Mirror in the Sky (9 page)

“Contact how?”

“I don't know . . . psychically?”

I could feel my heart beginning to race. “Have you lost your mind, Mom?” I said.

“Keep your voice down,” my mother said. She looked baffled, as though she expected me to be happy for her.

“I can't keep my voice down. This is ridiculous!”

“You don't understand what it is to lose a parent so young. To be on your own practically your whole life, and to have no one to belong to.”

“But I'm losing a parent now!” I was losing more than a parent. I was losing the only friend I had left.

“I just need to talk to them one last time, and if there's a chance of that . . .”

“Why can't you psychically communicate with your dead parents here in Connecticut?”

She flinched at this. “Because . . .” she said, her eyes tearing up, “I don't know how. I need you to understand this, Tara, and maybe someday, when you're older, you will. I've just been surviving. Ever since they died, that's all I've done. Sometimes I wonder who I could have been if they had been there. Maybe I can still be that person. I feel alive for the first time in so long. I feel inspired. Maybe it's not too late for me to change . . . for things to change.”

“What would you even want to change?” I gasped.

“When you were born, your dad and I had to put aside certain things we wanted to do . . . Of course it was worth it—we have you! But I wanted to dance, and your father—he had plans to become a physicist. But none of that happened, and so . . . here we are. I'm not saying we can go back, or that we should retrace our steps. Just that . . . I wonder if we can do more, be more. Your father—he's not willing to change, but I am. I have to. It's a temporary break away from being here, but it needs to happen. I just need you to—”

But I couldn't listen anymore. I was already on the other side of the market, my mother calling after me. The tears flooded my eyes, clouding my view as I ran through the gate. Just a few minutes ago, it felt like the world was opening, offering me
endless new opportunities. But just when you thought things were changing for the better, they took a nosedive.

“Little girl, be careful,” the stringy-haired protestor called out after me.

“Oh, go fuck yourself!” I screamed at him. He gaped at me before he started laughing.

I didn't care about the honking of horns, the precise route of joggers. Cyclists swerved to avoid me, this blinded, wounded child running as fast as she could, to a home that had become too small, so small that it needed to be broken in order for its inhabitants to escape.

TWELVE

I stayed in my room the rest of the day, listening to my parents arguing in the kitchen. Whenever people mentioned moving to California on TV, it always seemed like a ridiculous solution to imagined problems, and my mother's desire to go there only affirmed this narrative.

But by the time the afternoon light was filtering through my shades in long vertical lines, lambent slices of burnished gold, the outrage I had felt earlier that morning was replaced by despair. How could she do this to us? I knew my father didn't love his job running the restaurant, and I had certainly never fit in at Brierly, but my mother had been a part of our limping team, and now she wanted out. Now she had decided that there was a better world out there for her, a better life, and she was simply going to leave us behind in order to embrace it.

“Why now? Why
California
?” my father yelled at her.

“Because if I don't do it now, I never will!” she yelled back.

“So you're just going to run away, Jennifer? What about Tara? What about us? How can you be so selfish?”

“I can't explain it to you,” she whimpered. “But if I can just see my parents again . . .”

“They're gone, Jennifer! You're here. You have us! At least value what you have! You're acting like an awful mother, an awful wife!”

It was betrayal of the highest order, and I was glad that my father was angry, yelling at her that she was an awful mother and an awful wife.

At 9:45 I got a text from Nick.
Heading your way. Should be there in 10
, it said.
I'll meet you outside
, I quickly texted back, before I threw on a pair of skinny jeans and a black halter top. My parents were so busy fighting that they didn't even notice me slipping out the door. I emerged on the driveway just as the headlights of Nick's Jeep lit up the branches of the eucalyptus tree across the street, transforming them to outstretched arms.

My heart began to race. For a minute, all the grief and outrage I felt for my mother dissipated, and when he turned into the driveway, I greeted him with the kind of enormous smile that can only emerge after a tension-filled day, an object thrust from a highly pressurized capsule.

