinking and get our land legs back, we go out.”
“Hunting?” she asks with a wry face.
“Yeah,” I say. “Or just looking. Cosmoline—takes the edge off for a while, you know. One of the downsides of transvac. Or the benefits, if you’re a monk.”
“Pushes you back from the responsibility of acting human?” she asks, with a quiet tone I can’t read, and a side look as she chops the celery and tomatoes and begins to simmer a fish stock of scraps she bought at the market. I can smell again, it’s mostly back. Being able to smell is half the job of coming home. I can smell Alice beneath the rose perfume. It’s not like she smells sexy, not yet, but smelling her is a treat, a revelation.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re not very good company for a few days. You’ll vouch for that.”
“I will,” she says, terse but not judgmental. She puts a lid on the simmering pot, after adding more onions and celery. She snaps off a stalk and passes it across the counter to me. I hold it, look it over. Nothing like it on the Red. Nothing so crisp and fresh, nothing this crisp and alive, even after it’s been pulled from the bunch and trimmed. Likely Teal has never bitten into a stalk of celery. Nothing like this for decades to come, probably. If ever. How brave was that, for the Muskies to fly out to the Red, knowing what they’d leave behind, just to see something new, something few humans had ever seen?
“When company was coming,” Alice says, apropos of nothing, “my mother used to lay out a tray of celery stuffed with Cheez Whiz.”
That makes nice sparks burst in my head, lovely bits of glow, soft and gentle, like a thousand little night-lights following me around in the dark. “Really?”
“True salt of the Earth. Emphasis on the salt.” Alice smiles and keeps adding to the pot. Onions, olive oil, garlic, saffron, so many fresh herbs I can’t count, black pepper, white pepper… bewildering.
She turns down the heat, watching me with a light, open-lipped grin.
I lift the celery, fence the air.
“Yeah,” she says, and taps the pot with a wooden spoon, also purchased at the market, and fences back. Celery crosses spoon. Spoon wins. I finish off my losing weapon.
“This will take a while,” she says, putting down the spoon, “but I guarantee, it’ll be the best you ever tasted.” She reaches into the last canvas bag and lifts out a bottle of white wine, natural grapes, no GM stuff—not cheap. She pours a good splash into the pot.
Then, she asks, lifting the bottle, “Ready?”
My body does not cringe.
“We have juice glasses,” I say.
“Poor boys.”
It’s getting dark outside. Another sol is passing—I mean, another day. So unreal. The apartment smells wonderful. I’m not sweating, I’m not shaking, my legs are almost back to normal, memories a little less jagged.