Shine Shine Shine (27 page)

“Maybe not out here, but back at home, there is.”

*   *   *

I
T REMINDED
M
AXON OF
the last effective conversation he’d had with Sunny about Bubber’s medication, before she’d finally told him he was not qualified to have an opinion, being crazy himself.

“What if he’s actually
more
evolved? What if I’m actually more evolved?” Maxon had shouted. He was standing outside the door to his office, and they were arguing about Haldol. Often when he came out of his office, he only made it a few feet out into the hall before he had to go right back in.

“This will work,” Sunny said. “He will be okay. This will fix it.”

“I don’t want to fix it,” Maxon yelled, his veins popping. He slammed his fist into the wall. “Do you even remember what he was like before we started testing him, and all this medication? Do you even remember that experience, what it was like having that child?”

“You’re violent,” said Sunny dryly. “Maybe you need Haldol too.”

“I don’t need drugs,” Maxon asserted.

“Yeah, because my mother spent her whole life fixing you, and you know what? You know what, smartass?” Now Sunny was getting riled, and she yanked at the yarn ball feeding the knitting she was attempting to do. Maxon came two steps down the hall away from his office, away from his office and toward her living room. She was wearing her chopsticks wig, two wooden sticks stuck through a beautiful twist of blond hair. She was wearing her eyebrows, but one of them had come half off while she was steaming broccoli, so it dangled.

“What?” he said.

“You’re still not fixed!” she shouted, poking her needles savagely. “You’re still not fucking fixed! You’re crazy as a goddamned bedbug! Well, I’m not raising that kid to be a nutcase. He’s not that kid, I’m not that mom, and you better try as hard as damn hell not to be that dad. We’re not Mr. and Mrs. Wacko. With our junior- and senior-model lunatic, and our resident sideshow freak. I’m not doing it.”

Maxon stepped back, deflated. He did not know how to articulate what he saw. He could draw it, but he sensed that would be weird. This was not a time to decorate the dishwasher, but when he saw Mr. and Mrs. Wacko and the junior-model lunatic, they were the new age nuclear family. All in space suits. No one using or understanding facial clues. In space, who cares? Literal, systematic, addicted to protocol. Unemotional, intelligent, math-minded. The future family. Not autism, not insanity, but the next evolution, engineered for space travel, space living, the habitation of a lunar colony.

“Get Mr. and Mrs. Wacko along with a dozen or so of their autistic brood, and plant them on the moon, and they’ll do just fine,” he said. “Evolution, Sunny. Evolution. Did you think it just stopped?”

“Come here,” she said, softening. She motioned for him to come and sit next to her on the sofa. He could now see she was watching something on television, even hear some of the words coming out of the speaker.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry for yelling.”

“It’s okay, baby,” Sunny said. “I’m just going to put Haldol in your thermos.”

“No fucking Haldol,” said Maxon. “For him or me, seriously.”

“Okay, no Haldol,” she said, climbing into his lap. “You need a shave.”

*   *   *

“D
AD,
”
SAID
B
UBBER IN
the space suit.

“Son,” said Maxon.

“You need to find a way into that cargo module,” said Bubber.

“I haven’t found that yet,” said Maxon. Every time he spoke, it sounded like a raspy interruption, like the silence had made its own sound and the talking was bothering it.

“Dad, think,” said Bubber patiently. “How were you planning to get it open before? You must have had some kind of way to get it open.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” said Maxon. “This was not in the script.”

“So, you weren’t supposed to get it open at all?”

“No,” said Maxon. “The command module was going to dock with the cargo and we were going to open the shaft, between them…”

“You could be the command module,” said Bubber. “You could dock.”

“But the air shaft, there won’t be a seal.”

“Who cares?” said Bubber. “I don’t need it, the robots don’t need it, and you don’t need it.”

Maxon thought.

“So, where will it dock?” Bubber asked.

“Follow me,” said Maxon.

Of course, Bubber was right. Bubber’s brain had worked like a brain should work. He could get in through the docking channel, by applying stimulus to the appropriate places, the way they would have opened it if they’d docked. He didn’t need a hatch. Within minutes, he was booting up a Hera, fitting her with the titanium and aluminum she’d need to make them a comm unit. He looked back out the docking channel to see if Bubber was still there. He was, floating in space, giving Maxon a thumbs-up, which was a good way of saying, “I’m okay.”

