“TMI,” Kathy says. “Way too much.”
“Adesh,” Bern says, “please have the birds-and-bees talk with Commander Lundgren. I think it’s time.”
Kathy whacks the biologist on the shoulder. Laughing, he gets up from the table and collects his tray. “Off to get some work done. Be good, kids.”
“I’m right behind you,” Adesh says, standing and clearing his place. “I have a Zoom conference to prepare for.”
“Good luck,” Kathy calls as the two men walk away.
“I’m surprised you’ve seen so little of my home state,” Gwendy continues, once again staring at the billionaire. “With all that money, I figured you’ve been everywhere twice.”
“Well, excuse me for stating the obvious,” he says, “but with all that money, I wouldn’t exactly call Maine a desired destination. Paris, Tortola, Turks and Caicos, now those are a different—”
“Have you ever been to Castle Rock?” Gwendy asks, cutting him off. “How about Derry?”
“No and no,” he snaps, letting go of his fork. He quickly snatches it out of the air in front of him when it begins to float up toward the ceiling. “I’ve never been to Castle Rock and I’ve never been to Derry. Now, can I finish eating my dinner in peace?”
“Of course,” Gwendy says, slipping on her Patsy Follett smile. “Just one last thing—I wanted to thank you for returning my notebook. Lucky for me you found it.”
“Yeah, well, you ought to be more careful.”
She starts away, then stops and turns back. “Maybe you should be, too.”
A flush rises in his cheeks. Gotcha, Gwendy thinks.
A few minutes later, while scraping their plates into the vacuum receptacle at the other side of the cafeteria, Kathy asks, “What in the hell was that all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“C’mon. You were poking at him.”
“I was just curious.”
“About what?”
“How he’d respond to a poke. Did you see that flush?”
Kathy frowns. “I didn’t notice.”
Gwendy watches her walk away, thinking: Test or no test, she still doesn’t trust me completely. Well, I’ve got news for you, lady. The feeling is mutual.
On the way back to her quarters, Gwendy makes a brief diversion to the weather deck to check on the latest readings. She knows that some staff members back in the down-below—maybe even most of them—don’t expect her to perform much more than a lick and a promise when it comes to her climate monitor duties. But that just makes her want to exceed expectations and prove them all wrong; it’s how she’s always been wired.
Her laptop is back in her room, so she scribbles a couple of notations in a Moleskine ledger and returns it to its place in the top drawer of the desk. When she’s finished, she writes a reminder note about tomorrow’s video conference with faculty members from the University of Maine and sticks it right in the middle of one of the monitor screens. No way can she forget that. She hopes.
When she gets to her room a short time later, she makes a beeline for the sofa. She’s suddenly exhausted and all she wants to do is lie down and rest her brain. It’s strange, she thinks. She watched a video earlier this afternoon of her husband being murdered—not to mention the four odd creatures in yellow coats and their mile-long ugly green car (if it even was a car, she thinks)—but after shoveling a bit of shit in Winston’s direction at dinner, she feels a little more in control of things. In fact, she feels surprisingly steadfast. For the first time in days, she’s not even thinking about the button box and its magic bag of tricks and treats. Eyes growing heavy, she props a pillow under her head and gets comfortable. Just before she dozes off, she notices her laptop sitting open on the coffee table and thinks: Wait a minute, didn’t I close that before I left? And put it away?
Probably she didn’t. She’s gotten so forgetful. Then her eyes slide the rest of the way shut—and she’s sleeping the dreamless sleep of the innocent.
36
DAY 4 ON MANY Flags.
Gwendy brushes her teeth, rinses the night-cream off of her face, and ties her hair back in a ponytail. Then she dresses in blue shorts and an Eagle Heavy tee. She figures a vigorous walk around the outer rim might help to keep her head clear and increase her appetite for breakfast. She never seems to be hungry anymore, and that worries her. Take last night for example. She enjoyed her time at the dinner table—especially poking Gareth Winston, that was the high point—but she barely touched the food in her tray. She will this morning, appetite or no appetite. Only three more days until her space walk with the Pocket Rocket, and she can use all the calories she can get.
Gwendy doesn’t even consider going for a run. That little act of misguided lunacy—chocolates or no chocolates—could have easily backfired and ended in disaster. She can picture the scene without even trying: The Senator from Maine floating on her back, unresponsive as her misfiring sixty-four-year-old heart sputters. Dale Glen, surrounded by the other crew members, dutifully administering epinephrin and doing CPR. Alas, the sputtering heart quits. After a few more minutes of trying to jump-start it, a grim-faced Dr. Glen calls it. Kathy Lundgren hurries back to Spoke One to tearfully notify Eileen Braddock at Mission Control. Before the body of Maine’s junior senator has even had time to grow cold in the infirmary (Gwendy assumes that’s where she’d be taken), Gareth Winston slips into her suite and steals away with the button box. End of story. Maybe the end of everything.
Pure crap of course, her heart checked out fine after half a dozen treadmill stress tests. Plus, paranoid fantasies sometimes accompany Alzheimer’s. That was just one of the fun facts about the illness she discovered (and now wishes she hadn’t) on the Internet. There’s even a name for it: sundowning. And since sundown up here happens roughly every 90 minutes, that leaves plenty of opportunity for weird thoughts.
I am not sundowning!
Maybe not, but still, no running. Best to be safe.
A brisk walk will do me fine, she thinks, sitting down on the edge of the sofa cushion. Bending over, she slips on her sneakers, first the right, then the left. Then she reaches down, picks up the laces—and stops. She has no idea what to do with them.
“Oh, come on,” she admonishes herself. “Of course you know how.” What was that shoe-tying rhyme she learned in preschool? Something about bunny ears, wasn’t it? The bunny ears being the loops you made in the laces? She can’t remember, only that it ended beautiful and bold. Right now Gwendy doesn’t feel beautiful or bold. Just scared. She tries—at least a half dozen times—but doesn’t even come close.
Finally, after a brief bout of crying and a thoroughly unsatisfying temper tantrum, in which she kicks off both sneakers and sends them floating across the sitting room, Gwendy pulls up a YouTube tutorial on her laptop. The girl in the video is five years old. Her name is Mallory and she’s from Atlanta, Georgia. The Senator watches the ninety-second video three times from start to finish, murmuring the words to the accompanying song, which she now remembers perfectly: Bunny ears, bunny ears, playing by a tree. Criss-crossed the tree, trying to catch me. Bunny ears, bunny ears, jumped into the hole, popped out the other side beautiful and bold.
She finally manages to tie her Reeboks. Even then, they’re a little loose.
By the time she heads out the door, half an hour later than planned, Gwendy Peterson is daydreaming about the button box again. And singing about bunny ears.