Spin (18 page)

I had so many memories of her. But those memories were years old now, vanishing into the past with an almost Spinlike momentum. Jason saw me holding the picture frame and was silent for a few blessed moments. Then he said, “Really, Tyler, this fixation is unworthy of you.”

“Hardly a fixation, Jase.”

“Why? Because you’re
over
her or because you’re
afraid
of her? But I could ask her the same question. If she ever called. Simon keeps her on a tight leash. I suspect she misses the old NK days, when the movement was full of naked Unitarians and Evangelical hippies. The price of piety is steeper now.” He added, “She talks to Carol every now and then.”

“Is she at least happy?”

“Diane is among zealots. She may be one herself. Happiness isn’t an option.”

“Do you think she’s in danger?”

He shrugged. “I think she’s living the life she chose for herself. She could have made other choices. She could, for instance, have married
you
, Ty, if not for this ridiculous fantasy of hers—”

“What fantasy?”

“That E.D. is your father. That she’s your biological sister.”

I backed away from the bookcase too hastily and knocked the photographs to the floor.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Patently ridiculous. But I don’t think she entirely gave up on the idea until she was in college.”

“How could she even think—”

“It was a fantasy, not a theory. Think about it. There was never much affection between Diane and E.D. She felt ignored by him. And in a sense, she was right. E.D. never wanted a daughter, he wanted an heir, a male heir. He had high expectations, and I happened to live up to them. Diane was a distraction as far as E.D. was concerned. He expected Carol to raise her, and Carol—” He shrugged. “Carol wasn’t up to the task.”

“So she made up this—story?”

“She thought of it as a deduction. It explained the way E.D. kept your mother and you living on the property. It explained Carol’s constant unhappiness. And, basically, it made her feel good about herself. Your mother was kinder and more attentive to her than Carol ever was. She liked the idea of being blood kin to the Dupree family.”

I looked at Jason. His face was pale, his pupils dilated, his gaze distant and aimed at the window. I reminded myself that he was my patient, that he was exhibiting a predictable psychological response to a powerful drug; that this was the same man who, only a few hours ago, had wept at his own incontinence. I said, “I really have to leave now, Jason.”

“Why, this is all so shocking? You thought growing up was supposed to be painless?” Then, abruptly, before I could answer, he turned his head and met my eyes for the first time that evening. “Oh dear. I begin to suspect I’ve been behaving badly.”

I said, “The medication—”

“Behaving monstrously. Tyler, I’m sorry.”

“You’ll feel better after a night’s sleep. But you shouldn’t go back to Perihelion for a couple of days.”

“I won’t. Will you stop by tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” he said.

I left without replying.

That was the winter of the gantries. New launch platforms had been erected not just at Canaveral but across the desert Southwest, in southern France and equatorial Africa, at Jiuquan and Xichang in China and at Baikonur and Svobodnyy in Russia: gantries for the Martian seed launches and larger gantries for the so-called Big Stacks, the enormous booster assemblies that would carry human volunteers to a marginally habitable Mars if the crude terraforming succeeded. The gantries grew that winter like iron and steel forests, exuberant, lush, rooted in concrete and watered with reservoirs of federal money.

The first seed rockets were in a way less spectacular than the launch facilities built to support them. They were assembly-line boosters mass-produced from old Titan and Delta templates, not an ounce or a microchip more complicated than they needed to be, and they populated their pads in startling numbers as winter advanced into spring, spaceships like cottonwood pods, poised to carry dormant life to a distant, sterile soil.

It was also, in a sense, spring in the solar system at large, or at least a prolonged Indian summer. The habitable zone of the solar system was expanding outward as the sun depleted its helium core, beginning to encompass Mars as it would eventually encompass the watery Jovian moon Ganymede, another potential target for late-stage terraforming. On Mars, vast tonnages of frozen C0
₂
and water ice had begun to sublimate into the atmosphere over millions of warming summers. At the beginning of the Spin the Martian atmospheric pressure at ground level had been roughly eight millibars, as rarified as the air three miles above the peak of Mount Everest. Now, even without human intervention, the planet had achieved a climate equivalent to an arctic mountaintop bathed in gaseous carbon dioxide—balmy, by Martian standards.