“I hope you like the Kinks,” he said as I jumped into the passenger seat, the stereo blasting old British pop.

“Never heard of them,” I told him. He looked cute in a
white polo shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. His hair was slightly wet, as though he had just emerged from the shower.

“What?! Tara Krishnan's never heard of the Kinks? I thought you were all cultured and shit.” He smiled that familiar, loose smile and looked right at me, making me blush.

“Whatever gave you that impression?” I laughed, buckling my seat belt.

“Didn't you grow up in the city?”

“I've been living here since the fifth grade.”

“You always seem like you've got all this smart stuff swirling around your head. Like you're way beyond the rest of us. Halle says you're aloof.”

“I'm not aloof,” I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. Is that what they all thought? Is that why I had never been invited to anything, ever? “And besides, you're smart too,” I said, to soften my response.

“Not like you, though.”

Nick was being modest. He was one of the top students in our grade and president of the student council; but it was true, Halle and I had the highest grades in our class, not to mention the most extensive smattering of extracurriculars at Brierly. It was Mrs. Treem who had inadvertently revealed this to me in a meeting in her office, leaning forward in her chair in anticipation of a rare opportunity to seem helpful.

“I just want you to know that you have the second-highest GPA in your class. If you're able to maintain it, stick with swim team and yearbook and Amnesty International, and do well on the SATs, I'm confident you'll be able to get into a good college.”

“Who has the highest GPA?” I had asked her, remembering Mrs. Treem's irritating tendency to bury the lede.

“Well, you know I can't reveal that sort of information, Tara.” Mrs. Treem smiled her most falsely sympathetic smile, but I already knew the answer, and I felt it again, that shameful pang, that wave of defeat. Halle Lightfoot: 1, Tara Krishnan: 0. Except that it was more like Halle Lightfoot: 500,000, Tara Krishnan: 0. There was no competition. Or at the very least, Halle Lightfoot was certainly not in any sort of competition with me. She was too busy getting straight As, running track, editing the school newspaper, all while she walked the length of the student center as though she were Empress of Brierly, giving Hunter Caraway's loose curls a quick tug, or grabbing Jimmy Kaminsky's hat in a singular sweeping motion as she made her way past him, not even bothering to look back as she placed his hat on her own head, laughing away with Veronica and Alexa behind her. She made it look as though she were floating through crystalline waters, while I felt as though I was constantly trudging through quicksand. She was buoyant, a majestic ship sailing across a sea that was hers and hers alone, while the others were mere barnacles, clinging to her sides.

“Hey . . . who's that girl you always hung out with, your friend on the junior year abroad program?”

“Meg?”

“Yeah, is that her name? The one who laughs at her own jokes . . .” Nick grinned now, and I wondered if he was mocking me by my association with Meg. She
did
laugh at her own
jokes a fair amount. I had always thought I was the only one who noticed. It was as though she had become more and more used to our exile from everyone around us over time.

“You guys were attached at the hip.”

I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. “It wasn't like that.”

“Yeah, I always wondered about the two of you. Odd pairing. Like the weird one and the pretty one.”

It took me a second to realize that “the pretty one” was my assignation, and I looked away to hide the thrill I felt. I glanced out the window, catching the reflection of my eyes widening in disbelief.

“I'm glad you're coming to the party. Halle has a few of these a year, always when her parents are out of town, which is a lot.”

“How long have you two been together?”

“Almost a year.”

“I didn't realize it had been that long.”

“Yeah, well, Halle wanted to keep it quiet the first six months, so we didn't really let people know till last spring.”

“What are you guys going to do when you graduate?” I asked, the question tumbling out of my mouth, surprising us both, as though it were a bird rather than a question.

“We've got some time to figure things out,” he said without taking his eyes off the road.

“Sorry to be nosy,” I said, trying to recover.

