God is an Astronaut Read online

  So I didn’t even bother to feign recognition, to try to feel my way into the conversation, groping discreetly for clues, the way you’re supposed to. I just stared blankly at her. Blue Velvet Lady was positively shimmering in that jacket, but it was waaaay too cold for something that thin. My baguette knuckles were turning bright red.

  “Jess, Jess,” she said, shaking my elbow as though she were trying to resuscitate me. “I heard what happened. I read that article in the Post, and when I saw how they quoted Liam, I told Mike—”

  “I’m sorry,” I cut her off. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. My name is Priscilla.” Priscilla is the name of Corinne’s latest imaginary friend, the newest member of her coterie—an exceptional collection of individuals, so my daughter tells me. I have no idea what possessed me to say it. But I didn’t wait for a response. I just put my head down and kept walking into the wind. By the time I got back to my office, the baguette was nearly broken in half—I’d been throttling it that hard. So I threw it into the trash, that stupid ten-dollar loaf of bread.

  “Well, who was she?” Liam said later that night. We were on our way to Detroit—running late for Liam’s nine p.m. flight to Tucson. I was the one behind the wheel. Everyone on 94 drives like they want desperately to die; they can’t even be bothered to hide it, and I prefer my own scuttling, tail-between-my-legs defensiveness to Liam’s go-for-broke maneuvers, thank you very much.

  “I just told you I don’t know,” I said. “If I knew who she was, why would I have told her my name was Priscilla?”

  “Well, she’s sure as hell going to wonder about that the next time we run into her,” Liam said. “Jesus Christ, Jess.”

  Which is true, but this is the least of our worries. It was only the beginning of a disastrous conversation, which became more disastrous with each passing mile. We were discussing what we should tell our children—whether to lie to them, whether to come clean, and if so, how much. Corinne is still safe, I think, but someone will say something to Jack—a teacher, some little know-it-all runt on the bus. It’s only a matter of time.

  There’s something about trying to sum up your own take on a terrible truth, when you have to pare it down to something a five-year-old and a ten-year-old can—I was going to say “understand,” but that isn’t the right word, it isn’t even close. It reminds you that you don’t know shit. I was in favor of “Certain things are nobody’s fault.” Liam was more in line with “Human error inevitably makes its way into all our best efforts.” Barreling along at seventy miles an hour on the freeway, we were going round and round about semantics and I don’t even want to think about what else until Liam finally slammed his hand on the dashboard and said, “Tell them whatever you want, Jess, tell them whatever you want.”

  Pretty much useless, all this, I guess. I wonder how you are, you and your elegant pines. That adjective is yours, and I think of it from time to time. Pines are elegant—none of that deciduous fuss and muss. The days up there are probably still—what?—seven hours long, but the sap has probably already started rising. You might tell me, you know, if you felt so inclined, but maybe you don’t.

  Anyway.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 5:46 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: synonyms for sad

  There are forty-four, according to Merriam-Webster. You fell way short of that, and I beat you by two—only after dolorous came to me in a flash of inspiration during my drive home. It’s probably best if we don’t compare lists and don’t go back to see exactly which ones we missed, no? There was no insinuation in that deciduous remark of mine, none whatsoever. Ha! Seriously though, Arthur, watching the trees, I am struck by what a messy and arduous business it is. That’s all I meant. Forcing those buds out every spring, thousands of them, only to lose them all when the fall rolls around again. Not for the faint of heart.

  I did put your question to Paula. There was a man once who came up with fifty-one synonyms, she said. That’s the record. He was forty-three years old, she said, and in the throes of such despair that he was no longer even able to tie his own shoes. When they stuck him in the MRI machine they saw that the topography of his brain was riddled with dark pockets, like shantytowns—whole neighborhoods that had just gone off the grid. My sister delivers anecdotes like these with an admirable matter-of-factness.

  Glad to hear the work is going well, O man of few words.

  From the woman of many.

  ~j

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 11:02 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: marauding and other activities

  Believe it or not, yes. If Liam had time these days to be anything other than frantic, he would probably be mildly annoyed to discover that the greenhouse is the one thing I’ve actually made progress on during the past week. I wrote myself a greenhouse to-do list and taped it up on the calendar, smack dab on top of all of Jack’s rocket stickers. (I can’t look at those gaudy little spaceships without feeling queasy.) Every day I force myself to accomplish one thing on that list, even if it’s nothing more than running outside after dusk and scooping up a few armfuls of that brush I chain-saw-massacred back on the day of the accident, stuffing it into a Hefty, and lugging it down to the bottom of the hill so the trash guys can come haul it away.

