“You know what this means,” Christina said. She caught LT’s eye. “Next year we’ll be eating sugar sticks like the aliens did.”
Perhaps only LT understood what she meant. Homo sapiens are only ten percent human; most of the DNA in their bodies comes from the tiny flora that they carry inside themselves to digest their food and perform a million tiny tasks that keep them alive. If humans could someday adopt these new bacteria into their microbiome, a host of invasives could become edible. It would be the end of the famine.
She saw the wonder in his face, and laughed. “Wheels within wheels, Dad.”
After dinner, the urge to nap descended like a cloud, and only little Bella was immune. Carlos offered to take her to the park, but LT said he would like that honor.
“Where the slides are?” she asked.
“All the slides,” he said. “Just let me tuck in Mimi.”
He led his mother to the master bedroom, which was on the ground floor and had the best mattress. She moved carefully, as if hearing faint music in the distance, but at eighty she was still sharp, still beautiful, still determined to stay up with fashion. Her hair was three different shades of red.
“Eighty-five outside,” she said, “and in here it’s a Chicago winter.”
“I’ll get an afghan,” he said, and opened the closet. When he turned around, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand out on the coverlet.
“You must miss Doran.”
The knot that he carried in his chest tightened a fraction. He nodded.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “All our men dying so young.”
“Arnaud’s still alive,” LT said. “At least he was last year. He sent me a Christmas card.”
“Good God, what an asshole,” she said. “It’s true what they say, then.”
“I was the teenage asshole. I don’t know how anybody put up with me.”
She lay down and folded her hands across her chest like Cleopatra. He spread the afghan so that it covered her feet.
“This is a lovely house,” she said.
“It’s too big for me now. Unless you move in.”
“I prefer living on my own these days. I do my painting in the nude, you know.”
“You do not.”
“But I could. That’s the point.”
Bella was waiting for him by the front door. “Papa!”
“Ciao, Bella!”
She jumped into his arms. It was a pleasure to be someone’s favorite person again, at least for the moment. “Ready for the slides?”
He wished she didn’t live so far away. He wished he wasn’t so busy. People were making noises about nominating him for secretary, but he could say no, get off the treadmill. He could move to Canada and be close to Christina and Aaron and Bella, finally finish the book. Make one more research trip. He’d like to visit New Guinea again, see how the land of his daughter was faring. Fifty-three years after the meteor storm, and there were still so many questions to answer, and so many new things to see.
He carried Bella out into the Virginia heat. Soon he’d have to put her down, but he wanted to carry her as long as he could, as long as she let him. “So,” he said to her. “What’s all this about a disaster at craft time?”
The house was full of strangers. They kept touching his shoulder, leaning down into his face, wishing him happy birthday. Ninety-seven was a ridiculous age to celebrate. Not even a round number. They thought he wouldn’t make it to ninety-eight, much less a hundred. They’d probably been waiting for years for him to kick off, and this premature wake was the admission of their surrender.
A tiny gray-haired woman sat beside him. Christina. “You have to see this,” she said. She held a glass case, and suspended inside it was a glossy black shape flecked with silver. “It’s from the current Secretary of Agriculture. ‘For forty-five years of service to the nation and the world.’ This one came from Tennessee. You remember telling me about Mimi finding a seed?”
There was an ocean of days he couldn’t remember, but that day he recalled clearly. “Rock hound’s delight,” he said softly.
“What’s that, Dad?”
Ah. The strangers were watching, waiting for a proper response. He cleared his throat, and said loudly, “So have those alien bastards shown up yet?”
Everyone laughed.
The afternoon stretched on interminably. Cake, singing, talking, so much talking. He asked for his jacket and a familiar-looking stranger brought it to him, helped him out of his chair. “I have to tell you, sir, your books made me want to be a scientist. The Distant Gardener was the first—”
LT lifted a hand. “Which way is the backyard?” He could still walk on his own. He was proud of that.
Outside, the sky was bright, the air too warm. He didn’t need his coat, after all. He stood in a garden, surrounded by towering trees. But whose garden, whose house? It wasn’t his home in Virginia, that was long gone. Not Chicago or Columbus. Was this Tennessee?
Everything moves too fast, he thought, or else barely moves at all.
“Papa?”
A young woman, holding the hand of a little girl. The girl, just three or four years old, held a huge black flower whose petals were edged with scarlet.
“Ciao, Bella!” he said to the girl.
The woman said, “No, Papa, this is Annie. I’m Bella.”
A stab of embarrassment. And wonder. Bella was so old. How had that happened? How had he gotten so far from home? He wanted to do it all over again. He wanted Doran’s shoulder next to him, and tiny Christina in his arms. He wanted Carlos on his shoulders at the National Zoo. All of it, all of it again.
“It’s okay, Papa,” Bella said. His tears concerned her. What a small, common thing to worry about.
He inclined his head toward the little girl. “My apologies, Annie. How are you doing this afternoon? Did you fly all the way from California?”
She let go of her mother’s hand and approached him. “I have a flower.”
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s a pretty flower.”
“It certainly is.”
Bella said, “She likes to tell people things.”
The girl offered the flower to him. Up close, the black petals seemed to ripple and shift. Their dark surfaces swirled with traceries of silver that caught the light and spun it prettily. He raised it to his nose and made a show of sniffing it. The little girl laughed.
Words were not required. Sometimes the only way you could tell someone you loved them was to show them something beautiful. Sometimes, he thought, you have to send it from very far away.
“Where did you find this lovely flower?” he asked.
She pointed past his shoulder. He could feel the tower of green behind him. The leaves were about to move.
NOTE: The mnemonic for meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites was written by Andy Duncan and is used with his permission.
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