In the Quick Read online

  Tuc, tuc, tuc.

  Tuc, tuc, tuc.

  I took it apart and put it back together again. Over and over until it started to look nothing like my drawing, and I didn’t know if it was better or worse. I tried five toes instead of three. A high heel instead of a low one. The loops of wire like toenails were a problem, so I replaced them with plastic nobs unscrewed from the bottoms of the dining room chairs. The screws I’d used to fasten the basket to its legs were too short; I switched to bolts.

  The basket started to do what it was supposed to do in a very ugly way. It hobbled up the stairs like a person who had half forgotten how to walk. It needed to be faster, smoother. I made it faster. That was easy. But I got stuck on smoother. There was something heavy about the way its metal feet hit the floor. It stomped when I wanted it to half walk, half fly. I drew hundreds of solutions but none of them satisfied me. My mind roamed the house to find better materials, into every room, closet, cupboard. Nothing was right. I was stuck, and I pushed the basket under my bed.

  5

  I spent the weekend sitting close to the TV. They didn’t say anything new about Inquiry, just repeated things I’d already heard. But late in the afternoon on Sunday they started showing old video recordings of the crew. There was a clip of Anu Sharma, Inquiry’s commander, dismantling an oxygenator in a timed training exercise. Another of the four of them floating in bright white suits in a neutral buoyancy tank, part of the underwater training facility that prepared astronauts for working in zero gravity. They were secured to the side of a mock explorer, their tethers like tails behind them. Anu held a wrench in her hand and waved cheerfully to the camera.

  The video made their training look simple. But I knew it wasn’t simple because I’d watched Anu and her crew in that tank when my uncle was alive. A week before they announced which team would crew Inquiry—James Banovic’s or Anu Sharma’s—Anu’s team was scheduled for a routine exercise at NSP. I asked my uncle if we could go and watch, just for a few minutes, and he agreed.

  When we opened the doors to the observation theater, rows of empty chairs stretched out before us and a deep blue glow came from the center of the room where the tank stood. In it was the mock explorer, a replica of Inquiry, complete with its arrays, equipment panels, egress hatch.

  Bubbles filled the water as four people in white suits descended into the tank, tether cords twirling behind them. We watched as they crawled along the side of the station, moving their harness clips from anchor point to anchor point, and my uncle explained they were practicing a manual rotation of one of the arrays. The exercise was timed—a light on the side of the tank went from blue to green to yellow based on the number of minutes they had left, and it turned red when their time was up.

  Anu went first—I knew it was her because of the commander patch on her sleeve—and got into position at the farthest point on the array. Dimitri and Lee followed, tethering themselves at the base of the array, and Missy took up position at a set of controls near the egress hatch. Anu retrieved a tool velcroed to her suit and loosened the hardware on the underside of the array. The light switched from blue to green as Anu, Dimitri, and Lee slowly turned the array.

  They’re going to finish, no problem, I said to my uncle.

  It looks that way.

  They secured the array in its new position, replaced their tools, and began to move back to the egress hatch. But halfway there Dimitri’s and Lee’s tethers became tangled. Anu was behind them—her tether was fine—but she couldn’t move past her current anchor point. Dimitri and Lee attempted to untangle themselves, an awkward slow-motion dance of limbs and torsos and helmets. Up, over, around. They seemed to be making the problem worse. Anu gestured. The light switched from green to yellow. She gestured again.

  Why don’t they just detach themselves? I asked.

  Because in open space they would float away, my uncle said.

  Dimitri and Lee finally managed to unravel the knot they’d created and they moved toward the hatch. When they reached it the light was still yellow. Anu was behind them, and she went from anchor point to anchor point swiftly and efficiently—but the light turned red before she got there.

  She hovered for a moment at the hatch and I pressed my face against the cool glass, trying to discern her expression behind the dull shine of her visor. Then a harness descended into the tank to pull them up and the timer went back to zero.

  Will they go again? I asked.