But we meant to take the process further. We meant to lace the planet’s air with oxygen, to green its lowlands, to create ponds where, now, the periodically melting subsurface ice erupted in geysers of vapor or slurries of toxic mud.

We were perilously optimistic during the winter of the gantries.

On March third, shortly before the first scheduled wave of seed launches, Carol Lawton called me at home and told me my mother had suffered a severe stroke and wasn’t expected to live.

I made arrangements for a local medic to cover for me at Perihelion, then drove to Orlando and booked the first morning flight to D.C.

Carol met me at Reagan International, apparently sober. She opened her arms and I hugged her, this woman who had never displayed more than a puzzled indifference toward me during the years I had lived on her property. Then she stood back and put her tremorous hands on my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Tyler.”

“Is she still alive?”

“She’s hanging on. I have a car waiting. We can talk while we drive.”

I followed her out to a vehicle that must have been dispatched by E.D. himself, a black limo with federal stickers. The driver barely spoke as he put my luggage in the trunk, tipped his hat when I thanked him, and climbed into a driver’s seat meticulously isolated from the plush passenger compartment. He headed for George Washington University Hospital without being asked.

Carol was skinnier than I remembered her, birdlike against the leather upholstery. She took a cotton handkerchief out of her tiny purse and dabbed her eyes. “All this ridiculous crying,” she said. “I lost my contacts yesterday. Just sort of cried them away, if you can imagine that. There are some things a person takes for granted. For me it was having your mother in the house, keeping things in order, or just knowing she was nearby, there across the lawn. I used to wake up at night—I don’t sleep soundly, which probably doesn’t surprise you—I used to wake up feeling like the world was fragile and I might fall through it, fall right through the floor and keep on falling forever. Then I would think of her over there in the Little House, sound asleep. Sleeping soundly. It was like courtroom evidence. Exhibit A, Belinda Dupree, the possibility of peace of mind. She was the pillar of the household, Tyler, whether you knew it or not.”

I supposed I had known it. Really it had all been one household, though as a child I had seen mainly the distance between the two estates: my house, modest but calm, and the Big House, where the toys were more expensive and the arguments more vicious.

I asked whether E.D. had been to the hospital.

“E.D.? No. He’s busy. Sending spaceships to Mars seems to require a great many dinners downtown. I know that’s what’s keeping Jason in Florida, too, but I believe Jason deals with the practical side of the matter, if it
has
a practical side, while E.D. is more like a stage magician, pulling money out of various hats. But I’m sure you’ll see E.D. at the funeral.” I winced, and she gave me an apologetic look. “If and when. But the doctors say—”

“She’s not expected to recover.”

“She’s dying. Yes. As one physician to another. Do you remember that, Tyler? I had a practice once. Back in the days when I was capable of such a thing. And now you’re a doctor with a practice of your own. My God.”

I appreciated her bluntness. Maybe it came with her sudden sobriety. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

We arrived at George Washington University Hospital. Carol had already introduced herself to the nursing staff on the life-support floor, and we proceeded directly to my mother’s room. When Carol hesitated at the door I said, “Are you coming in?”

“I—no, I don’t think so. I’ve said good-bye several times already. I need to be where the air doesn’t smell like disinfectant. I’ll stand out in the parking lot and smoke a cigarette with the gurney-pushers. Meet me there?”

I said I would.

My mother was unconscious in her room, embedded in life support, her breathing regulated by a machine that wheezed as her rib cage expanded and relaxed. Her hair was whiter than I remembered it being. I stroked her cheek, but she didn’t respond.

Out of some misbegotten doctorly instinct I raised one of her eyelids, meaning, I suppose, to check the dilation of her pupils. But she had hemorrhaged into the eye after her stroke. It was red as a cherry tomato, flushed with blood.

