When I was in college, I’d worked as a wilderness guide and had become pretty proficient at rock climbing and raft guiding. I’d tried to stay in shape over the years so I could still play on those days when I’m able to pull away from my job. Running, climbing, swimming — whatever I could find time to do. If I wasn’t in shape, I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with the stress of this job.
After about an hour I returned home.
By then the sky was sharp and bright summer-blue, as if it were finally washed clean of the dark deeds that had marked the first couple days of the week.
At the house, I found Tessa sleepily finishing her breakfast of rice cakes, grape juice, and an orange. She didn’t always wear the black tourmaline necklace I’d given her on her seventeenth birthday, but today she did and it dangled prominently on the outside of her shirt. The necklace looked at home on her and it seemed to signify, to both of us, the day we started to mend the rift caused when her mother died.
Tessa had on fresh makeup and fingernail polish, and I found myself wondering if all this had anything to do with looking nice for the guy she’d fallen for, the one who she was going to see tonight, Aiden Ryeson.
Back on Wednesday, when he still hadn’t asked her out, I’d broached the topic with her. “I don’t understand. If you like him so much, why don’t you just ask him out?”
“I’m a girl. It doesn’t work that way.”
“This is the twenty-first century. You’re pretty independent. I mean, you’re not someone who’s normally intimidated by—”
“I’m not intimidated. I just think that if a guy likes you he should be the one to ask you out. It shows he’s serious about it.”
“So what happens if he doesn’t know you like him?”
“Oh, he knows.”
“How?”
She stared at me. “You are so clueless when it comes to women. No offense.”
“None taken. So you’re telling me that you made it clear to him, flirting, that sort of thing?”
She shook her head in exasperation to reiterate how clueless I was. “Whatever.”
“But still, I mean, you could just pick up the phone and—”
“If he knows I like him and he doesn’t want to ask me out, then he’s not worth it. If he likes me and he’s too much of a chicken to call me, then I don’t want to go out with him anyway. I want a guy who’s got the — well—”
“Sure. I know what you meant.”
But as it turned out, she didn’t need to call Aiden, because yesterday he’d done it: he’d asked her to tonight’s prom.
In a text message.
I wasn’t sure how kids did things these days, but from my perspective, he’d definitely waited long enough. And he asked her to prom by texting her? To me, it sure seemed like that at least bordered on being too chicken to call.
However, she was excited about it and I was glad to see that. In fact, despite how much she hated shopping, she was planning on going out this afternoon after school to buy a dress, just hours before heading out to the dance.
It was certainly last-minute, but knowing her, I wasn’t so sure she would have gone dress shopping earlier even if Aiden had asked her weeks ago.
When Lien-hua had been looking for her wedding dress, she must have been anticipating that Tessa would need a prom dress, because last night after Tessa received her text from Aiden, Lien-hua had informed us that she’d seen the perfect one at a shop in Arlington.
Of course, she didn’t know if it would still be in stock, but she’d offered to go look for it with Tessa this afternoon. I wasn’t thrilled about Lien-hua trekking out of bed, but she told me she would be fine for an hour, Brineesha agreed, and to avoid an argument, I’d backed down.
So, it was shaping up to be a big day for everyone.
Tessa got to go to prom with the boy she had a crush on, Lien-hua was ready to start venturing out into the world again, and, with Basque out of the way, I could start focusing more on the case involving Corey Wellington’s and Natalie Germaine’s suicides.
As I walked into the kitchen I saw Tessa texting with one hand without looking at her phone. She was lifting a rice cake to her mouth with the other hand.
“I’ll never understand how you do that,” I said, referring to her texting. “I can barely hit those keys when I’m staring at them.”
She swallowed her bite full of rice cake. “My fingers are smaller. Plus I text a couple hundred more times a day than you do.”
“True.”
She yawned. “Besides, you’re good at pickpocketing.”
“Well, that came out of nowhere.”
“No, I mean it. You could snag someone’s wallet, check his ID, slip it back into his pocket, and he’d never know.”
I recalled trying to conceal and reveal the unity candle to Lien-hua, which hadn’t exactly been a stellar performance. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure I’m that good.” I got some grape juice for myself. “Anyway, you learn that stuff, you know, at the Academy, mainly so you can spot it.”
“It’s cool, though.”
It didn’t exactly thrill me that my teenage daughter thought pickpocketing was cool.
I pointed to the package of rice cakes. “How do you eat those things anyway?”
“They’re good.” She rose and shuffled toward her room, then paused and must have realized she’d forgotten to put them away in their plastic bag. I offered to do it for her.
“Yeah,” she said, “if we leave ’em out they might get stale.”
“They’re rice cakes, how could you possibly tell?”
“Don’t try to be clever.” She yawned. “It’s way too early for that.”
“Ah.”
She went to get her things while I bagged them, downed a quick breakfast, and then mentally prepared to spend the day trying to untangle what might well be a string of suspicious suicides somehow related to one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.
57
Tessa was glad that she didn’t know any of the people Basque had killed this week. It made hearing the news a little easier, but it was another stark reminder to her of how diaphanous the fabric of life is.
It was something no one liked to talk about, but it was something that lay there, like a carpet beneath every passing moment. A carpet everyone tried to step over but no one actually succeeded at doing.
She cleared her textbooks off her desk, stuffed them into her backpack.
Ever since Aiden had asked her to the prom, she’d been thinking about her speech. And maybe it had to do with all the murders lately, but death was on her mind and what she had so far in regard to her graduation talk was not exactly what you would call inspiring.
Life in a nutshelclass="underline" we’re born, we suffer, and then we die.
Heartache and grief and loneliness chase us every day, the kind of love we long for is never quite within our reach, justice eludes us, and in the end, meaning is nothing but an illusion.
After all, life is an anomaly, the exception, not the norm. Death is the natural state of affairs both here and everywhere else we know of in the universe — and it’s on its way to reasserting itself.
All the evidence from evolutionary biology, astrophysics, astronomy, all the theorizing in statistics and probability make it clear there’s no possible way intelligent life exists anywhere else other than on earth. Any other view is either wishful thinking or a carefully cultivated blindness. Death is the default setting of the universe. The end of life on this planet would be the end of life everywhere.
And that day is coming.
Because our planet is dying. The second law of thermodynamics is unrelentingly exerting itself. Entropy will win. Human extinction is inevitable. One day all the stars will grow cold and bleak darkness will be the final destiny of all that there is. The final result of all of our efforts, all of our advances, all of our accomplishments, technology, our hopes, our dreams, will be nothing but evanescent memories disappearing into a vast dead expanse.