  Another team was already descending into the tank.

  No, my uncle said. They get their time and they have to make the most of it.

  That day I stayed with my uncle in his lab through dinner, and when the sun went down I fell asleep with my head on his desk. I woke sometime close to midnight, my head full of images of the neutral buoyancy tank, its startlingly blue water, its shifting bubbles and glinting arrays.

  My uncle was next door testing something in the vacuum chamber—I could see him through the glass. Across the room James and Theresa stood over a long table piled with needle drivers and circuit boards and tangles of cable and wiring. Their voices were low but intense; their heads were bent together.

  That won’t work, Theresa said.

  It will, James said.

  You said yourself it wouldn’t an hour ago.

  Maybe I was wrong—

  You’re admitting that? Theresa laughed and touched her lips to his.

  I felt strange watching them and ducked out of the room—they didn’t look up—and made my way to the observation theater. The hallways were dark and empty after the bustle of daytime, the sky a smudgy black as I walked across the catwalk between the research complex and the NSP training facility.

  The theater was lit only with the blue glow from the tank. My eyes adjusted as I moved toward it. It was so quiet. The water was clear, the shape of the mock explorer distinct and still. It seemed to take up more of the tank than it had earlier in the day. Its hull made a long shadow; its arrays and antennae stretched and refracted light from above.

  A plume of bubbles appeared and I jumped back from the glass. Three suits descended into the water. One of them had a commander’s patch—it was Anu. She landed at the egress hatch and tethered herself to an anchor point. But the other suits were oddly buoyant. I squinted through the bubbles and tried to understand what I was seeing.

  The suits were empty. Anu had ahold of their tethers and they floated free. She started to crawl along the explorer and repeat the exercise from earlier in the day. Not actually rotating the array—that was a job requiring more than one person—but replicating all the motions involved.

  Step by step, slowly and methodically, she simulated the actions of the manual rotation, dragging the empty suits behind her, and as she went she adapted the placement of the tether anchors. She clipped them in place and then unclipped them. Looped them around an antenna, above an equipment panel. Clip, unclip, clip.

  I saw what she was doing and followed along. I walked right and then left inside the theater. I even motioned when I saw the correct way to place the anchors at the base of the array—but then remembered the glass was only one-way.

  Once she found the best positioning, the best order, she didn’t stop. She repeated the motions involved, over and over. Three times, five. Ten. She kept going. Finally she stopped. I counted twelve times she’d gone through the full circuit before she unhooked herself and the empty suits and rose slowly to the surface.

  6

  When the last video clip of the Inquiry crew ended I got up from the floor and went to my bedroom. I pulled my invention out from under my bed, took it apart, and laid all the pieces on the carpet. Then I reconstructed it, slowly this time. I scrutinized each step, each choice. I changed the length of the toes slightly. The height of the heel by a quarter of an inch. The tilt of the basket by an eighth.

  I thought of the loping hop of the dogs as they r
an up the stairs, and of the abstract painting that hung in my room—the airy lift of the black lines. Their seeming weightlessness. That was what I wanted to create, how I wanted my basket to move, and it was uncomfortable, this gap between my idea and the thing I’d made.

  Early the next morning before my aunt and John were awake I roamed the house opening closets and drawers and cabinets. I picked things up and considered them and then put them down. A wire whisk was too thin. A blade from a table fan was too wide. Then I remembered a toy my uncle had made for John, a helicopter kept in a glass case in his room. Its propeller was exactly right.

  I went into John’s bedroom and the work was done in minutes. I put the toy, now missing its elegant metal blades, back in the case and installed the propeller in my walking basket. When I was done my invention looked like a bird with two tails. I tried it on the cardboard stairs. Better. I tightened some screws. And again—the best yet. I went out into the hallway, to the bottom of the staircase, and set it carefully on the hardwood floor. I pressed the button on my remote control and the feet started to move, slowly at first, and then faster. It climbed one step, and then another. The propeller gained speed, and the basket bounded up the stairs not like a machine at all but like a living creature.