I rode away from the hospital with Carol but turned down her invitation to dinner, told her I’d fix myself something. She said, “I’m sure there’s something in the kitchen at your mother’s place. But you’re more than welcome to stay in the Big House if you like. Even though it’s a bit of a mess these days without your mother to boss the help. I’m sure we can scare up a passable guest bedroom.”

I thanked her but said I’d prefer to stay across the lawn.

“Let me know if you change your mind.” She gazed from the gravel drive across the lawn to the Little House as if she were seeing it clearly for the first time in years. “You still carry a key—?”

“Still do,” I said.

“Well, then. I’ll leave you to it. The hospital has both numbers if her condition changes.” And Carol hugged me again and walked up the porch stairs with a resoluteness, not quite eagerness, that suggested she had postponed her drinking long enough.

I let myself into my mother’s house. Hers more than mine, I thought, though my presence had not been expunged from it. When I left for university I had denuded my small bedroom and packed whatever was important to me, but my mother had kept the bed and filled the blank spaces (the pine shelving, the windowsill) with potted plants, rapidly drying in her absence; I watered them. The rest of the house was equally tidy. Diane had once described my mother’s housekeeping as “linear,” by which I think she meant orderly but not obsessive. I surveyed the living room, the kitchen, glanced into her bedroom. Not everything was in its place. But everything
had
a place.

Come nightfall I closed the curtains and turned on every light in every room, more lights than my mother had ever deemed appropriate at any given time, a declaration against death. I wondered if Carol had noticed the glare across the winter-brown divide, and if so whether she found it comforting or alarming.

E.D. came home around nine that night, and he was gracious enough to knock at the door and offer his sympathy. He looked uncomfortable under the porch light, his tailored suit disheveled. His breath smoked in the evening chill. He touched his pockets, breast and hip, unconsciously, as if he had forgotten something or simply didn’t know what to do with his hands. “I’m sorry, Tyler,” he said.

His condolences seemed grossly premature, as if my mother’s death were not merely inevitable but an established fact. He had already written her off. But she was still drawing breath, I thought, or at least processing oxygen, miles away, alone in her room at George Washington. “Thank you for saying so, Mr. Lawton.”

“Jesus, Tyler, call me E.D. Everybody else does. Jason tells me you’re doing good work down there at Perihelion Florida.”

“My patients seem satisfied.”

“Great. Every contribution counts, no matter how small. Listen, did Carol put you out here? Because we have a guest bedroom ready if you want it.”

“I’m fine right where I am.”

“Okay. I understand that. Just knock if you need anything, all right?”

He ambled back across the winter-brown lawn. Much had been made, in the press and in the Lawton family, of Jason’s genius, but I reminded myself that E.D. could claim that title, too. He had parlayed an engineering degree and a talent for business into a major corporate enterprise, and he had been selling aerostat-enabled telecom bandwidth when Americom and AT&T were still blinking at the Spin like startled deer. What he lacked was not Jason’s intelligence but Jason’s wit and Jason’s deep curiosity about the physical universe. And maybe a dash of Jason’s humanity.

Then I was alone again, at home and not at home, and I sat on the sofa and marveled for a while at how little this room had changed. Sooner or later it would fall to me to dispose of the contents of the house, a job I could barely envision, a job more difficult, more preposterous, than the work of cultivating life on another planet. But maybe it was because I was contemplating that act of deconstruction that I noticed a gap on the top shelf of the etagere next to the TV.

Noticed it because, to my knowledge, the high shelf had received no more than a cursory dusting in all the years I had lived here. The top shelf was the attic of my mother’s life. I could have recited the order of the contents of that shelf by closing my eyes and picturing it: her high school yearbooks (Martell Secondary School in Bingham, Maine, 1975, ‘76, ’77, ‘78); her Berkeley grad book, 1982; a jade Buddha book-end; her diploma in a stand-up plastic frame; the brown accordion file in which she kept her birth certificate, passport, and tax documents; and, braced by another green Buddha, three tattered New Balance shoeboxes labeled mementos (school), mementos (marcus), and odds & ends.