  For a while there, Arthur, I didn’t even need a flashlight. The news vans out on the street had set up these floodlamps at night, and they would emanate this unearthly light through the trees, like a space station straight out of one of Jack’s sci-fi books. Thank God that’s over. (They did have this certain eerie allure, but the ambient lighting was starting to wreak circadian havoc. I was forced to buy blackout curtains for Jack, whose room faces the street, the heavy-duty kind they market to truckers and ER doctors.) What with that and all the traffic, we’re probably on some sort of neighborhood hit list.

  I guess the point of this is to say, I’m working hard to get back in the habit of keeping promises to myself. I just had no idea it was going to be this difficult to get back on the wagon.

  Quitting now,

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 2:49 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Speaking of Sasquatch

  Liam’s not a fan of the greenhouse. I was pretty sure you knew that already. The plans I drew up were, yes, a little extravagant, and my husband isn’t crazy about extravagant ideas unless they’re his, in which case he’s all for them. Back when I pitched the greenhouse to him, when I cornered him in the bathroom while he brushed his teeth and told him that I wanted to pull a few grand from our IRA to build it, he listened patiently to all my selling points and their exclamation points (fresh lettuce in December! heirloom tomatoes all year round! a space to breed my own orchids!) and then let out a long sigh. “I don’t know, Jess,” he said. “It’s not such a great time to take on that kind of big project, is it? Don’t we have a lot of things going on right now?”

  “If by ‘a lot of things’ you’re referring to my second job as a minivan chauffeur,” I said, “the answer is yes.”

  “I’m talking about your work. Your science.” Liam leaned over and spat matter-of-factly into the sink. “It’s just not the most practical thing. That’s all I’m saying. Not to mention that the seals around all those glass panes are going to hemorrhage heat in the winter. Even with the best insulating you can find, I can’t imagine what it will do to our energy bills. We’ll have a Sasquatch-size carbon footprint. I thought you loved the environment.”

  “Never mind,” I said, turning around to leave.

  “J
ess,” he said. “Jess.” He was saying my name in that way I hate, that tone of voice that makes it sound like a call to reason, so I just waved my hand and kept walking.

  “I’m not saying no,” he called after me. “For the record.”

  For the record, I have to go. Go forth and give those trees some tough love.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2014 11:01 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Bad fences

  But you have to admit that he has a point about the carbon footprint. I haven’t figured out a way around that problem. I don’t think there is one. This issue takes us back to our good old discussion about selfish gratification versus hypothetical greater good—that one where we were pretending to have a debate about the climate change problem while we were actually talking about something else. I’m tired of that conversation. We’re not going to agree. We’re not even going to be able to agree to disagree. Can we please talk about something else?

  For example: I think our paparazzi friends are gone for good. The last of them pulled up stakes yesterday, leaving our street with an eerily abandoned feeling.

  I finished clearing out the thicket behind our dining room door, and yesterday I began stripping off the sod. Winter hasn’t decamped entirely. You could see these silver glints of deep freeze in the grass’s roots, like little shards of granite. But I managed OK. I sectioned it off in pieces, handed over the smallest strips to Corinne and Jack, and they ran back and forth between the wheelbarrows, their arms full of rumpled squares of terra firma, like green and brown quilts, while Paula watched us skeptically from the dining room window. I’ve told Jack and Corinne that we’re going to have our own jungle garden. Orchids and orange trees and gardenias and roses hanging from the ceiling. It gets more lavish with each iteration. Butterflies will be considered; parrots have received the parental veto. The realization of such a thing cannot possibly be as beautiful as its imagining, of course. I’m perfectly well aware of this fact, and I do not need Paula to point it out to me. I just think we should enjoy whatever diversions we can find these days, wherever we find them. If this is an indication of some deeper lurking pathology, so be it. I picked Jack up after school this afternoon. When I pulled up into the parking lot, I saw him between the school buses before he saw me. He was standing with one hand on the playground hurricane fence, face turned toward the sky. He was tracking the path of a distant jet overhead with a troubled expression. He’d forgotten to zip up his backpack; everything was avalanching out of the sides of it, and the kids were running past, flick, flick, flick, like he wasn’t even there.

  We had almost finished, and I was bent over the wheelbarrow, loading up the last of the dirt, when I heard Corinne say, “Hi, Mrs. Hollins.” I looked up, and sure enough there was our neighbor, coming out of the trees at the edge of our yard. At the sound of Corinne’s voice she sucked in her breath, straightened up, and stepped backward, as though she were going to try to pull a Glinda the Good Witch disappearing trick and shimmer away into the camouflage of the maple trees. (This is, I think, Corinne’s most longed-for superpower.)

