“Mazel tov, Daughter,” he said, rocking me. “Your momma would be so proud.” I started to let my eyes close, to lean into his embrace. He was still my father. I could smell the remnants of the clock tower under the rank stench of wine and body odor. He still smelled like the dust in the rafters and the cedar of the wide floorboards.
Finally he pulled away, holding me at arm’s length. His face wrinkled in a grin.
“You’ve done well,” he said. I shrugged at that—it’s not like I’d done anything. “A specialist, like your old man.”
It was true. Abba did more than just ring the clock bells. He was an advisor to the meteorologists and doctors too. It was his job to help the people of our ship get used to the changes we’d inevitably face when we arrived on Zehava. Longer winters. Longer days. I knew he was proud of his job, of the ratty old blue cord threaded into his double-breasted coat.
“Thanks,” I said. But I couldn’t stand the intensity of his gaze. I turned to the empty sink, starting to wipe it clean with an old dishrag, glad to have something—anything—to distract me from his stare. Meanwhile Abba folded my uniform for me, holding the arms against him like they were another body. Then he gently set it down.
“Botany,” he said. Then he repeated it, more darkly this time. He reached for the bottle again. I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Botany. You’ll be working with Mara Stone, you know.”
“Will I?” I asked carefully. I’d never heard of her before, didn’t understand the shadow that had fallen over Abba’s words.
“Be careful,” he said finally, smearing his lips against the back of his hand. “I’ve worked hard to see that you grow up right. I won’t see it ruined by that woman.”
I didn’t know what to say. So I gave a timid nod. My father sank down into his seat, glowering at the wine bottle like it had insulted him. But he didn’t say anything.
“Um,” I said at last, groping for some words to fill the silence. One side of his lip lifted in a sneer of acknowledgment. I went on: “I was wondering why you requested a talmid. I mean, it’s great, but I’m just . . . It surprised me. And I was wondering why. You requested him, that is.”
My father lifted the bottle again, but it was empty. He let it thud down on the table as he let out a long sigh.
“Because I’m tired,” he said.
Then he rose and trudged up the stairs. His footfalls were heavy. I stayed still for a moment. Both Pepper and I kept our ears cocked toward the stairwell.
Finally it came—the sound of his bedroom door thundering shut.
When I had finished putting the dishes away, I carried the lab coats up to my room. I threw the lot of them into the corner and didn’t even bother to scold Pepper as he settled into the pile of soft cloth.
Even with the light off, within the confines of my narrow bed, I couldn’t ignore them. They seemed to glow up from the darkness, taunting me. I turned over to face the wall. My mind raced. Maybe I should have reached for my sketchbook, my pencils, poured out all my worries across the rough pages. But instead I just stared at the wall, my eyes wide and my body stiff.
I couldn’t help but feel that, somehow, this was all Momma’s fault. If she hadn’t died, maybe I wouldn’t have taken to spending so much time in the atrium alone, looking at trees and sketching the splayed fingers of oak leaves in red and green. When I was little, it had been our place—she would take me walking every night after supper. Girl time, she said. Of course, those walks stopped when she first got sick, a few weeks after I turned twelve.
At first her illness seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. Nearly every winter a rash of flu ran through the ship, and it was almost impossible to stay healthy when we all shared the same air. But Momma stayed sick long after the rest of us went back to school and work. I just feel a little queasy, she said, a bit under the weather. It wasn’t until the end of the season that we finally convinced her to go to the hospital.
In the waiting room I tried to ignore the fact that it was Doctor Rafferty and not one of the normal medics who tended to my mother. The blue cord on his shoulder was threaded with gold. Council member. Ronen noticed it too.
“Why would she need the head doctor for the flu?” he demanded, jostling my father’s arm. “If it’s viral, she should be better already!”
But our father didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Doctor Rafferty had appeared at the door, his olive features drawn.
“There’s a mass on her liver,” he said. “It’s . . . very unusual. I’ve read about this but never seen it. ‘Cancer’ is what it was once called. Uncontrolled cell growth. It seems to have already reached her lymphatic system.”
Doctor Rafferty’s expression was wrong. His lower lip twitched. There was something in his eyes, something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But my father and Ronen accepted the diagnosis without question, so I told myself I must have been crazy—told myself there was no time to worry about Doctor Rafferty. There was only Momma, dying.
A few weeks later she was gone, and high spring came stumbling back. And there was no one left to walk with me.
That night I dreamed of her.
We were walking through the atrium together, down the twisted paths. It was summer, a season I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid. Dragonflies, their long bodies gleaming like ancient amethysts, swarmed the dome. As I followed my mother over the overgrown brick, I swatted insects from my face. But it didn’t do any good. Between the tangle of vines and the fury of wings, I lost my mother down a fork in the path.
“Momma?” I called. I crossed a wooden footbridge where flashes of green caught my eye from over the rail. Turtles milled through the water below. Everything was too bright, too hot. It made me dizzy.
Then I heard movement in the jungle. I stalked forward, squinting through the heat.
“Momma?” I pushed the branches aside.
There, standing in the jungle, was my mother. She smiled at me, reaching out a hand. I pressed forward.
But then she turned, and I saw that she wasn’t alone. A boy stood just behind her. But his face was obscured by a veil of Spanish moss that spilled off one of the tree branches above.
I couldn’t make out his features, but this much I knew: He was tall, taller than Momma. Taller than me. The flowers all turned their faces to him, like they couldn’t wait to soak up his warmth. In turn his thin body bent unnaturally toward me as I stepped close. It was like he had no spine, no bones, like he was just a reed bending in the breeze.
I woke in the pitch dark of my bedroom, my heart doing a wild dance in my chest.
5
The next morning I hustled across the ship, pushing my sleeves up over my hands and listening to the clock bells strike out the quarter hour. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was late, of course. The labs were practically a world away from the grimy port district where we lived. To reach them I had to make my way through the commerce district, then the fields, then the pastures, then cross the narrow footbridge between the library and school. The concrete buildings that housed the labs rose up out of the ground near the far wall of the ship.
I made my way through the winding hallways, smiling nervously to the other specialists as I passed. They hardly noticed me as they rushed by, white coats streaming. When I finally reached the door to the botanical lab, I hesitated.
Truth be told, when I pressed my hand to the panel by the door, I hoped, for just a moment, that the door would stay shut.