Augustine turned away from the mirror and left behind that brief shimmer of honesty—too heavy to carry with him, too blinding to look at for very long. Jean opened the door for him, and when he stumbled against the frame she guided him through the opening, gently but firmly, then shut the door behind him. Alone on her front step, he leaned back against her door and stared up at the overcast sky, dark and dense and impenetrable. No stars, just clouds. It was the last time they spoke.
AUGUSTINE PULLED HIS outerwear on slowly and with great difficulty: scarf, hat, parka, boots, and finally his mittens. The tent was empty. The quiet sounds of his zippers being zipped, the clomp of his boots, the whisper of his parka rubbing against itself, all came together to create a soft symphony of incremental movement. Outside the wind still moaned, softly—Iris’s melody. Augie was already breathing hard by the time he opened the door. The cold nearly knocked him down. The wind filled his lungs with ice crystals blown up from the ground, and his breath was already frozen on his beard before he’d gone more than two steps. He screwed up his strength, his determination, his sadness, and turned it into forward motion—one last burst. The radio shed was visible beneath a bright sliver of moon, and he stumbled toward it as fast as he could go.
He wasn’t sure how he would begin when he spoke to her, or what he needed to say, but it didn’t seem to matter. He only wanted to hear her and be heard. To have one honest moment, after all this time. Just one. He was halfway to the shed when he noticed a set of tracks in the snow and stopped. He followed them with his eyes, down to the edge of the lake, where he saw a small, snow-covered hill that seemed out of place. He followed the tracks, and when he came to the hill he realized that it was the bear that had been following him—after all this time, over all these miles. Part of him wanted to be afraid, to run for cover, but the rest of him—most of him—wanted to reach out and touch its haunch. He did, gingerly, and the bear chuffed softly. He walked around the huge animal to where its nose was pointed toward the lake, its neck and stomach laid flat against the snow, paws tucked beneath. He took off his mitten and touched it again, where its shoulder blades came together in a peak. The bear’s fur was covered with a thin dusting of snow, but he let his fingers sink in and found a layer of warmth emanating from the bear’s skin.
The bear chuffed again, but still it didn’t move. Augie understood that it was dying. Its yellowing fur looked almost golden in the moonlight. Augie’s legs gave way and he collapsed to his knees beside the bear, his fingers still buried in its fur. The radio shed could wait, he decided, it was this—this was the moment he’d been looking for. The wind picked up and began to sweep the snow into the sky, obscuring the radio shed and the other tents behind a curtain of white, till there was nothing left but Augustine and the bear.
He thought of Jean. The first time he had seen her was from across the parking lot of the research facility. She’d pulled up in her dusty green El Camino, her dark hair swirling around her shoulders as she unloaded her bags from the passenger’s seat. Even from the entrance to the facility he’d noticed the red lipstick she was wearing, the sliver of skin that showed between her blouse and her jeans. He thought of the first time he’d undressed her, the first time he’d watched her sleeping, and wondered what it was that made her so compelling. So magnetic. He never did figure it out. And he thought of the photograph she’d sent him. That one snapshot: the child, the girl, their daughter. Standing still, arms crossed over her chest, wearing a pale yellow dress and no shoes, her dark hair cut just below her jaw, the straight line of her bangs ending above her eyebrows. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she wanted to say something, and her eyes were defiant—a bright, hazel glare.
The bear groaned and rolled onto its side. Augie moved closer. He wasn’t afraid any longer, and as he fitted himself against the bear’s warm stomach and felt its massive arms close over him, he was at peace. No longer an interloper, but a part of the landscape. He felt the bear’s hot breath against the crown of his head and burrowed deeper against it, turning his face away from the wind and into the fur, where he found the quiet thunder of a heartbeat, slow and deep and steady as a drum.
TWENTY
ON BOARD THE International Space Station it looked as though the other astronauts had just stepped out for a moment: machines still turned on, half-empty food packets floating in the kitchen area. The only things missing were the Soyuz reentry pods—two of the three were gone. The equipment in the space station was archaic compared to Aether’s facilities, but the crew was already familiar with it, all of them having lived on the ISS at one point or another. Sully inspected its comm. station with curiosity, comparing the silence to that on Aether. Both stations were hearing the same signals—that is, none at all. She clung to the frequency where she’d found the man in the Arctic, but he wasn’t there, and eventually she had to move on, scanning for other survivors. She wondered if she’d ever find him again.
After sweeping the station for habitants and clues, and finding neither, Aether’s crew came together near the remaining reentry pod. The last pod held three seats. Three of them would descend and two would remain on the ISS, circling Earth indefinitely. The options were murky: without a ground team to collect them, there was the potentially fatal possibility of landing in an ocean or a desert. The state of the planet below them was unknowable. Perhaps the dirt and the air and the water were poisoned, perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps there were survivors, perhaps there weren’t. In space, a finite amount of resources were available and it was unclear how long they would last. Neither choice was certain, and neither was safe. But they weren’t ready to decide yet. They huddled together and talked about the docking procedure, the supplies, the equipment—anything but the question of who would go and who would stay. Anything but that.
THEY SLEPT ON Aether that night, grasping at inane small talk over dinner. After two years of wandering the solar system they were home—almost. After two years, some of them would make the last leg of the journey and some wouldn’t. All the waiting, the torturous uncertainty, had led to an impossible but still-unspoken divide. Sully lay awake in her bunk, and she guessed the others did as well, weighing the options and arriving at the same solution over and over: none. She turned from one side to the other, flopped onto her back, then onto her stomach, burying her arms under the pillow, laying them at her sides, throwing them over her face. Sleep was impossible. She thought of her daughter and touched the photograph pinned to the wall, just a dim square in the dark, but she could see Lucy’s face anyway, her costume, the wavy dirty-blond hair—the curve of her smile burned into Sully’s brain like a beacon.
And if the worst had happened? If her daughter was nothing more than hot ash floating in a bright sky, or even more horrible, a heap of decomposing remains returning to the dirt? She tried not to think these things, and yet—she had abandoned her entire family, she couldn’t think about anything else. If only she had been a better mother, a better wife, a better person, then someone else would be lying in this bunk right now, replaying her own regrets. She would have stayed in Canada, she never would have applied for the space program or gone to Houston. The raspberry-red door in Vancouver would still be hers, and the copper pans that hung above the stove, and the task of folding her daughter’s miniature T-shirts. There would be no divorce, no separation, no trouble finding a more recent photograph of Lucy when she wanted one. This picture of how her life could have been seemed so perfect, lying there in the dark, but it was pointless. She wasn’t built for that life. She’d never been the woman Jack wanted, the woman he needed, she had never loved Lucy in the right way—she wasn’t even sure what the right way was, only that the other mothers did it differently, that she could never seem to say the right things or do the right things or be the right person around either of them. The truth was, having her family had been even harder than losing them. There had always been something missing, and only now, after all this time and all these miles, could she begin to understand what it was: a warmth, an opening. The roots of something that had never been given the chance to grow.