  Our neighbor kept shifting around like she was under some sort of duress. You could tell that there was nothing more than sheer bred-in-the-bone midwestern politeness holding her there, like a knife at her back. Saint Beth, I used to call her, at least until Liam started making catty meowing sounds when I said it. I think it’s the combination of her painterly red-gold ringlets—her highlights really do look gilded—and her overwhelming (perhaps creepy?) sincerity. Beth has a trampoline and five or six nieces and nephews that look as though they’ve been mail-ordered from a J.Crew catalog. She and her husband Jim are sans children, and Arthur, you don’t have to know the two of them for longer than five minutes to understand that this state of affairs is one of life’s Disappointments with a capital D, the kind of thing you don’t get over.

  Beth barely looked at Corinne. This from a woman who couldn’t get enough of my daughter last Halloween. (Have I told you this story already? Corinne was Sleeping Beauty and Beth was Cinderella, and I thought I was going to be stuck there on the stoop listening to the princess powwow all night. Finally I had to orchestrate our getaway by looking at my watch and reminding Corinne that midnight was only four hours away and we had to let Beth get to the ball before her Toyota Corolla turned back into a pumpkin. Meow, hiss, said Liam when I told him.)

  It was clear that Beth didn’t want to make eye contact with me either, although you had to hand it to her, she was making a valiant effort. She said brightly, “Oh, hi, Jess. I didn’t see you guys.”

  “Everything OK?” I said, because I could tell by her wavering gaze that it wasn’t. I was wondering if I should offer an apology for the TV van jamboree that had been going on for the past couple of weeks, the spectacle that’s been clogging up our neighborhood thoroughfare and impeding the eight-to-five commute of our respectable fellow citizens. (We seem to be surrounded by attorneys.) I was under orders from Liam not to—apologize, that is. “Those neighbors are surrounded by TV cameramen,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t say anything that could be misconstrued.”

  Only here I was, Arthur, looking at Beth, and thinking we’d played our hand wrong.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Ollie got out again. He must have pulled the stake on his chain out. I’ll find him.”

  “Ollie ran away?” Jack said. His voice gave a mournful little quaver at the end of the question. He’s been moody—by Jack standards, which is to say extremely—since the accident, and I couldn’t tell whether he was getting warmed up for the next calamity or just picking up on our sweet neighbor’s sudden coldness.

  “I’m sure he’s around here somewhere,” I said. Ollie, Arthur, is an English bulldog with a decidedly American obesity problem. I was thinking that it would have been impossible for him to run anywhere. He couldn’t have pulled off anything faster than a double-time waddle, tops. I started peeling off my gardening gloves in an effort to appear helpful and neighborly. “You want us to help look for him? Jack could run down to the end of the street and see—”

  “Please don’t bother,” she interrupted me. “I’m sure you’re busy. Jessica—” She dropped her voice. “I hope you realize that we’re all praying for you. With all our hearts.” And with that, she turned around and disappeared back into the trees.

  “What’s her problem?” said Corinne, but I couldn’t answer. My face was frozen in a tight smile, and I had to put down the wheelbarrow with exaggerated care in order not to dump it.

  Look, I’m going to stop here and try calling Liam again.

  More later, perhaps?

  jf

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2014 6:59 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: report from the front lines

  I know! I had no idea my neighbors were up to such a thing. Here I was thinking that Liam and I were living in an enclave of staunch secular humanists and rabid Dawkins-style atheists.

  I’m joking, of course, but all of this is about as funny as a punch in the face. What do people think? They think we’ve blown a bunch of innocent people to smithereens—that’s what they think. And they’re right, aren’t they? The hows and the whys don’t matter. Like any good liberal, I’m a firm believer in mitigating circumstances, but more and more, Arthur, I think it’s possible that we’re beyond those now.

  Not that I know squat about those hows or whys. I’m not sure how much Liam does either—he’s probably still knee-deep in spaceship rubble. So to answer your (carefully neutral) question: no news. Calls from Li these days are like catching a train. If you miss one, there’s nothing you can do but wait for the next one. Remember that year when Liam was practically living in Tuc
son—how I used to kid about performing my own modern-day rain dance? Only instead of rain, I’d dance for phone calls? It was barely a joke. There were evenings when I’d be downstairs in the kitchen, practically doing a little shuck and jive with the phone in one hand, beseeching the satellite dish gods up there in the heavens to shower me with phone calls from Liam.

  Now it’s even worse. I’m so completely at the mercy of that stupid phone. I have it with me and on at all times. I put it on the toilet tank while I’m showering, and on the dashboard while I’m driving, and on the podium during class while I’m doing what you used to call (fondly, I think?) my hector and lecture. I put it on Liam’s pillow while I’m sleeping, and as soon as I lurch awake, I grab it and stare at its evil little eye, waiting for it to blink with a message that’s almost never there. I feel like Janus—like I’ve grown another set of eyes and ears, a face always trained somewhere else, somewhere I am not.