“Thanks, little guy,” said Maxon. “It seems so obvious now.”

“No problem, Dad,” Bubber said. “Hey, it still took you only thirty-three minutes.”

That was so like Bubber. To time it without a watch.

*   *   *

M
ONTHS AGO, THEY WERE
on their way to get the mother from Pennsylvania. The neighbors said she was too sick to continue living in her own house. Of course, Sunny did not believe this.

“Mom,” she had said on the phone. “What are you eating? What did you eat today?”

“I drank an Ensure,” said the mother. “I’m fine. Hannah is here. She makes me drink it.”

Hannah was the Amish girl who came in to clean the house, cook the meals, and do whatever else. Sunny didn’t know what all. She was supposed to take the place of Nu.

“You need to eat more than just Ensure, Mom,” said Sunny. “I’m coming up there.”

When they got off Route 80, Sunny sat up straighter. She folded her arms over her chest. She fixed her wig in the rearview mirror and then changed her mind and replaced it with a different one. She made Maxon adjust it. Bubber, in the back of the minivan, was asleep. Maxon was at the wheel. The minute they got off the freeway, she could smell the deep piney smell of the woods, the loamy damp smell that was her childhood, and Maxon’s, and all the time they spent running alongside the creek, climbing trees. The air was more moist here than it was back in Virginia. The ferns were denser, the trees greener. Anyone would say it was a beautiful spot.

“Do you smell that?”

“What,” said Maxon.

“That … smell. The smell outside.”

“Smells like oil, tetracycline, carbon monoxide, and decomposing biomatter.”

“No, it doesn’t, ass. It smells good. Virginia doesn’t smell like this.”

“The air in Norfolk, Virginia, has eight percent more sodium chloride in it.”

“Be nostalgic, Maxon. Remember something.”

They were driving on rolling hills, in and out of farmland and woods, down Route 38 and all across Yates County. They passed dilapidated barns on the verge of falling down, gutted roadside stores, little creeks, cows in rows, and pointy little white churches. Sunny felt a familiar and unwelcome warmth and connection to the place. She felt guilty she had not been home more often. She had left her mother alone. All because she did not want to face her in a wig. That was wrong.

“Okay,” said Maxon. “I remember when the guy who lived right there turned out to be a pervert.”

“Bad,” said Sunny. “Nostalgia is supposed to be warm. It’s supposed to create a warm feeling.”

“Okay,” said Maxon, “I remember that in August of 1991, it was so hot we couldn’t go upstairs for a week.”

“Not literal warmth!” said Sunny, smacking him in the arm. “Please tell me you don’t need this explained.”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Maxon. “I’ve erased those years.”

“Don’t you love me, Maxon?” said Sunny, falling into a familiar trope. It was this way she signaled to him that she was done talking. It was one of many scripts she had written for them that they played out on a regular basis.

“I do,” he said.

“How much?”

“Tons,” he said.

“How many tons?”

“A Brazilian tons.”

At the corner of Route 38 and a road called Bear Run, she suddenly clutched his arm.

“Maxon. I have an idea. Let’s go see your mother instead.”

*   *   *

O
NE MILE OFF THE
main road, over a hill and down through the woods and over a one-lane bridge that crossed a mountain stream, they pulled up to Maxon’s old house. The original house was barely visible, piled all around with firewood in measured, regular stacks. The old barn, once stuffed so full of oily implements, piles of forgotten roofing tiles, tins of unguents, copper pipes, and other detritus, was now wide open, stacked with clean, orderly lumber. Out in the pasture that had once been dotted with foraged cars and mangy sheep was what appeared to be a fully functional mill, a rain of sawdust issuing from an opening on one side, a forklift in operation bringing in new wood. Maxon’s makeshift bicycle shop was gone. In its place, a lath cutter.

“I don’t want to see my mother,” said Maxon.

“What the hell has she done with the place?” marveled Sunny, stepping out of the car. “We were just here, five years ago, Maxon. It was a pit.”

“She married that guy from Butler,” said Maxon. “Come on, let’s go. This is uncomfortable. I don’t know what to say.”