  Then John’s footsteps sounded in the hall. I heard my aunt telling him, Wipe your feet for heaven’s sake.

  John still had his coat on; his nose was red from the cold. What’s that?

  Something to help Aunt Regina.

  My aunt came into the hallway carrying her heavy coat and John’s backpack and violin.

  I made something for you, I said, and set the basket on the stairs, put a book inside it, and closed its lid. I turned it on and the propeller began to whir. When I pressed the button it bounded up the stairs in five seconds flat.

  I beamed, turned the basket around, watched it climb back down.

  Very creative, my aunt said, and started hanging things on the coatrack.

  It’s to help your feet, I said.

  But she’d picked up a magazine from the side table and wasn’t listening.

  John came closer and pointed at the propeller. That’s from my helicopter.

  It’s not.

  It is!

  It’s better like this, I said. It does something now.

  John grabbed the basket and twisted hard to get the propeller loose. I tried to pull the basket back but he dropped it before I could. Its feet snapped off; its toes scattered. I blinked tears and grabbed at the pieces.

  John looked surprised, and maybe sorry.

  The metal dug into my palms, sharp and hot. I ran at him, my head down, my fists out.

  June! My aunt dropped the magazine and grabbed me. She pulled me away. June, calm down. The metal in my hands scratched her cheek, but it was an accident. I lunged for John again and he pushed me back. My head hit the banister and pinpricks of light exploded behind my eyes.

  7

  My aunt told me to go to the bottom basement step and count to one hundred. I didn’t want to go but her voice was high and tight. So I climbed down the stairs and didn’t cry. The basement was dimly lit and full of shadows, but its damp air was cool against my hot cheeks. I sat on the bottom step; the back of my head throbbed. I pressed my hand to it and when I pulled my hand away there was bright blood.

  I’m bleeding, I called upstairs, but no one answered.

  Nearby stood an old boiler with a vent like a mouth and I tried not to look at it.

  I called again, I’m hurt. I want to come up.

  My aunt called back, Count to one hundred.

  I started counting. At thirty-two a watery vibration sounded from a wall nearby, an eerie roar that rose and fell. My limbs were full of pins and needles and I had the childish thought that if I turned to run up the stairs the boiler would leap at me.

  I looked at it. Wide as a car and taller than my aunt, it seemed to crouch in the shadows, its pipes reaching like arms. But it was only a machine. It was as old as the house, my uncle had told me, and used to heat its rooms with steam before the house was switched to electric and then to geothermal heat. I used to come down here with him—he had a workbench in the far corner that was gone now. The boiler was like a huge pot that simmered, he said, and he drew me a picture of how it worked. I remembered the scratch of his pencil on the paper and the smell of WD-40 and epoxy glue. The basement didn’t smell like that anymore; it smelled only of wet concrete.

  When he finished the drawing he wondered aloud if he could get the boiler working again, just for fun. It would make a mess and your aunt won’t like it, he said. But I bet we could do it if we put our two minds together.

  His tools were still down here, locked in a cabinet. I got up from the stair. My head had stopped bleeding. I found a wire hanger forgotten on the floor, twisted it into the shape I needed, and picked the cabinet’s lock. The shelves were full of drills and sanders and pliers and screwdrivers, and it smelled like I remembered, like oil and glue and also a whisper of something burnt.

  I imagined my uncle standing beside me, his broad face and wispy hair. His wool sweater. In my mind he said, A flashlight, a wrench, and a box of matches. With those things in my hands I turned back to the boiler.

  The sun had gone down. The narrow windows at the top of the concrete walls were black and my flashlight made a small yellow circle in the darkness.

  Only one way to find out how it works, my uncle’s voice said.

  Take it apart, I said, and I imagined him nodding and handing me the wrench.

  I climbed onto a crate and loosened one of the pipes at the joint, then shined my light inside. There was insulation stuffed in there and I pulled it out. I blew air into the hole and it made a low, vibrating note.

