– Dr. Seuss
It was a beautiful late-March night fragrant with the first scents of spring, so Nan Dawkins decided to fire up the barbecue and dine outside-chicken, strips of red pepper and zucchini, and new potatoes. It reminded her of James, who often sat outside alone in the summer looking at the stars. Astronomy was one of his passions. The Celestron CPC 1100 XLT computerized telescope that he had bought recently sat under a plastic cover in his home office.
After dinner she sat sipping chardonnay and half listening to Karen talk about the poems they had read that day in school. One of them was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Normally, anything having to do with literature was a favorite topic of discussion, but tonight Nan seemed drawn to the stars trying to break through the city haze. She wondered if James was looking at them, too, wherever he was.
Her current theory was that he was working somewhere on a top-secret government program and would return soon. Maybe he had wanted to tell her but couldn’t. Maybe he’d forgotten, which was characteristic of James. He kept different aspects of his life in separate compartments.
“Mom?” her daughter called.
She drifted to their wedding day and his shy, handsome face, and returned.
“Yes, ‘Annabel Lee’ is a beautiful poem…” Nan started, and then stopped. When she looked for Karen’s oval face across the table, she found an empty chair. Turning, she saw her back passing through the gap in the sliding glass doors. She was carrying dirty plates.
“That’s very kind of you, darling,” Nan said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Mom.”
Wonderful girl, she thought. Cleaning up…because she sees I’m preoccupied. Where would I be without her?
Karen’s emotional steadiness through the ordeal continued to amaze her. Nan refilled her glass with wine and looked up at the stars. James, she knew, would be able to name them and recount the legends behind them. She located the Big Dipper and remembered that James had showed her how to connect the outer stars in the bowl and use them to locate Polaris, which marked the end of the Little Dipper’s handle.
During a summer vacation in the Adirondacks ten years ago, he had explained that the Big Dipper was actually an abbreviated version of the constellation Ursa Major-the Great Bear. The three stars that made up the bowl were thought to be hunters chasing the bear. The constellation served as both a calendar and storybook. In the fall the hunter would catch up with the bear. According to the Iroquois, it was blood from the dead bear that colored the autumn landscape.
As Nan lowered her gaze, she noticed something gold flickering. At first she thought it was a reflection off the sliding glass door, but when she looked closer she saw that it originated inside the house. Then she noticed smoke wafting out of the crack between the sliding glass doors.
Alarmed, she called, “Karen?”
Hearing a cry from inside that sounded more like a wounded cat than a child, she let go of the wineglass and sprang. As she squeezed through the doors, smoke and the smell of burning plastic stung her eyes. To her right, red and orange flames rose from the living room rug and sofa.
“Karen, oh my God! Where are you?”
A strangled sound resounded from the front hall.
Turning, she spotted a can of lighter fluid on the wooden end table and a box of matches. A picture of what had transpired flashed in her head as flames danced three feet away.
“Karen!”
She grabbed hold of the can, screamed as the heat seared her hand, and running back three steps, tossed it out the door onto the patio.
“Karen, sweetheart! Where are you? Say something!”
The smoke made it very difficult to see. When Karen shouted “Mommy, help!” Nan turned right and saw her daughter rolling on the wooden hallway floor, trying to extinguish flames at the bottom of her pants.
She threw herself on her daughter like a wild animal, then attacked the fire furiously with her hands. The flames were stubborn, but Nan smothered them out. Ignoring the burns on her hands and the seething, tightening sensation in her throat and lungs, she scooped up her daughter and ran out the front door, collapsing on the lawn.
She was still lying there in the same position when the paramedics revived her minutes later. She saw flashes of firemen passing, lights, smoke, and hoses. Rough hands lifted her onto a stretcher. She looked up at someone but had trouble getting the words out.
“My dau…”
A male voice said, “Relax, ma’am. You’ll be fine.”
“My daughter. Where’s Karen?” She felt panic.
“She’s okay, ma’am,” the man said in a reassuring voice. “We’ve got her. We’re taking you both to the hospital now.”
“I want to see her. I’ve got to see her!”
“Hold on, ma’am. You will.”
Her panic grew with every face they passed and jostle of the stretcher. Blue, red, and white flashed across the front lawn and driveway. Neighbors stood in silence and watched.
In the back of a red ambulance, she blinked into the bright light. To her left she saw Karen seated on a gurney. An EMT was using scissors to cut away the right leg of her pants.
“Karen, is that really you?” Nan shouted.
As soon as Karen saw her mother, she started to cry.
Restraints prevented Nan from sitting up, so she reached out and touched her daughter with the back of her injured hand. “It’s okay, darling. The doctors will take care of us now.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Karen cried. “I’m so sorry. I started the fire, Mommy. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, darling. I don’t care about that. But…why?”
Karen’s chest heaved and tears poured down her soot-covered cheeks. “I thought that maybe if Daddy heard about the fire on the news…he’d come home.”
Dawkins shuffled down the drab, cold hallway with Kwon behind him, trying to convince himself that he had accomplished something, which brought him a step closer to freedom. The new platform shroud that had been machined in a nearby shop under his supervision fit perfectly around the gyro compass and torque motors. Another couple of months and the GSP system would be fully functional and ready to insert into the Unha-3 missile. Allowing for several more months for testing and adjustments, he figured the process would be complete by September, at which time his service wouldn’t be needed anymore.
The seventeenth of September was Nan’s birthday. Maybe, just maybe, Dawkins thought, he’d make it home by then. As soon as he did, he’d contact the FBI and CIA, and brief them about the underground facility and the progress the North Koreans had made in their nuclear missile program. He’d spill all the information and impressions he’d stored in his brain.
He told himself that under the circumstances, informing U.S. authorities was the best he could do. He wanted to believe that the North Koreans were still a year or more away from building a nuclear missile that could hit the mainland United States. He based his estimate on the numerous other engineering problems they still had to solve, including miniaturizing the warhead, finding the right mix of fuel, and engineering the warhead housing so it wouldn’t burn up on reentry into the atmosphere.
Back in his room, he sat at the square wooden table as Sung prepared his dinner in the kitchen down the hall. He opened the journal he kept on the shelf that he assumed was read daily by NK officials, and wrote. “Day 25. Milestone day. The shroud fits…Goal accomplished! Tomorrow we begin testing. No. Tomorrow is my day off. Looking forward to another walk with Sung. Hope to see more red-crowned cranes. The fresh air gives me energy.”
Sung entered quietly in a dark blue tunic and matching pants, and slid the plastic plate in front of him. It was ton-yuk-kui, rice with pork strips, and banchan, spicy cabbage and cucumber. As she had explained, a good meal was one that harmonized warm and cold, spicy and mild, rough and soft, solid and liquid. This seemed to accomplish that.