“Say, ‘Hello, Mother. I am just stopping by to say hello, since I was in the area. This is my wife and child.’ And then wait and see what she says. I’ll help you.”

“She’s never seen the—” Maxon began.

“The what?” Sunny asked. “Child or wig?”

Maxon got out of the car, too, stood with one hand clamped on the roof, one hand clamped around the doorframe still. In the back of the car, Bubber woke up.

“Get Bubber out, would you?” said Sunny, brushing off her beautiful cream-colored maternity pantsuit, smoothing it over her belly. “Let’s go knock.”

But they didn’t have to. A man was coming up out of the barn, covered in a fine dust of wood shavings. He was maybe sixty. He took his hat off as he approached.

“Y’uns want firewood?” he asked politely. “I got lots, real dry.”

“No,” said Sunny. “We’re here to see Mrs. Mann.”

“You know Laney?” he said. He looked incredulous.

“We do,” said Sunny, her arm now wrapped protectively around a sleepy Bubber. She picked up the boy, held him on her hip, kissed him soundly on the head. “Is it okay if we go up to the house?”

“Uh, it’s Laney Snow now. I’m her husband. Nice to meet you, Ben Snow.”

They shook hands. Maxon looked at her, and his face correctly registered surprise.

“Mom,” said Bubber quietly. “I have to go potty.”

“Oh, sure,” the man said. “He can use the bathroom up ’ere too. Let me show y’uns in. Laney’ll be real glad to see you. She’s been doin’ books all day, she’s pretty close to crazy with all them numbers and what all. Be glad to see some visitors.”

The man took them toward the door of the old house. Instead of the frenetic clutter Sunny remembered, it was clean, neat. Still old, but cared for.

“Hey, Laney,” he yelled, swinging open the door. “You got friends here to see you, girl. Get on out here and say hello.”

“Come in,” came a high voice from inside the house. “Come on in, I’m in the kitchen.”

Maxon hung back, saying he would wait outside, but Sunny pinched his arm, propelled him onward until they were standing in a bright little kitchen.

*   *   *

T
HE LAST TIME SHE
had been in this kitchen, it was the summer after Maxon’s first year of college. When school got done in May, he’d gone straight to Europe, cycling and backpacking up and down the Alps and the Pyrenees, following bike races and sleeping anyplace he could plug in his laptop. He came home in August, with just a week to spare before he went back to school. She expected him to come rushing right over, burst into the kitchen, ask Nu for something to eat. She waited, but he stayed away, for three days, and no one at the Mann house would answer the phone. She felt irritated and confused. After all, she was going off to college herself in a few weeks. He had written her, e-mailed her, called her on the phone. Why would he not want to see her, to say hello and good-bye?

Her disappointment finally led her to action, and she marched across the valley, yanked open the door to his house, and went right in. She found him alone, sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of towering piles of paper and rubbish. The kitchen was dim, grim, and dirty; there were piles of dishes and papers, bags of fabric, garbage, and what looked like a squirrel’s nest on the counter. The space right around him was clear, and he was typing on his laptop, his head bent low over its blue light. He wore faded jeans and nothing else, and his head was shaved, tanned in stripes from his bicycle helmet. She knew he had been shaving it for her. The sight of his rib cage, his sternum, his collarbones, made her physically ache for him. She wanted to hold him, and feel him breathing.

But he was upset; he told her she had to go. “Sunny,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

“Why not?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

He stood up and came toward her, as if he was going to touch her, grab her, clamp her in his arms, but he stopped.

“Wait. I have to tell you something,” he said. “I was in France a few weeks ago. And I wrote a poem.”

“You wrote a poem?” In the middle of her confusion, she had time to be incredulous.

“Yes, I wrote one.”

“An actual poem, like with words and feelings and stuff?”

“With words.”

“Can I see it?”

“No, I didn’t write it down.”

“Well, can you tell me what it was? Do you remember it? How are you going to remember it?”

“I remember it.”

“But you won’t tell me what it was?”

“No.”

“Why not, Maxon?” She felt like she was going to cry.

“Your mother wouldn’t like it,” said Maxon. “She wouldn’t want it. She doesn’t want me to see you at all.”