“It's all right,” he said, turning to look at me. “Don't worry about us, we'll be okay.” He smiled before turning his high beams on. I didn't tell him that what had occupied my thoughts
that day wasn't whether Nick and Halle would stay together but whether my parents would. There was no one I could talk to about that . . . maybe Meg, once upon a time, but obviously not anymore. Was Meg really weird? I guess she was, a little bit. But I had always found her exuberant and funny, albeit mostly when she was talking about other people's lives. And we had somehow gravitated toward one another not because we had much in common but because our similar outsider status had sealed our friendship. But beyond the call before she left, and the Instagram message about Terra Nova, I hadn't heard from Meg. And after that phone call, I didn't feel so bad about not standing up for her. She wasn't there for me either. Based on what she had said to me that day, the day of her departure, it didn't seem like she wanted to be there for me anyway.

We turned onto Halle's street, a long unlit road in back-country Greenwich flanked by wraithlike trees springing up from the fog below.

“It's just here, down this road. I don't understand people who live here. It's sort of . . .”

“Creepy?”

“Yeah. But then, Connecticut. Who actually wants to
be
here?”

“I didn't know you felt that way.”

“It's fine, I guess, but it's not the real world. I can't wait to move to the city. Once I get outta here, I'm never coming back. What about you? Where would you live if you could live anywhere in the world?”

We turned into a long driveway unspooling before us for
what felt like miles. We were almost there, and yet I wanted to stay in this car and talk to him all night.

“I don't know . . . Paris, maybe. Or Rome.”

“Yup, cosmopolitan Tara. Not like us country bumpkins.”

I laughed. “You're hardly a country bumpkin.”

“I bet you're going to go do really cool things when you grow up,” he said.

“I don't know . . .” I was getting self-conscious and felt the need to turn the conversation on him. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

“All this Terra Nova stuff . . . it kind of makes me want to be a scientist.”

“My dad wanted to be a scientist,” I blurted out.

“What kind?”

“He wanted to be a physicist . . .” I said quietly. Just saying it aloud, something I had never done in front of a stranger, felt like a betrayal. It was an admission that my father had failed in some way. He had failed to achieve his dream, and so what sort of example could he set for me? Maybe my mother was right—she was leaving and going to California because my father had given up on his dream—he
had
failed. And because she wanted to talk to her dead parents. But mostly, probably, I thought she wanted to get away from us.

“He must be really into all this Terra Nova stuff.”

I was quiet for a moment. I thought about that other Tara. Was she sitting in Nick's car right now too? Was she amazed at the fact that she had been invited to a party at Halle Lightfoot's house? The bigger question was, how was she different from
me? Was she smarter, more comfortable in her skin? Did she know to throw back a flirty retort when Nick Osterman called her pretty?

And what about that other version of my father? Was he a physicist on Terra Nova? Did he decide to stick it out in graduate school, even if it was hard and he didn't know how he would support his family? On Terra Nova, was the other version of my mother running away to California?

I pondered these things until Halle's house came into view, making me inadvertently gasp. It was a white three-story plantation-style colonial extending out in various wings. Tall columns reached up to touch the roofline, and the windows of the house were all lit. Hundred-year-old oak trees dotted the rolling greens that spanned every direction, and the hedges were meticulously trimmed into inorganic shapes.

Nick pulled into the gravel drive, parking his car alongside a black Range Rover.

“Looks like Veronica's already here,” he said, turning off the ignition. I simply sat for a moment, looking at the awe-inspiring structure before me.

“It's just Halle and her parents, right? She's an only child, right?”

“Yeah, and their two dogs—Christine Lagarde and, well, Mario. Mario Draghi was the one who . . .”

Despite the memory of what had happened earlier that week, I couldn't help but cut him off. “They named their dogs after the director of the IMF and the president of the European Central Bank?”

“See, I didn't even know who those people were when she told me.”

“I have a weird crush on Mario Draghi,” I admitted, embarrassed as it came out of my mouth. “I mean, the man, not the . . . dog.”

“I'll bet you do.” Nick laughed. “I always figured you were sort of weird and kinky like that.” He got out of the car and came by my side, first opening the door and then taking my arm to lead me down a gravel path, a gesture that both surprised and flattered me.

“He's in a better place now. I mean . . . the dog. Not the man.”