  I went from one pipe to the next until they were all clear. I studied the box’s metal pressure gauge, unscrewed its cover, pulled out its wiring. Then I put it back the way I found it.

  Not much to it, is there? my uncle’s voice said.

  Will it work?

  Let’s find out, he said, and I lit my way to a bag of charcoal sitting under the stairs. The boiler’s heavy drawer groaned when I opened it. I tipped the charcoal inside, struck a match, and dropped it in. I struck more matches and let them fall into the pile of coal until the coal began to cinder and glow.

  I shut the drawer, opened the pressure valves, and flipped the boiler’s switch, but nothing happened. I stoked the coals and they glowed orange, but the pressure gauge showed no flicker of movement. I waited several minutes, watching the gauge the whole time; it didn’t change.

  My aunt called from above, They’re talking about Inquiry on TV. I dropped the matches and ran upstairs.

  In the living room she sat in the dark, the TV flickering blue and green on her face. It’s the communications system, she said.

  I sat down on the sofa. What about it?

  It stopped working. Or the crew’s not responding. They aren’t sure which.

  I watched the screen. What else did they say?

  There’s nothing we can do about it, she said. We should go to bed.

  Outside the dark window flecks of snow were falling. I wanted to say something to make her feel better. But all I could think to say was, I’m sorry I scratched your cheek.

  I know you are, she said. She stood, picked up one of the square sofa pillows, shook it out, and left the room.

  * * *

  —

  That night I woke to a hollow clanging in the walls and a low hiss. I stayed very still under the covers as the sound rose, and rose. I thought of the boiler in the basement and exhilaration—and panic—twisted my stomach. I forced myself to sit up and the air was thick like smoke. But it wasn’t smoke; it was steam. I felt its warm droplets on my face and hands.

  A shout came from John’s room. I went into the hallway as he emerged from
his bedroom. Damp hair plastered his round face and his cheeks were flushed red. Steamy air billowed through his doorway.

  My aunt came out of her room, her eyes unfocused, in a robe printed with blue and green parrots. What on earth? She waved her hand through the steam.

  John’s pajama pants sagged with moisture. He looked like he had wet himself.

  She tried to burn me in my bed! he said.

  I did not!

  My aunt bent down, gripped my shoulders, lined her face up with mine. What did you do? One of the parrots on her robe had an orange-and-green wing and a beady eye in the center of its small head. I reached out to pinch the tiny black eye, but she grabbed my hand and held it fast. June? Her voice sounded like it might crack in two.

  Then—a jolt of sound under our feet. A popping, sparking roar.

  My aunt streaked past me to the top of the stairs, the parrots rippling. Get out, get out! She pulled John and me down the stairs, out the front door, and into the freezing night air.

  8

  We stood in a neighbor’s drafty entryway for hours, watching fire trucks and flashing lights from the window. There was only one chair and my aunt sat in it with her arms wrapped around John.

  When the firefighters left, we were allowed to go back inside. My aunt went first, and John and I followed, quiet and shivering. We walked through the house slowly, all together in a group. Everything seemed the same, except for the smell of singed wood and something else too, like the time John accidentally melted a plastic spoon in a pan. My aunt touched things, curtains and paintings and lamps and pillows. We kept going and everything seemed all right until we got to the kitchen. The door to the basement was a ragged hole. The walls all around were black, and my aunt cried.

  In the morning there was no electricity—the fire had burned the fuse box in the basement. We went to school like normal, but we had to eat cold cereal with milk from a box in the pantry. That afternoon men in gray uniforms came with plastic sheeting and large vacuums with hoses that attached to their truck. They sucked up all the gray cinders in the basement, and the bad smell faded. My aunt sent all her paintings to be cleaned, and then she started washing every pot, plate, cup, and spoon in the house. The next day more people came and replaced the fuse box, rebuilt the basement steps, reframed the doorway, and hung a new door.