“You haven’t asked me.”
He smiled that crooked smile. “I know what you’re carrying.”
Valya immediately sensed something different. Granted, their circumstances had changed radically. And their relationship was only weeks old. But that voice, that posture, meant a kiss, a touch, a pat on her behind.
But now, here? Nothing. Valya touched his arm. “You’re through with me.”
She knew him well enough to see that her blind shot had struck home. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You won’t touch me. You won’t spend time with me. If it weren’t a little crazy, I’d think that you’d found someone else—”
Naturally he seized on that. “Given the circumstances, that is indeed a little crazy—”
“Don’t deny it.”
He didn’t. He floated for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m married.”
It took Valya a moment to register this information. Then, to deal with her own irrational surprise. She had never considered it! She knew he’d been married before—her one moment of due diligence had been to access Dale’s official NASA biography, which called him “married.” But that was years out of date, untouched since Dale’s unceremonious exit from the American agency.
Then there were the snickering glances from co-workers about Dale’s other, younger, prior women. Somehow it had all lulled her into…well, not asking the question.
She started laughing.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake…it’s not as though—” He wisely left that sentence unfinished. “Why is this funny?”
“Now you tell me? Here?”
He couldn’t resist joking. “Well, there’s never a good time—”
“Shut up! Leave me alone!” Her anger was as shocking as her surprise at the revelation. Clearly she was hungry, exhausted, frightened…at the edge of sanity, most likely. Or over it, because it was very unlikely that Dale Scott’s being married made any difference. None of them would be seeing Earth again.
She swam away, taking up a perch a few meters away, beyond the cluster of life support machines. After a few moments, Dale launched himself clear across the forty-meter-wide bubble to the opposite side.
Sometime during the second day, Valya returned from an unquiet doze to note a change in the background noise of the bubble. She clutched at her purse as she realized that the clicking and thumping had ramped up.
Dale, apparently feeling that her anger had subsided, was swimming toward her. “Don’t freak out,” he said, making her feel a lot like freaking out.
Through the milky walls, one thing became clear:
Keanu was closer! She and Dale and a hundred others…they were all falling toward it!
ARRIVAL DAY: XAVIER
“Hey, kid.”
Xavier Toutant was startled by the harsh voice behind him. After an hour of tugging and sweating, he had managed to pry open one of the jammed cabinets inside the back two thirds of the big diesel Fleetwood Freightliner 2020—not that he would have known the name, but it was plastered on the side of the recreational vehicle. It was dark; this whole weightless thing made you feel like an idiot even trying to open a door. Every time you pushed, you were the object that gave.
Now there was some other fool floating in here…white, thin, balding, midthirties, wearing a pair of slacks and a dress shirt that had suffered some major distressing. Even in the shadowy interior, Xavier could see that his face was red and his eyes small and mean. “Ass eyes” was what his uncle Clare would have called them.
“What are you doing in here?”
There were several possible responses, ranging from None of your fucking business to his usual noncommittal shrug. But Xavier had been upside down and dizzy and hungry for two days.
And he had watched this particular cracker lurking around the RV for the better part of a day. So he said, “Same thing you are.”
“Oh really. And what’s that?”
“Checking things out.”
“Like, what, you’re in a goddamned library?”
So far, in fact, Xavier had found nothing worth having in this wreck. Unless you counted a pair of battered lawn chairs, and in the weightless world of the bubble, he did not.
“So, then, what if I told you it was closing time?”
Xavier was getting tired of this clown. “Is this your ride?”
“What if I said yes?”
Xavier had to smile. “If this was yours, you wouldn’t have said that. So…I’m just scrounging, man. Don’t know what’s here…might be useful to find out.”
The cracker had wedged himself into the open front, which had gotten squished down either by the initial scoop or by being slammed into the walls of the big bubble afterward. Either way, it was a tight fit…which was one of the reasons little Xavier Toutant was one of the few people, if not the only one, to wriggle inside to see what was what.
He wasn’t worried that the cracker would try to tackle him. He would have to swim at him, allowing plenty of time for Xavier to wedge himself and either take a swing at him, or even rip off the open cabinet door and swat him like a big old bug.
“Not the worst idea I’ve heard,” the cracker said, confirming what Xavier had immediately suspected: This guy was a spiritual cousin, which is to say, he was a scrounger, a runner of errands. No matter now nicely he dressed back on Earth.
Or, to be more accurate, he was just another low-level criminal. “Find anything useful?”
“Not yet. Just started.”
For Xavier Toutant—formerly of New Orleans, Louisiana, but for the past fourteen years, an unhappy resident of Houston, Texas—the big white scoop came just in time.
Following that afternoon’s rain, he had gone out to the secret spot near the inlet to check on his plants. He had nine different sites, including the one up near La Porte. That and seven others were on slightly higher ground, less prone to flooding.
But not the one down near the new park. (Funny how everyone kept calling it “new,” since it was already in existence the day Xavier and his mother and sister arrived from New Orleans.)
So he’d put on his galoshes and the big raincoat, grabbed a flashlight, and climbed into his Chevy. As always, Momma had asked him where he was going. As always, he had simply said, “Out! Back in an hour!”
They had a good understanding. Momma didn’t pry into Xavier’s outings, and he didn’t pry into the collection of Chardonnay bottles that grew by one each day throughout the week, dropping to zero on Tuesday, when trash was picked up.
Not that he blamed her. They had lost everything in the Ninth Ward back in August 2005, and they hadn’t had much to begin with. Momma had worked as a waitress at Cajun Sam’s, which got flooded and never reopened.
Same thing for their ground-floor apartment on Florida Street, or so Aunt Marie had told them; they had evacuated ahead of the surge and had never been back.
And to this day, Momma never knew what happened to her brother Clare, who had been seen in or around the Superdome during all that mess, but never after.
They wound up here in La Porte, Texas, among the oil workers and righteous Texans who, at first, seemed quite happy to show their charity and take in those displaced by the hurricane and flooding.
The First AME Church had been great; no complaints there. They’d found Xavier and Momma a motel room and some clothing and meals, then vouchers for the same as things calmed down.
They’d hooked Momma up with a job at a Cajun barbecue place named Le Roi’s over toward some airport, all with the understanding that it was temporary, that one day soon they would go back to New Orleans.
But that day had never come. Xavier had been put into the second grade at Bayshore Elementary, and it turned out to be a better school than the one he’d attended in New Orleans, or so Momma told him.
And her job paid better than the one at Cajun Sam’s, too. Eventually—with help from the church—they’d moved out of the motel to the place they had now, and Xavier had gone through grade school and junior high and well into high school.